Is Boko Haram really worse the the Nigerian Civil war?

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Earlier this morning as my Father read a daily newspaper, he noticed a headline where the President Jonathan mentioned that "Boko Haram was worse than the Nigerian Civil war". At that, my Father shouted; "It's because he didn't lose anybody to the war". He was referring to Jonathan Goodluck who was probably still a kid during the war and probably didn't feel the heat during that war. Perhaps, Jonathan might not have lost any relative to the war and that's why he's comparing it to activities of Boko Haram.

I think, to most former Biafran soldiers or people who fought on the Biafran side of that war, they might find it a bit offensive to even compare the evils of Boko Haram to the evils of the Nigerian-Biafran war.

When one does a bit of research across the internet on the history of the Biafran war, you'd also notice that the highest casualties were among ordinary civilians and many reports have it that over 1 million civilians died during the over 3 years battle. If one now compares the number of people who have died since the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria, the number just runs under 15,000 victims which is a far cry from how many people that died during the civil war. Why then is Jonathan trying to compare the 1960s civil war to that of Boko haram?

Well, I also had to read the article on the newspaper and noticed that Jonathan was basically trying to explain that it's not the usual war that the army has been used to fight since this was basically terrorists hiding to bomb and kill innocent civilians. During the Biafran war, it wasn't common for armed men to just go to villages and start killing people or perhaps those scenarios went unreported like we have today. One major factor that killed a lot of civilians during those dark years of 1967 to 1970 was famine and the major casualties were children and women. The military men on both the Nigerian and Biafran were said to have had the least casualties since they were moving from place to place and were able to feed at times by using force on the local people. The civilians are the major victims during any war and this is common in both cases.

In summary, what we are saying is that the Nigerian-Biafran war was much worse than the Boko haram war since millions of people died during the formercompared to tens of thousands which had died during the latter's reign of terror. The only problem with the war against Boko haram is that the Nigerian army doesn't exactly know how exactly to fight this war and when it will end. Some people believe that the terrorist group are basically funded by opposition politicians in order to make the ruling party lose votes at the general elections. If the 2015 elections come and goes, I guess we'll then get to see if it's actually a political tool or a great evil that has come to torment Nigerians for the long term.

Posted by Felix Okoli on Thursday June 26, 2014 at 12:46:15: