Award winning author Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind
of President she wants. Read below..
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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