By Emmanuel Ugwu, Sahara Reporters
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| A group of protesters of the BBOG campaign at the Aso Villa, Abuja on Monday |
"The treatment meted out to BBOG by the Buhari administration is similar to the condescension with which the Jonathan administration dealt with them. Jonathan and his allies ridiculed the campaigners for making a cause out of the captivity of the girls."
On Monday, a peaceful and
orderly group of Nigerians, comprising Bring Back Our Girls advocates
and some parents of the 200 Chibok girls, assembled at the Unity
Fountain, Abuja. They set out for Aso Rock thereafter. Their aim was to
reach the Nigerian presidency with their presence and to prick the
conscience of the Nigerian state with the frustration, anguish and pain
of their two years old campaign. They fell short of that destination and
dream.
Before the protesters could inch close to a shouting distance of the
Villa, they ran into the impenetrably solid wall of partition between
the Nigerian citizen and the Nigerian leadership.
On Thursday, the protesters repeated the drill. They gathered at
their fixed point of departure and marched towards Aso Rock. Their
tenacity saw no new reward. They met the selfsame blockade they couldn't
break through three days back.
Now, the media reported the above incidents a little differently. All
the reports chorused that the BBOG vanguard was stopped on their way to
the Villa by a detachment of policemen. And that's factually correct.
The placard-carrying Nigerians in red were, indeed, blocked by
arms-bearing men in black.
But here's a corrective to the account of the truncation of the
marches: The protesters did not really run into a cordon of policemen.
They ran into the fourth wall of Aso Rock, the thickest invisible wall
in Nigeria.
In the world of theater, a fourth wall is a virtual barrier between
the space of the actors and the room of the audience. This imaginary
wall runs along the edge of the stage. Its essence is separation; to
demarcate the putative accommodations of the cast and the spectators in
such a way that there is an ample inter space between the two groups and
an unmistakable distinction between domains of the characters and the
non-characters.
The fourth wall is a boundary that neither of both parties can
cross. It forbids contact and interaction between actors and
non-actors. It clarifies and amplifies the existence of a professional
long distance relationship. And it is mutual respect for the span of
estrangement that makes for order. An order whose nature hinges on the
performance of the cast and the passivity of the spectators.
In barring BBOG and parents of the girls from moving too close for
comfort twice in one week, Aso Rock was protecting the sanctity of its
fourth wall, affirming the territoriality of the powers that be and
stressing that the Nigerian seat of power does not entertain the
trespass of commoners...even if the commoners presume to have a right to
access Nigeria's president and a valid reason to remind him of a
longstanding grievance the Nigerian state has been remiss to resolve.
During the Monday outing, the police informed the group that they
would not be permitted to proceed in the direction of Aso Rock because
they lacked ''security clearance''. The protesters didn't turn back at
the rebuff. They sat on the access road to the Villa and waited for
three hours, hoping that some authority figure would emerge to, at
least, acknowledge them. They had a letter to deliver to President
Buhari or Vice President Osinbajo.
All of that was wasted time and expectation. No Buhari or Osinbajo
aide or any Nigerian official came out to address them. Nobody was
delegated to engage them in the name of the government of their country.
They were absolutely ignored.
There was a fourth wall. The Buhari presidency made expressly clear
that it would not condescend to cross it to relate with the protesters.
And the people got the message.
To be sure, the snobbish fourth wall of Aso Rock predates Buhari. Its
history goes all the way back to the conceptualization of Aso Rock
itself. The edifice that now houses the Nigerian presidency was designed
to be a mystery inaccessible to the everyday Nigerian. It was built to
be a secret that doesn't lend itself to casual Mungo Park discovery. And
decades after its erection, Nigerians still know less of
its architecture than they do the looks of the offices of heads of
government of other countries halfway across the world!
But asking the Nigerian government to reveal the structure of Aso
Rock is too big a request to make for a start. The government would have
to first define the location of the office of the president of Nigeria.
Where is Aso Rock sited? What is its address?
The office and residence of the President of the United States is
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. The office and residence of the
British prime minister is 10 Downing Street, London. The office and
residence of the president of Nigeria has no address. It is a never land.
And it was deliberately situated in a literal nowhere so that it
would be a neighborhood by itself. It was constructed to exist as a
heaven. A space defined, not by its contiguity with another place, but
by its aloneness, its alienation, its self ostracism.
The hiding of Aso Rock from Nigerians was meant to perpetuate spatial
and relational unfamiliarity between the Nigerian leadership and the
Nigerian people. The namelessness of its bearing serves as an
advertisement of Aso Rock as the unapproachable hideaway of power. And
its subsistence for many years as an anonymous environment is proof
positive of the institutionalization of governance by disconnect in
Nigeria!
The treatment meted out to BBOG by the Buhari administration is
similar to the condescension with which the Jonathan administration
dealt with them. Jonathan and his allies ridiculed the campaigners for
making a cause out of the captivity of the girls. They attacked the
reputation of BBOG leaders with television ads. They pilloried and
shamed the humanitarians, calling them entrepreneurial scavengers. They
were 'politicizing' the kidnap of the girls for profit. They were
opposition mercenaries.
Jonathan's near-paranoid hostility to BBOG and his apathy for the
girls cost him a lot of goodwill. He had taken the ludicrous position
that the kidnap was a fairy tale invented by his political adversaries
to discredit him. So, in the spirit of spite, he elected to invest zero
interest in the supposed ruse. That cost us the opportunity to rescue
the girls within the early hours and days of their capture.
The scandalous unconcern outraged a good number of Nigerians. And
Candidate Buhari and his party, the APC, cashed in on the situation.
They cast Jonathan as a heartless leader and an inhumane person. They
promised to prioritize the rescue of the girls. Buhari touted his
experience as a general and head of state. He promised to bring back the
girls in the quickest possible time. Give me your votes and I will give
you back your girls!
When the BBOG protest was turned back at the junction that leads to
the Villa, buyer's remorse hit parents of the girls and members of
Chibok community. One year after they had bought into Buhari's pitch,
they were yet to be reunited with their daughters. And worse, they were
being disdainfully dismissed and humiliated as happened in the era of
the man they voted out of office.
Just like Jonathan, Buhari now views them as a nuisance since he has
separated them from their votes. He sees them as an irritation and
embarrassment. And if he wasn’t constrained by democratic strictures, he
would order that the streets of Abuja be rid of the pests!
Like Jonathan, Buhari would rather that the BBOG people find some
business instead of making the protest their preoccupation. He would
have them wipe the abduction off their memory. If he could bare his
mind, he would tell them to murmur wordlessly. They shouldn't make him
the villain. After all, he didn't create the mess: he inherited it!
Only one of the abducted girls has returned since Buhari assumed
office. And the 'rescue' of Amina Alli Nkeki was neither effected by
Nigerian security officials nor tangentially associated with a
purposeful state-sponsored redemption mission. The civilian JTF, a local vigilante, found her by chance.
Last year December, Buhari claimed that Nigeria had no credible intelligence on
who to negotiate with for the release of the girls. Between that time
and now, the identities of Nigerians with genuine and verifiable
relationships with the Boko Haram leadership have been established. And they have declared that their link to Boko Haram is known by the top brass of the Nigerian military. Yet, Buhari is still invoking the excuse of lack of a plausible lead to this day.
Amina says 6 of the Chibok girls had died before her escape. No one
knows if that's all the loss that has happened till now. The young girls
are under a regime of rape and deprivation. And they enjoy no decent
medical care in the forest where they live.
18 mothers of the Chibok girls have died since the date of their abduction.
Their death was caused, at least, in part, by heartbreak. Nobody can
size the torment that stole their souls. Only a parent living the
reality of their experience can know the full measure of the agony of a
mother that encounters her two-years-gone-missing teenage girl only on
'proof of life' videos made by adult male lunatics!
Yet, the Nigerian government doesn't feel any sense of obligation
towards the parents of the Chibok girls. There is no official platform
that caters to their trauma or their need to know what the state might
be doing to secure the release of their kids. There is no system or
method for communicating with them or relating with them.
Aso Rock thinks those parents are not worth state attention. They are
nobodies. They are folks Nigeria owes nothing. You can update them –at
your convenience! –on your ignorance about the whereabouts of their
daughters on national TV!
And when parental love compels them to reach Aso Rock because the
immobile mountain would not reach them, you stop them miles before they
can sight your gate; as if they were vagabond tourists.
You tell them you are not disposed to granting them the favor of
access. You ask them to keep to their side of the fourth wall. You tell
them to go home and pray and wait… while you expect 'credible
intelligence' to fall down like manna from heaven!
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