President Jonathan and Gov Shettima’s reactions to recent national tragedies as case study
President Goodluck Jonathan would appear to have left undone what he ought to have done, only to do what he ought not to have done immediately after the Nyanya bomb blasts of April 14 in which, officially, 75 people were reported killed (unofficial sources quoted over 200), and 170 injured, some critically; and the abduction of 234 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, in the night of the same day. These were serious developments that should have put not just the government but the entire nation in a somber mood in societies where human lives are valued.
But not here. President Jonathan travelled to Kano the day after the bomb blasts, and a few hours after the abductions, to attend a political rally. Mr Labaran Maku, information minister, was to stoutly defend the president’s trip and also restate the usual government’s assurance (that assures no one). He said many things, including the usual belated closing of the door after the horse has bolted. “We will make it very difficult for people with bad intensions to penetrate our parks. Certainly, we are going to bring bomb detectors and we are going (emphasis mine) to work with our security to guide us on how to make our schools, parks, markets and other public places safe for our people,” he said. In our five years of fighting the insurgents, is it just occurring to the government that these public places must be protected?
Mr. Maku said the President has directed the FCT Minister to begin surveillance and provision of security around the Nigerian capital, Abuja. How come it is now that they are to begin these, in spite of the fact that Abuja had been attacked again and again by Boko Haram? What happened to the CCTVs in the city? Obviously Mr. Maku himself must have lost count of the number of times he had made similar statements and given similar assurances on behalf of the government since he became information minister.
Perhaps the worst of it all was his statement that President Jonathan made the Kano trip to drum it to the numbskulls that they (terrorists) cannot paralyse the government, whatever they do. Hear Maku: “I think going to Kano was a statement, a loud statement that terrorism will not stop the administration of this country”. Nothing could be more harebrained. It was the kind of defence that worsens matters when silence would have been golden.
Not only did President Jonathan go to Kano, he danced at the rally with many of his party’s supporters. Could they have been dancing on the graves of the Nyanya victims? Or could they have been thrilled that some 234 innocent girls had been abducted by Boko Haram members? What could have warranted such celebratory mood? Someone who “has suffered psychologically as a result of this criminality,” as Mr Maku wanted us to believe, could not have been in a dancing mood barely a few hours after these horrible incidents. Mr. Maku himself said journalists used some gory pictures of the bombing which I am sure the president saw. How come he still found the feet to dance after seeing such pictures, if indeed they were gory, and if indeed he was not insensitive?
Even the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Dr Andrew Pocock, donated blood for the Nyanya victims, a thing that the minister of state for health said was a major challenge. If the president was as touched by the incidents as Mr. Maku said, could he not have made blood donation or something relevant a major aspect of his Kano rally, instead of launching an attack on the state governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, over campaign funds that he accused the governor of misappropriating? If the rally was so sacrosanct that it could not be postponed so that Ibrahim Shekarau, a former governor of Kano State that the president went to receive into the ruling party would not change his mind, there were better ways of empathising with the relatives of the dead as well as the parents of the hapless girls.
Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima gave an example of this when he said: “I have seen very serious moments since I became governor of Borno State in 2011 at a period of insurgent crisis. I have seen many innocent lives lost for no reason and I mourn every life lost with empathy and high sense of responsibility. But the last one week has been my worst days as a governor and even the worst in my life. I am troubled as a father, as a leader and as a politician”.
Shettima is not done yet, “ First, as a father, any time my young daughter comes around me in the last one week at the Government House, my heart beats very fast, my heart becomes so heavy and I develop serious headache when I look into the eyes of my young daughter, I wonder how the parents of those students feel when faced with the harsh reality that their daughters are either in the hands of abductors in fear and desperation for freedom, or wandering somewhere looking for safety while parents do not know the status of their children”. This sums it up.
Someone who sees his daughter and remembers the reality that some other girls probably her age are out there in the hands of people that cannot be trusted can never find the time to dance so soon; it is just not possible. The talk about not grinding governance to a halt is rubbish. Is it by receiving a former governor into the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that you prove to insurgents that they cannot stop government business? Couldn’t Shekarau have been received by the party’s chairman? Why the president who was supposed to be the chief mourner then? Even Mr. Maku that was defending the indefensible could not have found that same excuse pleasant if his daughter was among those abducted. I do not need to ask him the question the typical Hausa man would ask on whether one has experienced something before if it is true that it is only someone who had experienced it that would know how it feels.
Governor Shetima said it all when he added that “I took a sympathetic note of one particular parent who reportedly said he preferred seeing his daughter’s body to the trauma of having her abducted”. Did this occur to Mr. Maku that it is the height of lack of faith in the system that would make a parent come to this sort of conclusion? It was for the same reason that the parents of the abducted girls had to go to the forest in search of their loved ones themselves. Dance will be a luxury that these parents cannot afford at this point in time; so, for the government to tell them that the president travelled for a political rally barely hours after their daughters were abducted to prove a point would only further alienate the parents from the government and reduce their faith in the country. “I pledge to Nigeria my country” is at this point so meaningless to them because it is not just a question of what they can do for Nigeria but also a question of what Nigeria can do for them. The same applies to the relatives of the victims of Nyanya blasts.
We seriously have to be wary of those advising the president; these goofs are just too many and too frequent. It is important to probe whether they are not the Boko Haram within that the president himself spoke of sometime ago because the quality of their advice is suspect. One is not suggesting that President Jonathan should engage the services of professional criers to weep over these sad developments before we will know that he is worried. But there are by far better ways to mourn the dead in the Nyanya bomb blasts in a way that it would not look like one is dancing on their graves. And, as for the abducted girls, I leave you with the words of Dr Nze Anizort:”Just imagining the horrors those children will be passing through is enough to send shivers down one’s spine. But all we can do is to imagine it; the girls will be living it.”
