The
popular Nigerian columnist and convener of ENDS, Perry Brimah has given
an insight into how Goodluck Jonathan defeated Boko Haram.
Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari
Perry Brimah, a popular columnists and convener of ENDS [Every
Nigerian Do Something], has declared that ex-President Goodluck Jonathan
defeated Boko Haram while President Muhammadu Buhari only mopped up.
Brimah in a lengthy expose on Saturday, which he said was to reveal
the real truth, revealed all that Jonathan did despite alleged
obstruction by the North.
The article reads in parts below:
”For posterity it is important that we are honest in recording
accounts of the day. When we are partial and political, we only do
injustice to ourselves now and permanently to future generations. The
history of Boko Haram is sad and painful and one we wish to soon forget,
however it is important we keep accurate records to learn from it for
tomorrow.
Boko Haram, real name, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati
wal-Jihad, rekindled as its beta version, or Boko Haram II under
Goodluck Jonathan. Like Obasanjo, Jonathan tolerated and enabled the
establishment of Boko Haram in the wilderness of the northeast. He did
not care and saw it as an opportunity for political slander against his
perceived enemies in the north and also as a cash cow for embezzling
massive defense allocations. “Let them kill themselves,” he was reported
to have once said when given breaking news of terror incidents.
Obstructed By Northern Elite
Jonathan in his political desperation handed over his party to
the north. It is on record that his PDP party chairman, Bamanga Tukur, a
typical northern elite who President Muhammadu Buhari recently praised
on his birthday, said as recorded in the Punch that, “Boko Haram is
fighting for justice; Boko Haram is another name for justice.” This was a
strong sentiment in the north from when Boko Haram II started in 2011
till late 2013 when Sheikh Gumi and Muslims Against Terror broke ranks
and voiced loud condemnations of the group.
In June of 2013, Nation bore the headline, “Buhari faults
clampdown on Boko Haram members.” Quoting the article,” He (Buhari)
accused the government of killing and destroying their houses while the
Niger Delta militants were given special treatment by the government.
Buhari who spoke on Sunday on a Liberty Radio programme, Guest of the
Week monitored in Kaduna also admitted that the road to the registration
of the All Progressive Congress (APC) was rough.”
The north did not care about Boko Haram at this point and saw
it simply as a tool to prove Jonathan’s ineptness. Any move he made was
opposed by the north. At a point when Boko Haram had conquered 23 of 27
local governments in Borno and a ThinkTank I was a part of with a
ground-shaking article published May 8th 2013, successfully pushed
Jonathan to cut short his South Africa trip and immediately deploy
excess battalions to the northeast and declare a State of emergency, the
northern elite kicked against it. The Governors’ forum headed by Rotimi
Amaechi a founder of the APC, advised him to not listen to us, with the
words below as quoted from PremiumTimes of May 13th, 2013:
“We urge the Federal Government to continue to support affected
states in the bid to check violence…We also call on the Federal
Government to ignore the ongoing agitation for a state of emergency in
some parts of the country. These requests are being made by people who
do not wish our country well and who are bent on plunging the country
into a deeper crisis.”
The weak Jonathan declared a half-baked State of emergency
leaving the governors in situ. This was his undoing as Borno Governor
Shettima will later violate WAEC order and keep a Chibok school open for
exams which paved the way for Boko Haram to abduct over 270 girls in
what will be Jonathan’s greatest international embarrassment and partly
cost him the presidency.
The same governor admitted to Premium Times last August that he
did not even raise alarm over the kidnap of the girls under his domain
to the president for a full three weeks.
The United States blocked Nigeria from purchasing weapons to
fight Boko Haram. One of former President Jonathan’s blunders which only
he can be blamed for, is not telling Nigerians of this serious
hinderance in time.
Not only did the US not sell any weapons to Jonathan, but Obama
also blocked Nigeria from buying them from various countries. This
while several autocratic countries with major human right violations
were supplied steady ammo by the Obama admin. We recall that Hillary
Clinton resisted labelling Boko Haram a terrorist organisation in spite
of it being the most deadly in the world.
This is the uphill battle Goodluck Jonathan faced; waged by
internal and external enemies. When Jonathan finally realized that he
had set himself up and his re-election depended on defeating Boko Haram,
he scrambled in a last minute “6-month war” effort to decisively crush
the terrorists. Here I believe is where the controversial aspect of the
history begins.
I open with a challenge for anyone to give the list of towns in
the northeast liberated under Buhari as against the list of towns
liberated in Jonathan’s 6-month campaign. I also would like a list of
the number of terrorists the Buhari government killed or captured to
compare to Jonathan’s record of thousands.
Equipment
Goodluck Jonathan first bought the weapons Nigeria had not
bought since the 80s. Neither Babangida, nor Abacha, nor Abdulsalami,
nor Obasanjo, nor Yar’Adua had bought any decent weapons and war
machines for Nigeria over a span of 30 odd years. Against obstruction
from the US, Jonathan succeeded in bringing in some serious equipment.
Nigerians all watched as powerful T72 M1s from Ukraine were driven up
north. Beeagle blog, a foremost military conversation website publicized
these deadly acquisitions while Nigerians did not care and focused only
on politics.
As history was being turned on its head, Dasuki later defended
himself and attempted to correct our narrative by making public, images
of the sophisticated arms the Jonathan government bought. See: Dasuki
releases images of sophisticated weapons acquired under Jonathan
[PHOTOS] – DailyPost, August 2015.
In the six months including when Jonathan postponed the
elections till March to buy an extra month and half, Jonathan brought in
these APCs, MRAPs, tanks, drones and other equipment to capacitate the
Nigerian military at the war front.
It must be mentioned that Boko Haram was one of the most
motivated, financed and battle hardened armies in Africa at the time.
With promises of heaven, laced with hard drugs that made the heaven
practically visible, Boko Haram was not only battle-hardened but
potentially larger than the Nigerian military. With recruitable
mercenary forces across west Africa and to the Congo, the Boko Haram
army stood at a high point of as many as 40,000 soldiers.
Mercenaries
Goodluck Jonathan hired mercenaries from South Africa to wage
the bloody war, the 72 Mobile Force. These hardened mercenaries did not
come to Nigeria to drink tea in Maiduguri. They knew how to operate the
REVA MRAPs and other sophisticated machinery and the modified F7
supersonic jets, and that is what they came and did.
Of course, I accept a lot of the blame in the narrative being
as inaccurate as it is today. Instead of also acknowledging the triumphs
these mercenaries were achieving in record time, we all focused on
condemning Jonathan for allowing matters deteriorate to the point where
he was paying foreigners as much as $350 a day to fight our war for us.
Chad Troops
Even if we deny what our own military did during Jonathan’s
six-month war, can we deny what the “janjaweed” Chadian army did in the
northeast? I do not think the inhabitants of the northeast can ever deny
and discount the many times they celebrated and gave food and water to
Chadian troops as they massacred and pursued Boko Haram from town to
town, liberating successive towns and villages in the northeast. There
is ample local Chad TV video of these conquests.
Jonathan signed an MoU with Chad’s Idriss Deby and his troops,
some of the most battle hardened in Africa, came into Nigeria and
competed with a revived Nigerian army liberating cities from various
extents of the state. Reuters has one of the typical videos up on
Youtube showing the liberation of Damask in March of 2015. It reports
that 200 terrorists were killed in that battle. Vice News has “Chad’s
war against Boko Haram.” AlJazeera also has its video from March 2015 in
which it reports on the Chadian army liberation of many cities
including Dikwa where the journalist’s chopper landed.
Cities Jonathan Liberated
Nigeria’s 7 Infantry Division with the assistance of South
African 72 Mobile force troops retook Bama as reported in PremiumTimes
on March 16th 2015. On 27th March foreign media reported Nigeria’s
capture of Gwoza, Boko Haram’s urban headquarters.
Chief Media Consultant to the Forum of Spokespersons of
Security and Response, Agencies, FOSSRA, Yushau Shuaib resigned in
protest in March of 2016 after the Buhari government’s Jon Ode-led panel
denied the equipment acquisitions and war accomplishments of the
Jonathan administration.
In a scathing reaction to the new administration, Shuaib listed major cities liberated by Jonathan’s pre-election push, he said,
“some of the towns recovered before the coming of President
Buhari were Abadam, Askira, Baga, Bama, Bita, Buni Yadi, Damboa, Gamboru
Ngala, Goniri, Gujba, Gulani, Gwoza, Hong, Konduga, Kukawa, Marte,
Madagali, Michika, Monguno, as well as Mubi and many others.
“A clear testimony to some of the accomplishments was the
official DHQ release dated March 16, 2015 with reference No:
DHQ/ABJ/901/32/DDI and entitled: “Troops finally rout terrorists from
Bama and last stronghold in Yobe.”
The onus is on those who deny the achievements of the Jonathan
government in its last minute six-month war to provide a list of major
cities liberated by the Buhari government. Can Army Chief Tukur Yusuf
Buratai deny these accomplishments of the army under the command of
former President Goodluck Jonathan? It will do Nigeria good and history a
great favor to have a comprehensive response from CoAS Buratai.
Boko Haram was largely pushed out of Nigeria’s major towns back
into Sambisa forest and remote villages and settlements. The Buhari
government’s major achievement has been the liberation of a good amount
of Sambisa forest, though the terrorists are still based in some parts
of it. Unfortunately the terrorists have retaken the famous “Ground
Zero,” according to ENDS sources.
In praise to Buhari was the discovery of a massive Boko Haram
supply barge and 4000 petroleum drums, dealing the terrorists a most
severe logistics blow. Again this was in July of 2015, and could be
argued to have been under the momentum built by Jonathan.
So where is the evidence of Buhari’s decimation of Boko Haram,
other than mopping up and opening up towns liberated by the army under
the previous administration? Jonathan could not repopulate the towns due
to mine fears. The Buhari government is slowly de-mining them before
attempting to restore the surviving inhabitants.
The only time we heard the Buhari government announce the
killing of over 200, was when they accidentally bombed an IDP camp in
Rann, killing 236.
It is recollected that Jonathan secured the northeast to the
extent that peaceful elections could hold. This is irrefutable evidence
of the success of his campaign against the terrorist organisation before
handing over.
It was based on the momentum built by Jonathan that Buhari
could promise to defeat the terrorists by December of his first year in
office, and announce that he had pretty much completed that with only
mop up operations left. The evidence points out that it was Jonathan who
had completed 80% of the strategic defeat and the Buhari government
finished the rest 20% by December of 2015 and since then embarked in mop
up and negotiations with the terrorists to reintegrate into civilian
populations. 40,000 soldiers just don’t disappear.
A lot of what Jonathan did and Buhari has continued is under
the counter negotiations with terrorists dropping their arms and
silently attempting to lead normal lives. The governor of Taraba state
just complained that there are too many of these ex-Boko Haram
terrorists in his state now battling an uptick in violent crime.
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