Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan was quick to condemn last week's deadly Islamist assault on a Paris magazine, branding it a ''dastardly terrorist attack'', but he has been strangely quiet about the insurgency raging in his own back yard.
Hours after his pronouncement on the Charlie Hebdo outrage, it emerged that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Nigerians had been killed by Boko Haram extremists in the northeastern town of Baga after they overran a military garrison under the control of multinational African forces.
Bloomberg news agency reports that one of the president's spokesmen posted a tweet on Saturday questioning the death toll. Another failed to respond to inquiries yesterday.
The backstory is important: Jonathan seems loath, ahead of next month's election, to dwell on the biggest failure of his administration - its inability to protect the people.
In fact, he had precious little to say for the whole of last year, as Boko Haram, which is determined to establish a caliphate in Nigeria's northeast, bombed, blew up and stabbed to death thousands of people.
He took no less than three weeks to find his voice when the extremists kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok village in April last year.
World leaders, civic rights agencies and the international media had no such qualms and a massive social media campaign - #BringBack OurGirls - was launched. Despite all the attention, and the repeated pledges by Jonathan's generals to rescue the girls, they have still not been found.
This episode, and the fact that Boko Haram appears to be running rings around the Nigerian army, reflects poorly on Jonathan. At the weekend the military finally called for international assistance against Boko Haram.
The world would do well to heed this call. The insurgents pose a grave threat to Africa's most populous nation, and to us all.
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