Special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati has made it clear that the President has no business trying to go public to reveal the position of the female students of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Borno state abducted in April by Boko Haram, simply to please anybody and risk the lives of the girls.
Abati said, in reaction to editor Karren Attiah of the Washington Post today: “Mr. Jonathan won’t put the lives of these girls at risk by publicly revealing details of the recovery operation for the sake of satisfying his critics.”
Karren Attiah had written on what he said
“President Goodluck Jonathan should have written,“ but which Abati defended in his letter to the editor.
“Nigeria,” the Presidential spokesman said, “is aggressively confronting the Boko Haram threat.”
Calling Karen Attiah’s write up as misinformed, Dr, Abati said that the claim that the president has a “do-nothing” attitude toward rescuing the girls is not different than what was written about President Obama’s decision not to disclose his efforts to seize and arrest the alleged ringleader of the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans — until he did just that.
“Despite Ms. Attiah’s claims to the contrary, even before the abductions, the president was engaged in international intelligence-sharing involving West Africa, Europe and the United States, and he had also launched the Counter-Terrorism Centre in Nigeria.
“He has been working intensely on the very challenging situation posed by Boko Haram since assuming office, including declaring a state of emergency in May 2013 in the three most affected northern states.”
[myad]
