Tag: NIC

In 2005, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which is described as “The center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking within the United States Intelligence Community (IC)”, published a report of a one-day conference it convened to look at the future of sub-Saharan Africa. The conference examined a 15-year trend in the region and concluded that for Nigeria, any major event could upset its “precarious equilibrium.” The report did not rule out disintegration. Consequent upon the NIC report, the US military conducted a war game exercise in 2008 and also examined what should be the response of the US military should anarchy overtake Nigeria. There was no definitive prediction of a Nigerian break-up, nor any attribution of the predictions to the US government, but none of the studies undertaken by the US bodies ruled out that possibility. Indeed, in view of the security challenges facing Nigeria since 2009, and the country’s increasing fragility, it would require extreme optimism to rule out that frightful worst-case scenario.

But that is precisely what Nigeria’s rulers have done. Rather than dispassionately examine the damning reports on Nigeria, especially the parameters used to arrive at the frightening conclusions on the country’s stability and cohesion, the rulers have dismissed the study, especially since it emerged it was not a US government study — as if it mattered by whom the studies were produced. Surely it has not been forgotten that in 1991, there was hardly anyone, intellectual or soothsayer, within or outside the US government, who predicted that the Soviet Union would disintegrate that year. Underscoring that universal ignorance, a US international relations expert, George Kennan, confessed that he found it “hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.” Everyone, including leading members of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s government described the Soviet collapse as “unexpected.”

But Nigerians are enamoured of superstition and are fanatical about religion. Yet, irrespective of their private longings, revolutions are an integral part of history, happen periodically, and are often unpredictable. The spectacular and constantly irredeemable act of leadership malfeasance in Nigeria in fact makes the country more susceptible to fragmentation than any study anywhere has predicted. The absence of social, economic and criminal justice is enduring. The federal and state governments have repeatedly and callously undermined the constitution, abridged rights, promoted tyranny, exploited religious, ethnic and political cleavages, and hoped that by a strange alchemy they could deploy religious faith and conviction to dissipate the spectre of disintegration. They seem to think they are immune to the centrifugal tendencies, (especially the fashionable sectarian adventurism promoted by the Islamic State), overwhelming and inspiring fanatical elements in parts of the world such as Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Nigeria.

Nothing makes the danger of destabilisation and fragmentation more pressing for Nigeria than the continuing threat posed by the Boko Haram Islamist sect, which has just declared a caliphate in Gwoza, Borno State, and seems set to heighten its territorial affront in the face of shambolic and feeble military response. And nothing exemplifies that feebleness than the strange and dramatic manner 480 Nigerian soldiers found their way into Cameroon last week after a particularly gruelling encounter with Boko Haram militants. Some analysts have described the movement of the 480 troops, almost a battalion strength, as desertion, the worst disgrace Nigeria has ever faced in its 54-year chequered history. On their own, however, military officers, presuming Nigerians to be incoherent, have described the embarrassment incredulously as either tactical manoeuvre or tactical retreat.

Before the Soviet Empire and its accompanying Warsaw Pact alliance disintegrated, they did not face the kind of countdown Nigeria is confronting, a countdown where soldiers are reluctant to fight, their wives are protesting against the deployment of their husbands, and the national spirit is either inexistent or is substantially distorted. There have been one or two attempts at mutiny in barracks in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, with military authorities blackmailing the discerning public into desisting from commenting on the collapse at war fronts. It will be recalled that Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State was the first to raise the alarm that Nigerian troops were unwilling to fight because of poor motivation and inferior weapons. He was pilloried for his outspokenness, until soldiers themselves began to complain openly of being poorly armed, and their wives joined in the unprecedented revolt, never before seen in these parts.

That the country is badly and incompetently administered is no longer in doubt. What is in dispute is the continuing promotion of the nonsensical viewpoint that Boko Haram is the creation of anti-Jonathan elements, a viewpoint championed by ruffians in the South-South and strangely and stupidly endorsed by elements in the Southwest. This viewpoint has in turn triggered the divisive demonisation of the North as a wholesale champion of Boko Haram, even though the sect was birthed during the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner, and acquired its terrifying streak under the presidency of the late Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner. It apparently suits the Goodluck Jonathan presidency that that abhorrent viewpoint is promoted and reinforced by dangerous and malevolent reiteration. This was perhaps why the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State, was politicised not by the opposition, but by the Jonathan government, which first doubted the abductions, and has approached the matter since then with undisguised, shameless and enervating impotence.

Sadly, the government’s appalling strategy is anchored essentially on one leg: to defeat the insurgency militarily, a feat now looking increasingly complicated and far-fetched, and provoke the country with its disjointed and disfiguring triumphalism. As far as the complex factors that have engendered Boko Haram are concerned, such as injustice, economic deprivation, subversion of the constitution, political suppression and oppression, divisive use of religion and ethnicity, nothing has been done, and nothing is planned. Indeed, the abhorrent sub-plot of the Boko Haram insurgency, which is to use it for electoral ends, is nearly so complete that the Jonathan re-election team brutally hangs their campaign on blaming and demonising others — the opposition and the North especially — for its incompetence and impotence in forging a way out of the national morass. The consequence is that instead of the unity needed to direct the fight against the common foe, the country is more divided than ever, fighting one another, promoting fissiparous tendency even in the military, fostering ethnic and political resentment, while Dr Jonathan’s government continues to harvest the sympathy of some of the geopolitical zones which have concluded that Dr Jonathan is in fact being persecuted by northern oligarchs and a complicit faction of the Southwest elite.

It is not clear why the Jonathan presidency is unable to rise up imaginatively to  both the insurgency in particular and the disequilibrium in the polity in general, or whether he in fact truly desires to challenge and defeat the insurgency and other problems plaguing the country. But I think Dr Jonathan’s government is widely despised for its lack of discipline and its poor intellectual endowment. It is unable to situate the Boko Haram problem in the global Jihadist context, let alone in the less complex domestic context, and is reluctant to appreciate that the sect needs to be examined closely to discover why and how it continues to grow in strength, why it is attractive to all manner of adventurers, why the army seems out of tune with reality, and why his political methods have discouraged and alienated a large swathe of the country. Worse, I fear that Dr Jonathan is not even interested in mustering the huge responsibility needed to understand and solve these problems. He believes that his method of shifting the blame for the insurgency on the opposition and the North will yield him votes, and his tactics of plundering the constitution for provisions and sundry authorisation to sustain and promote the acts of repression will strengthen his hands. He is not tempted to change, and perhaps, as galling as this may sound, may never change even as the country plummets to its most terrifying nadir ever.