Despite Pageantry & Rhetoric US Continues to Undermine Nigerian Security
The United States disappointed the Buhari-led delegation by informing them that they were continuing their policy of refusing to even sell arms to Nigeria. The excuse repeatedly given by the Unites States is that Nigeria has human rights violations that prevents the US from selling weapons. Unable to change this policy the trip by President Buhari to Washington was a waste of time.
Looking closely at the recent history of US military weapons support, ISIS terrorist in Syria and Libya received weapons for free! They have a long history of arming the absolute Monarchy in Saudi Arabia, authoritarianism in Yemen, even Ethiopia that is not democratic receives millions in military assistance. Qatar, Djibouti, Honduras, and Algeria are all major customers of US weapons sales.
If the Buhari administration is naïve enough to believe the United States excuse then he too will be duped even more so than his predecessor by the Obama Administration’s overt hostility to Nigeria. By right the US president should have visited Nigeria instead of the Nigerian president coming to Washington. The US president has refused to afford Nigeria the respect that all previous US presidents before him afforded the country. Instead he has gone to South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, and now Kenya and Ethiopia. It is blatantly obvious that the deliberate agenda of the US is to diminish Nigeria in Africa as much as possible.
International relations is built on reciprocity. If a country continues to blatantly and belligerently undermine you then why keep pandering and dancing with them? By the end of his tenure former President Jonathan realized this and finally began to look elsewhere for support. The newly elected Buhari Administration was too naïve to notice this or perhaps incorrectly believed that the US would treat him differently. Aside from a little pageantry and rhetoric, nothing has changed.
The US is a “frenemy” of Nigeria, where they pose as friends but behave as adversaries. Susan Rice and former Nigerian ambassador John Campbell who is prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the US, are core architects of this policy as well as high-level military officials in the Department of Defense. Undermining Nigerian and African security as a means of expanding the influence and scope of AFRICOM, the US High Command for Africa, based in Germany is the core agenda of the United States. Many in this cabal actually hope that Nigeria breaks apart and ceases to exist as a nation-state as was outlined by John Campbell in his book predicting the break-up of Nigeria by 2015.
What the APC administration needs to realize is that the combative stance that the outgoing administration finally adopted with respect to the US was the right policy. There is no need to change this or presume that somehow the US will like them better. A strong Nigeria is simply not in the interest of the United States because it undermines their influence in Africa. It took far too long for the Jonathan administration to figure this out and hopefully the learning curve of the Buhari administration is not going to be so slow. Not everyone agrees with the US agenda, France openly opposed the US efforts to collapse Mali at the hands of Al qaeda forces they pushed out of Libya.
So there are many other potential partners for Nigeria. Further weapons procurement should be diversified so that the country is not reliant on any one partner. Instead of pandering to the US, the Buhari administration should send delegations to the all the countries that actually sold weapons to Nigeria during the crisis, which eventually led to the offensive that wiped-out Boko Haram’s territorial gains. The next stage of the fight against Boko Haram is going to be an intelligence-focused fight.
The Buhari administration badly needs to enhance the intelligence gathering capacity of the State Security Service and the military. The US has already failed to support Nigeria in this regard, so Nigeria needs to develop intelligence capacity-building partnerships with a diverse set of partners just as was done with weapons procurement by the previous administration.
David O. Kuranga, Ph.D. The author is the Managing Director and Principal of Kuranga and Associates, a full-service investment, political and economic risk consultancy, and asset management firm that specializes in Africa. He is also the author of The Power of Interdependence with Palgrave Macmillan Press.