In defence of Nyako (II)

From the beginning of the crisis, for instance, it has been reported a number of times that many non-Muslims have been apprehended trying to commit arson or detonate bombs. Now, it should be curious indeed if, in the affair of what is supposed to be a death-courting fundamentalist Muslim insurgency, non-Muslims are involved and apprehended. […]

From the beginning of the crisis, for instance, it has been reported a number of times that many non-Muslims have been apprehended trying to commit arson or detonate bombs. Now, it should be curious indeed if, in the affair of what is supposed to be a death-courting fundamentalist Muslim insurgency, non-Muslims are involved and apprehended. But there has been total reluctance to follow these leads.
Second, there had been noticeable reluctance to do the right thing before they got out of hand. While sometimes the need to avoid collateral damage could hamper operations, this might not be true in all cases where matters had been delayed. For instance, when the outcry over the build up in the bushes around Darazo began, the security took their time as if they were deliberately giving the insurgents time to dig in.
When the build up began, to the lay eyes of a bloody civilian, instant hot-pursuit tactics, with controlled air assault, the use of massive force and overwhelming numbers would have been sufficient to check everything; but instead, as always, the security forces were more interested in erecting checkpoints that in the end didn’t check anything except restrict the movement of innocent people; spread fear and feelings of even more insecurity that ends up fuelling people’ resentment.
Third, earlier this week, I was with Senator Ahmad Zanna, the legislator whose constituency is the epicentre of the crisis and who seems to be fighting a heroic but lone battle; and he told me that he had just received some local reconnaissance report on the movement of the abducted girls which he transmitted to highest military authorities, but up to that moment nothing had been done about his report. The following day we woke up to learn that they had been ferreted abroad. If there is a reason preventing our security forces from acting on such valuable information, the nation reserves the right to know.
Fourth, why is it that one hears reports of the general mistreatment of the gallant youths of the civilian JTF from all theatres of operation? In many instances, they are restricted, hampered and demobilised by the very troops they sprang up to help. Or, is someone not interested in winning this war against the insurgency?
Fifth, in general, why is it that after almost three years of operation, a year-long emergency and a mindboggling expenditure of some 3.4 trillion naira, the situation is no better; and, indeed, except for the cessation of the church bombings, it has generally got only worse?  Or, has the crisis become a goldmine for some?
But with all this, why didn’t the governors support Nyako? The reluctance and fear of Northern governors to identify with and support Nyako’s memo had nothing to do with its lack of merit. It probably had more to do with at least four facts—one, the president’s readiness to use and abuse the EFCC; two, the desire of some of the governors for re-election; three, the unhindered graduation of second termites to the Senate; and, four, the delusion of getting  shot at the vice-presidency.
And if, as the Page 3 Comment of the Sunday Trust of April 27, 2014 said, 15 APC governors didn’t support Nyako, this should be no ground to condemn him; that should have been ground to ask them to produce their own evidence that disproves his claims. But this is no political affair, and we would expect even governors of the PDP, or at least Northern governors, to have supported what was right; because, in this case, silence would not be golden—it was yellow, turned-tailed yellow; it was not statesmanlike: it was complicit. For these reasons some of them said the memo was divisive.
But, first, Nyako’s memo is no more divisive than Jonathan’s own style of governance and the policies of this administration—his budgetary allocations and especially their manner of release; the lopsidedness of his appointments; and the uneven spread of his government’s projects. In any case, the very reasons presidency sources are citing why a person of his standing shouldn’t have written that paper are the very same reasons why the government ought to have listened to him and accepted it in good faith with all the seriousness it deserves and investigated it with good cheer; and then go on to disprove its content and only then can they shut the governor up. Unless the government has something to hide, as Professor Ango Abdullahi said, it should have addressed the issues raised in the memo instead of condemning it without examination.
Second, Nyako didn’t say any tribe was conducting a pogrom against people in the North east; he accused the government of doing so. But if people in the South East and the South-South have now struck common cause and sealed a common identity with the administration such that an attack by Nyako on the government of Jonathan is seen by them as an attack on them as peoples, that will go a long way in making many obscure things very clear to the nation.
Third, it is strange that a presidency anxious about the memo causing divisiveness in the country never saw anything wrong in, and never did anything to stop, the atrocious insults and divisive propositions that for long had continued spewing from Dr Edwin Clark and Mujahid Asari Dokubo and some of the president’s spokesmen.
Fourth, the presidency somehow never saw any divisiveness and therefore no need to call Mr Olisa Metuh, spokesman of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, as he impugned Muslims in his attempt to heap the blame for Boko Haram violence on the opposition All People’s Congress.
Fifth, when General Patrick Azazi was security adviser to the president, many people had, not without good reason, suspected; and some, indeed, had charged that some of the violence looked like it was state-sponsored—and from his office. The evidence, still circumstantial, only came in retrospect: since his tragic death in a helicopter crash, no church had been bombed.
But how can the truth of what is happening be known? Are the people doing this government troops, or are they renegades not under official control of government commanders, or is it some supra-governmental foreign element that, in helping government achieve its goal, is trying to achieve its own? Or is all this a prelude to the CIA-predicted 2015 breakup of the country that promises parasite-free oil to the supplier and buyer alike? That truth will never be known unless Northern leaders stand up to ask.
And while giving the intellectual coup de grace to Professor Nwabueze’s embittered diatribe of a pseudo-socio-political anthropology of the necessity and inevitability of northern disunity, Wantaregh Paul Unongo, as he took the leadership, asked the questions that the North must answer now.
“Cana discerning true leadership from the North arise and see the true reasons why the current dispensation is encouraging all forces working tirelessly to weaken the concept of a unified Northern Nigeria?” he said…. “Do we have a leadership that can rise to this existential threat to us Northern Nigerians, as the late Sardauna would have arisen as he did in 1953, 1954, 1956 and 1957/1958?”
There are no leaders, Doctor. If you will lead, the North will follow; because the challenges are still coming. Just last week, Professor JP Clark, poet and playwright and one of the Eastern elite, said Nigeria’s problem stemmed from the fact that in 1960, the country was handed over to those who were not ready for independence. Actually, this had always been a misrepresentation; because, not only had the nation’s post-independence leaders never hidden their position on the matter, they had always made it clear that it was the country, not them, that wasn’t ready for independence—and we are right now just in the throes of one of its many proofs. If Jonathan could do what he was doing to the North in 2014, it would be in order for us to wonder what the Zikists and others have done to it in 1960. And here, Clark’s thesis was supposed to corroborate and validate Chinua Achebe’s earlier diagnosis of the country’s problem being squarely one of leadership. But if this had so far remained a preliminary tentative hypothesis, it had now been fortuitously proved by the Jonathan administration. Now, no one is left in any doubt.
But the corollary to what are doing now is sure to raise even more troubling questions for them later on. Quite apart from the inappropriateness of rotational presidency, the current triumphalism and combative ethnic jingoism playing themselves out as public policy are sure to stymie and for a long time—perhaps forever—preclude the prospects of an Igbo presidency in this country. If, even before getting a South-Eastern Igboman into the seat, Professor Ben Nwabueze and the civil war revenge brigade, playing second fiddle, are using the presidency of a kindred spirit to target and destroy the society, economy and politics of the North, what will happen when mainstream Ibo leadership, for instance Nwabueze’s leaders of thought, takes over the affairs of this country?
This should be good enough political bellwether for the North; and even though Northern leadership, most especially—and most notoriously—its governors, has now exposed itself as a fractured, cowardly, greedy, anti-people and visionless lot, no one but a political dunderhead will dare attempt to sell the dummy of an Igbo presidency to the North—again.