Jonathan’s missed opportunity in Chibok

Chibok is the village in Borno State where 276 female secondary school students were abducted by members of the Boko Haram sect 38 days ago today.The development was significant enough that practically every news channel in the world reported it in the context of the ongoing search to locate and rescue the girls. Many countries, […]

Chibok is the village in Borno State where 276 female secondary school students were abducted by members of the Boko Haram sect 38 days ago today.
The development was significant enough that practically every news channel in the world reported it in the context of the ongoing search to locate and rescue the girls. Many countries, including the United States, France, Britain, China and Israel, have contributed assets in men and materiel in the search for the girls’ abduction that has galvanised the world’s attention and concentrated unfamiliar intense scrutiny on the Nigerian government and the conduct of its top officials in the saga.
The result has been unflattering. The government’s initial response to the crisis of the abduction was anything but committed. Indeed, from the conduct and pronouncement of senior administration and ruling party officials, including the president, generally tended to cast doubts on the veracity of the reports that there were any abductions of girls from the Government Secondary School. Chibok.  For over two weeks after the abductions, the government was shaken out of its lethargy by the string of condemnation by foreign leaders and in editorial comments and opinion articles in many newspapers and other media across the globe.
The hashatag #BringBackOurGirls is now a worldwide movement that even little kids in distant lands identify plight of the missing Chibok girls with.
Therefore a presidential visit to Chibok, no matter how brief, was seen by many, not just in Nigeria, as opportunity to mitigate some of the flack that Jonathan has received over the government’s handling of the situation.
Expectations were high, even among grieving parents of the missing girls that at last their plight had been recognised in the highest quarters of the government, and efforts could now be intensified in the search to locate the whereabouts of their children.
These were underscored by reports of the arrival in Maiduguri of an advance team from the Presidency, one of the clearest indications that indeed Jonathan was being expected.
Alas! The visit was not to be. Why? Even the explanations, such as they were, for this failure did little to clear the growing perception that the government was falling back on its earlier position of denying the facts that were clear to the rest of Nigerians and the outside world.
After a full 24 hours of the initial reports, officials, especially one of his spokespersons, Dr Reuben Abati, tweeted that there was in fact no visit to Chibok was included in the president’s schedule.  Another spokesman, Dr Doyin Okupe, noted the following day that Jonathan ‘never said anything about visiting Chibok’.
Speaking at the end of the Paris meeting, Jonathan himself remarked that he did not need to visit Chibok, observing that his presence there would be worthless because it would not produce the missing girls. That may be true, but it’s a mistaken view, because it ignores the symbolism of such a trip, and portrays him as insensitive and lacking in empathy for those parents who thought his presence would be some sort of balm on the pains they must going through.
The episode appears to reflect division within the administration and among its supporters on how to handle the case of the missing girls, and continues to foster the notion, amplified in Western capitals, that Jonathan is weak and incapable of taking independent decisions.
It also fuels suspicions that the president himself may be sympathetic to the nonsense being peddled by his kinsmen and some of his loyalists, that the girls’ abductions, and indeed the terrorism of the insurgency as a whole, are part of a grand strategy by politicians in the North to stop him from being a candidate in the general elections next year.
Unfortunately, Jonathan once again, by avoiding this one symbolic but powerful gesture, missed the chance to demonstrate that he is the president of all Nigerians.