ABSTRACT
Boko Haram has been evolving in north-eastern Nigeria for over a decade. An extremely violent Islamist movement, it has in 2014 entered a new transitional phase. The inability of Nigeria’s armed forces to obstruct its onslaught, combined with a higher international profile, have lent it a confidence and ambition that appear to have prompted increasingly strategic behaviour, alongside its ongoing indiscriminate and widespread attacks against civilian and state target as well as served as a monumental threat to the National Security of the Nigerian state. The movement grew out of socio-economic flux that came with a process of democratic
transition, coupled with the consequences of decades of mismanagement resulting from military rule and corruption. In a sense, Boko Haram too has been in a constant state of flux: it has always adapted to changing circumstances, with its methods and membership reflecting this. This has allowed for multiple descriptions of the group to endure, bridging different narratives of terrorism, insurgency and criminality, where different drivers of conflict and instability have converged. Unique in Nigeria for its combination of sectarianism and terrorist tactics, Boko Haram is skilled at exploiting state institutional weaknesses. Its familiarity with the terrain in Borno state, its home territory, enables it to navigate around a demoralized and deficient security presence to carry out attacks with impunity. As a response to the insurgent activities of the group (Montclos, 2014). In February 2015 the African Union authorized the mobilization of a multinational force drawn from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria to tackle Boko Haram in northeast Nigeria and northern Cameroon. This paper shall therefore examine to what length the security objectives of the lake chad basin commission helped to curtail the activities of the Boko Haram sect.
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