This administration can still retreat from its present trajectory of high expectations, dashed hopes and eventual disillusionment. It must adopt a more realistic evaluation of its deeds and be honest with the Nigerian people. It must communicate with greater clarity, integrity, sensitivity and intelligence.
If former President Goodluck Jonathan had said that he had no credible intelligence regarding the whereabouts of the Chibok girls, months after promising to rescue them, he would have been shredded by the media and political opponents. Actually, he said something similar in his first public pronouncement after three weeks of official indifference following the Chibok abductions. When asked where the girls were, he replied his questioner, “You are a journalist. You know more than I do.” It was only one of the gaffes of a gaffe-riddled presidency.
However, on December 30, 2015, it was President Muhammadu Buhari who claimed that his administration had no credible intelligence on the Chibok girls. It was a startling admission coming so soon after he had announced that his government had technically defeated Boko Haram. What is more disturbing is how much this administration’s rhetoric is starting to converge with that of its predecessor. Last weekend, Boko Haram murdered nearly a hundred Nigerians in multiple attacks in Borno and Adamawa. The presidential spokesman Garba Shehu said that the terrorists “are so desperate to embarrass the government and the people that they have no qualms attacking isolated communities and markets.” In fact, Boko Haram has always targeted isolated communities, markets and other soft targets, including recently, IDP camps, and this weekend was no deviation from its modus operandi.
The statement was a depressing throwback to the previous administration’s insistence that the insurgency was designed to discredit Jonathan. In both instances, the Nigerians brutally slaughtered by the insurgents are merely incidental to a narrative in which the biggest national security emergency since the civil war is reduced to the personal embarrassment of a sitting president. This consistent official interpretation of mortal perils threatening Nigerians reflects just how incidental ordinary Nigerian lives are to the powerful. It recalls one of the insights of the political theorist Claude Ake who argued that regardless of their location on the political spectrum, Nigerian elites are fundamentally the same in character, disposition and outlook.
This truism is increasingly apt. Some weeks ago the Chibok parents and members of the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) advocacy group endured a frosty reception at Aso Rock where they had gone to inquire, once again, about the fate of their daughters. It was by most accounts an encounter devoid of the warmth that characterised an earlier meeting last year shortly after Buhari’s inauguration. Some members of the government team were overtly hostile. President Buhari enjoined the Chibok parents to be patient and announced a new investigation to unravel the mystery of the missing girls. For the Chibok parents who had made the arduous trip from the North-East, the meeting was desperately underwhelming.
It is never a good idea for politicians to dictate deadlines for achieving victory in counter-insurgency campaigns. Asymmetrical battle fields are highly fluid theatres whose protean conditions are impervious to political wish-fulfillment. Having issued a December deadline, the military and the administration locked themselves into a position in which they had to declare victory or lose face.
But the larger subtext is the adversarial dynamic that has crept into relations between the administration and the BBOG advocates and the Chibok parents. Power has a way of changing relationships. Just over a year ago, the All Progressives Congress saw the Chibok parents and the BBOG as a politically valuable weapon with which to bludgeon the hapless Jonathan administration. The APC even claimed that the founders of the BBOG were its members – a statement rebutted by the activists and then clarified by the APC. The times were different then. It was simply a case of an opposition political party capitalising on a tragedy that had captured global headlines and trying to own the vocal protest movement it had spawned. The APC and Buhari subsequently not only promised to end the insurgency but to rescue the Chibok girls. These as yet unfulfilled promises are now haunting the administration.
It is never a good idea for politicians to dictate deadlines for achieving victory in counter-insurgency campaigns. Asymmetrical battle fields are highly fluid theatres whose protean conditions are impervious to political wish-fulfillment. Having issued a December deadline, the military and the administration locked themselves into a position in which they had to declare victory or lose face.
The administration itself has never clarified what it means by “victory”. At a colloquium last August, I asked the presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina what exactly the administration meant by its claim that it was “winning” the war against terrorists since the insurgents had murdered over a thousand Nigerians in Buhari’s first four months in office. He had no satisfactory answer. The claim to have “technically defeated” Boko Haram is even more ambiguous. Victory is yet to be defined and huge questions remain unanswered. If Boko Haram has been defeated then why does it remain capable of attacks such as those that it carried out last weekend? How is it still able to carry out abductions? How much of Boko Haram’s recent retreat is a result of defeats and how much is actually a strategic shift from territorial capture, which it was never really suited for, to its comfortable traditional niche of guerilla warfare? And more importantly for their grieving parents, where are the Chibok girls?
By declaring a quick win, the administration has forced itself into a cul de sac in which it has only three options: loss of credibility as Boko Haram remains evidently operational, a retraction of the claim of victory, or an attempt to shape public perception through relentless propaganda. The administration appears to have opted for the third option and has continued to dig itself into a ditch of its own making. Lai Mohammed, the minister of information, has essentially urged journalists to stop reporting terror attacks while Garba Shehu asserted that Boko Haram’s attacks were calculated to gain “cheap publicity” – a strange endeavour for a group that already enjoys worldwide infamy; and the human cost of Boko Haram’s public relations blitz is anything but cheap.
…the Chibok parents have become something of an embarrassment to the administration because the unresolved fate of their daughters pungently contradicts the claim of victory. The BBOG activists are now pesky irritants whose advocacy punctures the official line. It seems that we have now come full circle.
The administration has called for Nigerians to rally behind it in a demonstration of bipartisan unity of purpose – an entirely sensible call but one which lacks impact if only because while in opposition, the APC scarcely towed such a line, notwithstanding Jonathan’s manifest ineptitude. Then, some APC chieftains trafficked in innuendo and inciting rhetoric suggesting that the Jonathan government was behind the terror attacks. It is consummately hypocritical of the APC to now act as though it did not contribute to the climate of subversive partisanship that degrades our ability to rally against a common enemy.
Under these circumstances, the Chibok parents have become something of an embarrassment to the administration because the unresolved fate of their daughters pungently contradicts the claim of victory. The BBOG activists are now pesky irritants whose advocacy punctures the official line. It seems that we have now come full circle. Just over a year ago, the Jonathan administration was harassing the activists and accusing them of trying to embarrass his government. One senses that before long, the current administration will make similar allegations if the Chibok girls remain missing and their parents and advocates refuse to keep quiet about it.
Rather than issuing an impossible deadline, what the administration should have announced (and what it probably meant to announce but for official miscommunication or mendacity or both) was the gradual degradation of Boko Haram’s ability to hold territory, and a transition from a military-led counter-insurgency operation to an intelligence-driven counter-terrorism campaign aimed at pre-empting bombings of soft targets. Increasingly, aspects of confronting Boko Haram will evolve from a military operation into a police action.
Despite the mantra of “change”, the terms of engagement between the people and their leaders have not changed significantly. Like its predecessors, this administration still has to be cajoled into responding to mass loss of life with empathy and emotional intelligence. The government has seemed genuinely surprised and irked to be held to the promises it freely made to rescue the girls.
Because Boko Haram is now a transnational entity, a real victory over it would mean that it has been liquidated by Nigeria and her neighbours, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger Republic. It would mean the destruction of its safe havens in remote and unpoliced border areas. The most significant indication of the group’s defeat would be the rebuilding of devastated communities in the North-East, the return of displaced persons without incident to their reconstructed homes, and the restoration of normalcy and security in the zone. None of these conditions has been fulfilled.
Boko Haram has reconstituted itself from the ashes of apparent defeat before. A full year passed after the 2009 crackdown in Maiduguri before the group returned with a vengeance. The group also survived many promises by Jonathan to destroy it. Given its resilience, Buhari’s claim of victory was premature. His administration is now emulating the previous administration’s habit of declaring the group’s imminent demise even as it piled up dead bodies.
Despite the mantra of “change”, the terms of engagement between the people and their leaders have not changed significantly. Like its predecessors, this administration still has to be cajoled into responding to mass loss of life with empathy and emotional intelligence. The government has seemed genuinely surprised and irked to be held to the promises it freely made to rescue the girls. Some of the administration’s defenders have bizarrely argued that it is unfair to criticise Buhari since the girls were abducted under the previous administration. Jonathan also blamed his administration’s five-year failure to contain the insurgency on the fact that the military regimes of the 1980s had failed to buy arms. In their engagements with the public, Nigerian elites, whatever their party, apparently read from the same book.
For this administration’s sake and ours, it must be kept honest through persistent questioning, healthy scepticism and active dissent. Our power elites have failed us often enough for us to do no less.
The terrorists’ resort to pure sadism is to be expected and will continue since their goals (whether it is igniting a sectarian civil war or establishing their caliphate) have proven impossible. Boko Haram is not the force it was three or four years ago but then again, it does not need to be to remain a brutally disruptive entity. Its psychotic inclinations are enough to perpetuate its reign of terror. The group can be beaten but not through risible spin. Having run as a no-nonsense soldier outraged by Boko Haram’s antics, Buhari perhaps felt the need to deliver a military miracle. But rather than selling an illusory quick win, the administration should cast the counter-terrorism campaign as a long-term engagement, and stress gradual progress and incremental deliverables. Its message should be that we are in this for the long haul.
This administration can still retreat from its present trajectory of high expectations, dashed hopes and eventual disillusionment. It must adopt a more realistic evaluation of its deeds and be honest with the Nigerian people. It must communicate with greater clarity, integrity, sensitivity and intelligence.
By its own admission, the administration would rather we ignore the North-East and unquestioningly accept the official narrative of victory. This weekend’s massacres were overshadowed in the media by yet more salacious disclosures of graft. Tragically, the routinised death and destruction in the North-East has ceased to command the headlines of a sensationalist and attention-deficient press. For this administration’s sake and ours, it must be kept honest through persistent questioning, healthy scepticism and active dissent. Our power elites have failed us often enough for us to do no less.
Chris Ngwodo is a writer, consultant and analyst.