By Chimamanda Adichie
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.
- Chimamanda Adichie is the award
winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, The Thing
Around Your Neck and Americanah
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