Nigeria Boko Haram victories may not boost Jonathan in poll

A spate of victories against Boko Haram has pushed the militants out of much of the territory they controlled in Nigeria, but that is unlikely to do much to boost President Goodluck Jonathan’s bid for re-election by divided voters next week. At the start of this year the Islamist militants had seized an area the size of Belgium in Africa’s biggest economy and were slaughtering civilians at will, a crisis authorities cited as a reason for delaying the poll by six weeks to March 28.

Boko Haram is now on the run and squeezed into ever smaller turf. That still won’t help John Dauda get his family back. “The military operations going on now mean nothing to me because I lost my two wives and four children,” the 52-year-old fuel dealer in northeastern Adamawa state said. For that reason, Jonathan will not be getting his vote when he goes into one of the polling booths to be set up in camps for the more than a million people who, like Dauda, have been displaced by fighting.

Jonathan, a Christian southerner, has been criticised for failing to tackle the insurgency. His main challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the north, has campaigned on his reputation for being tough on security when he was military ruler of Nigeria in the 1980s. Nigeria’s army said on Tuesday it had taken back all but three local government areas, out of around 20 controlled by Boko Haram, a shift owing partly to neighbours Chad, Cameroon and Niger stepping up offensives against the Islamists. It may have come too late to alter perceptions of Jonathan.

“Why did he have to wait until now that the elections are here? Recapturing those towns is like ‘medicine after death’,” computer science student Joe Garba, 38, said, shaking his head as he turned away from his keyboard in his university classroom.