School kidnaps: Another APC hen comes home to roost [OPINION]

By Abimbola Adelakun

Exactly one month to this day in 2014, Nigeria became the subject of international interest when 276 students of Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The brazenness and the novelty of the Chibok incident turned many Nigerians into conspiracy theorists. In those days, the All Progressives Congress/Congress for Progressive Change was the so-called opposition, and they really dug a spear into former President Goodluck Jonathan’s side. Bola Tinubu was the leader of the APC. Then Borno governor, Kashim Shettima, could not devise enough ways to stitch up the Jonathan administration over Chibok.

Reading through the old media reports recently and seeing the allegations against the Jonathan administration by people like Tinubu (and even his wife) and Shettima, it is striking how much they politicised that unfortunate incident.

A decade after Chibok, Tinubu is president; Shettima is his vice, and another 300 or so school children plus their teachers have been kidnapped in Gada, Sokoto State, and Kurija in Kaduna State. In fact, over 400 Nigerians have been reportedly abducted within a week. I wonder if the Tinubus and Shettima think of the irony of fate that underlines these serial abductions. Everything they said about Jonathan and his inept handling of the Chibok abductions can now be said about them.

Speaking on the recent incident, the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, noted that some fifth-column elements were at work. Media reports quoted him saying, “Across the North, we understand that some of the sub-regional geopolitical forces that are currently at play are actively conspiring against the stability of Nigeria.” While I appreciate Ngelale’s candour—and in terms of self-comportment, he is head, shoulders, and even ankle above his classless predecessors who turned the management of the presidency into a bolekaja affair—his bag of tricks is pretty old.

Ten years after Chibok and with unabated kidnaps throughout the country, Ngelale is still stuck on the propagandist’s spiel of “out-of-power northern Nigeria wants to make the country ungovernable for the southern president.” Like the rest of the Nigerian political class, he too blames abstract forces for our national issues. Nigeria is a place where “unknown soldiers” kill and despoil in broad daylight. Snakes and monkeys eat money, “cabals and deities,” the “elites of the elites” with “deep pockets” rob the country of funds for fuel subsidies. Electricity is unstable because some “demons” constantly toy with its functions. The problems that beset the country always have no face, no name, and therefore inapprehensible. We have heard all these tall tales before. Ngelale needs a new game.

To be clear, the issue here is not that professional politicians took advantage of the Chibok abductions to make the Jonathan administration look bad. What they did is what politicians everywhere do: amplify every failing and misstep of your opponent. The APC that unseated the Peoples Democratic Power from power might be amoral, but their actions are still consistent with the character of high-stakes politics.

Anyway, as I said, the politicisation of the Chibok abduction is not how the chickens can be said to have come home to roost for the APC. What rankles is that a whole decade after Chibok, despite abductions having become a normative evil, our government still has not fashioned a better response to these sad incidents. While Jonathan’s shortcomings in responding to the Chibok kidnappings can be chalked down to the novelty of Chibok, Tinubu/Shettima has no excuse. Yet, what can their administration say they have done any better than Jonathan who did not see Chibok coming? Yes, the president ordered security agencies to find those children but every Nigerian by now knows the efficacy value of such “orders.”

And here is where the trouble lies: if the present administration has not demonstrated better insight into a situation that has now become predictable, what guarantee exists that there will not be more of these incidents? The kidnappers are part of Nigeria’s social and political culture, and their choice to make a resounding impact by serially invading three schools over a mere few days cannot be separated from their observations of how entirely chaotic and dysfunctional the Tinubu administration has been. A government that cannot get basic things together in everyday administrative management is one whose resolve will be tested. Unfortunately, the kidnaps are one of the relatively easiest ways to go head-to-head with an administration that does not yet quite know what governance means and still get heftily paid while at it.

Culled from The Punch