The "international community" and ECOWAS are making unconvincing noises about using military force to dethrone Laurent Gbagbo and enthrone Alassane Ouattara. Nigeria is being pressured by the UN and the US to carry out the intervention on their behalf. The Goodluck Jonathan administration wants the dozen or so countries that call themselves "the international community" to quickly recognize their upcoming victory in the 2011 Nigerian elections, and is saying all the things the "international community" wants to hear.
Any "African" or "ECOWAS" military intervention in Cote d'Ivoire would be Nigerian in everything but name. We will be the ones providing most of the troops and doing all of the fighting, if fighting is required. The "international community" will promise finance, transport and logistics, but as our soldiers on duty in Darfur can tell you, there is a difference between what is promised and what is delivered.
Financially, politically, economically, diplomatically, strategically and morally, Nigeria really cannot afford a military intervention anywhere.
The question of which of Gbagbo or Ouattara or Bedie takes the Ivoirien presidency makes no difference to the strategic and regional interests of Nigeria. If you made a list of all the things the Ivorien government could do that would benefit joint Nigerian-Ivoirien and broader West African interests, you would have in effect have made a list of things Gbagbo, Ouattara and Bedie would never do and have never had any interest in doing. The suggestion of doing those things would cause those men to recoil in fear of Nigerian "domination"; they would then run to sell themselves and their country to France, the United States or China, depending on who offered them the best deal.
If you are morally, philosophically and ideologically committed to democracy in West Africa and Africa, well, you have nothing to gain from a Gbagbo, Ouattara or Bedie presidency. Gbagbo, like Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal, comes from the tradition of African politicians who start out leading the opposition to autocrats, only to become autocrats themselves when they finally get power. Ouattara and Bedie are scions of the Houphouet-Boigny autocracy. All three believe in rigging elections, and much like Nigerian politicians, all three rigged in the districts and regions where their machines already controlled.
If you are a modernist who wants Africa to move away from the failed politics of the past, well, you are looking at three dinosaurs left over from the Era of the Big Man. Decades after each man stepped into the political limelight, they have no new ideas or new inspiration; the chaos and instability their contest has brought to the Cote d'Ivoire is very, very old-school, much like the protagonists.
Installing one of the three as president would not make Cote d'Ivoire stable.
There are currently two large armies in the country, each occupying about half the land. One of these armies is the official government army, but in reality both of the armies are privately-owned militias loyal to specific political camps. The New Forces will never swear allegiance to President Gbagbo, and the official government army will never willingly serve a President Ouattara. Any plan to integrate the armies will be resisted by whoever eventually occupies the presidential mansion; if he mixed "enemy" soldiers with his own, and gave them the same access his soldiers have, he would feel himself surrounded at any moment by half-an-integrated-armies' worth of soldiers who would take the first opportunity to mount a coup-de-tat (and/or assassination going by the fate of former President Robert Guei).
Gbagbo, Ouattara and Bedie are the problem. The solution does not lie within them.
But forget that for a second. All of the above are just polemics.
The real issue is this.
Lets start from Nigeria. The internal security situation of our federal republic is ambiguous at the moment. And that is a deliberate understatement.
Some people will say we cannot "avoid our responsibilities" just because we have serious internal problems.
That kind of misses the point, but lets assume they are right.
Fine. Okay. You want to intervene in the politics of neighbouring countries in the interest of stability, even if we have problems of our own? Okay. No qualms.
Why don't we start with Niger Republic and Chad? Over the decades we have paid a political, economic, public safety and strategic price for living with persistent insecurity and instability in our two geographically vast northern neighbours. Our inability to positively influence events there exposes the lie of our claim to be "Giants of Africa".
To our south, apart from our inability to stop oil bunkering, there is the spectre of Equatorial Guinea in the ultra-strategic Gulf of Guinea. You want to promote democracy? This country competes with Eritrea for the title "Africa's North Korea". Before crude oil, it was a refugee camp masquerading as a country; with crude oil, well, think if North Korea discovered crude oil and the ruling family dynasty there pocketed all the money.
You want to unseat a dictator? Paul Biya is next door. In a different universe, the Democratic Republic of Congo would have been our biggest trading partner by volume, but Cameroun would have been integrated into a joint, shared economy that covered both our countries as well as every other country in the broader neighbourhood.
I am NOT saying we should intervene in Cameroun or anywhere else. In case you have not gleaned the fact by now, I am not a supporter of intervening in places, least of all when you haven't a clue what you are doing or why you are doing it.
It is nevertheless mind-boggling that we ignore problems at home and close to home in favour of ill-thought-out adventures in Cote d'Ivoire and Darfur. The weird thing is we would be in a better position to influence events in Cote d'Ivoire and Sudan if we fixed problems closer to home; we might even be able to rely on newly stable neighbours to assist us in any so-called intervention, rather than having to carry the whole load alone as usual.
Why prioritize the "international community's" interests and ignore our own? If the "international community" are so gung-ho on military intervention in Africa, I could make a long list of countries that need it far more than Cote d'Ivoire does ... starting with Equatorial Guinea. Oddly, the "international community" is good friends with the Equatotoguinean dictatorship. In fact, if Nigeria were to intervene in Equatorial Guinea, their reaction would be somewhat similar to their reaction to Iraq invading Kuwait.
I suppose if they want to militarily intervene in Cote d'Ivoire using their own troops, Nigeria is hardly in a position to stop them, but why should we use our troops to enforce their strategic aims. But if you tasked me with coming up with a solution to the Ivoirien crisis, we could talk about different ideas excluding outside military intervention.
As I said earlier, we are dealing with two large armies; the official government army has ballooned from a negligible size during Houphouet's autocracy to become the second-largest in West Africa behind Nigeria and the New Forces are at least large enough to balance the official government army. Both armies have access to mercenaries from neighbouring countries. One wonders where the armies are getting their munitions; such materiel is not manufactured in commercial quantities anywhere in West Africa.
I do not see anyone trying to use a military intervention to resolve the problem in Cyprus. Don't misunderstand me. I would hate to see Cote d'Ivoire remain divided for as long as Cyprus. That said, sometimes when you have let the situation get away from you, you have to take a step back as opposed to escalating a situation you already have no control over.
Maybe, just maybe, if the Cote d'Ivoire stabilizes along the lines of Cyprus we can create enough time and political space for new unionist political movements/parties/forces to rise on both sides of the divide. There is a desperate need for a pan-Ivoirien political movement on both sides of the line, movements that could eventually bring the two halves back together, as the West German and East German wings of the CDU did in Germany. Since there are no superpowers with vested interests in keeping Cote d'Ivoire separate, we should have long to wait. Unfortunately I do not think unity is possible so long as Gbagbo, Ouattara and Bedie are still politically relevant.
Actually, if the south and north can install temporary technocratic representation that sidelines Gbagbo and Ouattara, Nigeria and ECOWAS should take the position of neutral arbiters providing the umbrella for a timetable for the reestablishment of unity. Cote d'Ivoire may have to become a semi-federal ten-province republic, or adopt some other constitutional reforms that address fundamental questions.
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