Wole Soyinka writes on #BringBackJonathan2015

The dancing obscenity of Shekau and his gang of psychopaths and child abductors, taunting the world, travestying the BRING BACK OUR GIRLS campaign on internet, determinately met its match in Nigeria to inaugurate the week of September 11 – most opportunely.

Shekau’s dance macabre was surpassed by the unfurling of a political campaign banner that defiled an ingression point into Nigeria’s capital of Abuja. That banner read:  BRING BACK JONATHAN 2015.

President Jonathan has since disowned all cognizance or complicity in the outrage but, the damage has been done, the rot in a nation’s collective soul bared to the world. The very possibility of such a desecration took the Nigerian nation several notches down in human regard. It substantiated the very worst of what external observers have concluded and despaired of  - a culture of civic callousness, a coarsening of sensibilities and, a general human disregard.

It affirmed the acceptance, even ascendance of lurid practices where children are often victims of unconscionable abuses including ritual sacrifices, sexual enslavement, and worse.  Spurred by electoral desperation, a bunch of self-seeking morons and sycophants opted to plumb the abyss of self-degradation and drag the nation down to their caliber.

 It took us to a hitherto unprecedented low in ethical degeneration.  The wagers were placed on whose turn would it be to take the next potshots at innocent youths in captivity whose society and governance have failed them and blighted their esse?

 Would the Chibok girls now provide standup comic material for the latest staple of Nigerian escapist diet?  Would we now relocate to an incipient export commodity in the regalement industry designated perhaps “Taunt the Victims”?

As if to substantiate all the such surmises, an ex-governor, Sheriff, notorious throughout the nation – including within security circles as affirmed in their formal dossiers - as prime suspect in the sponsorship league of the scourge denominated Boko Haram,  was presented to the world as a presidential peregrinating companion. And the notional theorization became: was the culture of impunity conclusively receiving endorsement as a governance yardstick?

 Again, Goodluck Jonathan swung into a plausible explication: it was Mr. Sheriff who, as friend of the host President Idris Deby, had peregrinated ahead to Chad to receive Jonathan as a component of President Deby’s welcome entourage.  What, however does this verbally express of any president? How came it that a suspected affiliate of a pernicious malefactor gang, publicly under such ominous cloud, had the confidence to smuggle himself into the welcoming committee of another nation, and even appear in audience, to all appearance a co-host with the president of that nation?

Where does the confidence arise in him that Jonathan would not snub him openly or, after the initial shock, pull his obverse, his official host aside and verbally express to him, “Listen, it’s him, or me.”? So impunity now transcends boundaries, no matter how heinous the alleged offence?

The Nigerian president however appeared thoroughly at ease. What the nation witnessed in the photo-op was an affirmation of a governance principle, the revelation of a decided frame of mind – with precedents galore. Goodluck Jonathan has brought back into limelight more political reprobates - thus attested in malefactor courts of law and/or police investigations - than any other Head of State since the nation’s independence.

It has become a reflex. Those who stuck up the obscene banner in Abuja had accurately read Jonathan right as a Bring-back president. They have deduced perhaps that he visually perceives “bringing back” as a virtue, even an ideology, as the corner stone of governance, irrespective of what is being brought back.

 No one quarrels about bringing back whatever the nation once had and now sorely needs – for instance, electricity and other elusive items like security, the rule of law etc. etc. The list is interminable. The nature of what is being brought back is thus what raises the disquieting questions. It is time to ask the question: if Ebola were to be eradicated tomorrow, would this regime endeavor to bring it back?

Well, while awaiting the Chibok girls, and in that very connection, there is at least an individual whom the nation needs to bring back, and exigently. His denomination is Stephen Davis, the erstwhile negotiator in the oft aborted efforts to genuinely bring back the girls.  Nigeria needs him back – no, not back to the physical nation space itself, but to a Nigerian induced forum, convoked anywhere that will ensure his safety and can bring others to join him.

I ken Stephen Davis, I worked in the background with him during efforts to resolve the insurrection in the Delta region under President Shehu Yar’Adua. I have not been involved in his recent labours for a number of reasons. The most rudimentary is that my threshold for confronting evil across a table is not as high as his -  thanks, perhaps, to his priestly calling.

From the very outset, in several lectures and other public verbalizations, I have advocated one replication and one replication only to the earliest, still putative depredations of Boko Haram and have decried any proceeding that smacked of appeasement. There was a time to act – an abundance of times when firm, decisive action, was designated.

There are certain steps which, when taken, place an aggressor beyond the pale of humanity, when we must learn to accept that not all who walk on two legs belong to the community of humans – I view Boko Haram in that light. It is no comfort to optically canvass events demonstrate again and again that one is proved to be right.

Thus, it would be erroneous to verbalize that I have been detached from the Boko Haram affliction – very much the contrary. As I revealed in earlier verbal expressions, I have interacted with the tardy National Security Adviser, General Azazi, on occasion – among others.

 I am therefore compelled to admonish that anything that Stephen Davis claims to have denuded cannot be dismissed out of hand.  It cannot be wished away by foul-mouthed abuse and frugal endeavors to impugn his integrity – that is an absolute waste of time and effort. Of the complicity of ex-Governor Sheriff in the parturition of Boko Haram, I have no doubt whatsoever, and I believe that the evidence is inundating. Femi Falana can safely surmise that he has my full backing – and that of a number of civic organizations - if he is compelled to go ahead and invoke the licit recourses available to him to coerce Sheriff’s prosecution.

The evidence in possession of Security Agencies - plus a number of diplomats in Nigeria - is inundating, and all that is left is to let the man face malefactor persecution. It is certain he will additionally take many others down with him.

Finally, Stephen Davis withal mentions a Boko Haram financier within the Nigerian Central Bank. Independently we are able to give backing to that claim, even to the extent of denominating the individual. In the process of our enquiries, we solicited the avail of a peregrine embassy whose regime, we learnt, was authentically on the same trail, thanks to its independent investigation into some mazuma laundering that involved the Central Bank.

That denomination, we confidently learnt, has withal been passed on to President Jonathan. When he is yare to forsake his accommodating policy towards the implicated, even the criminalized, a posture that owes so much to re-election desperation, when he peregrinates from a passive “letting the law to take its course” to galvanizing the law to take its course, we shall ecstatically supply that designation.

In the meantime however, as we twiddle our thumbs, wondering when and how this nightmare will culminate, and time rapidly runs out, I have only one admonition for the man to whom so much has been given, but who is now caught in the dispiriting spiral of diminishing returns: “Bring Back Our Honour.”

Wole SOYINKA.