Background
Under President Buhari, military successes have seen the Nigerian Army take back much of the territory seized by Boko Haram (BH). Despite significant military defeats, BH’s influence and ideology, as well as its ability to conduct clandestine terrorist activities on soft targets, persist.
These include several bombings and attacks in Plateau, Kano, Kaduna, Borno, and Yobe states, often in mosques, marketplaces, and other public gatherings, which have seen women and young girls increasingly used as suicide bombers. The group’s propaganda machine continues unabated as well; video messages have taken on a more professional quality, as the group’s communications and social media outreach increasingly resemble those of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), to which it declared its allegiance in March 2015. In recent months, new reports show that BH is broadcasting messages over FM radio frequencies they claim as their own. BH’s sworn allegiance to ISIS and strong propaganda campaign have lent credibility and power to their violent extremist (VE) narratives, which threaten to capture the emotions and aspirations of young northern Nigerians already disenfranchised by widespread corruption, a lack of opportunities, and victims of heavy-handed security operations. As the conflict enters its eighth year and BH’s leadership begins to fragment along ideological lines, there is a unique opportunity to use strategic communications to counter the group’s violent narratives and discuss what people across the North want society to look like going forward, including creating space? for the rehabilitation and reintegration of former fighters and others abducted during the conflict in this regards EAI came up with a Radio shows Ina Mafita (The Way Forward) to Counter/ BH’s ideology a messaging with positive local narrative that reduce vulnerability to VE in Northern Nigeria.
