The President Muhammadu Buhari we know is a fatherly figure who has known grief on so many levels and has, as occasion demanded, combined comfortably the role of Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces with that of the nation’s mourner/comforter-in-chief.
We recall his visit to areas formerly under the control of the murderous Boko Haram insurgents, his empathy with the beleaguered residents, and his promise of continuing federal relief assistance which has been fulfilled in spirit, if not always on the scale called forth by the devastation.
We recall even more to the President’s credit the grand ceremony in Abuja at which he welcomed back more than 100 Chibok girls recovered from their Boko Haram captors. His empathy was genuine and palpable. It was as if he was welcoming his own long-lost daughters back into the fold.
Those gestures alone could not have ended the traumatic ordeal of the girls and their families, but they were a crucial and reassuring step toward their re-absorption into the families and communities from which they had been so cruelly plucked.
However, the Buhari who turned up the other day in Jalingo, Taraba State, following another bloody clash between cattle herders and farmers and their respective communities was hardly the President we thought we knew. As the clashes have grown in fierceness and the weapons employed have grown in sophistication, so have casualties multiplied.
Buhari’s immediate task was to show, however belatedly, that he cared, that every life mattered, that everything would be done to end the killings, and that federal supplies would be brought in to sustain those sheltering in camps of the displaced.
He did some of that, and more. He ordered that herdsmen found toting assault rifles, their preferred weapons, be arrested and prosecuted. We hope the police will implement this order faithfully and effectively. It is a measure of the pervasive dereliction in the system that the police would require an order from the President to move against what has always been a breach of the law.
But thereafter, Buhari inexplicably went off tangent.
Echoing the Fulani community, he asserted that far more people had been killed in Taraba than in earlier clashes in Benue and Zamfara states. The Fulani gave the casualty figures as 700; area authorities cited a much lower figure. In Benue, where the killing has been widespread and sustained, more than 70 persons were killed during the first weekend of this year alone, allegedly by cattle herders.
The grisly calculus of killings into which the President has been drawn is a distraction. A life lost in these gruesome circumstances is one life too many. The overriding challenge is to end the killings and take sustainable measures to promote a return to amity.
These are the substantive issues President Buhari should focus on during his subsequent visits to other conflict-ravaged communities in Benue, Zamfara, Kaduna, and elsewhere.
The potential for similar conflagrations in communities that have thus far been spared must not be discounted. The failure of intelligence that has contributed so much to the mayhem will have to be addressed forthrightly. Too many people have died for the state security apparatus to continue business as usual.
President Buhari said in Jalingo that he has multiple sources of intelligence on happenings across the country that presumably inform how he reacts to events. Many Nigerians will find this reassuring, since our national experience has been that security officials are more about telling their principals what they think those principals would like to hear rather than what they need to know.
The challenge always is to weigh those sources carefully, isolate the most credible, and use it as basis for timely action.
