Some of my relatives lived for decades in the North, in Kano and Bornu. They spoke fluent Hausa. (One relative taught me, at the age of eight, to count in Hausa.) They made planned visits to Anambra only a few times a year, at Christmas and to attend weddings and funerals. But sometimes, in the wake of violence, they made unplanned visits. I remember the word ‘Maitatsine’ – to my young ears, it had a striking lyricism – and I remember the influx of relatives who had packed a few bags and fled the killings. What struck me about those hasty returns to the East was that my relatives always went back to the North. Until two years ago when my uncle packed up his life of thirty years in Maiduguri and moved to Awka. He was not going back. This time, he felt, was different.
My uncle’s return illustrates a feeling shared
by many Nigerians about Boko Haram: a lack of hope, a lack of
confidence in our leadership. We are experiencing what is, apart from
the Biafran war, the most violent period in our nation’s existence. Like
many Nigerians, I am distressed about the students murdered in their
school, about the people whose bodies were spattered in Nyanya, about
the girls abducted in Chibok. I am furious that politicians are
politicizing what should be a collective Nigerian mourning, a shared
Nigerian sadness.
And I find our president’s actions and non-actions unbelievably surreal.
I do not want a president who, weeks after
girls are abducted from a school and days after brave Nigerians have
taken to the streets to protest the abductions, merely announces a
fact-finding committee to find the girls.
I want President Jonathan to be consumed,
utterly consumed, by the state of insecurity in Nigeria. I want him to
make security a priority, and make it seem like a priority. I
want a president consumed by the urgency of now, who rejects the false
idea of keeping up appearances while the country is mired in terror and
uncertainty. I want President Jonathan to know – and let Nigerians know
that he knows – that we are not made safer by soldiers checking the
boots of cars, that to shut down Abuja in order to hold a World Economic
Forum is proof of just how deeply insecure the country is. We have a
big problem, and I want the president to act as if we do. I want the
president to slice through the muddle of bureaucracy, the morass of ‘how
things are done,’ because Boko Haram is unusual and the response to it
cannot be business as usual.
I want President Jonathan to communicate with
the Nigerian people, to realize that leadership has a strong
psychological component: in the face of silence or incoherence, people
lose faith. I want him to humanize the lost and the missing, to insist
that their individual stories be told, to show that every Nigerian life
is precious in the eyes of the Nigerian state.
I want the president to seek new ideas, to
act, make decisions, publish the security budget spending, offer
incentives, sack people. I want the president to be angrily heartbroken
about the murder of so many, to lie sleepless in bed thinking of yet
what else can be done, to support and equip the armed forces and the
police, but also to insist on humaneness in the midst of terror. I want
the president to be equally enraged by soldiers who commit murder, by
policemen who beat bomb survivors and mourners. I want the president to
stop issuing limp, belated announcements through public officials, to
insist on a televised apology from whoever is responsible for lying to
Nigerians about the girls having been rescued.
I want President Jonathan to ignore his
opponents, to remember that it is the nature of politics, to refuse to
respond with defensiveness or guardedness, and to remember that
Nigerians are understandably cynical about their government.
I want President Jonathan to seek glory and a
place in history, instead of longevity in office. I want him to put
aside the forthcoming 2015 elections, and focus today on being the kind
of leader Nigeria has never had.
I do not care where the president of Nigeria
comes from. Even those Nigerians who focus on ‘where the president is
from’ will be won over if they are confronted with good leadership that
makes all Nigerians feel included. I have always wanted, as my
president, a man or a woman who is intelligent and honest and bold, who
is surrounded by truth-telling, competent advisers, whose policies are
people-centered, and who wants to lead, who wants to be president, but does not need to – or have to- be president at all costs.
President Jonathan may not fit that bill, but he can approximate it: by being the leader Nigerians desperately need now.
By Chimamanda Adichie
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