Africa’s shared destiny has once against been underscored by the proposed 8, 700 member strong Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) to be originally drawn from Nigeria and her four contiguous neighbouring countries of Cameroon, Chad and Niger (which together constitute members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission) and Benin Republic. The new regional joint military task force was considered and approved at the meeting of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union held on November 24, 2014.
The MJTF’s singular mandate is the decapitation of Boko Haram and the nuisance it represents. The AU’s initiative has the support of France, United States of America and United Nations. We view this development as the most audacious African response to the six year old insurgency in Nigeria that has claimed thousands of lives, destroyed socioeconomic activities in the north east part of the country and traumatised the whole of the North in particular and the entire nation in general. However, for the international military task force to have the desired impact, the full cooperation of Nigeria’s critical state actors, the military leadership and the local populace is required.
That this is exactly the counterinsurgency template required to root out Boko Haram from Nigeria, and Cameroun and Chad, which have come under assaults by insurgents, is underlined by the deep forays the multinational joint task force has recently made into the notorious Sambisa Forest, which has for long served as a sanctuary for the terrorists and from which they launched numerous bloody campaigns against Nigeria and her neighbours, and the spectacular recapturing of Munguno, Marte and some other communities in Borno State held by them. The Boko Haram-induced insurgency that began in 2009 has demystified the Nigerian military’s invincibility, as the insurgents have made nonsense of their containment plans. Sadly, the near futility of our military’s efforts was compounded last April, when Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State (more than 200 of them are yet to be found), and later went ahead to declare a Caliphate Republic in the swathe of territories controlled by them in the north east region of the country.
The declaration of intent by 28 African countries to sign up for the continental coalition against Boko Haram; the ongoing United States-backed counter-terrorism code-named ‘Flintlock’, which is billed to hone the combat fitness and agility of the participating 1, 300 soldiers from Africa; and the expressed solidarity of the presidents of the 10-nation Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), who pledged after an extraordinary meeting in Yaounde, Cameroon, to create an $86 million emergency fund to fight Boko Haram, are very reassuring. They are in fact, the psychological tonic to Nigeria that in the past made huge contributions and sacrifices to the final decolonization of Africa and expended huge resources on countless peace-keeping missions in and outside the continent.
The eventual pacification of Nigeria will be the fillip necessary to confront similar challenges in a continent where Al-Shabaab, al Qaeda, and now Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have posed a grave threat to its present and future stability. The new global response to Boko Haram’s threat to Africa’s stability has demonstrated in a most expansive way that only a concerted international approach would free the world from the menace of international terrorism. Just like the Ghanaian leader, John Dramani Mahama said: “When it comes to terrorism, nobody is too far away or too near”. The cancerous spread of Boko Haram in Africa has proved this point.
We, however, wish to warn the Nigerian political and military leaderships never to lose their guards. Like many critical stakeholders have warned, anything that has beneficial effects equally has deleterious consequences. The enemies of Nigeria and Federal Government could capitalize on the MJTF operations to carry out sinister designs on the country. The examples of Liberia and Sierra Leone in their trying moments in the 1980s/90s are instructive. So also was Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo Kinshasa) in the early 1960s during the era of Patrice Lumumba.
To avoid a repeat of history, the members of the Nigerian political class must close ranks. It is from within its ranks that potential plots of destablisation of the country could be hatched. Nigerians must see the current international efforts to return normalcy to their country as the last ditched ones to save it from the fangs of Boko Haram insurgents.
