Kidnappings in Nigeria

[size=18pt]A clueless government[/size]

The incompetence of Nigeria’s president and government is hurting the country’s reputation at home and abroad

FOR the past few years President Goodluck Jonathan has publicly shrugged off the deaths of thousands of people, mainly in the north-east of his country, portraying them as the unfortunate but unavoidable result of a fanatical insurgency for which his government cannot be blamed. But in the past few weeks the plight of 200-plus girls abducted from a school by Boko Haram, the extremist group chiefly responsible for the mayhem, has put Mr Jonathan and his government under an international spotlight, [size=15pt]exposing them not only as incompetent but callous, too.[/size]

As outrage spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, Barack Obama and other Western leaders, hitherto watching more or less silently from afar, have felt obliged to offer help as well as sympathy. West African leaders, led by Ghana’s president, have expressed unusual solidarity. The surge of global horror mixed with curiosity and bafflement was particularly embarrassing, at a time when Mr Jonathan was about to host a glamorous gathering of leaders, including China’s prime minister, at the World Economic Forum in Abuja, his capital, where he was hoping to celebrate the recent international re-evaluation of Nigeria’s economy as by far the biggest in Africa, well ahead of South Africa’s.
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Not that there was the slightest sympathy for Boko Haram and its maniacal leader, Abubakar Shekau, who purported to be the man pictured in a video released on May 5th, making blood-curdling threats to kill all Christians. “I took the girls,” he declared, standing in front of a tank, flanked by masked men in uniforms. “By Allah I will sell them in the marketplace…I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.” Some of the girls, it has been speculated, may already have been forced to marry their abductors for a bride-price equivalent to $12. The UN warned members of Boko Haram, which means “Western education is forbidden”, that if they carried out their leader’s threat they would be committing war crimes.

The girls, abducted on April 14th from a school in Chibok, a town in the north-eastern state of Borno, are probably being held in a rebel stronghold. One of these is in the dense Sambisa forest, 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) in area, south of Maiduguri, Borno’s capital. The other is in the Gwoza mountains, which straddle the cave-ridden border with Cameroon.

Boko Haram, which was founded in 2002 but began its violent insurgency in 2009, has been responsible for at least 4,000 deaths, mostly in the north-east. But it has also demonstrated an ability to strike at the centre of the country, setting off a bomb last month at a bus station in Abuja, killing at least 70 people, and another one on May 2nd near a police checkpoint, also in Abuja, killing around 20. The capital is now beset with checkpoints, snarling up traffic just when the government wants to show off the place to its foreign visitors.

In recent months Boko Haram has been aiming with increasing ferocity at soft targets such as schools and marketplaces, though it had not previously attempted a mass abduction. On May 5th, however, it was reported that it had kidnapped another eight girls from elsewhere in Borno. On the same day it was reported that Boko Haram had killed 300 people in the Borno town of Gamboru Ngala. Most secondary schools in the state had been closed before the mass abduction, for fear of an attack, but the education authorities had convened the girls at a boarding school so that they could take their final exams.

As worldwide outrage grew over the abductions, the American and British governments offered to help. A White House spokesman said that experts in intelligence, hostage negotiation and victim assistance would fly to Nigeria. The British offered to send surveillance aircraft along with soldiers from its special forces.

The Nigerians have been loth to accept such help in the past and are wary of perceived encroachments on their sovereignty. America has operated drones from a base in neighbouring Niger since 2012, but Nigeria’s government has long refused American requests to be allowed to do the same from Nigerian territory. Moreover, Nigerians are proud of their army ( ), the biggest in Africa, with its long history of contributions to peacekeeping missions, most recently in Mali. And they are also notably secretive and prickly about its operations—and the low standards of soldiery which foreign experts would see. Though Mr Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the north-east a year ago, his army has dismally failed to defeat Boko Haram.

Indeed, it has itself perpetrated numerous atrocities against civilians suspected of harbouring or lending sympathy to the rebels, who thrive among embittered young Muslims in the north, the poorest part of the country. The army was widely castigated after a military counter-attack on March 14th following an attempted jailbreak by suspected members of Boko Haram detained at a barracks in Maiduguri. According to hospital sources, around 500 people were killed, mainly at the hands of soldiers. Such human-rights abuses by the Nigerian army make Western governments edgy about offering to join the fray, for fear of being deemed complicit.

Corruption, Nigeria’s great scourge, is another reason for foreign military advisers to keep their distance. Nigeria’s soldiers say that commanders pocket the bulk of their salaries, leaving them with little incentive to fight a well-equipped guerrilla movement that knows the rugged terrain and forests. Why risk death at the hands of Boko Haram for no reward? It is hard, in such conditions, to see how outsiders could raise Nigerian troops’ morale, let alone improve their military skills.

Patience not always a virtue

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Nigerian government’s handling of the abduction is its seeming indifference to the plight of the girls’ families. It took more than two weeks before Mr Jonathan addressed the matter in public. His government’s sluggish response and its failure even to clarify how many girls had been abducted provoked protests in several cities across Nigeria—itself an unusual event.

[size=15pt]To make matters worse, the president’s wife, Patience, ordered the arrest of two leaders of the protests, bizarrely accusing them of belonging to Boko Haram and of fabricating reports of the abduction to smear the government. In a televised broadcast on May 4th, the first lady, who holds no official position, warned against further such marches. “You are playing games,” she said. “Don’t use schoolchildren and women for demonstration again. Keep it to Borno, let it end there,” the official News Agency of Nigeria reported.[/size]

Such statements do not give the impression that Mr Jonathan or his colleagues, who face elections next year, take the worries of ordinary Nigerians to heart.

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21601839-incompetence-nigerias-president-and-government-hurting-countrys

[size=18pt] Jonathan’s incompetence affecting Nigeria – Balarabe[/size]

Second Republic Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, has taken a swipe at President Goodluck Jonathan, saying his government has displayed incompetence, which has affected every part of Nigeria.

Musa, who said this during an interview, added that the fact that over 200 schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram sect from Chibok, Borno State, had not been rescued after 80 days was a show of gross incompetence on the part of the Federal Government.

He described the involvement of foreign security agents in the bid to rescue the schoolgirls and halt Boko Haram insurgency as unpatriotic, saying the Federal Government had the capacity to handle the situation.

Musa said, “The inability to resolve the issue of the abduction of the schoolgirls from Chibok, Borno State and the continued abduction of women and children is a show of gross incompetence on the part of the Federal Government.

“Apart from that, President Goodluck Jonathan and his government went ahead to unpatriotically invite foreigners to solve a problem that the Federal Government has the capacity to solve. And up till today, the foreigners have not been able to identify where the abducted children are. Nothing concrete is coming both from the Federal Government and those invited to help.”

http://dailyindependentnig.com/2014/07/jonathans-incompetence-affecting-nigeria-balarabe/

BishopMagic: ^^Quoting a fellow supporter of APC will not help your cause.

Go and Die of ebola

[size=18pt]Analysis: Goodluck Jonathan and a billion dollars of bad judgment[/size]

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan wants another $1 billion to funnel into his army, hoping that this will succeed where everything else has failed against Boko Haram. Here’s the thing, though – he hasn’t actually tried anything else except the military approach. And if we know one thing beyond reasonable doubt, it’s that the strong arm tactics don’t work.

Goodluck Jonathan cuts a somewhat forlorn figure in public these days. The year 2014 was meant to be a good year for Nigeria, and a good year for its president in the run-up to elections in 2015. This was the year that Nigeria finally overtook South Africa to become Africa’s biggest economy, a development that should have kick-started a new investment boom in what is still, despite the impressive stats, an underperforming market.

But Boko Haram had other plans. The Islamist militant group, already known for its brutality, has been more violent than ever this year. It’s not just those kidnapped girls – since January, more than 2000 people have died at the hands of Boko Haram members or people acting in the group’s name (this distinction is not always clear, but exists).

Nothing that Jonathan has done – or anyone else for that matter – has seemed to make the slightest of difference. A huge military crackdown last year was an unmitigated failure, only serving to push Boko Haram towards more vulnerable targets, such as schools and villages. A state of emergency in several northern states – so extreme that at one point cellphone networks were disabled – was ineffectual, inconveniencing ordinary citizens more than militants. A well-meaning but ultimately dangerous Twitter campaign still has not #BroughtBackOurGirls.

While losing the war on the ground, President Jonathan is also losing the public relations war. His popularity at home has taken a nosedive, with certain constituencies unimpressed with his continued struggles to stem the violence. His popularity abroad, meanwhile, has never been lower. In fact, things have got so bad that the Nigerian government has hired a fancy US PR firm – with an equally fancy retainer – to polish his and Nigeria’s international image. Ironically, even this backfired.

So it’s back to the drawing board for Jonathan and his band of young, well-educated advisors. They need a new plan, and quickly. Fortunately, they’ve got one.

Last week, President Jonathan approached parliament with an extraordinary budget request.

“I would like to bring to your attention the urgent need to upgrade the equipment, training and logistics of our armed forces and security services to enable them to more forcefully confront this serious threat,” wrote Jonathan in the letter to parliament, before asking permission from legislators to seek a $1 billion loan, presumably from western donors, to improve Nigeria’s military capabilities. (This is in addition to the $6 billion that the military and security services receive annually.)

This, then, is Jonathan’s new strategy – more money, more guns, more bullets and, inevitably, more fighting.

It didn’t take Nigeria’s political opposition – in the form of a new opposition coalition that poses the most serious threat ever to the ruling party’s electoral hegemony – to register their disapproval with Jonathan’s proposal, which really just guarantees more of the same failed tactics.

“The only reason the schoolgirls have remained in captivity is the sheer cluelessness and incompetence on the part of the Jonathan administration,” said Lai Mohamed, executive secretary of the All Progressives Congress. “Therefore putting more money in the hands of an incompetent and massively corrupt administration can only encourage more incompetence and corruption.”

Mohamed has a point. There’s also the Nigerian armed force’s previous record to consider. Not only have they so far failed to effectively combat Boko Haram, but military units have regularly been implicated in serious human rights violations, including massacres of civilians, summary executions and unlawful detention – exactly the kind of crimes they are supposed to be preventing.

“Many people I have met with during this visit openly acknowledge human rights violations have been committed by the security forces,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the South African Navi Pillay, said during a fact-finding expedition to Nigeria in March. “These have served to alienate communities and create fertile ground for Boko Haram to cultivate new recruits.” In other words, far from helping, the heavy-handed military response is actually making things worse.

There are better things that Nigeria could do with $1 billion. A couple of suggestions: how about investing in better investigative and prosecuting capacity, so that people who murder and maim can be detained and imprisoned through the criminal justice system? A slow process, sure, but one that upholds the rule of law and might not incite another generation of would-be terrorists. Or perhaps it could be put towards health, education and infrastructure in northern Nigeria? This would address the underlying issue that makes Boko Haram’s message so potent, namely the the dramatic development inequality that exists between northern and southern Nigeria.

Or perhaps, as the APC’s Mohamed observed, Nigeria shouldn’t be asking for any more money at all. Instead, the government should be trying to plug the $20 billion hole in state finances from missing oil revenue.

Parliament has yet to respond to Jonathan’s proposal, and won’t for another two months – not until it returns from recess. In that time, perhaps the cool heads would prevail and legislators will realize the folly of repeating all the mistakes of the past.

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-07-23-analysis-goodluck-jonathan-and-a-billion-dollars-of-bad-judgment/#.U-3plKPCdfs

Demdem: Jonathan is a curse to the Nigerian Nation.

suwailad:

The Change.org petition will be coming up soon and protests are being organized under way. This will be way bigger than the subsidy crisis.

suwailad: Isnt it clear now to all of you that Jonathan is clueless?
The total paralysis of the important sectors - talking of strikes here and there from Education, to Labor to Health, to worsening Security?

Jonathan is clueless! Lets boot him out now. Impeach the President now before its too late.

Please register your intent and displeasure.

Demdem: Jonathan is a curse to the Nigerian Nation.

Ahasco:

Those who curse are the cursed. Its obvious who the cursed is.

tsolz84: And I am a curse to my generation and lineage ..dumb bastard I am.

tijjanioyan: my sister if it is as easy as u said there wont be corrupt leaders in nigeria.if a leader knows dat he/she can easily be shown d way out if performance is below average he/she wont abuse d office/post.GOD bless dis country abundantly yet we're wallowing in poverty.many foreign analysts always say dat nigeria is too rich to be poor.leave d jonathians alone let dem be supporting d administration dubbed by d international community "d most corrupt one "in d history of d nation democracy.
God dat put him there knows d appropriate time 2remove him.i pray God should wish him all dat he wishes 4 nigeria.
Lets join hands in prayer dat God should forgive us all our sins &help dis great nation.

Lordlexyy: Mature, reasonale and sensible. God knows the appropriate time to appoint the right person. Even at that, we can't remain docile not doing anything. Being proactive through activism could give signal over our collective seriousness.

mysterious12: Nobody should just been our president. Six presidents, 8 heads of state , 53 yrs Nigeria is in fact worse. i will not vote if i were you

suwailad:

A president who had nothing to show while he was a governor in bayelsa, presiding over a an entity with more than five countries landlocked together is expected to be clueless, so what do we do, send him out to otuoke and then restructure this mess called niger-area.