The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Details of emergency proclamation deepen anguish

    Details of emergency proclamation deepen anguish

    Riding on the crest of a wave of popular approbation on the declaration of emergency, President Goodluck Jonathan is all the more convinced that he took the right step in his effort to pacify the restive Northeast region. The details of the proclamation, which were not immediately available but came many anxious days later, show conclusively how far-reaching the provisions are, and how fateful they could become in the coming months and years for the sustenance of democracy. Notwithstanding which part of the divide we find ourselves – for or against emergency – or how uncritically we embraced the panacea even before we knew the details of the proclamation, it is time for us to move on to even more germane but troubling matters, especially considering that emergency has become a fait accompli.

    I suspect that the president took a few more days than he planned to transmit the proclamation to the National Assembly because he was astounded by the overwhelming support Nigerians gave him. He probably felt he would not injure his goals, whatever they were, if he tweaked the provisions of the proclamation to tighten his hold on the Northeast. Any sound democrat – and there are few of them in Nigeria – or sound thinker should be alarmed by the provisions of the proclamation. Sadly, neither the public which whooped for emergency nor the National Assembly saddled with the greater responsibility of safeguarding democracy, has shown any disquiet or even discomfort with the details. The mostly conservative Senate has raised barely a whimper against emergency, and the often populist House of Representatives has only offered feeble protests.

    So, for now, we are stuck with emergency in the Northeast, even as fears grow in sane quarters that given Dr Jonathan’s constant immoderation and propensity for brinkmanship, he could yet widen the areas under emergency proclamation. Before the details of the proclamation were made public, this column had concluded that the governors of the affected states would become ceremonial rulers and the military commanders the de facto rulers. This observation flies in the face of the president’s pronouncement that he had not tampered with the democratic structures in the three states, and that the governor, Houses of Assembly and the local government areas were intact. It was inconceivable that the said democratic structures could function in the teeth of emergency, I warned. Surprisingly, lawyers, academicians and newspapers argued that by leaving the democratic structures in place, the president was jeopardising the success of emergency and prolonging the misery of the Northeast.

    Such undisciplined reasoning was not totally unexpected, considering that there had been a progressive attenuation of disciplined thinking and research in Nigeria for many years. I had nothing to base my suspicion on, of course, other than my intuitive distrust of Dr Jonathan’s bona fides, whether in relation to his depressing political pragmatism, his lack of ideological persuasion, or even his annoying abjuration of the role and place of philosophy in the government of any society, ancient or modern. When he finally publicised the details, it was clear that Dr Jonathan, like his superficial mentor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had unlimited contempt for the principles and practice of democracy. He entertains the quaint belief that it is sometimes necessary to destroy a thing in order to save it. The unsuspecting National Assembly, the bewildered public, and the querulous press apparently agree.

    In the proclamation, Dr Jonathan has completely and undisguisedly subordinated the governor, local government chairmen and, by implication, the Houses of Assembly in the affected areas to the military commanders in the three states. The military commanders, as emergency rule in Ekiti showed in 2006, are in turn subordinated to the president. In short, Dr Jonathan has the distinguished Lugardian honour of imposing indirect rule in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States. The National Assembly’s harmonised version of the proclamation tried to circumscribe the subordination of governors and LG chairmen to the president’s whims by limiting the orders he could issue to matters relating to “maintaining and securing peace, public order and public safety in the emergency areas.” The reality is, however, far different, and this needn’t be argued.

    But if this was the only evidence of power grab in the Northeast, it could be pardoned. In another far-reaching provision in the proclamation, the president is empowered to utilise the funds of the affected states for the purpose of executing the state of emergency. The president’s original proposal to spend state funds is truly frightening. But the National Assembly’s harmonised version futilely attempts to limit the usage of the funds to “provide for the protection, documentation, return, re-integration, resettlement, rehabilitation, compensation and remuneration of persons affected by this order.” It is hard to know exactly what was on the minds of the framers of this provision, for the responsibilities listed in that clause are actually much better performed by the states and LGs than the federal government, let alone a military commander. In fact, it is clear that the president originally intended this provision to underwrite the cost of the emergency itself.

    This column had warned last week that, “The governors will be ceremonial leaders throughout the emergency, even as the affected states may be coaxed into parting with a part of their monthly allocations to the war effort.” That warning was neither prescient nor comprehensive enough. There is nothing in Dr Jonathan’s proclamation or the legislature’s harmonised version to indicate the degree of tampering allowed the president. The governors are already browbeaten, and the public mood against them unsparing. They will, therefore, tamely submit to all forms of violation and indignity.

    The president already has enormous powers to do anything he wishes with the country, and is more powerful than any democratically elected president anywhere. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, no president has been circumspect or innovative in the use of those powers. Emergency in the Northeast now indirectly deposits more powers in the hands of the president than he used to have. He will henceforth begin to see all sorts of possibilities in accreting in influence and control in hostile states. He now understands how to grab power and how to fund that grab, irrespective of what positive ends he puts the grab to. Technically, he now knows what to do to extend emergency rule, and he will not be incommoded by shortage of funds, nor, quite embarrassing to every Nigerian, will he be in short supply of support.

    The Joint Task Force has proudly announced its troops have completely overrun Boko Haram camps in the emergency states. No less was expected. It would be stupid of the militants to stay and fight. The only time they did so in 2009, they were worsted, and their leader, Mohammed Yusuf, extra-judicially murdered. Since then they have adopted guerrilla tactics and war of attrition that enervate even the most sophisticated army. When emergency was proclaimed it was expected that the Boko Haram militants would flee their camps, regroup at a future date, re-strategise, and re-launch their terror war in more lethal fashion. It is that uncertain and sanguinary aftermath that the JTF and the Jonathan presidency should be worried about.

    I restate my perspective once again that Dr Jonathan’s leadership style is inconsistent with the highest ideals and principles of great leadership. State of emergency is superfluous in the circumstances of the rebellion in the Northeast, as it was superfluous in Plateau and Ekiti States under Obasanjo and in the defunct Western Region under Tafawa Balewa. If Dr Jonathan had not taken a dim view of the matter by embracing melodrama, he would have discovered that deploying additional troops and pacifying the region did not need the agency of a state of emergency, not to talk of needlessly and surreptitiously weakening democratic structures in the affected areas and indeed everywhere, tampering with the fundamental principles of federalism by proposing to spend state and LG money, and unjustly and unfairly blaming and subordinating elected governments to military commanders.

    Moreover, there is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the crisis facing the country in the Northeast. The rebellion in that region may have socio-economic undertones and a veneer of politics, but it is also much more disturbingly a potpourri of sectarian and class revolts rooted in malformed medieval ideologies. Such revolts, which often come and go within a generation, do not respond to force as facilely as many hope. But to the consternation of the sober and the mirth of the hysteric, Dr Jonathan has reacted to the crisis simplistically and imprudently. On its own, the National Assembly, in particular the Senate, has failed to react to the president’s prognosis with the kind of legislative aplomb a modern and activist legislature should summon.

    Giving free rein to the president’s subversion of democratic structures in the affected states is bound to have repercussions in the near and distant future. Obasanjo was not checked in 2006, though he never imposed emergency in more than one state at a time. Now, Jonathan has imposed emergency in three states at once, and seems set to foment trouble in a fourth, Rivers. And by harshly and abruptly discarding the little progress the country has made in consolidating democracy, and by stifling opposition efforts to propound alternatives, the president and his supporters have injured the body politic much more obnoxiously than Boko Haram is ever capable of doing.

  • Amaechi and the NGF: An election so disgraceful, so contemptible

    If anything indicates very starkly the hard temper of Nigerian democracy, last Friday’s election of chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) showed why and how. A day to the election, indeed hours before, no one, not even any of the governors, was sure who would win the election, in view of the base emotions that sometimes propel Nigerian politics. But it was always clear that whoever won would find it difficult to rally all the governors behind himself. Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State won by 19 votes to Plateau State’s Jonah Jang’s 16 votes, showing how divided and divisive that pressure group has become and how keenly the election was fought for a post that carries no constitutional significance, and is indeed superfluous to the needs of the country, not to talk of the desperate needs of the people of the 36 states.

    It was not as if the sorely tried winner was intrinsically divisive or even controversial. The problem with him, and which his victory evinced, was how, due to no fault of his, he was perceived in the presidency as an upstart and a troublemaker. In saner climes, his commitment to development, his doggedness, his courage and his eloquent grasp of issues should make him a rising star in his party. It is indeed no credit to the image of President Goodluck Jonathan that he and his men virtually demonised the Rivers governor, cast him in the shape of a radical and rebellious outcast, and were prepared to gleefully and unconstitutionally subvert Rivers State and deliberately divide and destroy the NGF.

    The import of the NGF election is not that some governors are miffed by their candidate’s loss, or that the president’s objectives seem for now to have been truncated. (Dr Jonathan is famous for not taking no for an answer). The import is that much more than the president, the country’s 36 governors theoretically form the bulwark of Nigerian democracy, yet many of them have become ardently contemptuous of the elementary principles of democracy. Though they represent the country’s collective political achievement and ideological stability, they have shown a disgraceful incompetence to manage an election in which only 35 people voted. How could a group of top politicians who find it difficult to summon the common sense to win or lose a small election with dignified calmness superintend state and national elections in which tens of millions of Nigerians would vote? How could a group of senior politicians who find it difficult to acknowledge their colleagues’ point of view find the grace and wisdom to tolerate dissent in their own states?

    It does not bother me who won or lost, though, because of the president’s meddlesomeness, I would rather his candidate lost; but I am worried that the governors played infantile politics, politics without principles, politics without nobility, politics without character. I am in fact deeply disturbed that a man of Governor Godswill Akpabio’s moderate accomplishments and admirable eloquence (he talks nineteen to the dozen) should lend his exertions and modest gifts to anomalous and ignoble ends. Where is his soul, and can he call it his own even if it were thrust under his nose? Not only is he disputing what was apparently a transparent election, he has taken incredible and laughable steps to make the NGF self-destruct. Had he offered himself entirely to, say, a great president, we would still have condemned his servility; but at least his faults would be redeemed by the great and noble purpose he wilfully and reckless spent it on. Unfortunately, he has devoted his every talent to the wrong cause and the wrong man.

    Amaechi has won, but I fear he will not be able to unite the association behind himself, nor be able to deploy the group for any meaningful democratic end. I also fear that the presidency, which has become a vindictive and sterile bastion of futile politics, will rededicate itself to destroying Amaechi. Nineteen governors voted for Amaechi; he will be lucky to get more than 20 to stand with him whenever he needs them. More, because of 2015, and because Dr Jonathan cannot rise to a profound level, the presidency will make Amaechi’s remaining years in office a living nightmare. And given the shallowness of the Nigerian mind and the immaturity of their politics, it is not guaranteed that Amaechi will find the kind of support his hard work as a governor and his character as a person merit. And contrary to what he thinks, his victory has not tested and proven Nigerian democracy. His victory, which cannot be divorced from the politics that preceded it or the shenanigan that followed, has only shown how irresponsible and reckless most of those who govern the country have become.

  • State of emergency superfluous

    State of emergency superfluous

    It requires a huge dose of optimism to trust President Goodluck Jonathan’s instinct in declaring a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States. I confess I do not have such an endowment, and I am not careful to hold a contrary position on this very controversial issue. Majority of Nigerians, perhaps 99 percent, favour emergency, and either abusively denounce those who don’t or equate opposition to emergency with support for Boko Haram insurgency. They are entitled to their opinion. The more supporters of emergency work themselves up into a fever over the few of us who see through the president’s manoeuvres, the more convinced I am that both the president and his supporters are misguided and intolerant.

    A day after Jonathan took the plunge and committed the Northeast angrily into emergency, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) spontaneously denounced the declaration and pointed out that the president was in fact playing politics with the issue of insecurity. But one day later, after having had the chance to reflect on the delicate matter and to measure the weight of their courage in the face of massive public endorsement of emergency, the party mellowed its stand from asking the National Assembly to reject emergency to asking them to examine it cautiously. I do not pretend to any of the party’s luxuries. I understand the need for the party to cast a wary, indeed longing, eye on the next general elections, and must therefore be careful not to distance itself too inappropriately from the herd grazing on emergency. But I have no vote to seek, and if I wish, I may even have no vote to cast in 2015.

    Of course the ACN, much more than any other party, did well to publicise its initial opposition to emergency even before it understood which way the cats were jumping. That it has had to quickly modify its original stand merely reflects that its leaders are realists who must watch the ballot box with a defensive keenness that exceeds its vaunted predatory instincts. The scale of support for Jonathan’s emergency declaration must have stunned northern leaders themselves into whooping for the measure, I suspect, against their better judgement. Indeed, in the north, whether among former heads of state or among leading politicians, all we hear is a mellifluous chorus of support for emergency. Obviously, at a time like this, discretion is the better part of valour.

    The dispute over emergency, it must be reiterated, is not about whether Boko Haram needed to be fought and defeated or whether it should be tolerated and pampered. Everyone, except the sect’s members, agrees that the killings in the north needed to be halted. The dispute, therefore, is essentially about methods, not goals. The southern part of Nigeria never liked Boko Haram for one minute, and minced no words in vociferously deploring its methods and objectives, even at the constant and irritating risk of accusing the north of supporting the sect. A corollary of that assumed convergence between the north and the sect is the south’s dismissive characterisation of every northerner who proposes a different perspective of tackling the insurgency as a Boko Haram supporter. Indeed, in my view, the northern part was at first ambivalent to the sect, even seemingly indulgent, and only belatedly horrified and shaken by the huge scale of atrocities the militants were perpetrating.

    Readers of this column will recall my trenchant view of Boko Haram, my opposition to amnesty, except for the sect’s foot soldiers, and only because of the administrative cost of prosecuting every sect member, and my unalloyed support for secularism and democracy. Boko Haram should be fought, and the military should lead the battle. But we must be careful to plan beyond military victory. The question to ask is whether emergency will help the government and the military to explain why they failed to defeat the sect and pacify the region. I suspect it will not. Dr Jonathan’s state of emergency does not only reek of politics, it seems to me a facile and fatuous strategy to divert attention from serious issues pertaining to the long-running campaign against terror in Nigeria, such as the Baga killings. Emergency also conceals the general disinclination of the Jonathan presidency for rigorous thinking and scientific governance and foreshadows a rising dictatorship.

    The Nigerian constitution places the responsibility for security squarely on the shoulders of the president, not in the hands of governors. If anyone was, therefore, remiss in his responsibility for security in the Northeast, it was the president. In fighting Boko Haram, there has been no presidential initiative to deploy forces that the states or local governments disagreed with. Dr Jonathan had the unlimited power to add to and subtract from the number of troops deployed in the war front. He took no input from the governors about tactical deployment, and there was no part of the affected states from which federal forces were barred. Does Jonathan therefore need a state of emergency to raise troop strength? What is he doing now that he couldn’t do without declaring emergency? Warrant to search? Suspension of habeas corpus?

    Section 305 of the 1999 constitution broadly describes the procedure for the proclamation of a state of emergency. As the ACN pointed out in its initial position, emergency was already in force in many parts of the Northeast, but was ineffective. Nobody ever questioned the government’s deployments and even rights abuses until Borno elders began to notice strange killings. In fact, there are no powers granted by emergency proclamation that the people had not already vouchsafed to the president in view of the drastic circumstances of insecurity in those regions. It is, therefore, necessary for to be cautious about emergency and admonish Nigerians on why the proclamation should be considered carefully side-by-side with Sections 33 and 35 of the constitution dealing with the rights of the people. It may even be necessary to draw attention to the entire Chapter IV of the constitution for the public and the National Assembly to appreciate those rights that, in emergency, are or should be non-derogable.

    The proclamation has been sent to the National Assembly, and the two chambers have scheduled a discussion for Tuesday. It is important they remove the fears of the people that Section 305 as applied will not be used inappropriately and narrow-mindedly to derogate the rights of the people under emergency. The legislature must not allow itself to be carried away by popular emotions, nor be blackmailed by the reckless and aggressive support most Nigerians have offered the president. They must carefully determine whether the cause of peace would be served by the liberty the president wishes to take over a war he has largely bungled and prolonged by his dithering.

    By declaring emergency, it seems to me, Dr Jonathan gave the impression that someone else, perhaps the governors of the affected states and their conniving political elite, was to blame for insecurity and Boko Haram. The governors’ economic and social policies probably contributed to the beginnings of the revolt and undoubtedly aggravated it, but it is inconceivable that emergency should be expected to remedy the problem and stamp it out permanently. The president also needed emergency to deflect censorious attention from the alleged atrocities that took place in Baga, Borno State in April. The matter was being probed, until emergency was declared. Not only will the probes now be compromised, it is certain that with emergency, no other probe elsewhere will be entertained. Frightened by the countrywide unanimity of approval for the president’s extraordinary measures, northern leaders have, against their better judgement, abandoned the hapless people of the three states to be sandwiched between the extreme measures of the Nigerian security forces and the brutal fanaticism and extortion of the Boko Haram sect.

    This abandonment is anchored on the indefensible argument, advanced mainly by the south and the presidency, that the people of those states had a duty to expose the sect. In other words damned if they rat on the sect, and damned if for fear of their lives they don’t. I feel for them, and wish we had a more informed, more empathetic and more reflective president. The campaign against Boko Haram failed not because we didn’t have the troops and the logistics to fight the sect, but because the security forces failed to fight a winnable and moral war, and win the confidence of the local populace, as indeed other victorious armies in the world take care to do. It is instructive that while Nigerians were hailing the president’s show of force and firepower in the Northeast, it took a visiting British general, Robert Fry, a former deputy commanding general of the coalition forces in Iraq, to caution against the use of excessive force in the Northeast. But Nigerians would rather those states were smashed to smithereens, and the local populace blamed themselves for not pushing out the militants in their midst. It seems we have lost our senses.

    President Jonathan, I have argued, does not need a state of emergency to take the measures he has just adumbrated. But none in the National Assembly will have the heart to tell him that. I am persuaded that indeed the proclamation reeks of offensive politicking. The Northeast is anti-Jonathan, and will stay so until 2015 and beyond. The president does not have any emotional attachment to those states, and could care less what they feel, as he said when he reluctantly visited them in March. Judging from his anger as he read his speech in a tremulous voice on Tuesday, Dr Jonathan was evidently tormented by his private demons, and was intemperate, unstatesmanlike and full of unnecessary fury. His supposed fierce mien was not, as some imagined, a ploy to display presidential toughness; it instead betrayed his boyish instinct for sophistry, his rustic impulsiveness, and his burgeoning ruthlessness and dictatorial tendency.

    Future generations will recall how, on the excuse of battling insurgency and saving the union, we abandoned to the federal rampage our kith and kin in the Northeast, a majority of whom are law-abiding, and for whom sadly and mortifyingly the rest of the world feels more fellow-feeling than Nigerians. By whooping hysterically for war, rather than for a clinical and brilliant campaign to take out the offending rascals destabilising the union, we seem to say that the problem, whose roots are deeper than military defeat can extirpate, can be destroyed with a massive military blow. Nothing can be further from the reality. Military victory may be achieved in the near future, but it remains to be seen whether the fiery and indecipherable logic of the rebellion and the sect’s promotion of borderless war can be subdued permanently by conventional military tactics.

    But more saddening are those who argue that the president should have sent the governors and their legislative houses packing either for being the cause of this imbroglio or for worsening it. This is simply senseless. Are we so undisciplined that at the first hint of a major trouble we are willing to whimsically dishonour some of the provisions of the constitution, or select which part to obey and which to ignore or downgrade? Strangely, among those who make this nonsensical argument are lawyers and academics who should know better. But it is not only lawyers who are losing their heads, that is, after Aso Villa’s melodramatic buck-passing, even journalists and editorial writers have gone completely irrational. They have not only endorsed Dr Jonathan’s questionable decision to impose emergency, they, who should be the bastion of civil rights and free speech, have issued dire warnings to opposition parties to fall in line behind the president. Already, of course, and as the brusque declaration of curfew in Adamawa showed, executive, judicial and legislative powers have been abridged by the military. The governors will be ceremonial leaders throughout the emergency, even as the affected states may be coaxed into parting with a part of their monthly allocation to the war effort.

    It is necessary for the National Assembly to scrutinise the president’s proclamation very closely and tame it. If, without emergency, the Baga incident elicited so much controversy, what should we expect with the leeway emergency proclamation confers? The legislators must understand that with the events in Rivers State, where federal might is being immoderately and perversely deployed, and the unsupportable and capricious inclusion of Adamawa in the emergency declaration, we are well on our way to a brutal dictatorship. We recall how miserably we fared when we feebly confronted the dictatorship and arbitrariness of the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo presidency; it is up to us if in the face of Dr Jonathan’s political dubieties we begin to prevaricate or, worse, wilt. We should not blame Boko Haram for exposing our poor mettle or northern leaders who failed to rally against the sect. If another president takes us for a ride again, and in the end corrupts and weakens the fabric of our democracy, we have ourselves, our weak legislature and our impressionable press to thank.

  • More than ever, the president now needs to inspire

    More than ever, the president now needs to inspire

    Judging from the way he talks, gestures and ruminates, sometimes angrily and at other times dismissively, President Goodluck Jonathan often gives the impression his pressing problems should be laid at the doorsteps of Nigeria’s boisterous and sometimes cantankerous media and the political opposition. The media is deeply judgemental, probing and censorious, and it has given Jonathan’s presidency no quarters. But it has always been all these, and will continue to be much more well after the Jonathan government; for even before independence, it never suffered fools gladly, not the white man and not his docile and colluding black servants. It is pointless for anyone to think that the media can now be tamed or diminished both by legislation and by brute force. Not only will such efforts remain undesirable, it will be ineffectual. On its own, the opposition, whether during military rule or civilian rule, is grounded on constitutional and cultural approbation. To attempt to put a leash on it is to try to make water flow uphill. It is as unrealistically unnatural as it is deliberately quixotic.

    It is, therefore, time for the Jonathan presidency to take the predilections of the media and opposition parties as a given and try to locate the problems, weaknesses and limitations of his troubled government elsewhere. Since he assumed the presidency, Jonathan has been suffering from insufficient appreciation of the country’s structural imbalances and disequilibrium, poor policy coordination, unprecedented security challenges gradually metamorphosing into full-scale insurgency, rampant militia activities such as the proselytising Ombatse cult in Nasarawa State, schismatic ethnic politics, and a self-inflicted underachieving cabinet, among others. Singly or collectively, these problems have caused and nurtured instability in the Northeast, dislocated the economy, created a frustrated and destructive army of unemployed youths, rendered Jonathan’s government desperate and insular, and pushed the country firmly towards the precipice. The media merely reports these issues, and opposition parties merely capitalise on them. Neither group has infringed the law or common sense. And neither has acted improperly or with less circumspection than is generally required to keep the president and his government on their toes.

    The Jonathan government is not underperforming because these problems are unique, unprecedented or severe. He is not failing because anyone wants him to fail or because he was programmed by legal and constitutional strictures to falter. And he is not confused because the problems are complex and interwoven. The Jonathan government is lost in a self-created labyrinth because he either lacks the capacity to grapple with the problems that mass before him, or he is naturally uninspiring, and so can no more inspire anyone than he can eat or converse with aristocratic finesse. It is well known that governments in Nigeria win elections against the run of play and in defiance of their appalling records. Perhaps Dr Jonathan hopes to capitalise on that historical antecedent by winning elections undeservedly, achieving unplanned breakthroughs, and solving crises either by avoiding them or ignoring them. If he embraces any of those options, he will have it tough going. For, this time, given the intensity of the socioeconomic and sectarian revolt in the North, it is hard to see how his customary pussyfooting and policy inexactitude would guarantee the survival of the country beyond the portentous 2015 an American military think tank warned a few years ago.

    Dr Jonathan needs to reinvent himself along the lines his flashes of verbal brilliance and candour indicate. In his many public engagements, he sometimes spoke with simplicity and honesty, almost with engaging bipolarity, as if he always needed to subordinate his real self to his public self, his tortuous and perhaps contrived Christian consciousness to his more popular and secular nonconformism. Not only is it time for him to determine who he wants to be, it is also time to ask himself whether he really wants to save his presidency and what is left of his reputation. He came into politics without having had the opportunity to define politics in terms of the values that shaped his life and upbringing. And from the time he became deputy governor, through the frenetic pace of his meteoric ascendancy, and up to the time he mounted the highest throne in the land, Jonathan did not appear to have paused to define his politics, what he intended to do with power once he got it, and what sort of country he hoped to mould out of its riotous disparateness.

    The national crises that weigh on his soul and grieve him endlessly call on him to vote one way or the other. That vote has been long in coming. Since he came in unprepared, he did not have a prepared template to face the problems. If he does not now take a walk in the wilderness and commune with his own soul, it will be difficult for him to make a choice, let alone the right choice. Worse, instead of scientifically and methodically confronting the evils threatening to undermine his presidency and even plunge the country into anarchy, he may find himself conceiving and administering ad hoc solutions. A president must come to the epiphanic realisation that he needs to change himself first before he can attempt to change the country.

    But rather than the hard and productive way of changing himself in order to change the country, inspiring himself in order to inspire the country, acquiring knowledge in order to lead the country from a position of knowledge, Dr Jonathan may be embracing all over again the unproductive and hackneyed method of summoning his security chiefs or cabinet whenever he faces an outbreak of crisis. In the past two years or so, the insurgency in the North and militia activities in other parts of the country have combined to unleash a steady stream of bloodletting on the country. The bloodbath never stopped for a moment; but the president has had to cut short his visit to parts of Southern Africa to attend to the killings in Bama, Borno State, and a village near Lafia in Nasarawa State. What initiatives does he hope to bring to the table? Indeed, what initiatives has he brought to the table in the past few months when horrendous killings took place?

    Cutting short his visit to Southern Africa is a mere public relations stunt. He had no choice than to do that, for not to do it would have compounded the blame he continues to receive for his inability to stanch the flow of blood in the country. But nothing serious will come from the renewed attention the president is giving the present crisis. His style and approach to the crisis will not change until he changes himself. When he changes, he will no longer go to the scene of rebellion and pass the buck to the elders of blighted communities, or make utterances that inflame passion, alienate the people, and aggravate the insurgency. And he will not also endorse the bloated impression the security forces have of themselves: that their uniforms somehow make them superior, invincible and untouchable. Now that militias and insurgents have defied his warning that no security agent should be murdered without eliciting a disproportionate response from the state’s awesome security machine, what does he intend to do to avenge the Nasarawa killings? Wipe out the entire state?

    The country is exploding into many theatres of war. It is time Dr Jonathan took the right and urgent steps. First, he needs to reinvent himself, discover who he is, what kind of politics he wants to play, and what concrete vision of a strong, free and democratic country he wants to have, enunciate and bring about. He cannot discover himself by simply sitting at the head of the table in situation rooms and listening to the same jaded ideas from his incompetent aides, misguided advisers and overwhelmed security chiefs.

    Second, he needs to take very bold steps to restructure the country if it is to survive beyond 2015. The first step here is to cause the devolution of the security structure away from the current unitary system. The more he delays, the more likely the kind of ugly incident that occurred at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital between grieving policemen, doctors and morgue attendants will repeat itself. That unfortunate incident is a pointer to the fact that nerves are getting frayed and patience is snapping dangerously. It is only a matter of time before the unimaginable happens. Worse, even if perpetrators of the Nasarawa killings are caught and dealt with, it does not mitigate the fact that more and more groups are defying the state, demystifying the security agencies, and signifying that the country is fast running out of time.

    Third, it is incredible that the president does not know he is actually the one playing politics with insecurity, wrongly accusing the media of insensitivity and sensationalism, and unfairly denouncing the opposition for warning of disintegration. It is in fact Jonathan that needs a new, invigorated, bold and effective cabinet. Apart from unadvisedly surrendering a crucial part of his responsibilities to one or two powerful ministers in his cabinet, the president has unfortunately surrounded himself with what a columnist with this newspaper described as ethnopolitical zanies, most of whom don’t know their left from their right, and whose preoccupation is greed and parochialism.

    The country is not decaying beneath a welter of crises, much of it sectarian, sanguinary and disruptive. The country is in fact decaying beneath a lack of leadership, uninspiring, insensitive, glacial, but deceptively bellicose, leadership. Dr Jonathan is lucky to be faced with the crises assailing his government. His problem is not that the crises are many, terrible and complex. His problem is how he is responding to them. So far, those responses have not been stirring. But they need to be if he is not to go down into 2015 a failure hoping to be rewarded with a second term for having led his country into chaos and decay.

  • The fire-eating quartet of Jonathan, Amaechi, Kuku and Asari-Dokubo

    The suspicion in many quarters is that President Goodluck Jonathan actually thinks he has done substantially well enough to justify his party presenting him for re-election in 2015. Kingsley Kuku, the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta, and Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), a militant group physically but not psychologically repentant, think so too, and have reiterated that fact in very unpleasant and annoying language. While the president has kept prudently but disingenuously silent on his records and 2015 ambition, Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State has spoken imprudently loud about his well-known enemies, their Abuja backers, and the subterfuge perpetrated by the presidency in the riverine state.

    Reacting to the massive disapproval that greeted his statements warning of economic sabotage and war if Dr Jonathan was not re-elected, but enjoying every bit of the publicity and attendant notoriety, Asari-Dokubo has goaded the public with yet more boastful and provocative comments. He could not be arrested, he threatened conceitedly, because the last time he was arrested and detained, oil production was cut down by a significant margin. This time, he thundered, his arrest would bring oil production to zero. Such buffoonery! There is no doubt that there are lots of troublemakers in the country, many of them lacking in restraint and sense of proportion, but the many silly remarks Asari-Dokubo made showed him to be a halfwit who should be noted but ignored.

    Hon. Kuku, who also heads the well-funded Presidential Amnesty Programme, was even more loquacious, insulting and conniving. “It is true that the Presidential Amnesty Programme has engendered peace, safety and security in the sensitive and strategic Niger Delta,” he began incongruously. “It is only a Jonathan presidency that can guarantee continued peace and energy security in the Niger Delta,” he concluded. He also managed to attempt to blackmail the United States warning them that if they fail to support Jonathan’s re-election it could threaten national stability and oil and gas exports. Unlike Nigeria, which is being blackmailed into precipitous appeasement of all sorts of malcontents, the US never likes to be arm-twisted. By now, after hearing all the careless talk by close aides and advisers of the president, foreign powers will have taken the measure of Nigerian rulers’ minds. They will not be surprised that Nigeria is embroiled in crisis.

    But much worse is the proxy war between the president himself and the governor of Rivers State. It is a turf war in which two leading politicians are fighting for supremacy. But the war is unsettling the state, promoting animosity, undermining the constitution, and worsening the tension that has enveloped the country from North to South. While the president’s men are fighting for control of the state in order not to lose it in 2015, Amaechi’s men tamely clutch only to the law and the constitution in a desperate struggle to stay afloat. It is not certain how the struggle will be resolved; whether the constitution will be sustained, or whether federal might will destabilise or even overwhelm the state.

    Whatever the situation in Rivers, and however the looming apocalypse in the Northeast, and now North-Central, plays out, the country should prepare for tough times ahead. The president can lower the temperature if he wants to. But there is no proof he knows how to or why he should, or more critically, the consequences of aggravating the turmoil in the country.

  • Turai/Patience: Embarrassing land battle ends somewhat

    Turai/Patience: Embarrassing land battle ends somewhat

    After more than two years of nasty controversy over the revocation and reallocation of a prime land in Abuja, and an embarrassing court battle between two First Ladies over the same land, an Abuja High Court has resolved the matter, at least for the moment. Though the spokesman of the First Lady, Mrs Patience Jonathan, said the land battle was between Turai Yar’Adua, widow of the former president, Umaru Yar’Adua, and the Federal Capital City (FCT), everyone knows that the bitter fight was between the two First Ladies. While it is true Dame Patience was not joined in the case when Hajiya Turai headed for the courts, it was widely known that by being the beneficiary of the land reallocation, she was by far the most interested party in the tripartite land dispute. Not only did she defend the reallocation in her scabrous but expansively entertaining style, she left no doubt whatsoever that what she planned to do with the land would summarise her legacy.

    During the presentation of the PDP Women-In-Power 2013 Calendar in February, she had this to say: “The wife of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Maryam, built the National Women Centre while the wife of Gen. Sani Abacha, Maryam, also built the National Hospital. None of them (former First Ladies) left with the buildings. I am not the owner of the AFLPM, and when I leave, I will not take it away. It is not a pet project of anyone.” The land in question is situated in the Central Business District in Abuja. In February 2010, it was allocated to the Women and Youth Empowerment Foundation (WAYEF), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) run by the immediate past First Lady, Hajiya Turai. However, in November 2011 the FCT minister, Bala Mohammed, revoked the allocation and transferred ownership of the land to African First Ladies Peace Mission (AFLPM) now led by Dame Patience. The First Lady had planned to build the headquarters of the AFLPM on the land, and for which the ingratiating FCT controversially budgeted about four billion naira.

    Though Ayo Osinlu, the First Lady’s spokesman, has attempted to present what amounts to a fresh case in the newspapers to sway the public, Justice Peter Affen was emphatic that he gave judgment based on the facts before him. It is, however, possible that some of the facts available to Mr. Osinlu and his bosses were not available to the judge. But that can be explained, as Mr Osinlu himself acknowledged, by the fact that the case was not between Hajiya Turai and Dame Patience; it was between the former First Lady and the FCT. The FCT has indicated interest in appealing the decision. It is entitled to push the matter even up to the Supreme Court, though it is hard to see Affen’s decision being overturned. What the continuation of the case will do, however, is to further prolong Dame Patience’s misery, open the government to more ridicule, and damage the little reputation the President Goodluck Jonathan government pretends to have for taking dispassionate views of issues – as if the Rotimi Amaechi case is not enough refutation.

    When the AFLPM met in July last year in Abuja, the land battle was still unresolved and the budget allocation for the AFLPM was yet to be sorted out. But through the intervention of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Adoke, Dame Patience, surrounded by a bevy of other First Ladies, managed to lay the foundation stone for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat. It takes unusual gusto and indifference to the law and propriety to circumvent legal and administrative objections with such flourish. Dame Patience doubtless has a fighting spirit. If only it could be harnessed for irreproachable causes.

    But the First Lady is not all defiance. She was probably emboldened to fight for the land based on the testimony of former FCT minister, Aliyu Moddibo Umar, who told the Voice of America radio service that the idea for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat was actually his own, not even Dame Patience’s or Hajiya Turai’s. He had secured the land, prepared a C-of-O for it, and had a structural drawing for the project done, all in 2008. He added that he thought it would be a legacy project for Hajiya Turai. But after he vacated that office, his successor, Senator Adamu Aliero, was said to have reallocated the land to Hajiya Turai’s NGO, an action, Dame Patience insisted, the current FCT minister was trying to correct.

    Thrice the trial judge gave the disputants opportunity to settle the matter out of court, and thrice they spurned the chance to act reasonably. According to Hajiya Turai’s lawyers, the land offered the former First Lady was either too small or it was situated in undeveloped area. In the end, the judge decided that the land should not have been revoked or reallocated. The main problem with the land battle, however, is not whether Hajiya Turai was right, as the law has now affirmed, or whether FCT/Dame Patience was wrong, going by the court decision. The problem is that the two First Ladies opened up the country to ridicule. It is inconceivable that the African First Ladies that attended the foundation laying ceremony of the secretariat last year did not hear or read about the unseemly struggle over the choice land in Abuja. They probably shrugged their shoulders, satisfied that they were not the ones making a mockery of their position or their countries. If Nigerians felt shameless about such matters, it was the least of the problems of the other First ladies.

    The blame for the intractable land dispute should be put squarely at the feet of Jonathan. It was wrong of him to allow the case to fester openly for so long to the point that Nigeria became a spectacle. It is okay for him to affirm his respect for the rule of law, and to accord the law the widest latitude in resolving conflicts, but in this instance, as in nearly all instances, it was better the case had not gone to court at all. Even if Hajiya Turai was wrong, greedy and duplicitous, for the sake of the country’s image and the high esteem many hold the presidency of Nigeria, Jonathan should have insisted the AFLPM looked for another piece of land, whether prime or not. After all, the FCT is still developing and expanding.

    There are times when tenacity is a virtue; but there are also times when it is unhelpful. The disputed land exemplifies tenacity as a vice. Jonathan should have put his foot down to avert the court dispute. He is not only president in fact, he is president in law, and he is supposed to embody the country’s self-esteem and approximate its self-belief. When he acts nobly, it rubs off on everyone; when he acts disreputably, it also tars everyone with the same brush. It is unnerving that that distinction escaped him in the dispute between Dame Patience and Hajiya Turai. How many more such distinctions will escape him before his term is finished?

    Now, the damage is done, and it is incalculable. If Jonathan had made the AFLPM to forgo the land, he could have appropriated to himself and his government a nobility far in excess of what he has exhibited so far or is in fact capable of. But even if he were to win the case on appeal, it could not mitigate the public relations damage the original loss occasioned, for many would see his importunate government as rapacious and vengeful. But if the FCT/government/Patience should lose again, it would be the ultimate humiliation they could not hope to live down. In other words, damned if they win; and damned if they lose.

    The president may again pretend to his usual detachment on this embarrassing legal battle, but the unavoidable fact is that the buck stops at his desk. He can either pick the buck and throw it away in denial, or remove his desk and declare with quixotic relish he had vanquished the phantom, or act with the wisdom expected of his office. What he cannot afford to do is stand still, pretend the nuisance battle is strictly legal, and hope the problem would resolve itself in the near future.

  • Baga: Satellite evidence turns army logic on its head

    Theoretically speaking, no one is certain that the death toll from the clash between the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) and Boko Haram insurgents in Baga, Borno State is as high as locals say or as low as the military authorities swear. But whether the 36 dead declared by the Army or the 185 dead asserted by the locals, the circumstances of the clash and the furore that followed it indicate that something deeply troubling happened in that community. Following the outcry that greeted the high death toll and the thousands of houses allegedly burnt during the nearly two-day operation, the military quickly empaneled a team of officers to investigate the clash. Its report was not substantially different from the initial account given by the commanders of the Baga operation. They insisted there were fewer than 1000 houses in Baga, thereby questioning the account of locals who said more than 2000 houses were deliberately torched by the rampaging soldiers.

    Nigerians met the military investigation reports with deep cynicism. Senator Maina Ma’aji Lawan, whose constituency includes Baga, has denounced the military statistics as an infernal lie. He swore that a massacre occurred in the town. He also suggested that in fact much of the town was sacked, not in fighting, but in reprisal. There are a few other teams of investigators empowered to look into the clash. They are expected to give less colourful and more believable accounts. But meanwhile, a US-based rights group, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), has unexpectedly supplied satellite images of the destroyed town before and after the clash, thus proving that a huge swath of the town was indeed sacked and burnt. It further analysed that the conflagration could not have been triggered by small arms and light weapons, as speculated by the military.

    The military authorities are yet to reply to this new evidence. But it is fast dawning on everyone that in the face of modern science, there is no hiding place for anyone or atrocity. If the HRW satellite images stand, and there is no reason they should not, the officers who endorsed the military report may have imperiled their integrity and commission. They and President Goodluck Jonathan who was quick to embrace the report will be surprised to know that even in Africa things are changing, and the atrocities connived at in the past have become anathema.

    The National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria (NHRC) will also be investigating the clash. But it has implausibly and precipitately cautioned that the Baga incident should not be politicised. Absolute nonsense. Of course, no one is politicising the massacre. The fact is that everyone is too shocked by the scale of killings that it smacks of gross insensitivity and even snobbery for the government and the NHRC to suggest someone might be politicising the issue. Let us hope that the NHRC’s hasty caution does not prejudice the outcome of its report. As for the president and the military, they seem quite desperate to downplay the incident. But even if 36 were killed, it still amounts to crime against humanity if the victims were defenceless civilians instead of armed militants. Surely, the government and the military can tell the difference.

  • Dame Patience states her case

    “We wish to say for the umpteenth time that the land matter had been taken out of context in the public domain, to create an impression that Dame Patience tried to take over a land previously allocated to Hajia Turai. The fact of the matter is that this was not the case, as we have consistently explained. The land, as clarified by former FCT Minister, Aliyu Moddibo Umar, in the Daily Trust edition of Thursday, August 2, 2012, was originally allocated to the African First Ladies Peace Mission during the tenure of Hajia Turai Yar’Adua, as President of the Peace Mission in 2008.

    “By some curious circumstances, which have been explained by the FCT Administration, the piece of land was re-allocated to Hajia Turai Yar’Adua’s NGO (WAYEF), under another plot number. It is this anomaly, considered an administrative error, which the FCT had tried to rectify.

    “Let it be known that the FCT took what it considered a legitimate course of action to rectify the error, which Hajia Turai challenged in court, having turned down several efforts to get her NGO another piece of land.

    “Our office had repeatedly stated that the land, which had been subject of litigation, was between the FCT Administration and Hajia Turai Yar’adua’s NGO, and neither the African First Ladies Peace Mission, even though it is the original allotee of the land, nor Dame Patience Jonathan, who is the sitting President of the continental body, was joined in the suit.

    “For purposes of emphasis, we wish to reiterate that the land in question was first allocated to the African First Ladies Peace Mission, according to records available to us, during the tenure of Hajia Turai Yar’Adua as President of the Mission. If in leaving office she had decided to depart with the land, the FCT HAS TAKEN APPROPRIATE LOGICAL ACTION to retrieve the said plot for the ORIGINAL allotee and purpose.”

    “To this extent, we wish to state categorically that the judgment referred to in the media was not against the person of Dame Patience Jonathan, and we will like the public and well-meaning Nigerians to put the matter in its proper perspective for the purpose of accurate record and common good.”

  • ACN, UPN, pipeline contracts and OPC

    ACN, UPN, pipeline contracts and OPC

    Shortly before the inauguration of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, I travelled by public transport to Ilorin. Somewhere in Ibadan, we came upon a band of Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) toughs wielding various weapons including automatic guns, short machetes and axes. Their leaders/commanders wore various specially embroidered clothes that harked back to the era of the Yoruba wars. Apart from small gourds strapped to their jumpers, they also wore red wrist or head bands with cowries stitched to them. They stopped traffic majestically and defiantly, and strolled across the road with not a care in the world. A few kilometres down the main road to Ilorin, we again encountered another band, this time in a convoy of beat-up cars and perhaps a pick-up van, if my memory serves me well. They drove fiercely and menacingly, some sitting on top of their cars, and others popping their heads out of the windows as their vehicles bobbed and weaved through the choked traffic.

    This was in the late 1990s, barely a few years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide raged in all its atavistic and sanguinary fury. Using the autocratic regime of Gen Sani Abacha as pretext, Yorubaland began to regress into anomie and idolatry. While still in traffic, and as OPC militants were strutting their stuff, I became both troubled and humiliated. Was this what the Southwest had become? Was the region’s civilisation so tenuous that it took just one destabilising incidence to demolish its accomplishments and send the region lumbering abjectly into the embrace of undemocratic and impulsive bands of area toughies? The OPC may no longer be brazen and daring as it was, but it has kept its structure fairly intact, and continues to attract mainly those who, like cultists, want a sense of adventure and meaning to life.

    The Southwest was somewhat lucky to have understood very early the pitfalls of putting its hopes and trust in an ethnic militia. Given the cold shoulder in polite circles, the OPC quietly morphed into a militia of local enforcers and security consultants. These jobs were needed to keep them busy in place of the revolution they, and many people, believed loomed in the 1990s and early 2000s. After reading about the Rwandan genocide and watching a documentary on it, not to talk of the post-Tito Yugoslavia that dissolved into civil war, it was easy to make up my mind about the dangers of indulging ethnic militias, whether among the Yoruba or in Boko Haram territory. The Yoruba were lucky the OPC experienced considerable attenuation over the years; the North is not so lucky in the hands of Boko Haram, which they at first indulged, then lamely opposed, and finally watched with quiet dismay and resignation from afar.

    For those who naively put their trust in the OPC as the saviour, backbone and standby militia of the Yoruba, the ongoing struggle for pipeline security contracts and leadership supremacy between Frederick Fasehun and Gani Adams can be very disillusioning. Sometime in April, Dr Fasehun had delivered a broadside on Mr Adams for attempting to match him wit for wit and brawn for brawn. But he also acknowledged that he had bidden for a pipeline security contract because the six million youths in his militia deserved the federal government’s economic patronage, just as Niger Delta youths are beneficiaries of very lucrative federal government contracts. No one knows where he got the outlandish figures of OPC membership. But responding to the ACN spokesman’s criticisms that he bade for the contract in order to fund a political party and turn it into a destabilising counterpoise to the region’s dominant party, Fasehun offered a most peremptory and non-ideological argument indicating that in his political world everything boiled down to money. That this materialism subverts the lofty principles of the Southwest, especially the lodestar of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) he is presumptuously trying to revive, is immaterial to him.

    I have read many opinions on the contract bid by the OPC leaders, and find them humbling. In defending Fasehun, most of the views quite illogically ignore the contradictions between propping up oneself as a saviour or defender of the Yoruba and being a federal government contractor. The Tompolos, Boyloaf and Dokubos of the Niger Delta have never tried to sound principled or ideological. From their antecedents and their current standing, they give the firm impression they need financial empowerment more for its own sake than for any esoteric reasons. They are not driven by any principle of democracy, federalism, human rights, or any other lofty values that ennoble humanity. If the right contracts are dispensed to them, it becomes an incentive to work with and give support to the government of the day. In this they are at least honest, for they do not attempt the disingenuousness their OPC counterparts have now become famous for. How Mr Adams and Fasehun, for instance, hope to get pipeline protection contracts from the Jonathan presidency and in the same breath defend the values that have characterised the Yoruba for centuries is a puzzle. More puzzling is the fact that they do not see the tragedy of outsourcing security to ethnic militants and repentant bigots.

    But the dishonesty of the OPC leaders and their self-serving philosophy do not end there. They are not squabbling over ideology, or over political orientation, or even over societal reengineering. These self-appointed defenders of the Yoruba race are squabbling over two things only: contract from the government, and leadership position in the OPC. It is a surprise that it has taken so long for many Yoruba elites to see through the gimmickry of the militia. While the contracts have not yet been awarded, Fasehun has spoken condescendingly of subletting less than one-third of the contract’s value to Mr Adams’ faction of the OPC. The latter, inured to the paradox of Yoruba defenders fighting for crumbs from a potential enemy, is asking for nothing less than half of the total value of the contract. This, he says, is because he leads about 90 percent of the membership of the OPC.

    The dissembling duo already has projects in the pipeline. While Dr Fasehun is attempting to revive the defunct UPN, Mr Adams, less pretentious, less ambitious, but perhaps more practical and self-important, simply wants to keep his boys engaged and happy. Both suggest that the Southwest deserves it, for the ACN, according to them has proved incapable of taking care of the welfare of the region. On April 18, Fasehun published a rambling and innuendo-ridden advertorial in which he attempted to rationalise the revival of the UPN. The best in the advert is his exaggerated affectations on democracy. But it would have been better if he had not published anything, for it is clear that in spite of his activist years, he lacks both the depth and character to preach democracy to anyone or offer leadership to any group.

    Fasehun assumes that merely invoking the name of UPN is enough to bring back the glory of the Chief Obafemi Awolowo era. He forgets that it was not the party that ennobled Awo; on the contrary it was Awo through his brilliance, depth, passion and discipline, not to say contempt for federal handouts, that ennobled the party. What virtue will Fasehun bring to the party he seeks so cavalierly and comically to resuscitate? I can see none. And what on earth has come over opinion writers and analysts that they give Fasehun a hearing, he that recently asked for Major Hamza Al-Mustapha to be pardoned, he of doubtful ideology and of hidden motives? Had the ferment in the country graduated into a revolution and any of the two OPC leaders assumed prominence, imagine what terrors, poor judgement and mediocrity would have been unleashed on the region.

    As Mr Adams said in his provocative response to Fasehun’s angry and disrespecting characterisation of his rival, the two OPCs are perfectly irreconcilable. But much more than the struggle for leadership of the ethnic militia, the pipeline contract controversy has exposed the superciliousness of the older man and the superficiality of the younger claimant. The elites and opinion moulders in the Southwest must surely have taken the measure of the two pretenders to the Yoruba throne. They are first and foremost contractors, a duo of self-serving and ambitious leaders without the farsightedness, discipline, sacrifice and competence to interpret the past and decipher the tangled skein of Nigeria’s future, let alone embody the values and virtues that have stood the Southwest out for centuries.

  • Baga massacre: Jonathan’s words return to haunt him

    Two Fridays ago, soldiers of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) swooped on Baga, a fishing town on the shores of Lake Chad, Borno State, leaving in their wake some 185 people dead, many of them, according to locals, women and children. The casualty figures are disputed, with the MJTF arguing that not more than 35 people or so died, and the locals insisting that in fact more than 200 people perished in the military assault. The military have given very colourful but hard-to-believe story of the assault. They insist they got intelligence information that Boko Haram militants were massing in a mosque in the town. A patrol was sent to assess the threat, but the patrol was met with extraordinary firepower during which an officer was killed, in fact beheaded. The MJTF reinforced and descended on the town, but was again met with great firepower. This time, however, said the military authorities, they were ready, and scores of civilians and militants were killed.

    Going by the worldwide condemnation of the excessive firepower deployed by the soldiers, the Jonathan presidency has ordered full-scale investigation into the assault, with a promise that offending soldiers who breached the military rules of engagement would be punished. Not only are we not told what would happen to the Chadian and Nigerien troops in the MJTF, there may be nothing to indicate by what proficiency the MJTF managed to sustain only slight injuries. No soldier died in the reprisal raid itself.

    Baga locals, however, gave a different account. They insisted the problem actually began at a cinema house where a misunderstanding between cinema goers led to some shootings that drew the attention of a nearby patrol. Unfortunately, an officer was killed, hence the reinforcement and the savage reprisal. When the reprisals began, said the locals, the militants had long gone, while most residents of the town who bore the brunt of the MJTF revenge were not even aware of the severity of the commotion at the cinema.

    Whether the government and National Assembly inquiries will reveal the truth, including accurate casualty figures, is difficult to say. But many people suspect that the reprisal was inspired by Jonathan’s intemperate remarks in Borno and Yobe States when he visited both places in March. (See right). This column had warned at the time that the president’s undignified remarks could return to haunt him in the months ahead. The suspicion is that that has now happened, a fact that has prompted calls for the president and offending soldiers to be dragged before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Palladium had on March 10 concluded: “So, now, will the president begin applying the Odi method perfected by Chief Olusgeun Obasanjo, and which he himself condemned as ineffective? If anyone still holds out hope that Jonathan has the depth and judgement to rule a complex nation, especially one facing dire ethnic and religious challenges, I offer to the optimist the president’s view on the consequences of killing security agents. And if anyone thinks we are not in even deeper trouble than we imagine, I offer the same presidential remark as an example. Let every community in the country beware; even their deviants cannot afford to bite a soldier, protest against police tyranny, or fight a security official to the death.”