His Excellency Former President Goodluck Jonathan has labeled the 2014 kidnapping of Chibok schoolgirls as a blemish for his government, conceding that it is an incident he will “die with.”.
During the public presentation of Scars: Nigeria’s Journey and the Boko Haram Conundrum, a retired Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Lucky Irabor, wrote book, Jonathan expressed hope that one day, leaders of Boko Haram would limit their activities to writing to help explain their actual motivations, as main actors in the Nigerian Civil War had subsequently written about it.
Looking back at the insurgency that stained his presidency, Jonathan added that his administration tried various peace negotiations and established committees to bargain with insurgents. In one of them, according to him, Boko Haram offered opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari as a negotiator with the government.
Jonathan added that this led him to think that Buhari would simply rein in the insurgency when he became president in 2015, but the crisis has not ended. He theorized that the relative ease with which the group was obtaining sophisticated weapons appeared to suggest a foreign hand, adding that maybe a “carrot-and-stick” approach could resolve the conflict.
However, Jonathan’s assertion was denied by ex-Presidential Spokesman Garba Shehu, who insisted that Boko Haram never nominated Buhari for any mediation afterwards.
In a statement, Shehu recalled that Buhari was once a target of a Boko Haram bomb attack in Kaduna in 2014 and had always been a vocal opponent of the group’s ideology. He cited a statement by Buhari’s party at the time, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which clarified that the former general had no knowledge of any such nomination and dismissed it as mere speculation.
Shehu called Jonathan’s comment a lie, saying if the comment was being associated with a potential 2027 presidential election bid, “he is embarking on a false start.”.
