Rethinking Boko-Haram: Contending Perspectives among Nigerians in Diaspora and Youths

Over the past four years, a range of conflicting narratives have emerged around the Boko-Haram violence crisis, its causes and possible solutions. These conflicting and competing narratives have made it difficult for the government to devise a clear cut approach in dealing with the violence, and have contributed to worsening the relationship between the predominantly Muslim North and the mainly Christian South. The study critically puts to test a number of existing models that seek both to explain the origins of Boko-Haram and to pro-pose solutions. It does this in relation to the publicly stated views of two groups: Nigerians in the Diaspora and Youth leaders. Although, there are a number of explanations, I organise these under three dominant school of thoughts: (i) the Economic or Human Development approach, which is em-bedded in an explanation based on poverty and deprivation; (ii) the Religious or Islamic State model that focuses on the role of ideology and religion, and (iii) the Political, which consists of Elite conspiracy or feud approach, which views power, greed, and elite machinations as the main causes of Boko-Haram violence. Without a doubt, The Boko-Haram phenomenon is extremely complex. Yet these three main theoretical explanations of the Boko-Haram violence crisis have a significant influence on public thinking about the problem. While the political feud or elite conspiracy theory seems to be mainly put for-ward by Southerners, Northerners tend to think that Human development is-sues of poverty are more important. It was found that there was no single dominant way of thinking about the problem in terms of explaining it. In terms of solutions, however, youth were overwhelmingly for a military solution, whilst the diaspora focused mainly on dialogue. The study hopes to contribute to findings ways out of the crisis, in a modest way.