Having succeeded in strangling our country almost to death by its wanton profligacy, gross ineptitude and catastrophic incompetence, the APC-led administration of General Muhammadu Buhari now seems hell-bent on selling us to United States. The whole of progressive Africa was shell-shocked last week when, in the course of a zoom conference that U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken held with African leaders, General Buhari casually requested the re-location of AFRICOM to Africa.
I was really shocked and dumbfounded. I am not sure that Buhari fully grasped the implications of such a major policy U-turn. I have my suspicions. There are one or two shadowy creatures that are always malingering around the corridors of power in Aso Rock. They do not have any official roles in government. But they operate as part of the remnants of the cabal. One of them has held high positions in government but has been notorious as a certified foreign agent since his youth. They must have put the AFRICOM idea into Buhari’s speech, knowing that his cognitive powers have been wiped away by illness. They have used that same weakness allegedly to get him to sign away financial approvals running into billions of dollars. Their shenanigans patently amount to high treason.
They must have put the AFRICOM idea into Buhari’s speech, knowing that his cognitive powers have been wiped away by illness
The Africa Command, popularly known as AFRICOM, was the brainchild of George W. Bush’s “war on terror”. It was conceived as an intervention force towards safeguarding American strategic security as well as oil interests in Africa. President Bush defined its aims as being to “enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa”. AFRICOM is an integrated command with headquarters based on Stuttgart, Germany, with Défense/MilitaryAdvisers in 38 African countries.
The original idea was to set up the headquarters in Africa, but there was stiff opposition from various stakeholders.
The SADC countries warned that “it is better if the United States were involved with Africa from a distance rather than be present on the continent.” Our own ECOWAS similarly opposed installation of AFRICOM on our continent, with the sole exception of Liberia, which seemed to have sat on the fence. In December 2007, our late President Umaru Yar’Adua was unambiguous in his stand: “I did not agree that AFRICOM should be based in Africa. What we discussed with Bush is that if they have something to do for Africa that has to do with peace and security, they should contribute. I told him that we African countries have our own plan to establish a joint military command in every sub-region (as we) have in economic groupings.”
In Johannesburg, the influential Business Daily warned, “The expansion of an American strategic geopolitical military base on the continent will worsen many of the problems Africa has at present”.
Many observers have pointed to the abject record of American military interventions in countries as wide apart as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq and the rest.
For more than a decade, we were receiving prophecies of doom from policy think tanks to the effect that Nigeria would collapse in 2015. When that did not happen, they changed the date to 2020. Now they are talking of 2030. Military academies in the United States have been doing war games with Nigeria as the model of the failed state of the future.
I have been an assiduous student of Western classical diplomacy from Machiavelli to Talleyrand, Metternich and Henry Kissinger. I know that the Westphalian machstaaten power-states system, which emerged in early modern Europe, is based on nothing but the pursuit of power and self-interest.
World powers have been building up military bases in our neighbouring countries – Cameroon, Chad, Niger and so on. AFRICOM has been patrolling the Gulf of Guinea. I sense a kind schadenfreude about Nigeria. The grand strategy of the world powers seems to be the encirclement of our country. When you read some of the documents uncovered by Wikileaks, we would be fools to be inviting the world powers to come and help us. I would have gone to Israel instead.
Nigeria and United states have enjoyed cordial relations going back decades. The Murtala interregnum and his assertive rhetoric at the Extraordinary OAU Summit of January 1976 annoyed the likes of Henry Kissinger. The lowest ebb in our relations was in 2013 when the Obama administration banned the sale of our oil on American shores; denying us of 25 percent of our market. The Obama administration was ostensibly chagrined by the Goodluck Jonathan’s intransigence on gay and lesbian legislation.
To all intents and purposes, Africa did not exist in the worldview of the erstwhile Trump administration. Donald Trump dismissed our countries as “shit-hole countries”.
The late Kenyan political scientist Mazrui argued that the independence of African nations required a new African collective security arrangement anchored on “Pax Africana”. All the progressive forces in our continent firmly believe that firmly African problems are best solved by Africans themselves without meddling by external do-gooders, no matter how well-meaning.
When the eminent American political scientist James Coleman was about to embark on his doctoral work at Harvard in the 1950s, he sought advice from his tutor Rupert Emerson. A general in that field, Emerson counselled the young graduate student to focus on Nigeria. He prophesied that Nigeria is destined to be the most important country in Africa and a world power in the future. Coleman’s mammoth doctoral dissertation was later published as, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (University of California Press, 1963). It is widely regarded as one of the classic works of modern political science.
Nigeria has a high and noble destiny. We are the guardians of Africa and symbol of the black race. As such, we cannot be subservient to any world power. If General Buhari feels that he cannot lead us out of our current doldrums without AFRICOM relocating to our continent, then I fear that he is sleepwalking into the oblivion of history.
