So far, it is the photo of the year. Even if you give allowance for partisan posturing, you cannot miss out on the significance of its poetry. The headlines could come in many incarnations. Eleven governors visit Borno State. Scratch that. Eleven Governors walk the streets of Maiduguri. Scratch that. Eleven Governors beat Jonathan to visit Maiduguri. Scratch that again. Eleven Governors defy…
They did not dab across a street in the hurried frenzy of a rabbit. They did not don shorts and tee shirts. No bullet-proof clothing as far as the eye could see. They filled the street, apparently wide enough to take a football team and then some.
They waved their hands at the inhabitants, most of them, even if you were as tall as the Governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, (SAN) in his cap and buba and sokoto, which was the most anti-athletic attire to don if you wanted to dodge a bomb. Or a small man like Adams Oshiomhole, or a smallish man like the grassroots governor, Rauf Aregbesola, whose bouncy physique undermines his fiftyish years. Or the cerebral Kayode Fayemi who knows a thing or two about military strategy and the vulnerabilities of the powerful.
It was billed as the meeting of the governors of the All Progressives Congress, but it was easy to play the coward. They could have burdened the streets with the braggadocio of power: armoured vehicles rumbling, sirens fluting arrogantly, military men in heady and defiant gear, guns threatening, the governors themselves nestled in a bubble and invisible from outside.
That was exactly the picture of the last visit from the number two citizen, Namadi Sambo. All markets were shut down, schools ironically fulfilled the Boko Haram agenda by shutting down, an unofficial curfew and restriction of movement darkened the city of Maiduguri. It was shut down not by the terror of the Islamic group but by the presence of the purveyor of peace and conciliation, the government from Abuja.
But unlike that dreary scene, these governors walked the streets, and they also visited a girls’ school and sat with the pupils. Is that not what the people had wanted from their president since he ascended the throne?
Yet the reports had it that the Presidency and the SSS did not want the governors to go. The reason: a report that the new terror group known as ANSARU was going to attack them. The directors of SSS in the states visited the governors and asked them to refrain from the visit. But the governors understood that leadership is not about fear, but about action.
They acted like Charles de Gaulle who would not shrink from a public ceremony because security reports hinted that his assassination was afoot. As Frederick Forsythe recorded it, the French leader defied and triumphed over the day of the jackal.
So, they flew their planes and left their homes to what many now see as a war zone. Their host, the debonair Kashim Shettima, the governor of Borno State, had thrived like Daniel Webster’s black birds through the cumulus clouds of Boko Haram.
The Jonathan SSS did not want the governors to go. They wanted to unitarise fear. If they had disdain for true federalism, they had to impose fear on the governors too. The governors federalised courage and good sense by defying a self-serving report.
A President who cannot hold ceremonies of state outside the Presidential Villa wants to corrode the states with the spirit of cowardice. But it was after the governors’ visit that the Presidency has now let it out that the President will visit Maiduguri. So what is the purpose of the President’s visit? Is it to show that he loves them? If it is love, after how many markets razed and reborn, churches blown apart and restored, lives lost without hope of resurrection at least in this life? After how many mosques and police stations atrophied and schools out of joint? Did he not flee to Brazil once when one of the northern cities burned?
Who does not think that Jonathan’s visit is about politics and not empathy? He wants to win enough northern states to cancel out his expected losses in the Southwest. He wants, as it is speculated, to endear himself to enough northern votes so he can defuse the new switch of politics: APC.
When he does visit, will it be a visit, or an occupation? Will it be like Napoleon’s army in Moscow? The French general expected a royal entry like Jesus but found a deserted wilderness. Will he follow the magnificence of the governors and wave his presidential hands, not to an arranged crowd, but to a street of habitués and to a market? Will he pay visits that will show that he came out of love and not out of cynicism?
Even when he visits places like Lagos, the city capsizes with traffic bedlam and schedules fall into anarchy. The day belongs only to the President and the city dwellers sacrifice the day like a lamb.
Governor Shettima does not have the power that President Jonathan possesses over Maiduguri. As the commander in chief, he deployed the soldiers and the police that have kept charge. Governor Shettima is the chief security officer of the state, but neither the head of the army nor the commissioner of police reports to him. Yet, he has the courage to work the schools, do the roads, preserve the hospitals where the slain go to like a ritual.
Yet, the President who controls all of the armed forces has not even sniffed the region to buoy the spirits of the men in uniform. The Borno and Yobe examples are a grand mockery of our federal system. President Jonathan has made this mockery even more emphatic. Was President Bush not flayed for not visiting Katrina when the flood ravaged Louisiana? Did Obama’s fortune not change because of prompt responses to Hurricane Sandy? Did both men not endear their hearts to their countrymen and women by their visits to Iraq and Afghanistan?
Yet he preens when it is to corral PDP governors to Aso Rock and bully them with video clips and hectoring menaces about how to oust Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi as chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum.
Why is it taking the President now to visit, or could it be that he has been planning this for a long time? Maybe the schedulers are to blame. You laugh. How far is Yobe from Abuja when Governor Ibikunle Amosun could fly a world away from Abeokuta?
When prose stylist Joseph Conrad writes about a long journey, he chooses a long short story titled Youth, and it is about a 20-year-old who steers a ship from England to Bangkok. The journey takes long, but it is not for lack of trying. T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi valorises an epic walk over a long distance by those who know where they are going and won’t yield.
The people who live in Maiduguri, according to the testimony of one of the governors, have too much love of life to allow the rite of violence to refrain them from the routine glories of their days. They eat, love, play and work daily. That was what the eleven governors affirmed from the picture.
But if the president is visiting now, when politics has suffused the polity, his move has lost all innocence. Where were you, Mister President, when they wanted your love?
Like the play by Friedrich Durrenmatt called The Visit, the President’s sojourn to Maiduguri will come away as a move to extract a debt rather than exude a love. If the President wants to exalt his coming, he must play a high act that even his foes will call gracious. It must match, if not exceed, the act of the eleven governors.
If not, he would be fulfilling the words of the inimitable Oscar Wilde, who wrote that “when one visits, it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time.” Let his visit be a photo and not a photo op.
