It took a long time – nearly a month – for Boko Haram’s abduction of about 230 Nigerian schoolgirls to become an international issue.
Now everyone is talking about it, or even doing something about it. The US, UK, France, Canada and China have all pledged some sort of military assistance, indirect it seems, at least so far.
So is this a success or failure for Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan? Perhaps he believes he has succeeded because the world has now recognised his problem.
And yet the episode also detracted dramatically from his hosting of the World Economic Forum’s Africa summit in Abuja last week.
That had been switched from its usual venue in Cape Town to Nigeria this year to coincide with Nigeria overtaking South Africa as Africa’s largest economy.
But instead of focusing on that achievement, the summit coverage was mostly about the abduction of the schoolgirls. And that also threw light on Nigeria’s inept handling of the Boko Haram problem.
Of course, anyone can become a victim of the kind of completely ruthless, brutal terrorism carried out by Boko Haram. And, despite the sudden flurry of pledges from mainly Western powers to help Nigeria rescue the girls, it is hard to imagine how anyone is going to be able to do much about it.
If any rescuers get close to the abductors, there must be a very real chance that they will kill the girls.
Yet the chances of rescue might have been higher if Nigerian special forces had struck earlier, before Boko Haram could divide the girls into smaller groups and start selling them off as “brides”, as they are now suspected to have done.
But Jonathan’s real culpability goes back to before the girls were abducted; to his handling of Boko Haram over the past four years since its insurgency began.
In a report published last month, the International Crisis Group (ICG) has detailed the many missteps by Jonathan’s government; essentially its neglect of the development of the Muslim north and the brutality of its security forces in trying to suppress Boko Haram in the early stages of its evolution when negotiations would probably have borne fruit.
The ICG, for instance, fully supports Boko Haram’s own call for the prosecution of the police officers who extrajudicially executed the organisation’s founding leader, Mohammed Yusuf, in 2009.
The report describes how Jonathan’s initiatives, such as they have been, to negotiate a truce with Boko Haram and to bring badly needed development to the north have been frittered away through corruption, ineptitude and scamming.
“Boko Haram is both a serious challenge and a manifestation of more profound threats to Nigeria’s security,” the report says, adding that unless the government tackles the economic and other injustices that drive the problem, “Boko Haram, or groups like it, will continue to destabilise large parts of the country”.
“Yet the government’s response is largely military, and political will to do more appears entirely lacking.”
In other words, the Boko Haram problem is yet another symptom, though certainly a dramatic and ugly one, of Nigeria’s prevailing problems of immense corruption and political impotence at the centre.
Johnnie Carson, who was US assistant secretary of state for Africa from 2009 to last year, told The New York Times last week that he had opposed the US designating Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation, among other reasons, because he feared it might legitimise a heavy-handed crackdown by Nigerian security forces.
Now the US has designated Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation, and because of their outrage in abducting the 230 schoolgirls, the US and others are lending muscle to Jonathan’s efforts to crush it.
So perhaps, after all, Jonathan regards the Africa summit as a success for that reason. But the underlying problems that nurtured Boko Haram are unlikely to disappear, even if Nigeria and its allies do somehow inflict military defeat on it.