Tag: Goodluck Jonathan

President Goodluck Jonathan will today be meeting with security chiefs and state governors in what is billed to be momentous and far-reaching discussions on the direction Nigeria is travelling and the intractable insurgency it is combating. If they have the courage and the common sense to deliberate on the right issues and make the right choices, there will be plenty of reasons to hope for a bright future. But if they don’t, as it seems more likely, this year and especially the next will be so fraught with cataclysmic events that the unity of the country could be seriously endangered. The meeting itself is a spinoff from an earlier meeting in which the president unadvisedly met with his party’s governors and the nation’s security chiefs, with all sorts of convoluted explanations as to why that shocking misstep was taken. The opposition governors will hope that they will not be presented with a fait accompli flowing from last week’s restricted and partisan meeting.

The context of the meeting is indeed long and complex. Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State baited presidential and military anger a few months ago when he warned that the military campaign against Boko Haram insurgency was flagging because of lack of political will and the Nigerian Army’s use of lower calibre weapons. The insurgents, he said, were better armed and, more importantly, better motivated. Both the presidency and the military excoriated him with a virulence that even discomfited the country’s normally unshakable newspaper editors. It was clear to everyone but the presidency and the military that the governor was pained by the immeasurable suffering of his people, the horrendous scale of material destruction, the continuing and rapid immiseration of the Northeast in general, and what he suspected could be the fatal consequence of a badly managed and spiralling war.

But unsure that the point had been made sufficiently to Governor Shettima and others in the Northeast who thought irreverently like him, the president himself weighed in by making caustic and sarcastic remarks about the Northeast governors’ logic. If he withdrew his troops, threatened the president, as if that was an option either in a democratic polity or even a totalitarian regime, the insurgents would overrun the region almost immediately. His empathy, which the governor and the people demanded with anguished but incoherent pleas, was lost in the cobweb of the president’s biting sarcasm and detachment. The president in fact argued that the Northeast governors had been complicit in the origins of the insurgency by their careless and reckless attitude to developmental issues, particularly education. Mercifully, however, the president did not yield to his own sarcasm; he wisely revved up the war against the insurgents, even ordering his top army chiefs to relocate to the epicentre of the revolt.

But the counterinsurgency operations have yet to turn the tide of war. Instead, the insurgents have ramped up their operations, even acting with such impunity and persistence that leave the country and its military stupefied. This was what probably led Governor Murtala Nyako of Adamawa State, himself a former naval general, to make the inflammable and far-fetched insinuation in a letter to his fellow northern governors that the federal government was, by its incompetence in fighting the war and probable connivance at the insurgency, engaged in deliberate genocide against the North. Like his fellow Northeast governors under the declaration of emergency, he had wondered whether the insurgents and their sponsors were ghosts, and why in spite of the declaration of emergency, the insurgents sometimes operated for four, five, six hours unchallenged. These observations and arguments doubtless grated on the nerves of presidency officials who then took refuge in scurrilous responses.

It was amidst this ding-dong that Boko Haram operatives bombed the Nyanya motor park near Abuja killing over 75 people. A day after, the insurgents abducted about 270 schoolgirls from the Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. The outrage that followed and the misery and anguish the two gory events elicited have led to paranoid reactions from every part of the nation. While some resort to historical analysis, blaming the northern elite for having connived at the sect’s operations in its early years, others suggest that more drastic measures, including full emergency rule, should be declared in the Northeast. Yet others blame President Goodluck Jonathan and his military chiefs for their incompetent response to the campaign of terror. Today’s expanded security meeting between the president, the nation’s security chiefs and governors is expected to deliberate chiefly on the waning counterinsurgency operations in the Northeast and adopt options to remedy the dangerous lurch towards apocalypse. It will not attempt to understand or systematise the sect’s objectives from its chaotic modus operandi, especially its undiscriminating killing spree, though this is also necessary to win the war.

Nor does it require a soothsayer to enunciate the four or so options the meeting might be considering today. They are: full emergency declaration involving the suspension of democratic structures in the Northeast; extension of declaration of emergency with the retention of democratic structures for another six months; ending emergency declaration; and reshuffling military chiefs, like US President Abraham Lincoln did during the American Civil War, until the right commanders are found to wage a more scientific war against Boko Haram.

The declaration of full emergency rule is, however, beset by almost insurmountable difficulties. The argument that retention of democratic structures inhibits military operations is unsustainable. The government is at liberty to change commanders as it pleases, increase deployment of troops and weapons, formulate tactics, shut down telecommunication facilities and impose curfew, among other measures. Does the government hope to get a free hand in such a fashion that no one would question rights abuses? In the light of experiences in other hot spots in the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, would that not exacerbate the conflict and give added fillip to the sect’s recruitment drive? Does the Nigerian military not recognise the help it began to receive from the local populace, including the so-called civilian JTF, after it humanised its operations and recognised the need to win the hearts of the local populace?

Even if the northern elite had connived at the insurgency in its early moments, the revulsion against it in the North is now almost total. With effective military tactics, better motivation, adequate weaponry and inspiring political leadership, it should be possible to take the fight to Boko Haram, notwithstanding its alarming propensity to morph and its apparently better adaptability to changing war terrains and opposing military tactics. The option of full emergency rule is in many respects merely a cover for the poor handling of counterinsurgency operations at both the political and military levels. The Northeast is still sustained today by its democratic structures. These structures, as incompetent as they were in the past to address developmental needs, give the region a sense of belonging, an atmosphere of enduring civilised living, and hope for a quick end to their anguish. The erasure of democratic structures, temporary or otherwise, is bound to make the perspicacious worry that an incompetent presidency with a predilection for dictatorial methods could use the pretext of emergency rule to precipitate a whole cocktail of repressive measures that will probably spread far beyond the troubled region. After all, apart from the Southwest, there is hardly any political zone that is not facing one emergency or the other.

Two events illustrate the presidency’s and military’s unacceptable counterinsurgency measures. One, the president has not deemed it fit, perhaps on account of security fears, to visit the families of the abducted schoolgirls, about 20 of whom were taken away by insurgents from Konduga in Borno State in February, and about 270 snatched from Chibok in Borno this April. An apologetic Governor Shettima has paid a belated visit to Chibok, as he put it, against security advice. The president, who should be the repository of the country’s mores, traditions and values such as courage, probably heeded security advice and has been unable to visit the region since he last travelled there some years ago and lambasted its elite for colluding with the insurgents. Second, the Chibok abductions and rescue efforts are a reflection of the military’s tactical inadequacy. Not only did the insurgents disguise as soldiers to abduct the schoolgirls, according to furious parents who went in search of their children in the notorious Sambisa forest and the schoolgirls who escaped from their captors, they found no evidence for miles and miles of the presence of soldiers said to be in hot pursuit of the insurgents.

There are a few things fishy about what is going on. The political class, civil society groups and the media must reengage their curiosity to get to the bottom of the dispiriting national story of violence and recriminations. The task should not be left in the hands of the fierce-talking but obviously emotive governors of the Northeast. Questions must be asked, and notwithstanding the intimidatory tactics of the presidency and the military, who both seem prepared to embark on even more egregious blunders in fighting the insurgency, these groups must boldly demand answers. If the country should succumb to pressure to allow the government declare total emergency in the Northeast, questions about government methods and military tactics would be foreclosed without any assurance that the insurgency would be quelled in the short or long run. Nigeria’s ethnic pastiche, it must be remembered with calmness and restraint, is unlike any other.

The Boko Haram insurgency has festered so badly partly because of leadership incompetence. No nation can determine whether they will encounter problems or not, or whether the problems will be of one shape or the other. But they have the liberty and they must show the mental competence to tackle the problems when they arise. That is the stuff leadership is made of. What is clear from the Boko Haram narrative is the appalling collapse of leadership at all levels, from the executive to the legislature, from the judiciary to the media, and from the religious to the family. The presidency is in a bad shape, with the president quite unable to appreciate the whole gamut of his responsibilities, and his aides either too distracted by material considerations or too ignorant to offer the scientific advice required to help the president make the right choices.

It is not always that a president is up to the onerous task of lifting his country from self-made entanglements. In that situation the other sections of the society must have the discipline, courage and knowledge to compel the executive to make the right choices. Sadly, Nigeria is a bad example. Here, for instance, the judiciary and the law enforcement agencies have contributed immensely to the promotion of jungle justice and self-help because of a corrupt justice system perverted by ignorance and executive subversion. The legislature is even worse. Its leading functionaries sometimes see themselves not in the mould of great parliamentarians, but as cowardly and colluding appendages and errand boys of the executive.

On a large scale, therefore, Nigeria is being laid prostrate by the abject failure of its leaders and peoples, not by the challenges they face, whether Boko Haram or not. The country must hope that today’s security meeting at the presidency will not embark on the futile road to nowhere. It is not clear to what extent the PDP governors have undermined the polity, but the country must hope that it can find among them and among the opposition governors those who will tell the president that emergency rule will not redress the abject leadership failures that have caused everyone so much grief and fear of the future. They must tell the president that what is required is a determined and forceful president with the right heart to empathise with his people and carry them along, not in the combative and judgemental fashion he is accustomed to; a president who can find the commanders with the tactical brilliance to take on the insurgents and the skill to motivate the fighting troops; and a president who will give his commanders an ultimatum to rescue the abducted schoolgirls whose plight mock our manhood and national essence.

The governors must compel the president to appoint, in spite of himself, better and more knowledgeable advisers who can give him courageous and brilliant options, and if need be, provide him a solid spine in case it is true he lacks one. The terrorism war can be fought without precluding democratic structures, as other nations have shown, and without precluding vigorous opposition to the government’s style and methods, again as other nations have copiously demonstrated. It is hoped that for once Nigerian leaders will use their brains rather than their emotions to produce the right mix of choices upon which the country can be rebuild anew. The general mood may be deeply pessimistic, and a large and influential part of the population even angry, but the disaster that has taken decades in coalescing can still be dissipated if by a celestial sleight of hand the president and his team can find the wisdom, vision and patriotism to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.