According to the word going round following an upsurge in the activities of Boko Haram in the last few weeks, President Goodluck Jonathan is the brain behind the insurgency.
It is said that he has instructed Boko Haram to step up the attacks, take more towns and villages in the North-east, move a little bit into the North-central and the North-west, and set the North on fire. He has asked them, it is said, to do as much damage as they can do, cause as much confusion as possible and shed as much blood as is within reach.
Why? 2015. It is all about 2015. There are, indeed, different shades of this theory. One is that since he is unlikely to win in the North-east, it is better for Boko Haram to control the geo-political zone so that there will be no voting there, thereby depriving the opposition of millions of votes so that he can, easily, be returned to office.
In fact, when he declared a state of emergency in three North-eastern states in 2013, the opposition said it was part of his re-election plan. They vehemently opposed it. A slightly modified side of this theory, however, is that Jonathan does not want elections to hold at all.
So by instructing Boko Haram to renew their assaults, it is alleged, he has an excuse to invoke emergency powers, plead general insecurity in the country, move the polls indefinitely and retain the presidency until he feels good enough to call elections.
This aspect of the theory is based on the belief that Jonathan does not think he can win the presidential election and therefore wants to hold on to power, through the back door, just to buy time.
There is a second conspiracy theory, a bit older than the one we just discussed. It was prevalent a few weeks ago especially after the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshall Alex Badeh, announced a ceasefire on behalf of Boko Haram and declared that the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls were just a few days away from being released.
A theory popped up immediately: Jonathan knew the solution to Boko Haram all along but was just waiting for the elections to come close before acting. It was all a game, the theorists proffered.
In fact, someone said with Jonathan about to pick the nomination form of his party, he timed the ceasefire agreement and the release of the girls so well for his campaign. This theory suggests that Jonathan may not be the one behind Boko Haram, unlike the first one.
It proposes instead that Jonathan was deliberately allowing the bloodshed because it was politically beneficial to him. By ending the war and retrieving the girls, he would have wormed his way into the hearts of Nigerian voters, they say. Good theory, just that there was no ceasefire after all.
There is a third theory that says Jonathan is aiding the insurgency because he wants Nigeria to break up, so that the Niger Delta can walk away with their oil. It is not an entirely new theory รข”€ it's been around for a while.
But the upsurge in the insurgency has revived it, with many of the theorists saying Jonathan would rather there is no Nigeria than be defeated in 2015. Someone even commented on a website that it is the Igbo, in conjunction with the South-south, that are behind the war, that they want to revive what they couldn't get during the civil war for Republic of Biafra.
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