Abstract
In the summer of 2013, the Nigerian military, as part of its counterinsurgency operations against Boko Haram insurgents, shut down GSM mobile telephony in three northeast states – Adamawa, Borno and Yobe. This article explores the rationale, impact and citizens’ opinion of the mobile phone blackout. It draws on focus group discussions with local opinion leaders and in-depth personal interviews with military and security insiders, as well as data of Boko Haram incidences before, during and after the blackout from military sources and conflict databases. It argues that, although the mobile phone shutdown was ‘successful’ from a military- tactical point of view, it angered citizens and engendered negative opinions toward the state and new emergency policies. While citizens developed various coping and circumventing strategies, Boko Haram evolved from an open network model of insurgency to a closed centralized system, shifting the center of its operations to the Sambisa Forest. This fundamentally changed the dynamics of the conflict. The shutdown demonstrated, among others, that while ICTs serve various desirable purposes for developing states, they will be jettisoned when their use challenges the state’s legitimacy and raison d'être, but not without consequences.
Highlights
New ICTs have fulfilled various desirable purposes for Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy
Prior to Global System of Mobile communication (GSM), Nigerians depended mainly on landlines provided by the state-owned monopoly, Nigerian Telecoms (NITEL)
To develop a clearer awareness of the nature of impact the mobile phone shutdown had on local people, focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted with local opinion leaders in Adamawa State
Summary
New ICTs have fulfilled various desirable purposes for Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. We provide a background to the Boko Haram insurgency, including the origins of the sect, their ideology and their interactions with mobile phone technology. It discusses the context of mobile phone usage in Nigeria, arguing that mobile telephony has become part of social practice in the country, thereby re-ordering patterns of social relations and enabling even the rural poor to, on their own terms, re-order what Giddens (1981) calls time-space distantiation. The abduction sparked a global social media movement and the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls Prior to this date, very few people outside of Nigeria knew much about the group. The group is opposed to Western education but to the entire superstructure of Western civilization and its various appendages and influence, including democracy, civil law, human rights, language, etc
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