The President I want' - By Chimamanda Adichie

Award winning author Chimamanda Adichie writes on the kind of
President she wants. Read below..


Some of my relatives lived for decades in the North, in Kano
and Bornu. They spoke fluent Hausa. (One relative taught me,
at the age of eight, to count in Hausa.) They made planned
visits to Anambra only a few times a year, at Christmas and
to attend weddings and funerals. But sometimes, in the wake of
violence, they made unplanned visits. I remember the word
‘Maitatsine’ – to my young ears, it had a striking lyricism –
and I remember the influx of relatives who had packed a few
bags and fled the killings. What struck me about those hasty
returns to the East was that my relatives always went back to
the North. Until two years ago when my uncle packed up his
life of thirty years in Maiduguri and moved to Awka. He was
not going back. This time, he felt, was different.
My uncle’s return illustrates a feeling shared by many Nigerians
about Boko Haram: a lack of hope, a lack of confidence in our
leadership. We are experiencing what is, apart from the Biafran war,
the most violent period in our nation’s existence. Like many
Nigerians, I am distressed about the students murdered in their
school, about the people whose bodies were spattered in Nyanya, about
the girls abducted in Chibok. I am furious that politicians are
politicizing what should be a collective Nigerian mourning, a shared
Nigerian sadness.
And I find our president’s actions and non-actions unbelievably
surreal.
I do not want a president who, weeks after girls are abducted from a
school and days after brave Nigerians have taken to the streets to
protest the abductions, merely announces a fact-finding committee to
find the girls.
I want President Jonathan to be consumed, utterly consumed, by the
state of insecurity in Nigeria. I want him to make security a
priority, and make it seem like a priority. I want a president
consumed by the urgency of now, who rejects the false idea of keeping
up appearances while the country is mired in terror and uncertainty.
I want President Jonathan to know – and let Nigerians know that he
knows – that we are not made safer by soldiers checking the boots of
cars, that to shut down Abuja in order to hold a World Economic
Forum is proof of just how deeply insecure the country is. We have a
big problem, and I want the president to act as if we do. I want the
president to slice through the muddle of bureaucracy, the morass of
‘how things are done,’ because Boko Haram is unusual and the
response to it cannot be business as usual.
I want President Jonathan to communicate with the Nigerian people,
to realize that leadership has a strong psychological component: in
the face of silence or incoherence, people lose faith. I want him to
humanize the lost and the missing, to insist that their individual
stories be told, to show that every Nigerian life is precious in the eyes
of the Nigerian state.
I want the president to seek new ideas, to act, make decisions, publish
the security budget spending, offer incentives, sack people. I want the
president to be angrily heartbroken about the murder of so many, to
lie sleepless in bed thinking of yet what else can be done, to support
and equip the armed forces and the police, but also to insist on
humaneness in the midst of terror. I want the president to be equally
enraged by soldiers who commit murder, by policemen who beat bomb
survivors and mourners. I want the president to stop issuing limp,
belated announcements through public officials, to insist on a
televised apology from whoever is responsible for lying to Nigerians
about the girls having been rescued.
I want President Jonathan to ignore his opponents, to remember that
it is the nature of politics, to refuse to respond with defensiveness or
guardedness, and to remember that Nigerians are understandably
cynical about their government.
I want President Jonathan to seek glory and a place in history,
instead of longevity in office. I want him to put aside the
forthcoming 2015 elections, and focus today on being the kind of
leader Nigeria has never had.
I do not care where the president of Nigeria comes from. Even those
Nigerians who focus on ‘where the president is from’ will be won over
if they are confronted with good leadership that makes all Nigerians
feel included. I have always wanted, as my president, a man or a
woman who is intelligent and honest and bold, who is surrounded by
truth-telling, competent advisers, whose policies are people-centered,
and who wants to lead, who wants to be president, but does
not need to – or have to- be president at all costs.
President Jonathan may not fit that bill, but he can approximate it:
by being the leader Nigerians desperately need now.
By Chimamanda Adichie