Former President Goodluck Jonathan has revealed that at the peak of his administration’s efforts to negotiate with Boko Haram, the insurgents nominated General Muhammadu Buhari (as he then was) as their preferred negotiator.
Jonathan, speaking on Friday at the public presentation of Scars: Nigeria’s Journey and the Boko Haram Conundrum, a book authored by retired Chief of Defence Staff, General Lucky Irabor, said he had expected Buhari’s later emergence as president in 2015 to fast-track a resolution of the crisis.
“In one of the committees we set up then, Boko Haram nominated Buhari to lead their team to negotiate with the government,” Jonathan disclosed. “So, I felt that if they nominated Buhari to represent them, then when he took over, it could have been an easy way to negotiate with them and they would have handed over their guns. But Boko Haram is still there till today.”
The former president stressed that the insurgency was more complex than commonly portrayed, pointing out that Boko Haram’s survival beyond Buhari’s eight-year administration underscored the depth of the crisis.
Reflecting on the 2014 abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls, Jonathan described it as a personal scar he would carry for life. “It is a scar I will die with. But perhaps later, more details may become known, and that too has to do with Boko Haram,” he said.
Tracing the insurgency’s origins to 2009 under the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Jonathan noted that he spent much of his five years in office battling Boko Haram through different committees and approaches.
“I thought that after I left, within a reasonable time, General Buhari would wipe them out. But even today, Boko Haram is still there. The issue of Boko Haram is far more complex than it is often presented,” he said.
Jonathan concluded by urging Nigeria to adopt fresh perspectives in confronting the crisis, warning that simplistic explanations such as hunger or poverty fail to capture the insurgency’s deeper roots.
