Below is a piece I wrote in response to a former classmate’s post supporting the claim of a group that went to stage a protest at the French Embassy in Abuja that France is funding terrorist groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria.
By
Dr. Dokubo Melford Goodhead
Man, you've got to do better than this. Did the Chief of Staff show any proof? Can you post the interview here, so that we can analyze it? Since the rise (and fall) of Al Qaeda and the fall of Iraq and Libya and the subsequent state of unrest that was unleashed in both countries, extremist Islamist forces have been terrorizing the Sahel region. Before, the violence in the Sahel was mostly due to Tuareg agitation for their own independent country outside of Mali. At independence, the political elite of Mali successfully made their case with France that even though the Tuareg have been part of Mali for a long time and had a major role in the founding of the intellectual and trading city of Timbuktu, they were trading settlers from across the Sahara and that historically Timbuktu was part of the Mali Empire, so the Tuaregs should accept citizenship in a multi-ethnic Mali. There was a tenuous acceptance of this arrangement until the first Prime Minister and President of Mali, Modibo Keita, decided to introduce widespread agricultural and educational reforms in his effort to modernize Mali. The reforms demanded that the Tuareg ranch their cattle and camels and enroll their children in school. The Tuaregs were not happy, especially because some of their leaders felt that the black Africans (not the elite Mali clans such as the Keitas, though, that trace their ancestry to the emperors of the Mali Empire) that they once used as slaves were now giving them orders (this was the ethno-racial angle) and that the taxes that Keita imposed on their cattle and camels to help fund his modernization project was too much. That was the economic angle that sparked the crisis. So, they openly revolted and started demanding for a separate country of their own once more. That was the seed of the unrest in the Sahel that has spread to countries such as Nigeria.
GoodheadMali then asked the French to send in French soldiers to help them contain the Tuaregs as well as broker a peaceful settlement between the country and the Tuaregs, short of giving them their own country. In other words, Mali was willing to give the Tuaregs a semi-autonomous state that is part of Mali. France obliged and peace returned. Among the Tuaregs, the acceptance of this deal was not universal, so any time that there is political unrest in Mali, separatist elements among the Tuaregs take it as an opportunity to re-ignite their struggle for their own country.
Then, the Jihadist element came in with the political rise of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Al Qaeda, the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the subsequent rise of the Islamic State, and the fall of Gaddafi. For as long as Muammar Gaddafi was in power and the French maintained a military presence in the Malian Sahel, the radicalized elements among the Tuaregs were not able to wreak havoc in the Sahel because Gaddafi reined them in and those that escaped his security blanket and operated on the fringes to disturb Mali were fairly easily dealt with by the French soldiers and the Malian army. This all changed when Gaddafi was overthrown. Libya, itself, became a source of Jihadist forces. Suddenly, the small French military presence and the Malian Army were not able to deal with the Tuareg agitators, some of whom had become radicalized as Jihadist elements. And, then, of course, there was the influx of Jihadist elements thrown up by the collapse of Libya.
President Tinubu Unfortunately, the French were not willing to pour the kind of forces into the Sahel that was needed to deal decisively with the problem. They were looking at the economic, personnel, and even political cost of it in France and this became the crux of the problem with the Sahel countries that culminated in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger telling the French to leave. In their reasoning, France was getting far more than enough from them to worry about the economic cost of keeping these Jihadist forces in check the way that Gaddafi had effectively kept them in check. And if French politicians were worried about the damage that the loss of French soldiers would do to their political careers in France, they showed that the former colonies, from which they were taking much, would never rise to the level of very serious commitment from France, the way that African soldiers had, for example, fought for colonial France in the name of rushing to the help of the “Mother” country. Short of that kind of reciprocal commitment, the French were showing by their behavior that they were of no use to them. This was the reason for the expulsion of France and the turn to Putin and Russian Wagner forces for help.
Timbuktu
Many commentators in the West, who have not bothered to do their research, like their African counterparts that are spreading the unfounded narrative that the West is actually funding the Jihadist groups, have given all kinds of puerile analyses of the turn of the Sahelian countries to Russia for help. If France had stepped up their military presence to contain the Jihadist elements in the Sahel, I make bold to say that the three Sahelian countries would not have kicked out France. This is a dispassionate analysis. It is not based on whether or not I believe that the neocolonial influence of France on the Sahelian countries is good or bad. I, personally, believe that it was too extreme and was, in the main, detrimental to the Sahelian countries and that the relationship should have been put on a more equitable footing in a win-win situation that recognizes that these countries are no longer the colonies of France.
In Nigeria, young men such as Muhammed Yusuf got inspired by the Jihadist fervor breaking out in the Muslim world and decided to be part of it. As I said in my earlier piece, when he and his successor Abubakr Shekau, especially the latter, used it to attack Christians, by especially repeatedly sending suicide bombers to Christian churches, the leading Muslim elite of the North did not see it as their problem. This was why they joined forces with Tinubu to tell President Obama not to supply weapons to President Jonathan under the spurious excuse that General Ihejirika ‘s men, who were closing in on the Boko Haram in the Sambisa Forest and would have finished them off had they received the direly needed weapons, were committing human rights abuses in the villages that they were liberating from the Boko Haram. I say so not to make light of accusations of human rights abuses. I take the rights of my fellow human beings very seriously and truly believe that injury to one is injury to all no matter the corner of the world that the injured may be. However, I believed, and still believe, that there was a simple solution to the matter and it lay in sending US investigators to investigate the accusation and if true, bringing the culprits to justice, so that those ruthless men who had no regard for life and property could be brought to heel before they became a monstrosity. Unfortunately and heartbreakingly, my fears have come true and those who thought that Boko Haram would always spare them are now dealing not just with Boko Haram but with all kinds of terrorist groups that the failure to bring the group to heel has unleashed on that part of the country and to a certain extent the rest of the country, since the problem of herder terrorism is also occurring under the general insecure atmosphere in the country. Do I take any joy in the fact that my fears have come true? Of course not! My heart is bleeding for my country and for the men, women, and children that are needlessly dying every day in the arms of those ruthless butchers.
This brings me to the question of how these groups get their arms. Folk who can’t be bothered with doing even basic research are quick to spout the nonsense that Western governments actively supply arms to the Jihadist groups. Yes, the American government supplied arms to the Mujahideen forces in Afghanistan to fight the pro-Soviet government and the invading Soviet army and that some of those fighters, such as Osama Bin Laden, later decided to become Jihadists to ostensibly purify Islam in the Arab world and that Mullah Omar and Abdul Ghani Baradar later founded the Taliban; but America was not funding Jihadism or terrorism in that situation. It was funding the defeat of the Soviet Union to prevent communism in Afghanistan. Now, of course, we can say in hindsight and I am, sure, that many in Washington will agree with me that it would have been better to leave the Socialist Afghan government in place instead of funding the Mujahideen and opening the Pandora box of these extremist forces, which no one knew at the time would be the outcome. Furthermore, no one, not one person, has shown any credible evidence that Western governments are funding Jihadist groups to destabilize African countries. It may sound good in the ears of some so-called pan-Africanists, who are unable to hold their leaders accountable or urge a truly pan-Africanist solution to the problem by creating an African Union Army with the motto “One for All and All for One” to decisively deal with these murderous forces, but that does not mean that there is any credible evidence to show that Western governments are funding these Jihadist forces. If there is one, I challenge anyone to show it to me.
David Hundeyin has posed the question that if Western governments are not funding these Jihadist groups, who is funding them? I expect something better from the caliber of a journalist like him. Even a little research in the library on the matter will show that these groups get their funding from sympathizers within the Muslim community, especially in the oil rich Arab States of the Persian Gulf, who believe that they are doing the work of Allah by supporting these groups. The Arab rulers are well aware of this: that is why they spend so much money on their security. Many of the groups that came before the current militant groups used to get heavy funding from wealthy Saudi donors to spread the teaching of Islam. Some analysts believed that the intention of the rich Saudis was not to spread militant Islam but to simply spread the faith and its teachings as a work of virtue in the eyes of Allah and that the rise of militant Islam from such work was due to another factor—the influence of the very religiously conservative and overly zealous Wahhabi Movement. Before the rise of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS), Saudi Arabia was under the influence of the Wahhabi Movement, which the Saudi rulers allied with to gain authenticity as respectable Muslim rulers with their citizens. This was how Saudi Arabia became the country most responsible for spreading militant Islam.
The rulers of Saudi Arabia tried their best to keep their relationship with the clerics of Wahhabism going in order to maintain their grip on power until King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud put his son MBS in charge of the affairs of the kingdom. MBS had been closely watching the transformation of Qatar and Dubai, especially Dubai, under Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and became possessed with the idea of replicating the same rapid pace of modernization in Saudi Arabia. He knew that this would put him at odds with the Wahhabi clerics, so one of the first things he did was to as it were cut their feet from under them by making them know in no uncertain terms that the de facto sharing of power and influence between them and the royal family was over and that he was now the undisputed ruler of the kingdom, and to challenge his authority would be suicidal to them. The reform cleric Salman al-Awda was the first that he marched into prison. Then, in quick succession, the clerics Safar al-Hawali, Awad al-Qarni, and Abdelaziz al-Fawzan followed. To cap off his effort to bring the clerics to heel, he defanged the notorious Mutawa, religious police, who were known for doing stuff like flogging women in public for supposedly not dressing properly.
President Emmanuel Macron of France
Incidentally, it was this move toward a faster pace of modernization by Arab rulers such as MBS that opened the door for a rapprochement between the Arab countries and Israel, as they wanted to make sure that they kept a tab on their security and did not become the victims of their own reforms, as often happens in history. Outside of security, they wanted to tap into Israeli technology in areas such as agriculture and science. What has kept this rapprochement from being fully consummated is the Palestinian issue. Aware of the leading role that Saudi Arabia plays in the Arab and Muslim world, MBS has said that full normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel will not take place until the Palestinians get their own state.
You have forced me to spend time that I wanted to use to tidy up the revision of a forthcoming book chapter to write this but I just could not keep quiet. There is no credible proof that Western governments are supporting Jihadist groups to destabilize countries like Nigeria. The Jihadist problem in places like Nigeria and the non-Sahel countries in West Africa, is rooted in security problems in the Sahel, with the perennial Tuareg problem in Mali, the rise of Al Qaeda, the fall of Saddam in Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State, the fall of Libya, where Gaddafi held extremist elements in check, and very notably corruption and mismanagement in the affected non-Sahelian countries, which has thrown millions of people into poverty and in places like Nigeria left millions of children, who should be in school, out of school, making them easy prey for extremist elements preaching fantastic rewards for them in heaven if they participate in Jihadist activities. These “wretched of the earth,” in the words of Frantz Fanon, have nothing to lose on this earth, so they throw themselves with zeal into the murderous wars of their indoctrinators.
The Tinubu government has experts, such as Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, who know all these facts, and men like him know that there are serious people who know these facts too, so I don’t know who the government is trying to fool with these contrived protests. He is the one that said that he was going to recruit fifty million youths as soldiers and in one fell swoop solve the problem of insecurity and unemployment. Yet, the first major loan, thirteen billion dollars, he got he poured into a classic elephant project—a road that could have been built way later, perhaps, by another administration, heading a country in far better economic conditions. He should have used the money to rapidly stabilize the country by investing the money in, yes, recruiting more young men for the army, perhaps as many as a million, setting up a drone corps in the army that will blanket the entire country with surveillance drones 24/7 to be the eyes of the security forces 24/7, resettling the people in the IDP camps in their villages, funding agriculture through widespread cooperative societies to enable farmers in the rural areas to pull their resources together so that the government and the banks can better help them to maximize production and commerce in the agriculture sector, setting up export facilities and working with the farmers to export the surplus produce, and putting all the out-of-school children into schools by working with the state and local governments to make sure that every child gets a free education and is enrolled in school until the end of high school. An educated mind is more difficult to recruit for violent extremism. Even the problem of malnourished children could have been taken care of through a program to serve free lunch in school, a program that has the capacity to spur further production and growth in the economy.
Scene of Islamic attack
attack
I think that the 13 billion dollars would have been able to do all of the above, especially with the devaluation of the Naira, which would have turned out after all to be a blessing, as the money would have created local production especially in the sudden market for education material that would come into play as a result of the free-education program and the market for internally-produced agro-technology, which is gaining momentum in the country and is waiting for exactly such a program to turn it into a major part of the economy. By now, we would have started noticing marked improvement in security, agriculture, education, and commerce throughout the country. And inflation will be markedly down. Instead, what we are getting is his spokespersons spouting nonsense on TV and his intimidation of the political opposition into defection to the APC.
Modibbo Keita
He calls himself a progressive, so I presume that he is familiar with the late Claude Ake’s thoroughgoing analysis of the role that agriculture plays in driving the development of poor countries. With the thirteen billion dollars he is wasting on the coastal highway—at least, as far as the needs of the moment are concerned—he would have achieved all of these things instead of engaging in circus shows like the sponsored protest at the French Embassy.
0 Comments