Presidential media charade and crocodile tears (1)

Aliyu Musa

Hours after the result of America’s 2004 president election was announced returning President George W Bush to White House the Daily Mirror came out with the front page headline: DOH! 4 MORE YEARS OF DUBYA – How can 59, 054, 087 people be so DUMB? Americans might have been dumb in their choice of President Bush over Senator John Kerry on that occasion but their security and safety were made a bigger priority in the second four years of the wartime president’s tenure. And at the end of it they cut the Republicans’ arrogance to size by dumping them for the Democrats. Contrastingly, in Nigeria we cling onto our Dubyas and defend their ‘fictitious mandates’ with our blood. And that is why come 2015 we would go all out to unanimously endorse many more years of Dubya, regardless of how worse off we become.

The past week has been very eventful. First, the president had his usually unimpressive presidential media chat, which, although not surprisingly, exposed the president’s total ignorance of the happenings in the country and his clear demonstration of cluelessness by admitting that journalists knew more about the Chibok kidnap saga than him. But hidden away in the well fortified Aso Presidential Villa he, nonetheless, feigns victory over the arrogant Abukakar Shekau’s formerly ragtag army that is now undeniably the scourge of our military.

But Mr President, in defence of the notoriously indefensible, resorted to blame-shifting and, backed by his domestic appendage (apology to Professor Wole Soyinka), clownishly reduced our national tragedy to a trivial TV comedy, with crocodile tears shed as if it was only moments ago the girls went missing. And to add to the depressing climax Shekau irritatingly bragged about his terror escapades in a 57-minute video that lasted almost forever.

But Shekau’s is doubtlessly a case of chronic psychopathy, which only thrives in climates where extreme insensitivity and absolute nonchalance are accorded official endorsement. And Nigeria’s is second to none. But it is even far-fetched that a president who danced at a rally hours after scores of citizens had been blasted to death in a terror attack at his backyard would accuse anyone but himself of insensitivity and his wife would summon and order an elected governor of a state under an emergency rule to produce the missing girls or face consequences as if the abduction was a sham concocted to embarrass the regime. But this is Nigeria, where the oddest of things that people accept with bits of grumbles happen.

But why would a Shekau and his disaster-prone ideology not endure under the nose of our president?

Shortly after the president inaugurated the jamboree he christened National Conference it was found that there was unignorable regional and religious representation lopsidedness that needed addressing, especially given that resolutions would be agreed by voting. A delegation led by Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III paid him a visit and tabled the complaint before him. But he shockingly parried back by accusing some core northern states of equally marginalising Christians by not funding pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In other words, if Christians in those states were marginalised in that manner why would anyone complain if he, Mr President, chose to marginalise Muslims? So, with such an ‘unpresidently’ retort he killed the issue and no one has raised it again, since then.

Shekau is manipulatively rallying equally psychopathic but vulnerable young men using religion as a decoy. But Mr President and his men also use religion divisively, probably to distract attention from their monumental failure in governance. For example, during the media chat the president played up this religion mantra when he emphasised that 80 per cent of the girls abducted from Government Girls Secondary School Chibok were Christians (whatever he meant by that?). And that laid the basis for similarly religious polarisation, despite the unanimity with which Nigerians across religious and ethnic divides protested government’s silence and inaction.

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) northern chapter has since echoed the president’s point by publishing a full list of the missing girls in newspapers and followed up with a press statement alleging conspiracy by Governor Kashim Shettima, the principal, vice principal and chief security officer of the school (all of whom are Muslims). And like the days when Churches were bombed on Sundays they warned they might be forced to react (against whom, fellow Muslim victims?.

What is most irking, however, is that neither the president nor his wife nor officials of CAN see the tragic case of the abducted girls as a major governance failure emanating from the top. They also forget that Borno State has been under emergency rule, during which time the president usurped the governor’s role as chief security officer of the state. If there was any conspiracy it is those who refused to act when they should have acted and are now shedding crocodile tears that should have accusing fingers pointed at them.