Ken Ugbechie
It is well over a 100 days since over 200 girls from Government Secondary School in the small community of Chibok in Borno State were forcibly ferried from their hostel in the dark hours of night by the evil Boko Haram sect. Yes, well over a hundred days and their story has been told in more than a hundred ways. The Chibok narrative, despicable as it is, was unfortunately turned into a political spindle by some mindless politicians who thought to make political capital out of the despair of innocent maidens and the pained hearts of grieving families.
These politicians tried to blame President Goodluck Jonathan for the travails of the Chibok girls and much more for the terror insurgency in the country. The opposition took advantage of the terror hoodoo to stick a label of incompetence on President Jonathan. If this is some sort of political brinkmanship and an attempt to short-sell the president, then it is a strategy gone awry.
The most disappointing legion in the Chibok saga and by extension the terror plague is the Northern elite. First, it was some armed men raiding communities at wee hours and killing innocent men, women and children. When all of this happened, the northern elite kept mum. Then the first bomb exploded, they saw no evil in it. All too soon, the bombers began to wax bold, making demands of the Nigerian government including asking Jonathan to resign. To this mum was the word from the Northern political mandarins. Even the feeble voices of those who attempted to condemn the terror act were drowned by the loud silence from those northern elite who ought to be championing the cause of anti-terror.
The Jonathan government, assailed on all fronts by myriad socio-economic challenges, made attempts to tame the terror but it was obviously hamstrung by the burden of history, a history it did not create, a history it inherited. It is a history of a poorly equipped national security apparatchik, especially the police and the military. They are both seared by corruption and dirty underhand dealings. In times past, it was easy to ascribe graft more to the police but as the terror menace has proved now, the Nigerian military obviously has some questions to answer on matters of corruption. Any Nigerian with even the poorest memory band will recall that Defence has always taken the biggest chunk of our national budget. Such humungous amounts allocated every year to the ministry of defence were never for recurrent expenses alone, there had always been capital projects including the acquisition of weaponry in every budget. Today, Boko Haram has exposed the very harsh fact that the military top cats never minded to purchase any weaponry or bothered to equip the nation’s armoury. Since the terror war broke out and the military rank and file was drafted to ward off the terrorists, they have practically been fighting with bare knuckles.
This is the context in which Nigerians should see the beauty that has come out of the ashes of terror with the abduction of Chibok girls as the tipping point. Since the abduction of the 276 Chibok girls, global attention shifted to the terror siege to Nigeria. Before then, the containment of terror has been left solely in the hands of the Nigerian government. Now, Chibok has ratcheted the Boko Haram insurgency to a war against humanity and the global community now sees the need to rally support for Nigeria.
The Nigerian opposition politicians did not behave well. They should copy the template of the western world. Everywhere in the world, when terror strikes, everybody irrespective of political ideology fuses into one mass in support of the government in its quest to tame the terror. It happened in US and UK. But rather than rise in support of the government against the common enemy, they conspired to heap the blame on Jonathan. If this was intended to tar the president in the colour of incompetence, they failed because the ordinary Nigerian has seen through the hypocrisy of his army of critics. They have seen their shallow pretence and claim to patriotism. More importantly, the attempt to blame Jonathan for the scourge of terror has exposed the lazy thinking and poor political strategy in the camp of the opposition. Nigerians are tired of senseless criticisms. They want a solution, an end to the insurgency.
The president needs the support of all Nigerians and the international community. Because of the foggy cloud that initially surrounded the abduction of the Chibok girls, the president had to set up a fact-finding Committee which submitted its report on 20th June, 2014. According to its findings, 119 female students escaped from the school during the attack by Boko Haram; 276 female students were abducted; 57 female students escaped from the insurgents after the abduction; while 219 female students remain unaccounted for. He did not stop there. President Jonathan has honestly admitted what previous leaders have papered over, to wit, that the nation’s security apparatchik is ill-equipped to match contemporary security challenges. The Chibok episode has brought the attention of the Presidency to a foundational truth that the military oligarchs have hidden over the years which is that Nigeria, in spite of its ‘giant of Africa’ claim, does not have a ready military and other security forces to defend the nation in the 21st century. This is not befitting for a nation that the world sees as the salvation song waiting to be sung by the Black race. Jonathan is doing something about this: equipping the security forces and building the capacities of the human capital of the armed forces in order to grab the advantage in weapons and reconnaissance capabilities over the enemy. The high profile arrests made in recent time and the continued averting of more bombings by security personnel are direct gains from such improved reconnaissance and improved synergy between civilians and the armed forces. Besides, the president is raising funds to rebuild the broken walls of the north east ravaged by terror. Such laudable gestures should be supported by all as against the raucous and rancid chants from the critics of Mr. President.
