Between Malala and the diminished presidency

And shame even by its pedestrian interpretation, are those things adults often do that instantaneously impinged on their poise and character. It discredited them. It defamed. It dishonoured. It degraded. It brought once respected characters into disrepute, and much more.       As bad as shame could be, the same relation explained, it does not amount to […]

And shame even by its pedestrian interpretation, are those things adults often do that instantaneously impinged on their poise and character. It discredited them. It defamed. It dishonoured. It degraded. It brought once respected characters into disrepute, and much more.       
As bad as shame could be, the same relation explained, it does not amount to a death sentence by any means. When managed properly, shame and its contingent negative impulses should be temporary in the lives of men, and indeed women.
The embarrassment the feeling of shame causes should never follow us to our graves. When managed properly, shame could serve as an inspiration for positive things. But before that can happen shame also demands a modicum of honesty from us all. It demands that we recognise that it exists. It tasks our honesty when we admit that we brought it – shame – upon ourselves by acknowledging the very things we did wrong in the first place.   
When President Jonathan sought to blame his political associates and civil society groups for the cancellation of what he thought was a scheduled meeting with the grieving parents of the missing girls from Chibok last week, it was a pathetic repudiation of that truism.
He became the first Nigerian leader to be treated by the nation’s ordinary citizens, and not even his much trumpeted meeting with the same parents in Chibok yesterday can change that.
It took the same President more than two weeks to even come round to accepting the prospects that the girls were even abducted in the first place. And when he eventually did, his response was timid and easily predictable. Rather than to read the riot act to our security forces to find the girls, he preferred to hide his head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich.
The President astonished even those who believed in his fabled ‘fresh air’ and ‘transformation agenda’ by forming a committee to verify the claims on the missing girls. That was the precise moment he abdicated responsibility as our Commander in Chief. And as he fidgeted, the kidnappers receded into the innermost processes of Sambisa forest with their uncommon bounty of fresh-faced teenage girls.
The criminal – some would even say impeachable – inaction, especially at initial stages of the abductions, made it all so easy for Shekau and his marauding gang of bandits and serial killers. Only one person must accept the maximum blame. Only one person swore to guarantee the security of Nigerians. Our constitution provides for only one Commander in Chief, and he is not the Governor of Borno State.
Far from treating the abductions with the urgency it desperately yearned for, we were all treated to a most embarrassing comedy from the occupants of Aso Rock. The President’s wife utilized the opportunity to dispel whatever lingering doubts Nigerians had on the official reasoning in the presidency on the insurgency that has wrecked most parts of the northern states.
They said it was all ignited to embarrass the president because he is a southerner, who also happens to be a minority. And didn’t some faceless northern politicians threaten to make the country ungovernable if he won the 2011 presidential elections?
But as he wallowed in the deeply embarrassing inaction anchored on the equally ignominious and highly illogical narrative, some events began to unfold under their noses. A pan-Nigerian coalition of principled Nigerian men and women, led by former education minister Obi Ezekwesili, descended on the tranquil precincts of Abuja’s Unity Fountain to demand for action on the missing girls.
To any other responsible government, their courageous effort, in the face of the wild thugs our security agencies have been turned into of recent, represented both a challenge and an opportunity.
That was the moment the President should have visited the anguished parents in Chibok, in the company of all his service chiefs. It was the moment to make them appreciate the presence of federal might that was so irresponsibly absent during the abductions. It’s a golden opportunity for the president to celebrate Ezekwesili and her group for showing the Boko Haram sect that its ideology was doomed; that Nigerians of different ethnicity, religion and creed were united against it!
The president did none of that. The gesture did not fit into the political narrative of the hawks that surround him. The siege against the group continued. The parents of the girls were left to wallow in their grief, and, as we learnt last week, the grief proved too much for some of the parents. They passed on.
It needs to be restated at this point that Obi Ezekwesili who has devoted her precious time to the humane endeavour is not your typical rabble-rouser. She was not only a federal minister but also an erstwhile vice-president of the World Bank. And she is also apolitical, as far as we know.
But because the presidency barely understood the meaning of shame, it passed up both opportunities without even realising it. Let us pause for a moment to contemplate the enormous goodwill an impromptu visit to the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaigners at the Unity Fountain by the President would have attracted for him among sceptical Nigerians.
To his eternal shame, the president failed to seize the opportunity to be viewed as a leader. Instead, he chose to hire a foreign image making firm and in the process attracted the ire of Nigerians outside his comfort zone. We may never know whether it was the initiative of the Consultants, but Malala Yousafzai – the internationally renowned Pakistani 17-year-old girl, who barely survived assassination by the Taliban – suddenly surfaced in Nigeria.
The presidency may not know it, but the visit enabled millions across the world to discover what William Shakespeare meant when he wrote ‘good wine needs no bush’. A good product hardly needs advertisement. Viewed from an alternative perspective, even the best advert firm in the world cannot sell a rotten brand.
The few video clips from Malala’s visit to the Villa were instructive. Where she appeared calm and assured, our president looked uncomfortable, and twitchy. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by undeclared guilt. He had treated the parents of the missing school girls, and all those who sympathized with them like trash.
It took Malala, who just celebrated her 17th birthday the day before, to extort a promise from the president to meet with the same parents three months into their ordeal. The revelation must have come as a tremendous shock to all leaders and people of the civilized world.