It’s never a good sign when your political mentor starts publically
questioning your decisions as President, particularly if he is the man
who laid the path to the presidency in the first place. For weeks
Nigeria’s revered former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, had been quietly
criticizing his former protégé and current President Goodluck Jonathan’s
ability to combat the Boko Haram militant group. But when the Nigerian election commission announced a six-week postponement of elections to allow for a military operation against the insurgents, Obasanjo turned up the volume, publically insinuating
that it was a ploy for the President to cement his position in the face
of the rising popularity of his rival Muhammadu Buhari before endorsing
Buhari in an interview with the Financial Times.
The elections come at a difficult time for Nigeria. Boko Haram has
increased its attacks, and its terrain, over the past few months,
expanding into neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon and raising fears
for the stability of Africa’s biggest economy and most populous nation.
Boko Haram has killed an estimated 13,000 Nigerians, and has abducted
more than 1,000 others, including 257 schoolgirls
in April. Despite a promised military operation, Nigeria’s ongoing
political squabbling continues to prevent a unified national response.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has pledged to disrupt the polls,
laying the groundwork for a fraught election season.
It was really only a matter of time before the divorce between
Jonathan and Obasanjo became final. No one, however, expected it to be
quite so theatrical. In front of a gathering of journalists and members
of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, Obasanjo handed his membership
card to a colleague to be torn up and announced his resignation from the
party he helped found in 1999, when he became the country’s first
post-dictatorship President. “Henceforth I will only be a Nigerian. I am
ready to work with anybody regardless of his or her political
affiliation,” he said in a statement
that ran in national newspapers. That small act of petulance
is likely to have far-reaching consequences for Jonathan’s campaign for
re-election, already under strain from wide-ranging accusations of
incompetence and weakness. While Obasanjo declared that he would not
join the opposition, many will interpret it as an endorsement for the
party of Buhari.
Shekau pledged to disrupt the elections “at any cost” also on Tuesday in a 15-minute video
released via the group’s new Twitter account. “This election will not
be held even if we are dead,” he vowed, speaking in the Hausa language
of northern Nigeria. As if to prove his point, two suicide attacks killed at least 38 people on the same day the video was released. Two days before, on Feb. 15, a female suicide bomber killed at least 10 passersby in a market, also in the country’s northeast.
The number of Boko Haram attacks has increased dramatically since the
announcement of the postponement of the elections, which were slated
for Feb. 14. As a result, few Nigerians believe the leadership’s
assurances that the insurgency will be defeated in time to allow
residents of the northeast, where it is strongest, to vote. “Even if the
ongoing military operations smash all the insurgents’ camps, as
promised, Boko Haram has shown itself to be highly mobile, tactically
adaptable and considerably resilient,” says Nnamdi Obasi, Nigeria
researcher for the International Crisis Group. “So it is doubtful that
the government will achieve an environment sufficiently secure for
displaced persons to return home and for the electoral agency to conduct
polls all over the northeast on March 28.”
The governments of Chad, Niger and Cameroon have promised to lend a
hand by sending troops, but they are finding themselves bogged down with
combatting Boko Haram on home turf. Shekau, in previous videos, pledged
to attack any country that went after Boko Haram. He has followed
through, threatening leaders by name in his video broadcasts, and
sending forces and suicide bombers across the borders of all three countries. Cameroon’s army announced
on Feb. 17 that it had killed 86 Boko Haram fighters and detained a
further 1,000 suspected supporters. On the same day, Niger’s government
claimed to have killed 200 rebels, detained 160 supporters, and averted a
suicide bomb attack in the town of Diffa.
Such assertions are difficult to corroborate. If true, they are an
alarming indication of Boko Haram’s reach and strength. Obasanjo may
have criticized Jonathan’s inability to manage Boko Haram, but if the
combined forces of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon can’t defeat the
insurgency with international support, then his successor may also find
it difficult.
Culled from Time
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