President Buhari and the Chibok Conundrum

Adefining moment for the Muhammadu Buhari presidency would be the day the Chibok girls are freed from captivity and reunited with their tormented parents. That would definitely end the drama, political controversies and certain mercantile contrivances the macabre episode created.

The world was repulsed when some 200 plus female students set to write their final examinations were herded into waiting trucks and ferreted into unknown destinations. Finding the girls would effectively make Nigeria’s president a hero. And the reverse would apply as well if the mirage is prolonged and unresolved. 

The world knows that the release of school girls abducted by the Boko Haram terrorist sect on April 14, 2014 in Chibok, Borno State was one of the sensational campaign promises upon which the repented ex dictator won election last March. But like the president said in his Tuesday interview with CNN renowned journalist, Christiane Amanpour, it is too early to judge his performance in office. But there is some level of consensus that the ugly abduction scandal should be treated with more urgency.

Fortunately, Buhari seems to be aware of the full weight of the pressures of his promises especially with regards to freedom for the girls. According to him during his inauguration speech, “we cannot claim to have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls and all other innocent persons held hostage by insurgents.

This government will do all it can to rescue them alive.” The Chibok saga had sparked a worldwide rage poured out on social media with one of the biggest campaigns of 2014 on Twitter with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls circulated more than five million times. In fact, a frontline campaigner for the safe return of the girls both in the real and virtual world, Oby Ezekwesili, a prominent former national official, underscores the burden on Buhari thus: “The rescue of the Chibok girls would be the strongest statement this government could make for having respect for the sanctity and dignity of every Nigerian life.” Her group which champions the crusade for the release of the girls recently met with President Buhari apparently to receive assurances from the new occupant of Aso Rock that the girls have not been forgotten in captivity. Former president Goodluck Jonathan courted more controversies for his administration by refusing to grant audience to the group.

It is therefore understandable that the president would concede as suggested by Amanpour’s question, that negotiation with the terrorists was not a foreclosed option provided it would buy the captives the much craved liberty and by extension, put an end to the national embarrassment the sordid Chibok affair threw the country into over a year ago. “If we are convinced that we can have the girls, why not, we can negotiate. Our goal is to have the girls. We will ask them what they want and we can free the girls; return them to their school; unite them with their parents and rehabilitate them, so, they can live a normal life,” Buhari told his CNN host.

He was also quick to add a caveat though: government would not be stampeded into talks with boko haram until it is reasonably sure it is dealing with the right leadership of the now amorphous deadly sect. “We have to be careful about the credibility of various Boko Haram groups. You need to be careful that you are talking to the right group,” he said benefitting of course from hindsight where his predecessor in office was hoodwinked into a fake truce with boko haram by persons of questionable intents.

Media reports of possible talks between the government and representatives of the sect have neither been denied nor confirmed by government. Presidential adviser on media and publicity, Femi Adesina, had in a cryptic reaction to the reports said the Buhari administration “will not be averse” to talks with Boko Haram. “The new initiative reopens an offer made last year to the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan to release the 219 students in exchange for 16 Boko Haram detainees,” an unnamed activist said to be fronting for the sect was quoted in the reports.

These lines of apparent policy direction by the Buhari administration on Boko Haram appear to be syncing with the advocacy of Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima who has unabashedly canvassed and promoted amnesty for the blood-sucking sect as a way of ending the reign of terror. The point is not lost at all to keen observers that this governor was on the entourage of the president to the United States for the just concluded state visit. “Unless we want to engage in an endless war of attrition that will be hallmarked by the continuing destruction of lives and property, it becomes imperative that willing members of the Boko Haram sect that want to come out of the bush must be given the opportunity to be de-radicalised and then rehabilitated to become useful citizens of society,” the governor said on the day of his inauguration into office for a second term. A call as disagreeable as the complicit postures of the caller himself, amnesty for boko haram is like awarding a medal to a serial rapist simply because he has consistently escaped apprehension and still has his lethal balls between his legs.

That is not what candidate Buhari promised Nigerians during the electioneering campaigns. He promised to liquidate the sect into final capitulation. It is to that promise he will be held accountable by Nigerians. Anything less would be tantamount to shifting the goal posts in the middle of the game. The likes of Shettima can identify the repentant vagabonds in their jurisdictions and offer them prizes for mass murder. But the cry of justice by well-meaning Nigerians cannot be outweighed by his uncanny and unthinkable proposition. The governor has argued that “it is never easy to accept back into the community, those who have taken up arms, killed, pillaged, raped and destroyed. But in the long run, society must make very expensive choices for peace, reconciliation and development.”

But he fails to accept the fact that there can never be reconciliation if the offending (read marauding) party stoutly declines to accept his (devilish) culpability and be expressly contrite enough to commit to refrain from his awful past in the search for genuine forgiveness. It is Mr. Shettima’s cranky advocacies, puerile propositions and complicit conduct (for instance in the sad Chibok kidnap when he approved contrary to federal advice that the school girls proceed with the exams without adequate security cover) that have muddled up any attempt to have a coherent national narrative on boko haram as argued by this column in a penultimate article.

Now that the Borno governor has a “listening president, who would be willing to assist us with utmost dispatch, to accelerate our development” contrary to “a hostile (Jonathan-led) Federal Government, which lived in denial about the savagery of Boko Haram and which also saw the insurgency from the most perverted, narrow and irresponsible prism, that somehow, the insurgency had been fuelled against it, by the political and other elites of this part of Nigeria,” the probability that President Buhari may fall for the amnesty proposal cannot be dismissed. In retrospect, Buhari had before the campaign erroneously compared the problem of boko haram with the challenge once presented by ex militants of the Niger delta and had canvassed for amnesty for the sect. But knowing that such line of argument would do maximum damage to his quest to become president, he had (or seen to have) jettisoned such clannish and narrow dispositions and promised to crush boko haram like he did the Matatsine sect decades ago.

Thus, granting amnesty would be dismissing his own promise to crush the sect on assumption of office. And that would also be quite contrary and hypocritical since he (and his party, the APC) had consistently queried the dual carrot-and-stick approach employed by the preceding administration. Any vitiation of his resolve or taunted ability to bring the sect to its knees would erode the worldwide acclaim which heralded his ride to power. According to renowned Time magazine in its profile of Buhari when it listed him among the list of 100 most influential people in the world recently, the president “now he has to live up to voters’ expectations from battling the Boko Haram insurgency to tackling endemic corruption.” The Chibok test case stares him starkly in the face. And the world waits on him.