Boko Haram: Jonathan’s Paris flop

May 30, 2014

President Goodluck Jonathan

FRENCH President Francois Hollande’s sympathy for Nigeria over Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls of Chibok, Borno State, last April, found strong expression in a May 17 security meeting in Paris. It was held to ramp up West African support for the girls’ rescue. Although the representatives of the United States, Britain and European Union attended, the summit was essentially a gathering of Nigeria and her immediate neighbours: Chad, Niger, Cameroun and Benin Republic.

The Hollande initiative is a welcome development. However, that it took such a conclave in faraway France for Nigeria to forge a strong coalition with these Francophone countries against Boko Haram’s terrorism underscores the bankruptcy of our diplomacy.

The Paris meeting decided on a set of bilateral and multi-lateral measures, ranging from the need for Nigeria to share intelligence with her neighbours and establish border surveillance and patrols, to raising a team to work out how to implement the agreed action plan. A second phase of this Marshal Plan will create regional counter-terrorism strategy in the mould of Lake Chad Basin Commission, with the US, United Kingdom, France and EU acting as coordinators.

Since independence, Nigeria has been a respected voice in African affairs as shown in her role in the Congo crisis of the 1960’s, the independence struggles in Angola and Zimbabwe, and South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. Also, she was the fulcrum in ending instabilities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Rwanda a few years ago. The Economic Community of West African States, a platform to integrate the sub-region economically, founded in 1975, was a Nigerian initiative. And this explains why the ECOWAS headquarters is in Abuja. Records of its operations indicate its heavy dependence on our country’s financial contributions for survival. As the “big brother,” Nigeria acts as the navel of the economies of most member-states.

Ordinarily, a country with these credentials should be able to exert her influence either in Africa or the sub-region; or effortlessly get whatever the assistance she needs from neighbours in times of need. But this expectation appears to belong to the past with Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidency. At a period like this, a strong Presidency ought to have initiated a security meeting of ECOWAS heads of state in Abuja, and put in place a regional response mechanism to the terrorism challenge. Since 2012, defeated insurgents in Somalia, Mali and Libya and others in the Islamic Maghreb have been finding their way into Nigeria with arms, passing through a long chain of countries intertwined with us, without any concerted transnational bulwark.

A few meetings of ECOWAS had ended in Abuja, with the country merely warning members to be wary of the activities of Boko Haram because of its international networks. According to Kadre Desire Ouedraogo, Head of ECOWAS Commission, the West African body has a terrorism strategy. It is against this backdrop that security chiefs and intelligence czars met in Accra, Ghana, two weeks ago, to agree on a regional master plan to assist Nigeria. Why this move is made now when the arrow has already left the bow is because of poverty of leadership. President Jonathan should get it right: modern-day diplomacy and leadership are driven by swift and sagacious impulses.

It was for security threats such as Boko Haram’s that Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Togo, entered into a security protocol in December 1984. Again, why this treaty was never activated beggars belief. What is clear, however, is that the same laxity usually evinced at home in implementing internal policies and extant laws, which has led to a total breakdown of law and order, has unabashedly been extended to our foreign policy frontiers.

Chad has suddenly become a major reconnaissance base for the US and French military. Their jets and soldiers have been stationed there as part of the growing global efforts to free the abducted girls. If Nigeria’s diplomatic machinery had been effective, Chad’s role now, which is very strategic, ought to have been maximised before the crisis got out of control. Its President, Idriss Derby, said after the Paris meeting, “There is determination (now) to tackle this situation head-on… to launch a war, a total war on Boko Haram.”

Compassion may be on the faces of these leaders that Jonathan meets at security conference tables over the Boko Haram enigma, but we wager that in the inner construct of some of them are derision and disdain for our country. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda’s recent jab that he would rather commit suicide than allow his country to be like Nigeria, where over 200 schoolgirls could easily disappear, should be an eyeopener to our own President. The hard fact is, what counts is the safe return of these girls, not the number of security meetings he attends abroad.