By Ahmed Dodo
SIR: The recent statement by former American envoy to Nigeria, John Campbell, that it is unlikely for Nigeria to get technical and financial support from the U.S. in its desperate effort to checkmate the prevalent insecurity situation in the country was to many Nigerians, a final proof to the suspicious long-held view about the reluctance of the West to effectively assist the country in its war against terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping.
Campbell echoed a deflated logic that U.S. laws strictly prohibit the American government from providing technical expertise to security forces accused of human rights violations – an illogical premise most western governments are timidly using as an excuse over the years, unconcerned as hundreds of Nigerian civilians are killed weekly.
While the U.S. might not have openly coerced the other western nations from assisting Nigeria, its foreign policy, and body language over the years lacks the coordinating prowess of being the self-acclaimed leader of the free world.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s recent appeal to the United States and the international community to support Nigeria and the sub-region in tackling growing security challenges to avoid spillovers, most unfortunately, has in no way encouraged the West to look into this proposal holistically; even though most African leaders and their people have long been suspicious of the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) which the Nigerian president appealed to the American Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to relocate from Stuttgart, Germany to Africa in a virtual meeting.
The verity that the West bears a share of responsibility for the insecurity and subsequent killings going on in Nigeria is glaring from their recent relaxed immigration policy to the country’s frustrated teeming youths, this with the offer of juicy scholarships and mouthwatering work wages, all in their effort to shore up their economy with energetic workforce thus flagrantly encouraging brain drain and capital flight from overwhelmed African nations.
While the west has continued to gain from the intellectual and the physical prowess of Nigerians in Diaspora, the logical thought of reciprocating their contribution through technical and intelligence supports to their besieged nation to effectively confront its insecurity challenges has rather been politicized and intentionally delayed.
A good example is the specious conditions imposed by the United States when the Nigerian government wanted to purchase 12 –A-29 Super Tucano fighter planes. These conditions include the 2020 late transfer date for the aircraft, the bigoted suggestion that Nigerian technicians will not be trained by U.S. staff, be part of maintenance crews, neither can they study the production of the planes. These prejudiced conditions were a result of concerns about the alleged human rights abuses by the Nigerian military; rather, experts see the conditions as a smokescreen to deny the sale of the planes to the Nigerian authority. The sale of the planes is still enmeshed in controversies and Nigerians are still waiting for their planes more than four years after.
Canada which has been at the forefront of encouraging youthful Nigerians to migrate over has not deemed it appropriate to deploy its intelligence to assist the Nigerian government in taming its insecurity challenges, neither has France kept its promise to assist Nigeria tackle insecurity in the Lake Chad basin. The recent promise by President Emmanuel Macron to the Nigerian president at a bilateral meeting in France has not changed the deadly onslaught of ISWAP and Boko Haram terrorists from the Lake Chad axis against the Nigerian military and the traumatized civilian population.
The British government meek responses to the insecurity problem and killings going on in one of its former colonies and its blunt refusal to make available its rich intelligence resources and vast technical expertise to tame the evil forces ravaging the oil-rich nation that has benefitted it for long is one of the utmost betrayals in bilateral relationship and foreign policy diplomacy.
The complicity of the western media led by U.S. corporate media has helped infused some of the deadly attacks in Nigeria and contributed to the current insecurity challenges. A clear case was how Twitter used its platform to instigate the destructive #EndSARS protests and its partisan support to secessionists in the country. The U.S. government has through its media long promoted the fuzzy idea that Nigeria is a failed state and predicted the breakup of the country within a time frame.
Kidnappers, terrorists, and bandits are still having a field day across Nigeria, daily maiming, killing, and kidnapping schoolchildren for ransom while the West as rightly echoed by John Campbell is still withholding their needed supports. Their action and policy rather appeared to be like vultures patiently waiting to scramble for the recolonization of the country and its people.
- Ahmed Dodo, Abuja.
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