Our axis of evil President Goodluck Jonathan woke up from his pusillanimity on Tuesday, May 14, 2013. Immediately the news hit the social network, many discerning analysts knew the he would do something run-against-the-mill. Eventually, no one was taking unawares. Before the broadcast, some mischievous folks, persuaded the broadcast would be unique, divined that the president, realizing that the Nigerian load was bigger than him, was probably throwing in the towel and walking away to go fish in the creeks of Bayelsa. Another mischievous folk quipped that if ever Jonathan dreams of this, his femme-fatale (pardon the French), the Bayelsa Permanent Secretary, would have put a hole through his head before he utters out that heresy! Anyway, the President told the world that he could not continue to bode the violence and chaos of the Northern states, through the equally effeminate and faceless Boko Haram. As such, a state of emergency was imposed on Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. I have done a content analysis of the broadcast and placed it side by side the man delivering it and found a great variation in them. While the written broadcast was tough and brooked no dissent, the man delivering it was seemingly fidgety and unsure of himself. The emergency broadcaster role that presidents delivering such speeches often assume was lacking in the delivery and we had a president whose gaze stayed too long on his speech and less on contact with his viewers. Sorry that I bothered you with the seemingly intangibles but all these would help us in coming to terms with the psychology of the man who paddles the canoe of our destiny. A lot has been said on the proclamation of the emergency itself. While some people commend Jonathan for his emergent courage, some said it was one of the various gaffes the president had committed since this Boko Haram pestilence seized the country. Even though Jonathan’s resort to high-handed military invasion of the emergency states could be seen as an extreme position in the quest for peace in the North, the Arewa Consultative Council (ACF’s) attack on the President’s decision is another escapist, even if stupid, proffer by Northern elders on the problem of terrorism that Nigeria is faced with. The ACF, in a communique signed by its Deputy National Publicity Secretary, Fati Ibrahim, not only condemned Jonathan’s emergency rule on those states but said, rather stupidly, that it was a declaration of war on the North. If you ask me, ACF’s most recent denunciation is an icing on the cake of the impunity and insult it had been heaping on the rest of Nigeria since the Boko Haram onslaught. As simplistic as it may sound, Jonathan has been more conciliatory than expected in the quest to bring peace to the North. Though everyone knows that the nuisance of this terrorist group has more to do with the obsession of the North to go back to its presidency inheritance which it had occupied for an unfair number of years, we had all always attacked Jonathan for being too pusillanimous in his policies of routing the menace. Olusegun Obasanjo, God bless his brash and crude tactics, would, by now, have made some of those insurgent cells history. However, that Obasanjo must have, by now, ipso-facto, as the lawyers say, been arrested by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for crimes against humanity, is another kettle of fish entirely. Having thus tried the carrot for too long and less of the cudgel, virtually everyone is happy with the president now that he has chosen to assert himself. What he has done is to show all that no one can hold the country hostage as the combine of the Northern elders and their foot soldiers, the Boko Haram, have so far done. Such statements from the ACF to the effect that this quest to bring sanity to the enclave of the terrorists was a declaration of war on the North is not only arrant nonsense, it takes for granted that the rest of the country, which has lost sizeable number of kinsmen and women who resided in the North, had merely lost chickens and not their loved ones. Having said that, it is apparent that the three states of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa would suffocate terribly under the bayonets of artillery fire and bombardment as they have been doing. But the freedom given by Jonathan to women and children linked to the insurgency still baffles. While many have linked it to the pusillanimity of the president, many see it as a way of circumventing the human rights abuse charge against the administration. If these women and children were being held months prior to the emergency, what happened to the charge that an accused should not be detained for more than twenty four hours? If they were recently arrested, has their de-linkage to the insurgency been totally proven? These are the questions that beg for answers. All said and done, prosecutors of the emergency should be humane with civilians. However, they should be merciless with the terrorists and ferret them out from wherever they are with a clinical finish. It is high time we delinked Nigeria from this unfavorable axis of Satan. tribune.ng/news2013/en/columns/2012-10-29-11-16-41/saturday-with-ayinla-mukaiba/item/12767-our-axis-of-evil.html
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 10:49:17 +0000
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