“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” This quote is credited to Hiram W. Johnson, a Californian politician who served in the US Senate from 1917 to 1945, when he died.
This was the first thought that came to mind when a certain Stephen Davis, said to be an Australian hostage negotiator, started throwing around the names of certain Nigerians he claimed are sponsors of the terrorist group Boko Haram. According to news reports, Dr. Davis mentioned a “senior official at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)”, former Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff and the immediate past Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Azubuike Onyeabo Ihejirika, as three of the culprits in the nefarious and treasonous business.
Alhaji Sheriff called a press conference in Abuja to deny Davis’s accusations and profess his innocence.  General Ihejirika also repudiated the label of terrorism sponsorship. Expectedly, there is no word from the “senior official of the CBN”, either in corroboration or refutation, giving that his or her accusation is little other than a pebble thrown into a pool. It will create some ripple without disturbing any living thing inside the pool. Are senior CBN officials not in the hundreds? That is where the puzzle begins.
Why did Stephen Davis mention Ihejirika and Sheriff by name but not the senior official at the CBN? “Dr. Davis told SaharaReporters that he did not want to name the CBN official as this may prejudice investigation by Nigeria’s security services”! This simply points to something uncoordinated or disarticulated about Dr. Stephen Davies. The naming of the CBN official complicit in the sponsorship of Boko Haram may prejudice investigations but not the naming of both Ihejirika and Sheriff. How rational.
What are Stephen Davis’s antecedents? The Internet yielded precious little on this fellow, save the report that the late President Yar’Adua had hired him in connection with Niger Delta militancy. If, as his promoters are saying, Stephen Davis was contracted by the Nigerian President to negotiate the release of the abducted Chibok girls, would the right procedure not be for him to first report his findings to the Nigerian leader, rather than go singing in the media? If Stephen Davis was indeed contracted to negotiate the release of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, he would have earned a tidy sum for his troubles. Yet he purportedly spent four months in Nigeria without negotiating the release of even a single girl. Were his fees not money down the drain? Was his signal failure to achieve anything not down to his questionable credentials?
Of course, Nigerians are adept at searching for things in Sokoto that are in their sokoto trousers. Davis is Australian, from Down Under, therefore, he must be an expert on the subject at hand. But his story is laughable. Dig this: ““Boko Haram commanders told me they would be prepared to release some as a goodwill gesture towards a peace deal with the government, so I went to Nigeria on the basis of being able to secure their release. The girls were there, 60 girls. There were 20 vehicles with girls. We travelled for four-and-a-half hours to reach them, but 15 minutes before we arrived, they were kidnapped again by another group who wanted to cash in on a reward.”
Of course, the above is fairy tale. Why would Boko Haram require 20 vehicles to transport 60 girls? After travelling for nearly five hours, Davis was just 15 minutes away from the hostages when they were re-kidnapped by “another group who wanted to cash in on a reward”. How did Davies know this? He was told by Boko Haram! Since he never got to where the girls were kept, how did he know their number? And how did he come about the number of vehicles that conveyed them? Boko Haram had also told him! Thus, we have in Stephen Davis no more than a megaphone, a repeater station, regurgitating the hogwash force-fed him by his sponsors.  How is it credible that Davis, said to have a PhD in political geography, discussed journeys that ran into hours without mentioning the name of a single location, town or village; without reference to state boundaries and without discussing distances in terms of miles or kilometres? Critically examined, the quantum of his submission would be disgraceful even for someone whose highest academic qualification is the Ordinary National Diploma! It is embarrassing that Nigerians of the orthodox and social media have donned the “All Weather” toga. Any inanity thrown in their direction is greedily lapped up.
I personally am not sleepless about Davis’s other speculations. But, for two reasons, his accusation of General Ihejirika, deserves closer attention. One, Ihejirika is not a politician and, therefore, may not dabble in the doublespeak of, say, a Nasir el Rufia, the partisan politician who first splashed Stephen Davis’s ordure through cyberspace. Again, the charge of terrorist complicity against a former head of the Nigerian Army should elicit prompt reaction. Onyeabo Azubuike Ihejirika (58) is from Ovim in Isuikwuato Local Government Area of Abia State.
A member of the Nigerian Defence Academy’s 18th regular combatant course, he received his Army commission in 1977. Before his appointment as Army Chief in 2010, a position he held for three and a half years, he had been Chief of Defence Logistics at Defence Headquarters, former GOC of 81 Division in Lagos and former Director of Engineering at Defence Headquarters.
Boko Haram “triumphs” were at their lowest when Ihejirika ran things. He fought the terrorists with incisive military resolution, so much so that many northern politicians threatened to drag him to the International Human Rights Tribunal on “war crime” charges. To date, the threat has not been carried out, not even at the Maidugiri Magistrates Court. But it is obvious that a new attempt is on to calumniate General Ihejirika, and also distract attention from the efforts to identify and apprehend the real sponsors of terrorism. Of the 28 officers, both foreign and indigenous, that have headed the Nigerian Army, Ihejirika is only the second Igbo, the other being General Aguiyi-Ironsi, who was murdered in the counter-coup of July 1966. Detractors have found it impossible to live down Ihejirika’s attainment.
Please study critically this other quote from SaharaReporters: “Asked to explain why Mr. Ihejirika, a non-Muslim who hails from the predominantly Christian southeastern part of Nigeria, became a Boko Haram ‘sponsor’, Mr. Davis said, ‘Boko Haram commanders and some connected with them told me on several occasions Ihejirika was one of their sponsors.’” This is tendentious, to say the very least. Why should it be the word of “Boko Haram commanders and some connected with them” – arsonists, suicide bombers, rapists, terrorists – against the distinction and integrity of a Nigerian General? Because some Australian manufacturer of fairy tales said so?
The Stephen Davis story regarding General Ihejirika amounts to sawdust. Terrorists told him Ihejirika is one their sponsors. He did not ask in what ways the military brass sponsored them. He did not cite any evidence they showed him. I am scandalized. Truth is being made the central casualty of the war against Boko Haram. The Federal Government must not allow this. Its best option is to quickly separate the wheat from the chaff, identify the real sponsors of terrorism, the head of the serpent, and decapitate it.
Iloegbunam (iloegbunam@hotmail.com) is the author of Ironside, the biography of General Aguiyi-Ironsi.

Stephen Davis and the sponsors of Boko Haram