Some senior government and ruling party officials and their cronies ostensibly went to town with tales of grand conspiracy by detractors and opponents to discredit the government with the “Chibok missing girls”. However, if actually government opponents and detractors have managed to stage the missing of the girls, it underscores more graphically, government’s incompetence and crucial failure because aside from the exclusive control of the country’s security architecture, three states in the North-East, Borno State in particular, are under emergency rule, which gives the Federal Government total and sweeping powers over security issues.
The Borno State Government which allegedly insisted that the school in the Chibok community was safe for the students to sit for their exams against the advice of the West African Examinations Council, can actually and could have been over-ruled by the federal authorities if they knew their onion. The fact is that most people in the Federal Government understand government only in its simplest and most rudimentary function; distribution and allocation of patronage; – government appointments, award of contracts, other plumb perks and sundry favours. Hardly do they appreciate the burden of leadership, including sacrifices of personal comfort.
That the ordeal of the Chibok girls has aroused global indignation, attracting a youngster, whose promising life was nearly cut short by an extremist sect, sharing the same implacable hate for civilisation like its Boko Haram counterparts in Nigeria, is entirely at the door step of an incompetent regime.
However, notwithstanding the goodwill of Malala, her audacity to wag finger at our government and direct at what would have to be accomplished with time line to butt, illustrates a new depth and disgraceful tempo that a government of supine inefficiency and egregious incompetence has reached. Malala may have addressed the United Nations Special Session, got feted by powerful western media channels at prime time, but she has yet to poke finger at any government in the world, including her own government whose record of serial bungling, incompetence and venality is in the open.
Talking down a Head of State with cabinet ministers in deferential tow is a new frontier of non-state activist diplomacy that the young Pakistani lad has accomplished in Nigeria under President Goodluck Jonathan and would never contemplate to extend to anywhere else in the world.
Why would the Nigerian state be subjected to such a sadistic deconstruction? The young girl’s seeming elegant intelligence and confidence are admirable. Her ordeal at the hands of the primitive sect that attempted to assassinate her gives her campaign for girl education the moral torso it needs to make remarkable impression. Coming to Nigeria to lend a voice to the campaign to rescue the missing girls and promote girl education are obviously worthy causes. Government’s panic at the new level of international searchlight Malala’s visit would have been made at its inefficiency led it to hijack a visit that would have been barely and merely solidarity visit.
The youngster seized her moment, directed Jonathan to meet with the parents of the abducted Chibok girls and got assurance of the same. This is after the President has demurred on the same issue that most Nigerians had urged him on, in the past, with the claim that neither going to Chibok nor meeting the grieving parents would get the girls back. But Under Malala’s marching order, the President agreed to meet the grieving parents of the missing girls.
The fact, however, is that while the Pakistani teenager voice may have had the weight of international celebrity aggressively propped by the West, there is a really nothing new that she said to the President and his government.
For more than two months, some Nigerians have been camping out in Abuja and pressing the urgent need to rescue the Chibok girls and for government to take measures to assuage the pains of the grieving parents of the girls, by at least, a symbolic visit to the community. Government officials had suggested something that the “Bring our girls back” activists were opposition politicians as if that makes them less Nigerians and unfit to be involved in national issues.
Now that a Pakistani teenager has come and said the same thing, senior government officials including the President scampered to be seen as doing something on the same issue that constructive voices had been patriotically urging at home, over 100 days after the girls were kidnapped.
One key issue that Malala canvassed while in Nigeria is education. Africa’s most curious post-colonial calamity was the neglect of education, notwithstanding that it was the intellectual enabling, fostered by education that was the core weapon in the anti – colonial struggle. Education is the most formidable component in the construction of human capital, the most dynamic force in any development strategy. A Pakistani teenager actually didn’t need to remind us of the crucibles of education. But, here was a pitiable scenario of a teenager, reeling out to the education minister the statistics of the number of out-of -school children, with the minister shyly on the defensive.
However, if it takes more than Malala to drum the squalid state of education to government officials, it is welcome. South East Asia’s famed contemporary boom and the shift of the world’s economic pole to the Pacific Rim, away from the Atlantic, owe in no small measure to the region’s massive investment in education and other critical variables to the human capital development. If Nigeria is not to be abruptly choked off from the current resource-driven growth to bankruptcy with its political consequence of instability, then she should take education to the strategic core agenda for sustainable and inclusive development.
Onunaiju is a journalist based in Abuja
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