In 2008 I attended the African Peer Review Mechanism in Borno State, Nigeria. During that time I experienced the part of the country that is currently under siege by Boko Haram.

I have felt pain in my heart at the ongoing atrocities committed by Boko Haram, especially since the barbaric kidnapping of the 200 girl children from school in 2013.

One cannot help but ask where the leadership is in the federal and state governments, religious formations, media and communities, and from the intellectuals in the area where these atrocities are taking place.

The killings are happening in the same country that, in 2013, overtook South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. What is surprising is that ordinary Nigerians are being terrorised and criminally abused in a country that was the bulwark of the Economic Community of West African States monitoring and observation group that contributed significantly to the defeat of the terrorists in Sierra Leone – the Revolutionary United Front – that were assisted by Charles Taylor’s tyrannical regime in Liberia and a network of international illegal diamond traders.

In the wake of the attacks, many have wondered why leadership and statehood in Nigeria is apparently getting weaker despite the country going through the motions of holding regular elections in at least the last two and a half decades? Military barracks are being overrun by the rebels and soldiers desert frequently.

One problem lies in Boko Haram developing beyond just being a Nigerian phenomenon to a cross-border contagion that operates in several neighbouring countries including Cameroon and Chad.

It also needs to be appreciated that formations such as Boko Haram and the manner of their operations are not new in Africa. They are akin to the externally-supported military destabilisation that countries such as Angola and Mozambique experienced. They are also reminiscent of other destabilisation activities that involved the use of mercenaries.

One of the central questions that need to be asked is who is funding, training and arming Boko Haram? There appears to be little or no effort focused on tracking the sources of the arms and other hardware used by Boko Haram. The militaries of Nigeria, Chad, and Cameroon must be better integrated with their police and military intelligence. Communities on the ground must also form part of military intelligence in armed conflict situations.

Boko Haram’s stated objectives are twofold: secede from Nigeria and create a theocratic Islamic “caliphate” in the northeastern part of the country, which may extend to parts of Niger and Cameroon.

This alone should awaken leaders in Africa and spur them to take collective action against Boko Haram in line with the provisions of the Constitutive Act of the African Union as war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed at random by Boko Haram.

Internationally, the crimes being committed by the terror that is Boko Haram also ought also to be addressed by Nigeria and the international community as they are covered by a number of international treaties or agreements, among them the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions.

It is only this week that the chairperson of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, issued a statement condemning the atrocities being carried out by Boko Haram and promising action.

But this is rather late in the day because many months have passed since Boko Haram’s kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls who have yet to be rescued. The Peace and Security Council of the AU should have acted much earlier.

A lot is being said about the discrepancy between the lukewarm responses of African leaders to the atrocities being committed by Boko Haram in Nigeria and the vocal and vigorous outrage following the recent horrific killing of 17 people by terrorists in France.

The difference says a lot about us as Africans and how we still view ourselves as less valuable than our former colonisers. Colonialism, including its apartheid variant, was not just about political domination; it was political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual and mental. It will take generations to undo. This is the agenda for Africa’s renaissance.

The same applies to the former colonisers. As long as Africa and Africans have no political and real economic power, and as long as we continue to imitate our former colonisers in ways of thinking and doing things, they will continue to regard themselves as superior to us. The false consciousness of superiority was ingrained in them from the time they enslaved us and then colonised us. There is need for holistic and multidimensional revolution.

Professor Shadrack Gutto is with the Institute for African Renaissance Studies at the University of South Africa.