If anyone needed a compelling argument against electing old and lethargic leaders whose breasts the milk of human kindness has long dried, the response by the present administration to the recent killings in the Yelwata community of Benue should suffice. For a round of violence that consumed an estimated 200 people, the press release issued by the government in the wake of the incident severely lacked the urgency and empathy one would expect. It was signed by the President’s media aide, Bayo Onanuga, who sounded just as morally fatigued—perhaps even bored—with the recurrence of Nigeria’s tragedy as his principal. Politics for them seems to be an activity to engage in merely to capture as many constituencies as possible, appropriate national resources to themselves and their cronies, and celebrate themselves. The real hard work of governance and nation-building confounds them.

First, the press release was irresponsible. Their tautologically describing the Benue killings as “reprisal attacks” suggests that the murders were warranted. While I am sceptical that Onanuga (or his team) thought that the Yelwata attacks were justified recrimination, their choice of language betrays their understanding. How could they even tell that the Benue attacks were a counterattack? Did they have confessional statements from the perpetrators? It is one thing for the media to describe an attack as “reprisal,” it is another thing entirely for the official narration by the Presidency to do so. If that incident was a reprisal, they could at least have provided the identity of the attackers and the prior grievance that supposedly provoked retaliation.

The Presidency needed not to have waited until the latest attack before promising to “act decisively and arrest perpetrators of these evil acts on all sides of the conflict and prosecute them”. By vowing to deal with aggressors universally rather than pinpointing the perpetrators of the dastardly attacks, they tried too hard to respond to public outrage without offending either the tribe of the aggressors or the community of the victims. When your politics is all about winning elections, that is the placatory manner you speak on issues that require you to demonstrate a firm resolve.

There is no way to slice the Benue attacks without the ineffectiveness of the Bola Tinubu administration glaring back at you. Their haste to slap a diagnosis on the crisis seems to obscure their ability to see this beyond what they would prefer it to be. According to the Benue Governor, Hyacinth Alia, those attackers overwhelmed the military and police, entered the community, and massacred for hours on end. That sequence of action looks far more sophisticated than what the same language of “reprisal attacks” conveys. If this was a reprisal, at what point did the Yelwata people carry out an attack of similar proportion on their assailants? And even if they ever did, what was the government’s response?

The blood of the dead has not even dried, and the Presidency is already demanding “reconciliation” among the “warring communities”. Why put the cart of reconciliation before the horse of justice? If someone comes into your community, overwhelms the security agents protecting you, and then murders your people, would you want to be reconciled with them? It is funny how they are discussing reconciliation as the solution. When an act of grave injustice happens to poorer people in rural communities, the political establishment urges them to make peace with their killers. But when even a trivial matter affects the same political class in Nigeria, they will go to any extent—including trampling on due process of the law—to get their own payback.

We are all enraged by this murder in Benue, but this is just one of the several incidents ongoing in Nigeria that show that governance is slipping from Tinubu’s grasp. The man has been a better politician than a leader.

His best skills lie in the manipulative art of politicking to win elections. When it comes to governance, he is slow. There is little he has done so far that assures that Nigeria is on the path to peace, prosperity, and progress. He and his cronies are busy back-patting themselves as a precursor to launching their 2027 electoral campaign, but the truth is that Nigeria under their watch is poorly administered. Virtually all the ongoing activities in the country are tailored toward the next election, and very little suggests that these people are driven to any urgency to reform the nation for the people.

People always come as an afterthought, and their social flourishing rarely drives any political or economic agenda. For the President to patronisingly announce that he would “adjust his schedule” to go to Benue to commiserate with the victims of the attack shows we are dealing with a leadership that thinks our national problems are an inconvenience or even a distraction to his ambition rather than the raison d’être of his government. What does Tinubu do every day that is so urgent that going to Benue requires adjusting his schedule? Other than receiving visitors with whom he takes photos to show who else has been captured ahead of the 2027 election and inaugurating petty projects, what does anyone see him do? Now, he acts as if going to Benue is a favour. That pejorative attitude has defined his administration since 2023.

Tinubu needs to wake up and realise that we cannot continue like this. The problem of insecurity has gone on for so long in Nigeria that it has virtually become a tradition. It is time for him to sit up and do the hard work of governance. He should refrain from politicking for now and focus on fulfilling the mandate he claimed in 2023. It is not enough to state that you have given a directive to “security chiefs to implement his earlier directive to bring lasting peace and security to Benue State”, but you must push out reforms.

This idea of giving marching orders to security chiefs is not cutting it. Imagine a whole President saying he has given a directive for his earlier directive to be executed! So, what happens if the meta-directive does not yield desired results? Will he issue another directive to implement the directives he gave earlier directive be implemented? That does not sound very reassuring about his leadership abilities. The idea of merely tasking security chiefs to produce results does not seem to be working. Muhammadu Buhari, too, once gave a directive to set up a military command centre in Maiduguri. At some point, his administration claimed the “technical defeat” of terrorism in the same way Nuhu Ribadu boasted that they had defeated insurgency by “90 per cent” just a few months ago. We should move beyond these games and address Nigeria’s problems comprehensively.

Insecurity is a major issue, and its persistence contributes to and intersects with other forms as well. Life is precarious in Nigeria; people are strained due to the ill-conceived and poorly executed policies of the Bola Tinubu administration. If we continue at the rate we are going, more people will be pushed to the brink of even worse criminal behaviour. Time is running out on us, and our leader should not help us waste it.

Punch