In his April 14 2015 NYT
Op Ed, General Muhammadu Buhari, the President-elect of Nigeria, appears to
respond to some of my comments on what I called Buhari’s
Chatham House Silences. He is still silent on some other silences but his
Op Ed is an indication that he has attentive speech writers around him ready to
respond to current affairs on international media platforms. However, it would
have been more appropriate for him to publish such policy opinions in the
Nigerian media first and let foreign media outlets pick up the stories from
there (as Professor Obi Nwakanma opined in his Orbit column for The Vanguard. In my earlier comment the very day he made the Chatham House campaign speech,
I
had this to say on my blog:
‘This sounds like a speech written by
Tony Blair with emphasis on militarism as the solution to insecurity and to its
'causes', without acknowledging that militarism is a big part of the problem.
Nowhere in Buhari's Chatham House speech today is there a single recognition of
the importance of education even though Boko Haram poses its challenge
primarily as an educational one! This contrasts with the speech of Azikiwe,
Nigeria's first president, to the colonial Legislative Council sitting in
Kaduna in 1948 in which he disagreed with those who spoke out against education
on the assumption that educated children tend to be disobedient. And by
education, is not meant only text-book education, important as that is in a
country with mass illiteracy, 80% failure in high school exams and no university
ranked among the top 1000 in the world. Buhari also said that Nigeria has never
been as insecure as it is today except during the civil war. So the question
arises, which candidate for president has the courage in leadership to
apologize to Nigerians for the atrocities committed by the Nigerian state
during the civil war and commit to pay reparations to the survivors of the war
that cost us 3.1 million of some of our most industrious, creative and
intellectual youth in 30 months of carnage supported by Britain and the Soviet
Union and led by soldiers like Buhari? Without admitting the wrongs done
against the Igbo and making amends, Nigeria will continue to send the message
to groups like Boko Haram that the mass killing of our people and mass abduction
of our young girls are heroic acts to be rewarded with ill-gotten gains. Making
atonement and allowing the history to be taught in schools, building monuments
to the victimized, allowing the flag of Biafra to be flown on private property
without the risk of extra judicial killings that go on with impunity unabated,
authorization of commemorative car license plates and holding re-enactments of
the war to re-educate the people and to attract tourists (one of the things
that Buhari promises to stimulate), will be part of the necessary political
education to emphasize to Nigerians that never again will any government wake
up and slap the buttocks of soldiers, then send them into a genocidal rampage
against fellow Nigerians. The cooperation of the neighboring countries' armies
in fighting Boko Haram should also have been acknowledged by Buhari and a
visionary leadership should seek to rebuild the larger polity that Nnamdi
Azikiwe attempted to build with his National Council for Nigeria and the
Cameroons.’
In his NYT
Op Ed, Buhari maintains that he plans to ‘Stop Boko Haram’ terrorists with
the force of the Nigerian military first before addressing the underlying causes of
the terrorism - including poverty, ignorance and illiteracy. To accomplish the
first task of stopping Boko Haram, he plans to renew the training of Nigerian
soldiers by the US military that the out-going administration cancelled after the
US curiously refused to sell weapons to the regime that could not guarantee not
to use them to commit human rights violations. Buhari also promised to equip the military with the
necessary weapons that corruption apparently denied the troops and to coordinate with
neighboring countries to avoid each country pushing the terrorists beyond their
borders into the borders of their neighbors, only to have to fight them again another day.
I caution the president-elect against
over-confidence in militarism as the solution to terrorism in Nigeria. The most
powerful military in the world, Pax Americana, is yet to defeat terrorism
militarily in any country and the deployment of US military might tends to
escalate rather than diminish terrorist threats around the world. This is
probably because the war on terror inevitably destroys numerous innocent human
beings that are called collateral damages, resulting in some of their sympathizers,
friends and family vowing revenge for the killing of their innocent ones. As a
result, a big part of the US war on terror relies on diplomacy and to a smaller
extent, on amnesty for enemy combatants who have been freed from detention
after many years of being held without trial and also for active combatants who are
offered dialogue. General Buhari needs to revive the amnesty program that
President Umaru Yaradua adopted and which President Jonathan used to help to
disarm the Niger Delta militants. No one believes that militarism, no matter
how powerful, is enough to defeat terrorism, nor that you need to stop Boko Haram first before addressing the roots.
The solutions to the second task of
tackling the root causes of terrorism were not outlined in as much detail in
his NYT
Op Ed. Nor is there a clear indication that Buhari's speech writers understand that a major
part of the root causes is the normalization of mass violence since the Igbo
genocide in Biafra and that part of the solutions to the current terrorism is to
openly apologize to the survivors of the Igbo genocide and offer them reasonable
reparations, as I suggested in my
comment on his Chatham House speech.
Given that Igbophobia still thrives in
the country as indicated by the cruel threat of a Muslim Yoruba chief to commit genocide
against the Igbo in Lagos unless they voted for his chosen governorship candidate (a rationalization of xenophobia cited by Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini to justify his refusal to apologize for inciting mass violence against African 'foreigners' in South Africa), Buhari
needs to address the Igbo problem urgently as part of the efforts to turn a new page in the country. Other ethnic groups that have suffered lesser
historic wrongs in Nigeria have been offered reparations but the big Igbo
elephant in the room continues to be ignored at the expense of Nigerians.
Furthermore, the problem of education
and poverty, though more acute in the North East base of Boko Haram, is a
nationwide problem that cries out for enormous allocation of resources across
the country. If Buhari succeeds in eliminating illiteracy from all parts of Nigeria
in the next four years (turning Boko Haram into Boko Halal, as Professor Ken Harrow suggested on USAfricadialogue news group moderated by Professor Toyin Falola); if he has the courage to apologize on behalf of Nigerians for
the Igbo genocide and if he offers reparations to the survivors, authorizes the teaching of the history of the genocide in schools, and amends the constitutional amendment that Jonathan vetoed to allow the creation of the sixth state in the South East for geopolitical equity among the zones, his
legacy will stand out in the history of Nigeria without a doubt. If he adopts
militarism as his major strategy and succeeds in making matters worse as
militarism tends to do, history will not be kind to him because this is his second chance to do the right thing for the suffering masses of Nigeria.
Dr Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
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