Shortly after the Baga massacre, Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, complained plaintively that Chadian and Nigerien members of the Multinational Joint Task Force based on the outskirts of Baga, Borno State, withdrew from the base shortly before Boko Haram insurgents overran the town early January. “We were left alone to face Boko Haram,” he wailed. Apart from missing the poignant fact that Baga is Nigerian soil, and that the Nigerian military had the responsibility, singly or jointly, but perhaps much more singly, to defend the town when it was attacked, the CDS seemed to give the impression the Chadian and Nigerien troops avoided battle. Not only did Nigerian troops take the massive blows alone, and unfortunately flee before Boko Haram militants, freshly supplied military equipment were lost to the insurgents, leading some officers to suggest that internal sabotage caused the Baga embarrassment.
A few days after the Baga attack, and amidst the ensuing global outrage and shock, Chadian authorities brushed aside Nigeria, reached an agreement with Cameroon to fight Boko Haram, and brusquely appropriated the headquarters of the Multinational Joint Task Force from Nigeria, where it was temporarily bivouacked, to the Chadian capital city of Ndjamena. Almost instantaneously too, the Chadians mobilised troops and began advancing towards Cameroon to join battle with Boko Haram. The effort immediately began to yield fruits, with the rescue of a German captive, Robert Eberherd, held for six months by the insurgents. The summary of events since the Baga debacle, as recounted by a Chadian Colonel to the world press, was instructive, and it captured the full essence of the tragedy that has befallen Nigeria in recent years, especially under President Godluck Jonathan.
“We are going to advance (last Monday) towards the enemy,” Chadian army Col. Djerou Ibrahim, who is leading the offensive against Boko Haram, told AFP from the strategic crossroads town of Maltam in northern Cameroon. “Our mission is to hunt down Boko Haram, and we have all the means to do that.” His tone was self-assured; his voice determined, bold and challenging. Chad was eager to go, and went they did. Chad and Cameroon barely restrained themselves from accusing Nigeria of undermining the fight against Boko Haram. They did not say so; but all the actions they took, including their views, appropriation of the Multinational Joint Task Force capital, and the opening of a Cameroonian front against the insurgents, gave the impression they were willing to go it alone, preferably without Nigeria. After all, on at least two occasions, Cameroonian troops had rescued fleeing Nigerian troops.
The Nigerian response was at first pathetic. “All backing of our operations will be welcomed, but that must conform to operations we already have underway, given those are on Nigerian territory,” said Nigerian Army spokesman, Chris Olukolade, a Major-General. That conditional support for the Chadian operations has since been modified by Nigeria, perhaps after they realised the implication of the entire developments on the image of the country. Nigeria now says that neither the United Nations (UN) nor an African Union (AU)-backed force is welcomed. “A regional force should be capable of tackling the problem,” says National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, a retired Colonel, to the British Broadcasting Service (BBC) last week. “It’s something that we can do. It’s absolutely something we can do. I think as it is, we are in good shape to address the issue with those partners, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.” He does not, however, appear to have addressed the partners’ loss of confidence in the readiness and ability of Nigeria to fight.
Much more than any other incident, the Baga attack and the events that followed showed the precipitous decline Nigeria has suffered on all fronts in recent years. Nigerians are not impervious to the decay and decline afflicting their country. In fact, they are deeply hurt by the loss of national pride and confidence, and are unable to summon any hope that the problem can be remedied in the immediate future. The decay, of course, did not begin with Baga. Baga was just the climax of a rancid political process. Nor did the loss of confidence begin with the military’s shambolic response to the Boko Haram insurgency. It began insidiously with the failure of the government to respond intelligently to the factors that predisposed Nigeria to instability, both economic and social. The consequence is that with every successful attack by Boko Haram, both Nigeria and especially its government are perceived as weak and ineffective. That perception has endured, is even coalescing into an electorally significant consensus, and has transmogrified into a cancerous attack on the liver and sinews of the country.
There is no question that Nigeria’s national pride is deeply injured by the lack of qualitative and quantitative responses to the existential challenges the country is facing, notwithstanding the desultory efforts by the military brass to downplay the impact or effectiveness of the insurgency and Boko Haram’s fighting force. From the humiliating Chibok abductions, which has now lasted for more than nine months, to the continuing massacres in parts of the Northeast, the large scale insecurity in virtually all parts of the country, herdsmen attacks, robberies, and even the excesses of law enforcement agencies, the mood, not to say the dominant rhetoric, in the country is decidedly conflictual and aggressive. Politics is now destabilised by all sorts of forces needling and tearing the national fabric. There is a huge sense of foreboding that the country’s very existence is endangered, a perception that is at bottom responsible for the shifting opinions about what must be done to arrest the drift and who can best perform that function of saving the union.
Whether it is justified or not, the perception three weeks to the general elections is that President Jonathan has had four years to respond imaginatively to the challenges of the moment. In interviews, many of them gaffe-ridden, the President has shown shallow and conflicting understanding of the forces at play. Worse, the President has been unable to give the courage and inspiration needed by Nigerians to face these growing challenges. Conversely, his opponent in the February 14 election, Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general, is believed to possess the mental fortitude to respond to the challenges. Whether there is proof for this optimism or not, the perception is that Gen. Buhari has the military background to arrest the turmoil in the Northeast and prevent the chaos from spreading beyond the troubled region.
The crisis of confidence afflicting the country manifested in far away Mali in January 2013 when a combined French and African Union (AU) forces fought to retrieve the country from Islamists and secular Tuareg secessionists who attempted to balkanise Mali. Nigeria was among the countries that offered troops. But when the war began, Nigerian troops were assigned guard duties, while Chadian troops, whom the French believed were more reliable and well-suited for desert warfare, were deployed in the frontlines. Humiliated, Nigeria withdrew its troops. It was a warning to Nigerian authorities that a lot had gone wrong with its military and security policy. But little was done until Boko Haram exposed the Nigerian military’s underbelly.
The economy has suffered bigger turbulence than any other sector, leading to a far worse perception of the Jonathan government as incapable of dealing with, responding to, and anticipating the crisis, a crisis accentuated by unfavourable international economic environment. Assailed by pension fund thieves, fuel subsidy racketeers, incomplete remittance of oil receipts to government treasury, the Nigerian economy has reeled drunkenly from side to side from declining oil prices, corruption and mismanagement. With many states unable to pay their workers as and when due, the economy now totters dangerously on the brink. Social chaos is only a hair’s breadth away. The fragile semblance of stability is sustained only by hope that February’s electoral outcomes would serve as both a useful nodyne and catharsis.
No one feels this sense of despondency much keener than Nigerians in the U.S. and Europe. They are at the receiving end of international ridicule for the acute failings of the Nigerian government. The inurement Nigerians at home feel against the consequences of leadership failure, perhaps because their senses have been deadened against the pains and afflictions of poor governance and leadership, is absent among Nigerians abroad. They are consequently more united in their perception of the present government as an unmitigated failure, and have scorned the Jonathan government with near perfect unanimity. That unanimity may not have been transferred back to Nigeria, but it is a barometer of how the government is perceived abroad and why there is no one to stand up in defence of the country and its government against the rampant insults they attract in the foreign media.
Nigerians’ poor perception of their government is exacerbated by the ridicule Nigeria and the Jonathan government are subjected to everywhere, even in Africa. When Nigeria asked for international help to rescue the abducted Chibok schoolgirls, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, himself a dictator of sorts, spoke to Ugandans about the impotence of the Jonathan government: “I have never called the UN to guard your security. Me, Yoweri Museveni, to say that I have failed to protect my people and I call in the UN….I would rather hang myself,..We prioritised national security by developing a strong army, otherwise our Uganda would be like DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), South Sudan, Somalia or Nigeria where militias have disappeared with school children. It would be a vote of no confidence to our country and citizens if we can’t guarantee our security, what kind of persons would we be?…It would be a mistake for the government of Nigeria to negotiate with these people. The most important thing is to defeat them, then negotiations can come after that.”
It was evident that even in Africa, Nigeria is thought of poorly. For a country that used to offer the continent leadership and largely defined its tastes and international relations direction, such as when it enunciated the Concert of Medium Powers, the low esteem in which it is held and its political decline are particularly galling. Nigeria has never had it so bad. In March last year, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe also sneered at Nigeria and its government, an abuse not lost on Nigerians at home and abroad. Speaking on corruption in Nigeria during his birthday bash in Harare, Mr Mugabe says: “Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach your pocket to get anything done…You see we used to go to Nigeria and every time we went there we had to carry extra cash in our pockets to corruptly pay for everything. You get into a plane in Nigeria and you sit there and the crew keeps dilly-dallying without taking off as they wait for you to pay them to fly the plane.”
President Jonathan has himself not helped matters. Both he and his party have vaingloriously attempted to infuse sectarian politics into the Nigerian body politic. That tactics has however recorded dubious success. Some notable religious leaders have been converted to the Jonathan presidency’s strange theology, but many others have become persuaded of the potential of sectarian politics to wreak havoc on the country’s unity, stability and progress. Indeed, the use of sectarian tactics has had the unintended consequence of worsening the perception of the Jonathan presidency as frighteningly inured to the catastrophic impact of religious politics in parts of the world convulsed by intolerance and other forms of imported and domestic extremism.
As the presidential election draws near, these perceptions have become even more unflattering and disturbing. Compounded by world media attention and opinion, much of it scathingly critical of President Jonathan’s handling of the Nigerian crisis, the negative perceptions have virtually undermined the Jonathan presidential campaign, making his best efforts, past achievements, modest gains in key areas of the economy and society pale into insignificance. More past heads of state, including Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, have openly endorsed the rival opposition candidate, Gen Buhari. There seems to be no respite for the President. And as perceptions harden against him, with many voters’ minds already made up, the opposition seems set to harvest protest votes springing from the electorate’s fear of a worst-case scenario unfolding upon Nigeria.
