Nonsense Comes Calling Next Door

ENGAGEMENTS by Chidi Amuta

Nigeria’s   immediate  past  president, Muhammad Bukhara, has a tragic sense of humor. His unrelenting indifference to the condition of the humanity of his compatriots often came out in the things he decided to make important or ignore. One of them is his kinship attachment to Niger Republic. In the dying days of his presidency, he seized every opportunity to underline his difficulty in presiding over fellow Nigerians towards who he had an unmistakably condescending attitude.  He either saw us as a bit more difficult to handle than the cattle in his Dura ranch.

At other times, he bragged that his retirement would be more peaceful in Niger Republic than in riotous Nigeria. His preference for Niger Republic was not just a passing fancy or the butt of casual jokes. It was grounded in real attachment backed by dollars. He spent billions of dollars of Nigerian money to fund development projects like rail lines, oil pipelines, refineries etc. in Niger Republic. He even gifted a fleet of luxury SUVs to the government over there, insisting that sometimes we need to love our neighbors more than ourselves if possible.

No one knows what will happen to Bukhara’s nostalgic longings for Niger now that his fellow  soldiers have sacked his kinsman, president Bayou. In what has graduated into a full -scale military coup, the Nigerien military has arrested and put away the president, sacked the government, suspended the constitution and nullified all functions of the democratic state. The two-year old democratic government that enabled the government has therefore been replaced by a military dictatorship. The television footages that have featured the rebellious soldiers does not indicate a group that is likely to hurry off from power no matter what the rest of the world says. In fact, after announcing the new leader as a certain General Abdourahmane Tchiani, former Brigade of Presidential Guards commander who had obviously been eyeing his former boss’s lavish privileges. Bukhara is now left with pleading for the physical safety of his toppled kinsman. For now, no one can say what these rapacious soldiers will do if militarily challenged by the international community.

The military putsch in Niger is part of an apparent script that has been travelling all over the West African Sahel in recent times. Similar coups have occurred recently and in rapid succession in Mali, Guinea, Chad, Burkina Faso and, to some extent, Sudan where the clashing ambitions of rival generals and warlords has burst into an open civil war. Nearly all these regressions into autocratic rule are united by certain common factors.

The threat of jihadist terrorism and insurgency in the northernmost parts have created greater insecurity in all these countries. The national armies  have been overwhelmed by jihadist insurgents and fighters. Climate change in the Sahel at large has created more desperate hunger,  poverty and general economic distress in these agriculturally dependent countries. Economic pressure has translated into widespread unrest and urban protests. Protests have graduated into political unrest and dissatisfaction, making partisan democracy and its slovenly rituals untenable and unpopular. The existence of military establishments of ambitious and politicized officers has accelerated the recourse to coups.

The French who used to be the stabilizing influence and force all over French speaking West Africa have in recent times become unpopular and gone into a retreat mode  given the political and economic burden of colonial era influence peddling.  The domestic social and economic situation in France have since made colonial era indulgences rather expensive and untenable. The security  and economic vacuum has in many places been filled by the presence of Russian influence through the Wagner Group private military company which serves as the Kremlin’s external affairs enforcer and buccaneer business frontier force.

Taken together, these factors have combined to suddenly convert the West African region into the world’s next frontier of  global confrontations and strategic instability. The development in Niger Republic has even more added significance.  While the instability raged in the rest of French speaking West Africa, Niger  served as the last outpost of residual Western influence and some stability in an area of trouble. The retreating French forces still have outposts with an estimated 1,500 troops stationed in Niger Republic. The United States AFRICOM African outreach force has a little over 1000 troops stationed in Niger.

In addition, the US has a drone base in Niger as well as  strategic air defense  installations in that country to overlook the troubles in the rest of the Sahel and also Nigeria which, for political reasons, cannot host direct Western military presence. This reporter is aware  that the US outposts in Niger serve as critical intel feeds to the Nigerian security forces in their anti terrorism  drive. It also serves the Joint Task Force of Niger, Chad, Cameroun and Nigeria with tangential extension to Benin Republic.  At the level of political values, the two -year old democratic government of Mr. Bayou represents, even if symbolically, the promise of democracy in an area directly confronted by Islamic jihadist terrorists and widespread fundamentalist rascality.

With the coup in Niger Republic, Nigeria is precariously exposed to the real forces of strategic instability in the region. Niger is our immediate northern neighbor with direct extensive land borders with Katsina and Zamfara states. Similarly, Chad, our neighbor to the troubled North East  zone of Borno and Yobe states, is under a military dictatorship after the battlefield  assassination of former president Idris Derby.

These two neighbours now under military dictatorship share borders with Nigeria in an area of clear and present insecurity. Zamfara state has literally been an ungoverned space with bandits traversing freely and operating in defiance of the elected former governor. They exert tributes, impose and collect levies from locals in return for permits to carry out farming activities. A cocktail of foreign rogue miners, official security personnel, local chieftains and bandit enforcers mostly with arms and personnel from across the porous borders make the state a hell hole of insecurity. Scouts of the Wagner Group have reportedly scoped the area for openings while earlier  sending in feelers to the National Assembly in Abuja for an open invitation for mercenary intervention in Nigeria’s counter terrorism crusade. The same situation applies to Chad from where Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists have tormented many local governments  in Borno and Yobe States respectively while making frantic incursions into ungoverned spaces in the border areas linking Cameroun, Nigeria and Chad.

From a national security viewpoint, therefore, Nigeria’s northern frontiers  are seriously compromised. The façade of democratic continuum between Nigeria, Chad and Niger that used to dress up an umbrella of common interest and shared security  has been fatally altered and punctured. Nigeria’s bulwark of regional security  has shifted southwards to the expanded corridor stretching from Cameroun in the East  to Benin Republic and Togo in the West. Together with these countries and the Atlantic seaboard covering the strategic Gulf of Guinea stretch, the stability of Nigeria and its survival as democracy and free market now depends.  This security stretch can only survive through a strengthening of ties with key Western allies. For the avoidance of doubts, Chinese economic and strategic interest in Equatorial Guinea is real as evidenced in the recent commissioning of a major Chinese navel facility in that country. Similarly, Russian influence and interest through the Wagner Group of mercenaries all over West Africa is now self- evident. .

There is therefore a real, credible and urgent national security threat to Nigeria in the developing picture. The presence of military dictatorships sharing common borders with us towards a troubled northern zone is a threat not just to our internal security but also to our democracy since influences travel easily across borders. The challenge for Nigeria in my view is both diplomatic and strategic in a national defense and security sense. Nigeria cannot expect its foreign relations and regional security posture to remain the same as before. 

The global power context of West Africa is changing rapidly. The virtual departure of the French as a security stabilization partner and economic force in the region is a tectonic shift. The increasing shift of US security interest from the Middle East is important for the war against terrorism even in the Sahel. The more secure the US homeland becomes against terrorists attacks, its interests in global anti terrorist war will wane. How we handle the jihadist onslaught, the influence of Russia and the spread of military dictatorships around us should be the preoccupation of Nigeria’s foreign policy in the years ahead.

The coup in Niger Republic in particular indicates a tragic failure of intelligence and foreign policy strategic thinking on Nigeria’s part. You cannot claim to be a great regional power if you are incapable of influencing developments in your immediate neighbourhood. Nigeria ought to be in a position to  influence political and security developments in Niger, Chad and Benin. Given our sporadic border disquiet with Cameroun, we ought to be actively interested in political developments in that country as well. But tragically, Mr. Bukhara presided over Nigeria for eight years without a sentence being uttered by Abuja on Nigeria’s new foreign policy challenges let alone any indication of a strategy for engagement with neighbours on the most elementary international developments like climate change or cross border refugee movements.

Most importantly, at no time under either Jonathan or Bukhara was there any indication in our foreign policy body language that we were conscious of the implications of our democracy for political directions and developments in our immediate neighbourhood. We just drifted along, content in the pathetic illusion that foreign relations and policy only means scrambling the presidential jet at short notice to attend every Boy Scout Movement conference everywhere in the world.  And yet, this is the same Nigeria that decisively intervened to alter, for good, the future histories of Liberia and Sierra Leone. When nations fail or decay, you can tell by what they helplessly allow to happen in their neighbourhood!

In the context of the coup in Niger Republic and what it means for Nigeria’s future external relations, however, the Tinubu administration can still manage to cobble more serious engagement approach. The new president can use his present ceremonial garb as Chairman of ECOWAS to quickly engineer first a West Africa –wide multilateral coalition to compel the junta in Niger to set a deadline for a return to democracy. That could be the lead on to dismantling  other despotisms in the region.  But he and his colleagues will ultimately need to procure an African Union and United Nations mandate backed by reasonable force to discourage further slide of the region into military authoritarianism. The upsurge of military dictatorships in West Africa needs to be communicated to the world as a dangerous international development which, if unchecked, could negatively affect the future history of the rest of Africa at a time when the world is faced with more urgent and serious economic and technological challenges.