by Ilemona Onoja
Dear Karen Attiah, would an American citizen who had impersonated someone else in order to attend a meeting with US First Lady Michelle Obama have been given a handshake, scones and milk before being showed the door? I don’t even know whether to wait for an answer or not.
I had heard a lot of the hullabaloo about Karen Attiah’s op-ed in the Washington Post [READ HERE] not very long ago. But I had never been moved to read it. Until a twitter contact, @Avariberry, started posting excerpts and attracting comments about it on her twitter timeline. What I read aroused my curiosity and pushed me to look for it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have. Karen Attiah’s satire, written in response to President Goodluck Jonathan’s earlier op-ed [READ HERE] in the same paper, was a disappointing, poorly researched misrepresentation of facts sustained by half truths, ignorance and reeked very badly of propaganda. I use the word propaganda cautiously because it does seem like there is indeed some sort of plan to blight GEJ’s efforts against boko haram.
Attiah’s satire was even more saddening because most of the allegations she made are punctured by information easily accessible on the internet. One would expect that a journalist who works for an international media outfit in the repute of Wa-Po would at least cross check the material she was putting out. Sigh. One would just be very wrong.
For instance, a cursory search on the internet search engine, Google, would have revealed that the allegation that Nigeria “…has long been reluctant to accept counterterrorism help from the US and other partners.” could not have been further from the truth.
In 2013, long before boko haram kidnapped more than 200 girls in Chibok, Sambo Dasuki- Nigeria’s National Security Adviser- led an effort to secure counterterrorism help from the United States. To properly push this effort, the Nigerian government retained a powerful lobbying firm- Patton Boggs, to lobby support within the Obama administration and to “provide comprehensive security advice, including the donation of excess military and law enforcement equipment.”
Retired US Marine, Col. John Garrett was the Patton Boggs point man on this effort and met with officials of the United States’ Africa Command, the Pentagon’s combatant command for the African region, in Stuttgart in December 2013. On behalf of Dasuki, Garrett requested for information on boko haram activities derived from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights over Borno State. Garret also requested for a donation of non-lethal military hardware such as night vision goggles, communication equipment and mine resistant armoured personnel vehicles from stockpiles left over from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These requests, also contained in an email by Garret to US Army Major John Ringquist, were ignored and as at May 2014 Garret had been unable to secure meetings with the US Ambassador to Nigeria or other top US military officials.
This information was filed at the US Justice Department under the Foreign Agencies Registration Act (FARA) and was contained in an ABC Networks report aired/published in May 2014. It is amazing that Attiah missed such information and went ahead to make her silly allegation.
This hardly sounds like a nation that is reluctant to accept foreign help and partnerships to combat a terrorist scourge. In fact, the allegation is made all the more silly when one considers that for more than a year Nigeria, Chad and Niger have operated a Joint Military Task Force that patrols the area around Borno State and combats boko haram. Or that since 2012, Nigeria and Niger have had military patrols along the over 900kms border they share.
Or that Nigeria, Benin and Cameroon have been implementing efforts to combat the proliferation of arms and assault weapons, piracy and terrorism under the auspices of the Gulf of Guinea Commission. In fact, this Commission took its case to the 6633rd meeting of the United Nation’s Security Council on October 19, 2011 and the President of the GGC Security Council, Joy Ogwu (a Nigerian), informed the Council about the problem of piracy and the proliferation of light arms in the West African region. She specifically requested for the adoption of a UN Security Council Draft Resolution, amongst other actions, to complement the efforts spearheaded by Nigeria which included joint maritime patrols with the Republic of Benin to deter piracy.
These facts poke holes in Attiah’s allegation that Nigeria has not sought to promote regional efforts in tackling boko haram.
Attiah reveals her lack of knowledge about the subject, and indeed the far reaching effects of the propaganda employed in Nigeria, when she speaks about the arrest of a member of the popular hash-tag movement, #BringBackOurGirls. The woman, a director in Nigeria’s Civil Service, had in a meeting with Nigeria’s First Lady claimed to be the mother of one of the kidnapped girls.
In her willingness to do anything at all to help, Mrs. Jonathan handed the woman over to the Nigerian Minister for Women Affairs for a follow up meeting. At a third meeting at the Presidential Villa, this woman was asked questions in public which revealed that she was indeed not related to any of the kidnapped children. Further checks revealed that she had filled in false data on the forms provided to her by security agents before the commencement of the meeting.
Dear Karen Attiah, would an American citizen who had impersonated someone else in order to attend a meeting with US First Lady Michelle Obama have been given a handshake, scones and milk before being showed the door? I don’t even know whether to wait for an answer or not.
Of course she was rightly arrested. In these perilous times, with bombs going off and people dying should the security agencies not have investigated this? What were this woman’s motivations for lying and impersonating to get so close to the First Lady?
AS a Nigerian, I felt a sense of burning rage when I read Attiah slate our military. These are brave men and women who give their lives daily fighting an unconventional militia in a mould they have never faced before, an enemy willing to cause untold military and civilian carnage, willing to die for an ideology even they themselves do not understand.
The men and women of the Nigerian Army face these devils on a daily basis, willing to give their lives to protect our territorial integrity, constitutional liberties and to safeguard our freedoms. It is not honour to call them names, it is not honour to slate them in this manner, and there is no dignity in mocking people who would willingly die to protect thousands of their countrymen and women, to protect their country.
Yes, Karen Attiah good things will come out of this insurgency. Good things are already coming out of it. We have a president who has ensured an increase in budgetary allocation to education from N234.8b in 2010 to over N493b in 2014. We have a president who is implementing a program to formalize the almajiri (street children) system of Islamic education obtainable in most parts of Northern Nigeria to ensure the impartation of knowledge and skills required by students that will enhance their productivity and guarantee their competitiveness in the labour market.
This would drastically reduce the pool from which terrorists can recruit their foot soldiers. This system would help ensure that millions of children who are currently on the streets and not getting any education whatsoever would be put in schools and equipped with skills to live productive lives.
We, as Nigerians, have learnt not to be cowed by terror and area increasingly united in our fight against cowards who would kidnap children in pursuit of a warped religious/political ideology. We, as Nigerians, are increasingly assured that we will overcome this evil and be better for it.
At this point I must admit that we need friends. Terrorism is indeed a global scourge and the facts show that boko haram belongs to a complex international network that provides it with arms and logistics support as well as funds. We need friends who would help us bust this network and end this scourge that plagues us.
What we don’t need is people who would sit on an electronic high horse judging us from an position of ignorance. What we don’t need is people who mock our suffering. What we won’t need is people like Karen Attiah.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.
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