DAPCHI ABDUCTIONS REOPEN OLD WOUNDS
▶ Painful memories of Chibok as Nigerian president’s ineptitude is laid bare before next year’s general election
In January last year, bombs dropped by Nigerian army jets killed 115 civilians, among them foreign aid workers, in a camp for displaced people they mistook for a Boko Haram stronghold.
The tragic error quickly became a grim emblem of Abuja’s brutal nine-year war against the militant Islamic group.
Yesterday, military jets took to the skies again in the northeast, seven days after Boko Haram attacked a school in the town of Dapchi, Yobe state, abducting at least 110 girls.
In response the government has floundered, its ineptitude laid bare on Wednesday last week when Yobe governor Ibrahim Gaidam declared that the schoolgirls had been rescued, before quickly backtracking.
After protesters threw rocks at Mr Gaidam’s convoy, a handful of them were arrested.
The Nigerian leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, has declared a “national emergency” after the girls’ abduction. But this will do little to pacify those in the north-east whose lives have been torn apart by a conflict that has killed 20,000 people and displaced millions.
Cholera outbreaks in swollen refugee camps point to a worsening crisis. And with next year’s general election approaching, the Dapchi kidnappings may ultimately signal the downfall of a deeply ineffectual president.
The similarities between the Dapchi abductions and the infamous 2014 kidnappings of the Chibok schoolgirls has intensified anger. That the soldiers guarding the school in Dapchi were sent elsewhere a month ago, clearing the way for the militants’ attack, suggests that important lessons were not learnt.
The global attention given to the two cases distracts from the fact that abduction is a growing industry in Nigeria. The millions of dollars paid in ransoms to Boko Haram have helped to finance their insurgency.
And as the country’s economic fortunes have faltered, petty criminals have increasingly turned to the practice.
“Almost every Nigerian can identify someone they know who has either been abducted or had a loved one abducted,” a Nigerian analyst told The National
last month, after four North Americans were kidnapped in northern Kaduna state.
For many Nigerians the increase in abductions is an indictment of Mr Buhari’s leadership since he assumed control of Africa’s richest and most populous country in 2015 on a pledge of wholesale reform.
After taking six months to name a cabinet, the former military general was incapacitated by illness, making regular trips to London for urgent medical treatment.
Military gains made against Boko Haram early in Mr Buhari’s term were then more or less undone in his absence, with the group stepping up attacks on schools, universities and refugee camps.
Away from the insurgency, violent confrontations between farmers and nomadic herdsman driven from their traditional herding grounds by famine and drought have left hundreds dead in central and eastern Nigeria.
And decades on from the end of the civil war, secessionist sentiment is growing in the south-east of the country.
The Nigerian economy, plagued by endemic corruption, is still adrift after emerging from an 18-month recession, its problems aggravated by Mr Buhari’s heavy handedness.
Given the distraction of next year’s elections, reform now appears unlikely.
Six months ago, few expected him to run for another term. Now, his fortified health suggests he will.
But former generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida have been lobbying for Mr Buhari to step down, possibly heralding a new dawn in Nigerian politics.
If Mr Buhari obliges there will be little to mourn, even for the struggling president’s most ardent supporters.