Ex President should accept blame in Chibok girls saga

Last weekend, the UK Guardian reported that the former Nigerian leader turned down an offer from the British authorities to rescue the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted from their dormitory in April 2014.

"British armed forces offered to attempt to rescue nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamist group Boko Haram, but were rebuffed by Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria's President at the time," the story read.

Some other parts of the story read as follows: "In a mission named Operation Turus, the RAF conducted air reconnaissance over northern Nigeria for several months, following the kidnapping of 276 girls from the town of Chibok in April 2014. “The girls were located in the first few weeks of the RAF mission,” a source involved in Operation Turus told the Observer. “We offered to rescue them, but the Nigerian government declined.”

"The girls were then tracked by the aircraft as they were dispersed into progressively smaller groups over the following months, the source added".

In rejecting the offer to help, Jonathan was quoted as telling UK officials that "Nigeria’s intelligence and military services must solve the ultimate problem.”

ALSO READ: How GEJ allegedly rejected UK's offer to rescue Chibok girls in 2014

Jonathan has wasted little time in calling the story a tissue of lies.

In a statement that has been widely dispersed through his media aide, Ikechukwu Eze, Jonathan said: “We wish to promptly point out that nothing can be further from the truth, as Nigerians are conversant with the effort made by the Jonathan administration towards rescuing the Chibok girls, especially in relation to collaborating with the international community.

“We can confidently say that the lies in this report are self evident. This is because the international press as well as the Nigeria media actively covered the multinational efforts and collaboration which involved some of the major powers deploying their crack intelligence officers to work with our own security operatives, and those of our neighbours."

But the following paragraph from that statement was the ultimate own goal from Jonathan and his team:

"We are not surprised that this kind of concocted story is coming out at this point in time, as it appears that some people who have obviously been playing politics with the issue of the Chibok girls will stop at nothing to further their interest".

Therein lies the problem with Jonathan and this whole issue of the Chibok girls--the abduction by Boko Haram in April of 2014, was treated as a matter of politics by the Jonathan administration.

ALSO READ: Jonathan's govt played politics with abducted schoolgirls' says FG

'It was the APC that was behind it all', the Jonathan administration said at the time through its litany of talking heads.

Where urgency was needed to get the girls back in the early days of the abduction, the Jonathan administration dithered and plodded.

In May of 2014, then First Lady Patience Jonathan laid bare the thinking inside the Jonathan camp with that tragi-comedy "There is God o" outing.

For the Jonathans, this was the handiwork of opposition politicians who just wanted to score political points. As far as they were concerned at the time, no abduction had taken place.

Another former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, had blasted Jonathan for a lack of urgency in rescuing the girls as soon as they were abducted.

“The Federal Government could have acted quickly when the news broke so as to save the innocent girls, but nothing was done,” Obasanjo lamented.

ALSO READ: 21 girls released, FG confirms

Obasanjo added that: “The President (Jonathan) did not believe that those girls were abducted for almost 18 days. If the President got the information within 12 hours of the act and he reacted immediately, I believe those girls would have been rescued within 24 hours, maximum 48 hours.

"The President had doubts: ‘Is this true, or is it a ploy by people who don’t want me to be President again?’”

Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima has also spoken along similar lines.

So, when the UK Guardian says members of the British armed forces were pointed to where to shove their help, by the Nigerian government, it's difficult to disagree too much.

In the early days, Jonathan did not believe that the girls had been abducted. Every major snafu from the Nigerian military toward the rescue of the girls in 2014 and 2015, flowed from this mindset.

All the looting of monies meant to purchase weaponry for the decimation of Boko Haram, arose from this flawed mindset.

It's three years since the girls were abducted and we should be talking about how to rescue the over 100 of them still in Boko Haram custody.

But we shouldn't miss the lesson from this episode as we pray that this kind of incident never repeats itself.

There are die-hard 'Jonathanians' who still refer to the entire Chibok girls incident as a "scam". For this lot, it's quite unfortunate, to say the least.

But they are not alone.

Jonathan felt the same way before his administration thought it necessary to fashion out a rescue plan.

It was part of what cost him the throne a year later.

That's where that story from the UK Guardian was headed.

That's the context for it all.

It's time to heed the lessons from tarring every occurrence with the brush of politics.

If we don't learn the mistakes from the past, goes the cliché, we are bound to repeat them.