THE reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shootings has again exposed the hypocrisy of the international media, Western governments when it comes to dealing with issues that have far reaching consequences and also affect Africa.
It has also exposed as Africans that some of our leaders need to re-think their positions.
On January 7 2015, two Wahhabi Islamist gunmen forced their way into and opened fire in the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12, including staff cartoonists, economist Bernard Maris and two police officers, and wounding 11, four of them seriously.
During the attack, the gunmen shouted “Allahu akbar!” (God is great in Arabic) and also ‘the Prophet is avenged’.
To Sigolène Vinson, a female visitor to the offices, one of the attackers said “I’m not killing you because you are a woman and we don’t kill women, but you have to convert to Islam, read the Quran and wear a veil.” 
President François Hollande described it as a “terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity”. 
The two gunmen were identified as Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French Muslim brothers of Algerian descent.
In the aftermath of this ‘terrorist attack’ the French government granted nearly €1 million to support the magazine. 
The Digital Innovation Press Fund, partially funded by Google, donated €250 000 matching a donation by the French Press and Pluralism Fund.
The Guardian Media Group has pledged a donation of £100 000.
After the attacks, the phrase Je suis Charlie, French for ‘I am Charlie’, was adopted by supporters of free speech and freedom of expression who were reacting to the shootings as the attacks have been depicted as a way by fundamentalists of silencing critics.
The phrase identifies a speaker or supporter with those who were killed at the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and by extension, a supporter of freedom of speech and resistance to armed threats.
Some journalists have embraced the expression as a rallying cry for the freedom of self-expression.
Charlie Hebdo’s claim to fame is its negative depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
The newspaper has a history of attracting controversy, and was unsuccessfully sued in 2006 by Islamic organisations for having published the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. 
The cover of a 2011 issue, dubbed ‘Charia Hebdo’ (a pun on Islamic Sharia law), depicted a cartoon of the founder of Islam, Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden in some interpretations of Islam. 
The newspaper’s office, was fire-bombed and its website hacked.
In 2012, the newspaper published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammad, including nude caricatures; this came days after a series of violent attacks on US embassies in the Middle-East, purportedly in response to the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, prompting the French government to close embassies, consulates, cultural centres, and international schools in about 20 Muslim countries. 
Riot police surrounded the newspaper’s offices to protect it against possible attacks.
Religion has been a primary target of the magazine, and two years before the attack, Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Stéphane ‘Charb’ Charbonnier stated, “We have to carry on until Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism.” 
He was the editor-in-chief from 2009 until he was killed in the shooting.
In 2013, Al-Qaeda had added him to its most wanted list, along with three Jyllands-Posten staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose.
More than a million people joined over 40 presidents and prime ministers on the streets of Paris on Sunday January 11 2015, in the most striking show of solidarity in the West against the threat of Islamic extremism since the September 11 attacks.
French President Francois Hollande marched in Paris surrounded by more than 40 leaders including Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Gabonese President Ali Bongo.
Yes all these leaders came out in support of a newspaper that one could say fuelled hate, intolerance and definitely abused the right to freedom of speech to provoke Muslims.
As the world has been transfixed by the Charlie Hebdo killings and reactions, Nigerians continue to live with the ever present threat of Boko Haram.
Explosives strapped to a girl who appeared to be about 10 years old detonated on Saturday January 3 2015, killing at least 20 people, in a country whose encounters with terrorism were also punctuated by a hashtag “#BringBackOurGirls”.
Boko Haram militants killed as many as
2 000 people, mostly civilians, in a massacre that started the weekend before the terror attack on Charlie Hedbo.
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan was among leaders who condemned last week’s attack by Islamic extremists on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, yet his response to the slaughter of civilians by militants in his own country has been muted.
In fact, while President Jonathan issued a statement condemning the attack on Charlie Hebdo and expressing Nigeria’s ‘full solidarity’ with the people of France, he failed to do the same for the victims of terrorism in his own country.
President Jonathan is up for re-election next month and the atrocities committed by Boko Haram are the last thing he wants to address.
Some commentators criticised President Jonathan’s reticence about the violence in Nigeria’s Baga town, and the lack of a broader international outcry on par with the reaction to the attacks in France. 
Both the attacks in Nigeria and those in Paris are shocking and horrifying in their own respects, and yet one fomented an unprecedented international reaction.
Interestingly, commenting on developments in Nigeria and contrasting them to the global reaction to the France shooting and 9/11 attacks, John Campbell, the former US Ambassador to Nigeria, “Americans can directly relate to attacks on freedom of speech.
“They can directly relate to terrorism and the impact in France is being compared to the impact of 9/11 in the United States, Boko Haram by contrast is viewed as a kind of civil war … and it’s all happening a very long way away.”
Former House intelligence committee chairman, Mike Rogers has said that US officials believe that Boko Haram does not present as much of a threat to America as ISIS.
Without a sense of urgency or a direct threat, the American and European public are unlikely to react to attacks in Nigeria in the same way as they react to attacks in Paris.
Peter Pham, director of the Africa Centre at the Atlantic Council has summed it up in a statement when he says that Americans have grown numb to the level of violence throughout the African continent
“There’s a sense that ‘That’s Africa, bad things happen,” Pham explained.
“This is Paris, it’s a Western country.
“This shouldn’t happen.
“We’re conditioned by years of reports coming out of Africa to expect this type of thing in Africa.”
Boko Haram alone killed an estimated
10 000 people in 2014.