Boko Haram’s latest onslaughts in Potiskum and Mubi this past week draw our attention once again to the growing strength and defiance of its terrorist operations. If anything has defined the Jonathan presidency, it has been the Boko Haram insurgency, the single most dangerous political development in Nigeria since the civil war. In a sense, Jonathan is struggling with history, and the nature of his presidential legacy.
Years from now, when all the dust settles, Goodluck Jonathan will be remembered not by how under his watch, Nigerian contained the spread of the Ebola virus, and effectively managed a potentially dangerous public health disaster; he would not be remembered for his government’s commitment to reviving the National Rail Services, long abandoned by regimes before him, nor his significant investment and success in rebuilding public infrastructure. People will not remember that the Lagos – Benin Federal highway was impassable before its rehabilitation by the Jonathan administration, and that it once took seven hours to get to Benin from Lagos on that same road; they will not remember some of the obvious successes of the Jonathan administration.
But they will remember him as the President who was defeated by Boko Haram, and that under his watch a small rag tag army of insurgents grew into the wind that lifted the feathers that hid Nigeria’s sovereign anus – the rot in Nigeria’s national security and defense administration; the fact that Nigeria’s Armed Forces was perhaps, after all the “gra-gra” of brutal military dictatorships, no more than a rag tag force with limited operational capacity.
Now, where did all those billions in National Defence budgets over the years go? Nigerians will not remember even as Olatunji Dare has let us know last week in his column in the Nation that for years as Babangida’s Defence minister, Sani Abacha “chopped” money budgeted for military equipment, or that even the last President, Obasanjo, systematically defanged the Armed Forces, and that Jonathan inherited a very skeletal and operationally weak force – ill-trained, ill-equipped and ill-motivated. Nigerians will only remember that under his uncertain, and rather wishy-washy national defence and security policy, Boko Haram became uncontainable.
His legacy will also be marred by the perceived depth of institutional corruption in his administration. This perception that Jonathan’s government has not only tolerated unbridled corruption, but has shielded and in fact legitimized some of the most corrupt figures in Nigerian history haunts his administration, and many Nigerians connect it with the perceived inability of his government to deal forcefully with Boko Haram’s funding source.
It is true that the president has on many occasions declared himself personally innocent of corruption, and has even gone further to claim that he has neither a foreign bank account, nor has he sent any of his children to school outside the shores of Nigeria as further indication of his commitments to nation, and has on many occasions challenged his traducers to bring any proof otherwise of his personal corruption. Yet a number of actions taken by his administration, his critics say, has legitimized corruption as the official policy of the administration. Three examples: the administration continues to run NNPC and the Petroleum ministry as hermetically sealed places. Jonathan certainly inherited Obasanjo’s model of a secretive and unaccountable oil ministry which has made Diezani Madueke Nigeria’s most powerful Oil Minister to date.
The President’s public pardon of his corrupt former boss, Dipreye Alamieyeseigha, under whose tenure he first served as Deputy governor in Bayelsa, and who had been jailed for serial acts of corruption was a huge public relations mistake, as well indeed as his government’s pay-off in billions in Ports contracts and oil bunkering to former Niger-Delta “militants” like Tompolo who have become the scowling faces of “resource control.”
The cozying-up with the former armed militants from the Niger Delta who staged kidnaps, burned oil pipelines, and conducted terrorist attacks on government facilities, many say laid the initial grounds for Boko Haram fighters, who saw clearly, in the Federal government’s policy of appeasement, that it pays in the long-run to raise arms against Nigeria and foment terror, at the end of which you negotiate armistice and get your huge pay off, and become “government pikin.” It was this model of appeasement or as Babangida once put it, “settlement,” that was behind the failed ceasefire bid with Boko Haram; which had the administration confidently declare an end in the insurgency, only to have within the same day, Boko Haram widen its operations, capture new towns, and send out new suicide bombers. There are those who have described Boko Haram as a mere fissiparous movement in the North, which is funded by a discontented, and shadowy Northern political class bitter about its absence from the center and commanding heights of Nigeria’s political power since the end of military rule. I’m afraid Boko Haram can longer be so easily dismissed and described in those weary terms. I think it is now fair to say that every Nigerian is now Boko Haram.
I will return to this shortly. But let me touch on Jonathan’s perceived failures to act. In fact, Odigie Oyegun, National Chairman of the opposition APC was quoted in the papers saying that on Boko Haram, “Jonathan has abandoned us all” – meaning ordinary Nigerians, particularly up there in the North. The trouble with Oyegun’s declaration is that, in none of this does he state his party’s alternative policy. APC has never come out with a clear alternative framework on how an APC government would deal with Boko Haram. We do not have APC’s word on this; not even a clear-eyed policy critique by the party’s National Defence and Security Policy Commission on this administrations policy, but always a harangue. But that said, here is what should rile Nigerians: last week, Nigeria’s Ambassador to the US declared at the US Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, that the US refusal to sell arms to Nigeria to combat Boko Haram amounts to some kind of “American wonder.” Duh! I say.
America is not obligated to sell arms to Nigeria, neither is South Africa. There is a free arms market; Nigeria can go to China or Korea or even Zimbabwe to buy arms. America has acted on its own highest principles and Adefuye and his principals should live with it. Indeed, Nigeria should be ashamed that it has to depend on other nations to supply it with the tools and equipment it needs to defend its own people. Nations that depend on others to supply its instrument of war and self-defence become slaves to others. Why has Nigeria been unable to produce its own military equipment? Why does Nigeria have Universities, Polytechnics, and Research Institutes?
These are questions Nigerians do not ask. Who benefits from Nigeria’s arms importation rather than production? President Jonathan is fighting with what he has: an incompetent security protocol, and an under-equipped force – and the results are glaring. Who is to blame? The president? No. Nigerians have proved incapable of compelling their reps in the National Assembly to demand clear action from the president, or failing which impeach him for incompetence. Why can’t Nigerians summon their sovereign will? Because, all things considered, we are all Boko Haram. Because in our various little corners, we are all too busy fighting our small, insurgent battles with the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
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