It is rare for African leaders to turn on themselves, except perhaps over border disputes and maybe ideological disagreements. It is rarer still for more than one African leader to come together to take a fellow leader to the cleaners. But when the number of attackers rises to three in the space of a few months, the victim of their merciless putdowns must feel dejected, assuming he has the capacity to appreciate insult. If there is proof President Goodluck Jonathan recognises the burden to his presidency of the disfavour he has fallen into in the estimation of many of his fellow African leaders, and the image crisis their very frank verbal putdowns has caused him, he has not shown it. Alas, in less than three months, Dr Jonathan has been brutally excoriated by no less than three African leaders, to wit, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
Contributing to a panel discussion on “Solving conflicts and peace building in Africa” organized by the African Development Bank (ADB) during its recent annual meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, Mr Kagame came down hard on West African leaders who travelled to Paris to discuss perspectives on Boko Haram as a regional terror menace. It was clear the Nigerian leader was his real target. Said he: “I think we must take responsibility and accept our failures in dealing with these matters…When I am watching television and I find that our leaders, who should have been working together all along to address these problems that only affect their countries, wait until they are invited to go to Europe to sit there and find solutions to their problems…it’s as if they are made to sit down and address their problems…Why does anybody wait for that?…In fact, the image it gives is that we are not there to address these problems…they are (African leaders) happy to sit in Paris with the President of France and just talk about their problems…It doesn’t make sense that our leaders cannot get themselves together to address problems affecting our people…African leaders, we don’t need to be invited anywhere to go and address our problems, without first inviting ourselves to come together to tell each other the actual truth we must tell each other.”
Mr Kagame’s sarcasm must rank as one of the most elegant president-to-president broadsides ever. He was gentle on Nigeria; indeed, he was mindful of pushing the knife too deeply into the malleable backs of West African leaders. Nevertheless, he made the point very firmly that the leaders who gathered in Paris at the patrician behest of French President Francois Hollande to discuss the Boko Haram problem were vacuous. Nigeria has done its incredulous best to paint the Boko Haram nightmare as a West African problem, nay even a global (al-Qaeda) disease, but Mr Kagame wondered why neither Nigeria, which is buffeted by terrorists, nor West African leaders who were half-expectant the Nigerian disaster would come knocking at their doors, understood that their inability to provide leadership was more to blame for the morass than the resolve of the insurgents to subvert the sub-region.
Mr Mugabe had earlier given Nigeria a good hiding. Like Mr Kagame, the Zimbabwean leader was chary of mentioning Dr Jonathan by name. But though he generalised, the target of his abusive remarks was undisputable. Speaking in the presence of his military chiefs at a luncheon given in his honour on his 90th birthday, the ageing leader delivered this rasping invective against Nigeria: “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.” Dr Jonathan disputes the semantic certainty of what constitutes corruption and stealing, but there is no disputing the revolting image of Nigeria that he carries with him.
Perhaps the most galling and injurious insult against Dr Jonathan came from Mr Museveni, himself an aficionado of leadership and a connoisseur of the rigour and mystique of power. Addressing a political event in Kampala, and eager to win the approval of his country’s electorate, the intemperate Ugandan leader offered this memorable lampoon directed mainly at Dr Jonathan: “I have never called the United Nations to guard your (Ugandans) 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, South Sudan, Somalia or Nigeria where militias have disappeared with school children. It would be a vote of no confidence in 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.”
Mr Museveni of course exaggerates his distaste for Nigeria’s weakness and his approbation of Uganda’s capabilities, but he nonetheless conveys his exasperation with Nigeria’s leadership failures in unmistakable terms and telling language. Coming at a time of universal disapproval of Nigeria’s lack of decisiveness in the face of grave terrorist challenge, as well as Dr Jonathan’s languid response, the opinions of the three African leaders, not to say the overwhelming media disapprobation of Nigeria’s leadership elite, can hardly be faulted. The three leaders are themselves not unimpeachable. Mugabe has done more damage to Zimbabwe than Dr Jonathan has seemed capable of doing. In fact by refusing to lay a solid foundation for Zimbabwean democracy, Mr Mugabe appears to have set the stage for a very turbulent post-Mugabe era, perhaps far worse than Dr Jonathan’s lack of vision.
On his own, Mr Museveni may have offered Uganda a fairly intellectual and effective leadership, but corruption, authoritarianism, extra-judicial killings, lack of true democracy and poor handling of the Lord’s Resistance Army revolt in the northern parts of the country do not give the impression he stands on a higher moral ground to lecture Nigeria. But neither Mr Museveni’s egregious shortcomings nor Mr Mugabe’s intransigence and political short-sightedness, nor yet the sometimes strong-arm tactics of Mr Kagame, vitiate the force and moral impact of their criticisms. More, their opinions accurately reflect the dismay the whole world feels about the shocking incapacitation of the Jonathan government in tackling Boko Haram, and especially in effecting the release of the more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted by militants on April 15.
