Seventeen years of military operations against Boko Haram and its successor organisations have produced an extraordinary conclusion: the more soldiers Nigeria deploys in the Northeast, the more recruits the insurgency generates.
This is not a paradox. It is a predictable consequence of treating a social and economic crisis as a military problem.
The communities where Boko Haram recruits most effectively are communities where the state has been absent for two or three generations. Where schools do not function, where healthcare is unavailable, where young men have no economic prospects — in those communities, an organisation that offers certainty, community and income will always find recruits.
Military force can suppress insurgent activity. It cannot cure the conditions that produce insurgents. Only the patient, sustained presence of a developmental state can do that.
