Nigeria: garlands for the president

For a leader best known for taking controversial decisions, Nigerians are right in commending their president, Goodluck Jonathan, for rising to the occasion to declare states of emergency in parts of the country. Proof of the robust support for the president’s position is the near-unanimous approval his decision has evoked. Pause to imagine the upswing in goodwill had the president been similarly disposed in the past instead of busying himself with granting state pardon to high-profile thieves in the name of exercising presidential prerogative, needlessly increasing pump price of fuel and, through certain actions and inactions, providing cover for people who believe they cannot survive without stealing public funds! Yes, the president, not untypical of him, sounded as if he was unsure of the import of his action when he made the declaration on 14 May. But that is neither here nor there; the president should, in his characteristic humility, accept the bouquet of flowers from his subjects for taking the extra-ordinary decision they consistently clamoured for months.

Like his other decisions, the president, this time, could not have expected every Nigerian to agree with him and he indeed received knocks even from unusual quarters. For instance, the knocks from the main opposition Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, came as a surprise to many Nigerians who expected the nation to rally round their president at a critical moment. But those who condemn the ACN forget that this is politics and the ruling party would probably have been the first to cry blue murder had the shoe been on the other foot. Nigerians could not have so soon forgotten how the ruling party, desperate to achieve cheap political point, continue to criticize some of the well-thought out programmes of the ACN government in the nation’s commercial hub of Lagos. And those who cite the American experiment by expecting all Nigerians to agree with the president forget that the average American is prepared to die for the flag because, unlike Nigerians, they have governments they can genuinely call their own, not one that thrive on impunity. But again, this too, is neither here nor there.

NEED FOR EXTRA-ORDINARY ACTION

The reasons given for the declaration of states of emergency are well known and valid. From being an insurgency to establish an untenable theocracy, Nigerians have witnessed a campaign of terror, characterized by bombings, serial killings, abductions and bank robberies that created the impression that government had taken a break from its main responsibility of securing the lives and property of citizens. In their desperate bid, the insurgents, not without the complicity of some Nigerians, have of late become enamoured to the extent of spurning peace overtures from government and citizens and graduated barely stopped short of carving out a state within a state after wanton attack on and replacement of state symbols. Now, this is crossing the red line, an action intolerable to the most tolerant government on earth; it is one action that has the potential of placing President Jonathan on the wrong side of history had he continued to dither.

Ultimately, the increased military action will dislodge the insurgents and force a rethink among their leaders. Meanwhile, Nigerians would be deluded into assuming that the increased military activity in the flashpoints would rout the insurgents overnight or come without inconveniences to people in the affected areas. The insurgency may not have consumed as many lives as the better-forgotten civil war but it has lasted much longer and enough to provide the insurgents ample time to dig in. The situation has not been helped by the corruption-driven comatose economy being tended by an increasingly sterile ruling class. What Nigerians, especially the leadership, can take away from the insurgency in the north is that affirmative action is needed, beyond empty promises, to work the economy and engage less in talking politics.

It is as well that the insurgents still have the benefit of soft landing as President Jonathan did not go to the extreme of foreclosing the option of dialogue. In an increasingly violence-prone world where peace advocates are battling against the odds to make their voices heard, advocates of non peaceful means to resolve crises stand out as a sore thumb. When dialogue fails to run its full course and crisis rears its ugly head among communities and nations, military might becomes the factor that determines where the bell of victory sways. But, as the world has come to find out, lasting peace only comes after the guns have gone silent and combatants sit round a table foist a lasting victory never achievable on the battle front.

DIALOGUE IN JEOPARDY

Authorities in Nigeria once got sick with the slow wheel of dialogue and threw the country into a needless thirty month long civil war. At the end of it all, leaders of the victorious side went conciliatory by insisting that there was neither a victor nor a vanquished in a war that claimed more than one million lives that would have been saved through dialogue. It would appear that, since those dark days, Nigerian leaders have woken up to the need to do more talking than warring. If proof is needed, it came in those trying days of 1993 after the military government stopped a winner of an election from taking office. Outcome of the restiveness of that era resulted in the ascension to power of a man from the aggrieved region of the country to the presidency as a means of placating a people who were at the brink of taking up arms to protest their exclusion. Never mind the fact that the Olusegun Obasanjo, the main beneficiary of the campaign to placate the South West was opposed the ceding power to the winner of the June, 1993 presidential election. It is instructive, however, to note that, in the heat of the impasse, the late Ikemba Nnewi, General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, cautioned the main combatants to show more maturity than displayed by himself and war time Nigerian leader, General Yakubu Gowon when the failure of dialogue plunged the country into a needless war from May, 1967 to January, 1970.

Dialogue was to take the centre stage when some aggrieved youths in the oil rich Niger Delta region took up arms to protest their alleged exclusion. Still smarting from the eight-year misrule of Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigerians prevailed on his successor, the late Umaru Musa Yar’adua, to tow Obasanjo’s hardline in dealing with the restiveness in the Niger Delta through wielding the big stick. But Yar’adua thought differently: he directed that leaders of the Niger Delta militants be flown in a presidential jet to Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital city, for a presidential handshake. At the same time, he initiated a multi-million dollar rehabilitation programme to keep the repentant militants busy and created a federal ministry, headed by a cabinet minister, to run affairs of the Niger Delta. The process of placating the restive Niger Delta received a major boost when one of their own, Goodluck Jonathan, assumed the presidency after the death of Yar’adua. Ironically, the amnesty programme which baited the militants from their inhospitable hideouts in the creeks of the Niger Delta has been the subject of abuse by self-confessed terrorists and some misfits in government who are bent on rubbishing the process of dialogue through threats to hold the country to ransom on account of the ambitions of President Jonathan.

Around the same time, a group called MASSOB, or Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, emerged to continue from where the late Emeka Ojukwu stopped. Give this to MASSOB: the group has so far largely trod the path of non-violence in pressing its case. What remains disturbing is that the group is treading the ignoble path that led to the death of hundreds of Nigerians who were caught in the crossfire of the July, 1967 to January, 1970 crisis through constantly balking at the idea of pushing for the peaceful and democratic emergence of a president from the predominantly Igbo-speaking South East by opting, instead, for an independent state! It still remains to be seen how MASSOB plans to achieve its goal outside the political process but recently, one prominent member of the Nigerian Senate just stopped short of calling on the group to take up arms when he justified MASSOB’s non-conformist activities as normal if the South East region was ever to produce a president for the country. This position must have been informed by the ‘success story’ of the Niger Delta region and the predominantly Yoruba-speaking South West who won the bid for the presidency purely on compassionate grounds.

Today, those who kicked against Yar’adua’s overtures to the Niger Delta militants are sneering. They appear to be saying: ‘We told you it won’t work!’ And this is not without good cause. The poor handling of the rehabilitation programme in the Niger Delta now appears to make Obasanjo, a man who perpetrated serious atrocities by deploying armed troops to sack communities in the region, a fair skinned saint while Yar’adua, the man who opted for dialogue, is made to look like a black faced, two horned devil! If truth be told, the idea of throwing money at the Niger Delta crisis was a brilliant idea; the snag, however, was the failure on the part of authorities to capture the whole country for a rehabilitation programme. This failure, if truth be told, largely explains the poverty-driven violence in parts of the north of the country. Let no one be fooled; the violence in parts of the north flows more from poverty than the hare-brained desire to establish a theocracy and the misplaced belief that taking an innocent life is a passport to paradise.

REJUVENATING THE YAR’ADUA FORMULA

For now, it will not be out of place to press for an urgent resuscitation of the Yar’adua formula, this time, on a nation-wide scale and quit hoping that the problem will go by selectively throwing money at every problem or deploying troops to dislodge insurgents or extending presidential handshake to terrorists and saboteurs. Merely talking to a group of murderers in one part of the country serves to embolden potential murderers in other parts of the country to take up arms to press their case. And in the name of decency, the current leadership in the violence prone north, in this case, governors of the nineteen states in northern Nigeria, should give real meaning to the carrot and stick approach by quitting their needless but potentially harmful bickering over who among them runs for president in 2015. Beyond this, the governors should quit complaining about perceived lopsided federal allocations, most of which will end in private pockets, anyway by spending more on developmental programmes. At the end of the day, the option available now is to quit over-dependence on federal allocations by exploring and exploiting the unexplored and unexploited non-oil resources abundant in the vast plain of the north. So far, the lazy art of feasting on monthly federal allocations does not show that there is a political will to change.

Eventually, superior fire power will dislodge insurgents and force a recourse to the conference table. Desirous as dialogue is, it will have scant meaning if the insurgents fail to assuage the feelings of those they have widowed and orphaned. If and when the insurgents realize they are in error and have become repentant Nigerians who wish to be accepted and integrated, it should not be asking for too much to ask them to follow the strict procedures prescribed by the Shari’ah by asking for forgiveness from those people, Muslims and non-Muslims, they have orphaned and widowed. For instance, the killers among them should approach families of those they have killed and confess their sins. It is left for surviving family members to forgive and let go, otherwise, the Qur’an is clear on their fate: they too must be killed or they are made to pay blood-money for taking lives they neither created nor can restore to life. This is in addition to the mandatory and unbroken sixty day fasting prescribed for killers. Whether God will forgive the killer or not is the prerogative of the Creator. These are the injunctions of God and which is the right course for the insurgents to chart if indeed they are adherents of a faith that criminalizes taking any life, be it that of Muslims or non-Muslims, without justification. God knows man has the capacity to be animalistic and perpetrate jungle justice and that is why He prescribed ways to regulate societies; otherwise, the world would be a jungle peopled only by wild animals.

THE WAY FORWARD

Soon, superior fire power will force the insurgents to double back. Typically, there will be enough money to spend on victory parties where champagne will flow and many backs will be slapped. In the midst of the euphoria, government will be tempted to bow to the pressure for insurgents to be appeased. This will be a costly mistake because, from the amnesty programme in the Niger Delta, this is a practice that holds no future. Rather, the president should capture the whole country for an urgent and far-reaching rehabilitation drive. And for this to have meaning, the weird and odious practice of extending state pardon to high-profile thieves in the guise of exercising presidential prerogative and sundry decisions that provide cover for people who believe they cannot survive without stealing public funds should be discarded; the practice, at best, assails the sensibilities of right-thinking Nigerians. With the garlands Nigerians are hanging on the neck of their president, courtesy of his extra-ordinary decision to end the insurgency, no time is apt than now to change course.

*Abdulrazaq Magaji is based in Abuja, Nigeria

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