Why Buhari Should Have Prioritised a Visit to Borno Ahead of Ogun - by Jude Egbas

 

 

Last weekend, something grisly happened in Dalori, a farming community which lies some 12 kilometers off Maiduguri, the Borno State capital. Boko Haram terrorists arrived in Golf cars and motorbikes laden with explosives and petro-bombs; and set the entire community ablaze.

 

Dalori was a graveyard by the time the terrorists left town–100 corpses have been counted and livestock and farms are no more.

 

President Muhammadu Buhari was straddling Kenya and Ethiopia when tragedy struck Dalori. With the international, social and mainstream media running the story every other hour for days on end, the Nigerian leader flew on a plane to Ogun State instead to wine and dine as that community commemorates 40 years of its existence.

 

Save for a vapid, routine statement from the presidential aides condemning the attack on the president’s behalf, it hasn’t been reported that Buhari uttered a word in anger to the terrorists or in comfort to the people of Dalori or Borno.

 

Presidential trips are a scheduled affair and the Ogun visit must have been on Aso Villa’s itinerary for days. Nothing wrong with that. Presidential trips are also a mightily choreographed affair with the security apparatus of state having to be deployed to the visit location well in advance.

 

Presidential trips also can’t be cancelled on a whim or at short notice. To do so will mean tampering with the schedules of a long line of other persons and state officials in the bureaucracy.

 

However, on the list of the president’s priorities for the week, Dalori should have come before Ogun and rightly so. An unscheduled trip by President Muhammadu Buhari to the scene of the attack would have lifted everyone’s spirit, no less those of the fighting forces.

 

An unscheduled visit to Borno or anywhere near the scene of the attack would have comforted the displaced, the wounded, the traumatized, much more than any bare-bone press statement would have done. An address from Ogun directly aimed at the terrorists or commending the soldiers for the efforts they put in daily, would have been right on the money.

 

Even canceling the Ogun trip because Dalori happened would have been commended by everyone across the partisan aisle.

 

Instead, what we saw were images of the president grinning with Olamide, pumping fists and acknowledging the mortality of billionaire Adenuga and sharing drinks with the Ogun State governor Ibikunle Amosun while all of Borno was in sackcloth and ashes. It was bad for optics, bad for politics and bad for the values the once candidate Buhari promised to uphold and pursue.

 

This was like dancing on the graves of the deceased. And you have to go back to then president Goodluck Jonathan barnstorming at a campaign rally in Kano just hours after terrorists abducted schoolgirls and slit the throats of schoolboys in the north-east, to find this degree of coldness and mistimed blitheness.

 

Nigeria is at war and war-time presidents have to keep addressing the wounded and the battered from presidential jets, from hotels in foreign lands and from international conferences–on camera.

 

The president is in Strasbourg, France as you read this and will be touring Europe as well. A penny for each time he mentions Dalori on his foreign trips.