Okupe: ‘Jonathan’s only offence is winning an election’

Dr. Doyin Okupe, the senior special assistant to the president on public affairs, has linked the country’s terrorism woes with President Goodluck Jonathan’s “major” offence, which is winning the 2011 presidential election.

According to Okupe, who was speaking with BBC late Monday night, some “very strong and powerful people” are very unhappy that Jonathan has transferred power to the minority south-south.

He added that unless decisive steps are taken, Nigeria’s future is not guaranteed, because what the country is facing is “a major orchestrated issue” that can cause disaffection, although non-citizens do not understand the problem.

“If an American is speaking about Boko Haram or terrorism in Nigeria, he is probably looking at it from the prism of al Qaeda, because he does not understand the holistic problem of Nigeria,” Okupe said.

“But like I told you, it’s a Nigerian problem; we are going to find a Nigerian solution to it. We will definitely get over it. We have always gotten over everything that has affected us.

“Goodluck Jonathan has committed an offence. His major offence is that he won an election in Nigeria; and some very strong and powerful people are not happy, and [they] feel that he ought not to have won and make power resident where it ought not [to] be.

“Such people want to take this power by all means, at all cost; and they are doing all sorts of things… They have a lot of money and influence, both in and outside Nigeria.”

Okupe described insecurity as a global phenomenon, likening the case of the abducted Chibok school girls to American hostages held in Tehran for more than 400 days.

He maintained that the Nigerian government is relentless in its efforts to ensure the release of the girls; and while responding to the question of human rights abuses by the military in the northeast, he blamed the foreign media for always putting Nigeria in a bad light.

“These are the same people who published wrong things about Nigeria. Amnesty International said that the Nigerian military burnt down about 7,000 houses and killed several people,” he said.

“That ended up to be a major lie, a major international scam. It did not happen, and evidence today has proved that that was not correct. We are dealing with an internal crisis where the insurgents are Nigerians. They are not different from you and I.

“The other day, it was discovered that a lady who sells orange with wheel barrow on the streets of Kano was sitting on an AK 47. How do you distinguish between that and a member of Boko Haram?

“Yet, if Soldiers act on information and arrest the lady and bundle her into a car, they will say, ‘See how they are treating a lady; see how they are treating civilians’. These are some of the problems that we are experiencing.”

He admitted, though, that there is a high level of poverty in the northern part of the country, but he assured the public of the government’s commitment towards massively developing the region.

He also clamoured for stronger collaborations between the states and the federal government, lamenting that previous administrations did very little to develop the region.

“We know that the poverty in the north is a lot high, but it is not this administration that created it. Rather, the poverty in that region is as a result of longstanding neglect by various governments in the past.

“So redressing it is not just the responsibility of the Goodluck Jonathan-led government, but every government in Nigeria. The government has already started working on a master plan for the north.

“In this year’s budget, some money — substantial amount of money — has been put into studying what will need to be done after this crisis because you cannot rebuild, you cannot rehabilitate, you can’t do anything meaningful unless there is peace, so we have to wage this war first.”

He praised the performance of Jonathan’s government, saying: “In just three years, we have done a lot in infrastructure. Railways were dead for 20 years, but we revitalised it.

“We are now generating 2,000 mega watts of power. It’s not by chance that we became the largest economy in Africa. It is because we created an enabling environment. We have the best of brains, there are intellectuals working in this government. We have the best to run this economy.”