Clearly, the reverses of the last two weeks have been well foretold. It is important that our Commander-in-Chief gives the marching orders for these recent setbacks to be reversed. But regaining lost grounds will not be enough. President Jonathan needs to come to terms with the fact that we are officially in a state of war and that his most important job as both president and Commander-in-Chief is to secure our territory and keep us safe. His transformation agenda is important, but real transformation can only occur and make sense when there is security of life and property. At the moment, most Nigerians do not feel secure, including those living far from the assumed frontlines. This is partly because there is no clear sign we are winning the war.
The good news is that most Nigerians are convinced that our forces are capable of routing the insurgents if given the necessary support and leadership. But the word out there is that operational support is low, cornered by those in the cosy offices at the expense of those on the battle-fields. What could pass for the military and the civilian leadership of the war does not look fit-for-purpose. Members of our military high command, save for a few, look mostly out of shape and uninspiring. Though intelligence gathering should be at the heart of the war against terror, the Department of State Security (DSS) is more interested in showboating and in engaging perceived enemies of the government. The Minister of Defence is mysteriously under the radar while the junior minister seems more interested in burnishing his political profile.
As the Commander-in-Chief, President Jonathan needs to demonstrate that the task of defending the territorial integrity of Nigeria and of protecting Nigerians is dear to him. He should take advantage of the recent setbacks to salvage the flailing war on terror. His present war team is not helping him much. He should be tired of all the excuses and the lies. He should be embarrassed about how our country is being diminished and about how Nigerians are living in fear, turned to refugees in neighbouring countries and kidnapped and killed at will by some deranged terrorists. He needs a new war team. He needs people with fresh ideas and with fire in their bellies. Shaking up the team will inspire confidence, will signal that result is important to our president, and will show that he is determined to win this war.
But changing the team is not enough. The president needs to ensure accountability in the management of allocated resources and insist that our troops are adequately taken care of and well-motivated, including with symbolic gesture of being visited by their Commander-in-Chief.
Getting more money for the war effort might be important, but much more important is to ensure that we are not just throwing money at problems and not creating a tunnel for scarce public resource to end up in private pockets or in the war-chest for a different war. The president should also insist on a comprehensive review of our war plan. At the moment, what we do most of the time is reacting while the terrorists dictate the pace. We need to improve both our reaction time and our offensive capabilities.
We should not be reduced to celebrating recovery of territories that shouldn’t have been taken over in the first place. With combined ground and air power, we need to smoke out the terrorists and decimate them. While the soft approach to fighting terrorism is a good complement of the military approach and is a reasonable medium to long-term strategy, we need to comprehensively rout the terrorists first. So we need to urgently fix our boots-on-the-ground approach. And lastly, the president needs to address the mind-set that frames Boko Haram as a political campaign against him by a section of the country and the opposition. Apart from being defeatist, this mind-set is divisive and unhelpful. This is a war against Nigeria and Nigerians. We don’t need excuses from our president. We need him to do what presidents and Commanders-in-Chief do.
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