Random Thoughts: Of Friendly Abductors and Bullying Spoilt-brats

COUNTER POINT By Femi Akintunde-Johnson

There are moments when situations that should evoke joy turn up with a streak of bile. Such is the news of the release of Ruth Pogu who was on August 7, 2020 presented to the Borno State governor, Professor Babagana Zulum, and her relieved parents. The welcoming parties were expectedly joyous. Ruth had been abducted, and in captivity for seven years. She ‘surrendered’ to the Nigerian military alongside a male partner said to be her husband on July 28, somewhere in Bama, Borno State. She was not alone. Two children sired during her captivity showed up with her at Bama, where the former tormentor turned husband elected to renounce his evil ways, and surrender.

Everyone appeared excited to welcome Ruth back, including the beaming governor, her family members, and Yakubu Keki, the chairman of the association of parents affected by the Chibok girls abductions, called the Chibok Girls Movement. It is understandable. Not only do the parents of the girls still in captivity are now given some sort of hope-filled shot in the arm, that others may also return, with or without repentant spouses and little children in tow, but that they may have a chance to re-graph the trajectory of their lives, with full government backing. This is further underlined by the governor’s avowal to similarly support every abducted girl-child to a programme of rehabilitation and reintegration which would focus “on Ruth’s health, psychosocial well-being and her chosen path to a productive future, all of which will be determined by her.”

Now, what happens to the so-called husband? Virtually all the media reports were silent on the man who presumably raped Ruth serially, making her pregnant at least twice. While we do not denigrate the harrowing process it took him to follow his former captive and children on an uncertain journey of surrender, it is vital to know what the military authorities have in mind concerning him, after a thorough debriefing. While Ruth might have been influenced by a variant of Stockholm Syndrome, a grateful nation should insist on even-handed, civil but unmistakably firm activation of extant laws as they affect abductions, rape, forced marriage, among other infractions. He should not perpetuate the idea that on getting our kidnapped girls pregnant, you buy some sort of reprieve on humanitarian grounds from the state.

While we rejoice with the return of Ruth after seven years, and hopeful that other victims, who are possibly in the same situation as Ruth, will end up with the same pleasant ending, their abductors must believe that they have a chance to submit to the authorities, and be dealt with fairly and firmly in consonance with the gravity of their criminal activities, the depth of their remorsefulness and the weight of intelligence offered.

Then, to politics. When former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, came from nowhere in the first week of August, 2021, to make a scathing comparison of the ruling All People’s Congress, APC and the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, he ran into a riot, some sort of unhinged class hysteria. Usually taciturn since he left the hot seat of the INEC chair in 2015, perhaps the only man to oversee two national elections, Jega skinned the bloated egos of both political parties. And like a spoilt brat whose candy had been yanked off his stuffed hands by the village priest, the parties yelled blue murder, calling Jega all sorts of names, and lampooning his new political adventure. But was Jega really wrong in his condemnation of both parties? Is any Nigerian, unblinkered by partisan politics, unaware of the devastating pedigrees of both parties under which Nigeria has rocked in the past 21 years of this democratic dispensation?

Here are a few snapshots of Jega’s cinders: “Looking at their inability to change the economic fortunes of Nigeria for 20 years now, it is now apparently clear that they would not do anything even if Nigerians vote for any of the two parties again… The APC and PDP have formed governments; we were all witnesses. They did not come with good intentions to make amends. If you look at the fight against corruption, all these corrupt people that were supposed to be prosecuted sneaked into the APC… We are hearing nothing. That is why I’ve since registered with the People’s Redemption Party, PRP. I am now a PRP member looking for ways to help Nigeria…

“Since 1979, I’ve been teaching in the university for 40 years now. So, from what I read and observed when I was chairman of INEC, honestly, the way I see our politicians conducting elections and from the manner they represent their people when elected is something to be afraid of…”

Apart from the introduction of his entry into PRP, how many politically observant Nigerians have not ruminated over similar sentiments, and wished longingly for some sort of a miracle to change the current trajectory of our politics, at all levels?

Expectedly, petulant outbursts surged from both parties. First excerpts from the APC: “While Professor Jega is right about the PDP, a party under which he served as the chairman of the nation’s election management body, we reject his comparison of the APC with the PDP…. Professor Jega got his facts wrong and mixed up in his baseless comparison of the PDP with the APC… While we do not intend to join issues with Professor Jega, we encourage him to engage in genuine scholarly research and come up with evidence-based conclusions on the progressive orientation of the APC.

“It is, however, instructive to note that having recently abandoned his academic pursuit and blindly plunged into the arena of PDP’s brand of politics, the erstwhile electoral umpire as a politician can make such political statements occasionally while trying to launch his political career in a mushroom political party…” Typically abrasive.

Not to be outshined, PDP fired its own broadsides: “It is indeed unfortunate that Jega, as a Professor of Political Science, could portray an ignorance of the manifest contrasts between the robust fortunes of our nation under the PDP and the wasteland she has become under the APC.

“Perhaps the Professor needs to be reminded of how the PDP worked hard to revamp our nation’s economy, paid off our huge foreign debts and went ahead to grow the economy to become the largest investment hub in Africa as well as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with Fitch B+ rating; only for the APC to wreck the economy and turn our nation into the world’s poverty capital and a debtor country in a space of six years….” Predictably indignant.

To non-partisans who know there is no saintly politician in Nigeria, including Jega, the predictable vehemence and vitriol of both parties to Jega’s missiles are symptomatic of the deplorable state of our politics in the hands of easily irritable and excitable individuals… people who fly into rage and ramblings at the slightest provocation. We can run a long list of failed and missed opportunities and promises by both parties since the fourth republic began in 1999; and preface that with litany of hijacked policies and unmitigated siphoning of our national resources – claims and counterclaims that adroit spinners are willing to defend or oppose relentlessly without a pint of scruples.

Frothing with righteous indignation at Jega’s ‘expose’ of what is an open secret, is a reminder to us that much as our political platforms have been corrupted by posturings and activities of unprincipled and mercantile mobs, the people of Nigeria appear to have no one to stand in gap for them, and make combatants play by the rules of engagements. We are reminded, by the outbursts of the angry parties, that they are established and unshakeable in the belief that they run an equitable and progressive political enterprise, contrary to the sickening and impoverishing evidence all around us.

They spit on our faces when they deodorise the pains and devastations of the past two decades as they flaunt their mastery of sophistry and counter-revisionism. Yet, 2023 is still about two years away.