Retired Admiral Murtala Nyako has been reaping the whirlwind for sowing the wind of controversy by his recent claim that President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has been hiding under war against Boko Haram to commit genocide against the North. He made his claim in a letter dated April 16 to his 18 counterparts in the Northern States’ Governors’ Forum. The letter, entitled: “On-going full-scale genocide in Northern Nigeria,” sought the support of his counterparts to stop the alleged genocide.
Instead of support, Nyako, a former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, a former Navy chief, first military governor of Niger State and currently serving out his second term as a civilian governor of his native Adamawa State, has been suffering from splendid isolation – indeed, worse.
The chairman of the NSGF, Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu, has dismissed his claim as baseless. Another governor, Abia’s Theodore Orji, has said there was “unanimous condemnation of the memo” by the expanded security meeting of governors, service chiefs and other senior government officials summoned by the president last week. Not least of all, virtually all his colleagues have maintained an apparently embarrassed silence over his call for their support.
Probably the harshest criticism of the governor, however, has been Senate President David Mark’s brief but strongly worded opening remarks at the resumption of the Upper Chambers on April 29. Mark, speaking against the background of the suspected Boko Haram Easter bombing of the Nyanya motor park on the outskirts of Abuja which claimed many lives and the kidnapping of over 200 secondary school girls from Chibok in Borno State, did not name names. But when he said speaking along partisan lines over the fight against Boko Haram is “condemnable and totally unacceptable” and that “We should not sell the truth to serve the hour,” it was pretty obvious who he had in mind.
Outside government circles, there has been a near universal condemnation of the governor by the newspaper commentariat. For example, The Nation (April 24) condemned his letter as “divisive and opportunistic.” Sunday Trust (April 27) denounced his stance as “dangerous” while The Guardian (May 5) said his language “was indecorous and inappropriate” for his high office. It also dismissed his assertions as “wild and unguarded,” without the backing of any evidence.
As for the country’s leading newspaper pundits, as far as I know, only Adamu Adamu, the must-read Friday columnist of Daily Trust, has so far written to unequivocally support the governor in a two-part piece on April 25 and May 2.
I completely share the sentiments of those who have condemned Nyako’s use of such gutter language as “bullshit” and strong words like “evil-minded” in his letter to describe the presidency, even if it fits the description. As The Guardian said, certain language usages are simply unbecoming of certain office holders.
I also completely agree with the newspaper that, in so far as the governor’s frustration with the Federal Government’s obvious mishandling of the Boko Haram insurgency is understandable, his letter should have been addressed to Nigerians instead of only to his “fellow Governors and Citizens of the North.” The theatre of Boko Haram’s terrorism may be the North, more specifically the North-East, but the scourge has since transmogrified into a Nigerian problem which has claimed the lives and limbs of Nigerians from all parts of the country.
However, while we condemn the governor for his language, sensationalism and sectionalism, we must accept that his allegations are not completely baseless.
First, there was this online interview Sunday Trust had with Jomo Gbomo, the spokesman of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) nearly five years ago and which the newspaper published in its edition of June 21, 2009. In the half-page interview, Gbomo threatened MEND would extend its war from the creeks to the North. “Due to the fact that the (Northern) elite,” he said, “are taking us for fools and the majority of soldiers (fighting us are) from the North, the time has come when brothers have to go to war. In the end there will be mutual respect and true federalism will be mutually beneficial to all of us.”
In the end, Gbomo’s war against the North did not materialise because President Umaru Yar’adua, a Northern aristocrat if ever there was one, anticipated it through a policy of amnesty for the militants, most notably Government Ekpemupolo, a.k.a. Tompolo, and Mujahid Asari Dokubo.
As fate would have it, Yar’adua died before he could implement his policy. He was succeeded by his Vice, Goodluck Jonathan, first as acting president and eventually on his own steam following the 2011 presidential elections. This was against stiff opposition from much of the North which felt cheated out of the period Yar’adua would have spent as president if he had not died.
MEND is said to be no more, but some of its leaders today are part of the kitchen cabinet of President Jonathan. As such they have become powerful and rich beyond their wildest imagination through government patronage. And they are unlikely to have forgotten how things were before the amnesty.
Naturally they, and other beneficiaries of the current dispensation, would hate to lose their new-found power and wealth. As such they are likely to do anything to retain it. It is obvious that the greatest threat to doing so is from sections of the North with more than enough votes to deny their patron another term in a free and fair election.
These beneficiaries of the current dispensation obviously have the motive to take the battle for power to the “enemy” territory. More importantly, their stupendous wealth has given them the means. It therefore does not sound as outrageous as Nyako’s critics believe for the man to conclude that some people in authority or having its ears are hiding under the war against Boko Haram terrorism to “deal” with the “enemy.”
If this sounds like stretching logic to an absurd conclusion, consider the president’s response to a question during his Media Chat of last Monday about the seeming ineffectiveness of his handling of the Boko Haram insurrection all these years. “Things,” he said dismissively, “are not getting worse. The situation is calming, for now there is a low vibe. We have been able to suppress it reasonably well”.
Clearly, a president who will sound so complacent when over 1,500 people have been killed so far this year – more than all the casualties in the first four years of the war on Boko Haram – is either criminally negligent of his responsibility or, at the least, does not give a damn about the pain a section of the country is going through because he seems to think its leaders, if not its people, don’t like him.
Worse still, consider his response to the April 15 mass kidnapping of secondary school girls from Chibok. Instead of taking responsibility for dealing with the incident, the president has allowed his rather overweening wife, Dame Patience, and several of his sidekicks, to create the impression that the authorities did not believe there was any kidnapping in the first place; that it was all the handiwork of the enemies of his administration hell bent on painting it as incompetent, heartless and indifferent.
Second, if Governor Nyako went overboard in his allegations, he merely took his cue from the president. Two years or so ago the president claimed, without giving any shred of evidence, that his government was infiltrated with Boko Haram agents all the way to the presidency. Since then several of his close aides, including Reno Omokri, his special assistant on social media, and the director-general of the State Security Services, have attempted to frame several prominent Northerners, notably the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria turned whistleblower, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, and even more ridiculously retired Colonel Dangiwa Umar, one of his staunchest supporters in the country, as financiers of Boko Haram.
None of these aides have received as much as a rap on the knuckles even though their attempts have been exposed for what they were – frame-ups. Predictably this has fuelled widespread belief that the president is more interested in making political mileage out of the Boko Haram insurgency than in ending it.
Governor Nyako may have overdone himself in accusing the president of committing genocide against the North, but the best way to expose the governor’s claim for the hyperbole that it mostly was is to see it as a wake-up call to go beyond using essentially military means to solve a problem which requires sincere dialogue as well if it is to be overcome.
