By Ochereome Nnanna
When the immediate former President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, came to power in January 2017, he took stock of the situation the country was in. Over the decades, warlike America had become war-torn though the fighting was always on foreign land. It spends an average of $1 trillion on defence and wars annually. Its troops were mired all over the Middle East and Asia, especially in such countries as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Trump, who campaigned on a mantra of Making America Great Again, MAGA, decided to de-escalate belligerence. The troops must come home. America must make peace with its traditional foes – Russia, China, North Korea and others. America must suspend its “big brother” role to the European Union and let them shift for themselves, at least for the time being. America must rebuild the coal-fired energy sector and revamp abandoned towns. America must rebuild its broken philosophical and cultural foundations and become America once again.
I expected President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, immediately after collecting his Certificate of Return from the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, to fall into a sober mood because of the enormity of the tasks awaiting him after eight years of Muhammadu Buhari’s incompetent and sectional misrule. I expected him to look at the grim numbers.
The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics
earlier this year announced that 133 million Nigerians (out of about 210
million) had fallen into multidimensional poverty. Our debt stock had risen to
N46.26 trillion ($103.11 billion) as at December 2022, according to the Debt
Management Office, DMO; while the World Bank warned as at April 2023 that
Nigeria spent 96.3 per cent of its 2022 revenue on debt service.
In addition, Buhari’s grossly incompetent Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed (who later was accused of wrongly recommending herself for the position of Alternative Executive Director of the Work Bank) claimed that Nigeria would spend N7.5 trillion on petrol subsidy between January and June alone, in 2023! In the same 2022, the Senate ad-hoc committee on oil theft led by Senator Akpan Bassey, announced that Nigeria lost over $2 billion to oil theft.
On the security front, Nigeria is fighting
Jihadist terrorists, bandits, armed herdsmen, unknown gunmen, armed separatists
and oil thieves. Our armed forces are spread thin and our new Chief of Army
Staff, General Taoreed Lagbaja, says we need foreign assistance to overcome our
security challenges. With these and many more challenges, Tinubu or any other
person leading our country at this juncture, should be the last person looking
for more wars to waste our troops and lean resources on.
In 1969, legendary America
musician, Clarence Carter, released a song which he titled: Too Weak to Fight. Nigeria has more
than seven threats to her internal security. It is only an unwise leader that
will have such problem amidst a poor economy that will be spoiling to lead a
war into another sovereign nation. It is only the imprudent that rushes into
fights. If care is not taken, that “giant” rushing into that fight with the
“ants” will come back stripped stark naked. I am borrowing this idiom from the
Asiwaju himself.
Here is the issue. The head of
the Presidential Guard of Niger Republic, Gen. Abdulrahmane Omar Tchiani,
arrested former President Mohamed Bazoum and announced himself the new military
leader. Niger is the fifth country in West Africa now under military rule in
the past couple of years or so after Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad. Add
Sudan, which is also in the Sahel. ECOWAS’s so-called elected leaders are
panicking. A few weeks after Tinubu was sworn in as President of Nigeria, they
handed him the leadership mantle.
An elated and usually triumphal
Bola Tinubu quickly forgets the problems his country is neck-deep in. He wants
to show off Nigeria’s “Big Brother” stuff. So, he leads a sabre-rattling
response to the coup in Niger. He gives Gen. Tchiani and his group a week to
vacate power or face military action. He has the full support of his ECOWAS
colleagues. They know Nigeria will pick up the tab both in terms of human and
financial costs, so they egg him on. Tinubu wants to send a “strong” signal to
other prospective coup plotters, including possibly those who might fancy
threatening his own seat.
I am no clairvoyant, but I see
danger in this Quixotic adventurism. Gen. Tchiani has millions of his
countrymen and women firmly behind him. If war breaks out in Niger, ECOWAS
(especially Nigeria) will become an insignificant, bit player in the conflict.
The big boys – US, Russia, China, France – and smaller boys such as Iran and
Saudi Arabia, will come into it. Niger is uranium-rich. It is a treasure trove
of solid minerals, just like our Northern Nigeria.
We don’t know how that war will
go and how it will end. But bear these in mind. Millions of refugees will flood
Nigeria. Millions more of loose small arms and light weapons will also flood
in. Jihadist terrorists and armed treasure-hunting bandits will come. What
happened after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi could be a child’s play.
Remember, it was Gaddafi’s overthrow and the emptying of his armoury that
promoted Boko Haram from a ragtag group of Islamist agitators to the most
murderous terror outfit in the world in 2016/2017.
When will our leaders learn from
their own misfortunes? If we blunder into a war with Niger Republic, it could
ultimately threaten the existence of Nigeria. That will be good news to some
people. But nobody knows what will come with it. President Tinubu should listen
to our Lord Jesus Christ’s wise counsel: “Physician, heal thyself”(Medice, cura
te ipsum). Remove the log in your eye before bothering about the speck in your
neighbour’s. Our government should calm down!
*Nnanna is a commentator on public issues
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