Jonathan counters former UK PM Cameron: You didn’t offer help on Chibok girls

 

Former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan said claims by former UK Prime Minister David Cameron that his government rejected help to rescue the abducted Chibok girls were untrue.

“He (Cameron) never called me on the phone to offer any help,” Jonathan said in a statement.

“On the contrary, I am the one that reached out to him.”

Cameron, in his new book, For the Record accused Jonathan and his administration of corruption and rejecting the help of the British Government in rescuing the Chibok girls, who were kidnapped on April 14, 2014.

The former Nigeria president said Cameron’s allegations were far from truth. He said his government had requested help from the UK, US, Israel and France.

Jonathan, Nigeria’s president from, 2009 till 2015, said he could not have “appeal for help and then reject the very thing I appealed for”.

He said that history contradicts Cameron because the same Boko Haram linked terrorists abducted a British expatriate named Chris McManus, along with an Italian hostage Franco Lamolinara, in Sokoto on March 8, 2012 and he authorised a rescue effort by members of the British military Special Boat Service supported by officers and men of the Nigerian Army.

The former Nigeria president opined that Cameron failed to mention that he wrote him requesting his help on the adopted Chibok girls.

Jonathan questioned why Cameron suppressed that information, noting “that copies of that letter exist at the State Houses in Nigeria and London.”

In the book, Cameron also accused Jonathan of appointing security chiefs based on political considerations.

Jonathan, however, refuted the claims.

Jonathan said he fired the county’s service chiefs twice in five years, to show his intolerance to anything less than meaningful progress in the war on terror.

“I was completely blind to ethnic or political considerations in my appointments,” Jonathan said.

The former president said his government appointed people he never met based on their professional pedigree.

Jonathan accused Cameron of keeping grudges against him because he did not pass legislation supporting same sex marriage in Nigeria.

“I came under almost unbearable pressure from the Cameron,” Jonathan said. “I swore on the Bible to advance Nigeria’s interests, and not the interest of the United Kingdom or any foreign power.”

Jonathan signed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill into law on Monday, January 13, 2014.

He said Cameron thereafter reached him “through envoys, and made subtle and not so subtle threats against me and my government.”

On the issue of corruption, Jonathan said “Nigeria made her best ever improvement on the annual Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, moving from 144 the previous year, to 136, an 8 point improvement. As a nation, we have not made such improvements on the CPI before or after 2014.”