The below posting has practically no relation to the law and articles on Lawyers Alert Blog. However, with the definition of politics, governance , human rights and all, now dictated by a Lunatic named Shekau, leader of the Nigeria Terror group, Boko Haram that engages in cowardly acts of attacking civilians in markets and slaying of children’s throats, and abduction of little girls, we are forced to reproduce a little article on the lunatic herein below written by the ICG..
By International Crisis Group. Where does such vengeance come from? What does he want? Who is he? A review of academic and first-hand accounts reveal Shekau to be both an intellectualizing theologian and a ruthless killer. Raised Muslim, he was born sometime in the 1970s in a border town named Shekau between Niger and Nigeria — in the heart of the former Sokoto caliphate. In 1990, he moved to a town that would become the birthplace of Boko Haram to study under a traditional cleric, according to the International Crisis Group. In the early 2000s, he met its future charismatic leader, Muhammad Yusuf. Shekau became one of his earliest acolytes, and was soon one of the top lieutenants in the group. Intense and quiet, Shekau was more bookish than the group’s gregarious leader, Yusuf. “Shekau was always studying and writing, and was more devoted and modest than anyone else,” Ahmad Salkida, a man considered the Nigerian authority on Boko Haram, told the Financial Times in 2012. ”He would only wear cheap clothes and did not accept even to drive a car, preferring a motorbike.” Together, the men built what Salkida described in a separate account as an “imaginary state within a state.” Boko Haram was a sophisticated apparatus: a cabinet of leadership, a brigade of guards, a military branch, a large farm, and “an effective micro finance scheme.” It lured in the area’s impoverished and uneducated youths. “Boko Haram was founded on ideology, but poor governance was the catalyst for it to spread,” Salkida said. “If there had been proper governance and a functioning state, Yusuf would have found it very difficult to succeed.” But even in those days, there was something disquieting about Shekau. “Even when Boko Haram was peaceful,” Salkida explained, “he was somehow more feared than Yusuf.” Boko Haram, however, wouldn’t stay peaceful for long. Its clashes with Nigerian forces between 2004 and 2006 grew in intensity, and as the years ground past, Shekau became increasingly unmanageable. Yusuf “had trouble keeping his unruly lieutenants, particularly Shekau, in check,” reports the International Crisis Group. In 2009, Yusuf was captured by the Nigerian authorities in a battle that appeared to kill Shekau as well. Yusuf was soon killed in prison, and Boko Haram, deprived of its chief, appeared on the verge of collapse. But then, less than a year later, and appointed the new leader because he was “radical and aggressive,” Shekau released a video, vowing to exterminate Western culture and education in Nigeria.