Our soldiers have been on "peacekeeping" duty in Darfur for years now, and apparently there are still Nigerian "peacekeepers" in Liberia almost a quarter of a century since we first intervened. The Nigerian government has sent or will soon be sending Nigerian police officers to Mogadishu to "train" the Somali police. Nigerian soldiers are being sent to Guinea-Bissau as part of an ECOWAS force. There is much talk of deploying Nigerian soldiers as part of an ECOWAS force that will be sent to Mali. There are (or were) Nigerian soldiers and police officers deployed to Haiti (I found out when I read the news of one of them being killed there).
I don't know if Nigerian soldiers are posted to other locations, because there is very little public discussion of where it is we are sending our soldiers, why it is we are sending them, what it is that we expect them to do once they get there, how they are supposed to do what we expect, and (most importantly) whether any of it makes any sense, both in terms of the official mission goals and in terms of our own strategic interests.
We have court-martialed soldiers who served with ECOMOG for protesting that their peacekeeping pay was being stolen by their senior officers (life sentences for 27 protesting soldiers were commuted to 7 years imprisonment). We have court-martialed wounded former ECOMOG soldiers for protesting at their abandonment at Egyptian hospitals. And Nigerian soldiers have died in Somalia, Haiti, Darfur, Liberia and Sierra Leone. We really ought to do better for our troops.
Peacekeeping, as a concept, enjoys the support of most of the world's politicians, diplomats, pundits, bureaucrats, journalists, etc., and as such enjoys excellent public relations. No one would ever dare to publicly question whether peacekeeping missions actually succeed at what it is the proponents say peacekeeping does. When missions end, there is a tendency to declare whatever is left behind to be a success (something which happens with wars too), and then to stop talking aloud about the country in question -- especially when the country in question starts to go down a path that makes you wonder what the point of the peacekeeping was (or whether the mission ended because people got bored, or ran out of money, and not because something substantial had changed).
Before you get on my case, this blog post is not about "peacekeeping" per se.
I do have to say that I wonder about the fact that we Nigerians pride ourselves (for example) on participating in peacekeeping operations in the Congo/Zaire in the 1960s, and on the fact that the late General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi commanded that peacekeeping operation. In my opinion, that mission was a fig leaf behind which the charismatic and courageous Patrice Lumumba was murdered by his foreign and local enemies, who then replaced him with the kleptocratic, nation-destroying Mobutu Sese Seko. In other words, I fear we helped perpetuate the two-century-long and on-going destructive exploitation of the Congo.
This is how I think. Call me crazy if you want, but again, this blog post is not about peacekeeping per se.
During the ECOMOG wars, we used to ask ourselves: "Why is Nigeria fighting to bring democracy to other countries when there is no democracy in Nigeria?"
Today, you can ask the question: "Why is Nigeria fighting to bring security and stability to other countries when security and stability are at risk in Nigeria?"
It isn't as simple as demanding that our security forces focus on providing security at home. You see, even if you are someone who believes in external interventions, you have to ask a very, very pointed question: "Why are we ignoring Niger Republic and the Republic of Chad, but are sending soldiers to Mali, Darfur and Somalia?"
There are certain countries in the world who like to refer to themselves as "the international community", and who like to act like decisions they make among themselves are the decisions of the whole world. It seems to me that Nigeria's polices on peacekeeping are driven primarily by what the "international community" thinks is important to the "international community" and not by what is important to Nigeria.
There are reasons why Mali and Somalia make the "international community" nervous, and Darfur became something of a cause celebre among "international" journalists as well as among Hollywood stars. These places get talked about a lot in multilateral agencies, in diplomatic circles, and on the 24-hour "global" news cycle. Nigerian and African leaders want to be seen as "world leaders" hobnobbing with the leaders of the "international community", standing "shoulder to shoulder" to face "the world's problems".
Did you know that Northwestern and Northeastern Nigeria are currently suffering from wide-scale starvation? I am going to post about that next, but what I want to say here and now is that the Nigerian government is doing exactly NOTHING to help the Nigerian citizens in the Northwest and Northeast. Do you know why they are doing nothing? Because nobody is talking about it in the "global" news, and it isn't a topic at multilateral agencies and diplomatic circles, and think tanks in the countries of the "international community" are not producing papers about it.
Indeed, Nigeria had neither a presence nor influence in terms of the substantive responses to the crises in the Cote d'Ivoire, and area of immense strategic importance to us, because the "international community" did not desire us to be there (being as Cote d'Ivoire is an overseas department of a key member of the "international community").
And the Nigerian government has taken an extremely disinterested, laissez faire, approach to the absolute tyranny to our south in Equatorial Guinea. Back in the 1980s, Nigeria had to bribe the Nguema Clan to drop their plans to offer their country to the Apartheid government in South Africa for the construction of a forward air base. But more important than that, countries like Equatorial Guinea, and governments like the one led by the Nguema Clan, are part of the reason our continent keeps having these crises, and are (just as importantly) part of the reason why the continent's ability to react to crises is limited. We can't rely on Equatorial Guinea to help do things in Africa that they have been trying to avoid ever happening in their own country; indeed, if the number of African countries with "good" governments increased, then the number of countries that would want to see the end of the Nguema Clan's rule would by definition have increased by the same amount.
But Nigeria does nothing about it. Partly because Nigeria's leaders are also keen to maintain the current state of African governance -- like the Nguema Clan, they too fear an Africa of "good" government. But the other reason Nigeria does nothing about Equatorial Guinea is the government of Equatorial Guinea is a vital, strategic partner of the "international community", so there is no pressure from them on Nigeria to contribute troops to an Equatorial Guinea intervention force.
You may not recognize President Teodoro Obiang Nguema standing next to the smiling President Barrack Obama in a 2009 photograph. You also may not know that the Nguema Clan lead the worst dictatorship in Africa; Equatorial Guinea is an African version of North Korea, right down to the pseudo-monarchic rule of one family. Except unlike North Korea, Equatorial Guinea has crude oil, and the Nguema Clan have sided with the USA (rather than China) in the race for African resources. C'est la vie.
But I digress ..
We've got to start thinking about our continent and our planet from our own perspective. We've got to think through problems as they actually are, and not approach fundamental issues based on whatever is the flavour of the moment on the 24-hour "global" news channels, and in the halls of multilateral agencies and state houses of the "international community"
The fundamental nature of Niger Republic and the Republic of Chad is such that they both constitute a hindrance to any serious efforts to make peace, safety and security permanent in the north of our Federal Republic. We cannot solve our problems without solving their problems, and their problems are long-standing. We have known about their problems (and our interlinked problems) forever, but we have been of no use to them (or to ourselves) in terms of solving the problems. We ignore our own problems, and apply the same disregard to their problems.
Look, the things I wish for Nigeria are the same things I wish for every country in the world. But even if we "succeeded" (whatever that means) in Darfur or Mali, we would not have succeeded at all because the wider Sahel Region would still lack any kind of anchor to peace, prosperity, growth and stability. Indeed, what would be the point of success in Darfur, when the Darfur Region is surrounded by Libya, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan and the Central African Republic? Any "success" there would be fleeting, and to be honest, there has been no success so far, and there is unlikely to be any success, so it is a moot point, apart from the fact that our soldiers have been dying there.
I don't understand how our leaders think. If you were sitting in Abuja, thinking about the best thing you could do, from Abuja, to improve the security and prosperity of Nigeria and of the entire African continent, why exactly would you do any of the things our government chooses to do. Do we really think that this is where our scarce resources would be the most effective in tackling the issue? Indeed, while I wish for Somalia everything that I wish for Nigeria, why would participation in a Horn of African intervention be high on your list? And why do we continually commit troops to missions that we neither fund nor control? Why do we assume the decisions made by outside powers on how to react to African issues are the best choices? And why do we trust that promised funds and equipment will be forthcoming, no matter how many times we learn otherwise?
Nigeria's strategic interests in Africa are actually quite simple. One could bore you with a long, verbose exposition, but the simple phrase "Peace and Prosperity" sums it up nicely. We need our neighbours to be peaceful. We need our neighbours to be prosperous. Heck, we could do with some peace and prosperity ourselves. But this paradigm we have committed ourselves to is not working, is it?
If anything, interventions have a way of leading to outcomes that were not intended by those who championed, approved of, and ordered the interventions. When retired General Ibrahim Babangida made the decision to initiate the ECOMOG operation (for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery), I am quite sure he never anticipated Nigeria would get drawn into two full-fledged wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Nigerian government has never revealed the truth about casualties, or about the massive expenditure required to sustain our war effort for as long as we did.
And I am sure Babangida didn't expect we would still have soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone 20 years later.
Heck, if we take it all the way back to the beginning of our participation in such mission, I am quite sure the First Republic government did not intend to help provide cover for Lumumba's assassination when they decided to commit Nigerian troops to the mission.
I am afraid that the current federal administration will sleep-walk Nigeria into another long-term war, this time in Mali, and with greater casualties than the last time. And leaving aside the question of whether this is or is not the right thing to do (by the way, I don't think it is the right thing to do) there is no guarantee that the "international community" countries that want us to fight this war will provide any materiel or funding.
One thing I have learned from ECOMOG is there is a limit to the number of Nigerian soldiers we can forward-deploy to participate in a war. The maximum number was insufficient to do more than hold Monrovia, and when the defence of Freetown became vital (after Taylor outflanked us by expanding the war to Freetown), we had to participate in a charade in order to pull our troops out of Monrovia to go and hold Freetown.
By "charade", I mean the Liberian Presidential "Election" won by Charles Taylor. The small group of countries that call themselves the "international community" were uncomfortable with Nigeria's Abacha-era ECOMOG presence in Liberia; they paid for the elections and were quick to hail the polls as a successful conclusion of the Liberian Civil War. The Nigerian government played along with this because it allowed us to declare "victory" and move our forward-deployed troops to Freetown. Liberia was still prone to the same disaster the "elections" had supposedly forestalled. That both the Nigerian government and the "international community" knew that Taylor was behind the war in Sierra Leone, and that he was indirectly killing thousands of Sierra Leonians, and an unknown number of Nigerian soldiers. Yet, everyone played along with the farce that Taylor was a president and the elections were a success (which is a reminder of why we should look very carefully at the "victories" declared in wars and other interventions, including "peacekeeping").
Permit me to digress and say that Taylor's ability to make war in Liberia and Sierra Leone was linked to his support in certain neighbouring ECOWAS member countries, and to his ability to trade with countries in Europe. The two wars only started going against Taylor when a new government came to power in his most powerful regional rival, and when talk of "blood diamonds" shamed his trading partners outside Africa into cutting their trade with him. While our soldiers were dying at the hands of Taylor's army as well as his proxy army, we did little or nothing to interdict his sources of support. As students, we were all familiar with the statement "plus one minus one equals zero". The great problem with ECOMOG is we were committing plus-X to the fight, while doing nothing about the circumstances that allowed Charles Taylor the freedom to respond with minus-X, thus creating a long stalemate.
This is the problem with Darfur, and will be the problem with Mali.
There are only so many soldiers Nigeria can forward-deploy beyond our borders. The number is insufficient to pacify Darfur, even if we committed it entirely to Darfur. Because Darfur is surrounded by Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic, places where Nigeria has zero influence, we are unable to do anything about the things that fuel the conflict in Darfur. Adding Mali to the mix just adds another straw to the back of a camel that has already set down most of its existing load due to lack of capacity.
The things I wish for Nigeria are the same things I wish for all our neighbours in Africa. But the things the Nigerian government keeps involving itself with lead to the loss of Nigerian soldiers' lives, without in anyway achieving the creation of the peaceful and prosperous Africa we need. It didn't happen in the Congo/Zaire in the 1960s and it hasn't been happening since then. The "international community" doesn't credit us with participating in winning World War Two, and doesn't seem to acknowledge that we lost a lot of soldiers during our participation in the Somalia intervention from which the term "Blackhawk Down" was derived. On behalf of the families of the soldiers we lost in Somalia, I must ask, what was the point of that intervention? What did it achieve? Was it worth their lives?
People will say that I should not let the "great" be the enemy of the "good", that the imperfection of these interventions shouldn't be a reason to "abandon" the people of these countries....
.... but you know what? A lot of the things that are done in the international sphere seem to be part and parcel of what creates the problems in the first place. And when asked to participate in and interventions, it is almost like we are being asked to restore the situation back to what it was, even though what it was is what gave rise to the crisis in the first place. Everyone has heard the adage about people not learning from history being doomed to repeat it? It seems to me that our soldiers are being sent to warfronts in order to initiate the repetition of history.
In short, to say we are doing the "good" because we can't do the "great" is to assume that "good" is being done. Yes, I know the wars come to an end, but do the wars really end any sooner than they would have if there had been no intervention? In spite of thousands of peacekeeping soldiers, the Great Lakes are still afire, and Sudan (North, South and Darfur) are not at peace. It was more than a decade after the ECOMOG intervention before the Liberian and Sierra Leonian wars petered out (and no, it was not the United Kingdom that ended the wars, contrary to wat you might have heard).
Besides, I am not saying Nigeria should do nothing. I am saying that what we are currently doing is not what we should be doing, and that we are focused too far afield when the first priority must be Niger Republic and the Republic of Chad (but only in concert with efforts to bring the same measure of peace and stability to every region of Nigeria, not just the North, but every part of the country).
We start from there. Whatever else we do after that, we must start from there.
I cannot stop our government from deploying our soldiers and policemen. I am just asking that we debate and discuss each deployment before approving it.
Even if you entirely disagree with everything I have written, surely you agree that we should discuss these deployments a lot more than we do?
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