By his enthusiastic endorsement and approval of the contemptuous and derogatory language with which President Donald Trump couched his recent threat to intervene militarily in Nigeria to check alleged ‘Christian genocide, ‘ Mr Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, obviously believes that the American leader’s tirade was targeted solely at the President Bola Tinubu administration. And the new factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Kabiru Turaki, who recently unabashedly invited Trump to undertake a Messianic role of salvaging democracy in the country, which he perceived to be under threat, also sees the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the sole target of external umbrage at the challenges of insecurity in Nigeria.
Unfortunately, this is a gross misreading of the import of President Trump’s threat to unilaterally violate the country’s sovereignty in an all-out onslaught against Islamic terrorists. Indeed, the reactions of Obi, Turaki and other opponents of the Tinubu administration to Trump’s warning reinforce once again one of the reasons for the latter’s undisguised loathing for the African political elite as a whole. Some attribute Trump’s attitude toward Africa generally to a racist, supremacist outlook. That may not be entirely true. In reality, countries earn respect rather than seek that it be conferred on them gratuitously. Given the abundant resources with which she is endowed, should the African continent be in the pathetic situation of abject underdevelopment, economic misery and political retardation in which she finds herself today? Can we blame outsiders who treat her with condescension and utter derision in the global community?
Most African countries run what the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo described with characteristic brutal frankness as ‘street beggar economies’. Thus, despite being perhaps the most blessed portion of the globe in terms of mineral and natural resources as well as arable land and clement climate, the vast majority of the peoples of Africa are immersed in dehumanising poverty while their societies are plagued by debilitating and dysfunctional inequality that pits a microscopic, obscenely wealthy elite against the rest of the downtrodden populace. President Trump may have been misled by mischievous lobby groups with surreptitious agendas into mischaracterising the nature of violence and insecurity in Nigeria. But his warning is an indictment not just of the incumbent administration but of the political class as a whole.
It is unlikely that the American leader will be impressed by a political elite which supinely accedes to the insulting denigration of their country by outsiders or one which solicits external political saviours to fix their country over six and a half decades after independence. The insurgency, which has laid large swathes of northern Nigeria in particular prostates and metastasised to encompass banditry, herders-farmers bloodletting, religious extremism, incessant communal savagery, among others, has lasted over a decade and a half. The assorted non-state actors pitched against the Nigerian State have, over this period, acquired greater proficiency, access to increasingly more sophisticated arms, enhanced operational flexibility and dexterity, while the efficacy of the undoubtedly valiant Nigerian armed forces is impeded by debilitating elite factionalism, a pervasive culture of corruption and structural defects of a polity that undermine and sabotage national security.
Thus, political actors across factional partisan divides and political parties, who have been in power at one time or the other at different levels of government, are responsible for the current existential fragility of the Nigerian State, including the deteriorating insecurity that elicited Trump’s combustible response. It would thus be naivety of the extreme kind for elements of the opposition to gloat over the threat from Trump, thinking that it is only the ruling party and President Tinubu that are on the defensive. No, Trump’s action indicts the political class as a whole. It is a wake up call for the political class to get its act together and face more seriously the challenge and responsibility of running the affairs of a sovereign polity in an ever increasingly complex, fragile and unpredictable global order or disorder?
In an emergent world in which the canons of international diplomacy and conventional standards of international behaviour are being turned upside down, particularly in the ‘Trumpian’ era, political elites face the real possibility of losing control of their territories to aggressive outsiders if they prove to be inept as well as lacking in vision and patriotic fervour. It is only a reasonably competent ruling elite committed to the continuous and steady development and progress of their polities that can actualise the latent potentials of countries, gain the fervent support of their people and earn desired respect in the global community.
The language employed by Trump in his communication with Nigeria shows a mindset that will readily violate the sovereignty of another country, especially when the latter is perceived as weak and vulnerable. We can see the impunity with which the Trump administration has been launching attacks on vessels allegedly carrying drug peddling syndicates from Venezuela, killing scores of people in what international law experts describe as extrajudicial executions with scant regard for legal due process. Yet, we can see the deference with which Trump treats Vladimir Putin’s Russia or even Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. The state of a country’s military preparedness, especially the possession of nuclear capability, is clearly a key determinant of how nations are perceived and treated in global relations.
But military strength is also largely dependent on economic viability, and where the degree of corruption, for instance, among a country’s political elite is of a magnitude that undermines military efficacy, the political elite as a whole – both the ruling elite and the opposition – are on the ruinous path of communal class suicide. When the opposition seeks to destabilise and bring down an elected administration through surreptitiously inviting military intervention, for instance, simply because it is dissatisfied with the outcome of elections, then it undermines the possibilities of its ever ascending to power in future through the ballot box. In the same vein, it is not in the long run interest of ruling parties to deliberately seek to sabotage, undermine and render the opposition impotent and ineffective. That was the path chosen by the PDP during the imperial Chief Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, and it is partly responsible for the dismal fate that has befallen the former ruling behemoth today.
Right-wing ideologues of the Donald Trump mould are resurgent across the West today, and this tendency blames mass migration of people from the crisis and poverty-ridden parts of the world into their more prosperous countries as partly responsible for the deep-seated socio-economic contradictions of capitalism. Hence, the unprecedented aggression and fervour with which the Trump administration has been tackling what it perceives as the menace of immigration in the US. This is likely to be the pattern in several other advanced countries, including Britain and France, as far-right ideologies gain political ascendancy. As bad governance persists in Africa, particularly with the intransigence of sit-tight leaders for life and the resurgence of military coups, there will be increased clamour in the West for external interventions to promote a modicum of good governance on the continent and thus address at source the root of the mass exodus from Africa that has become a major problem in the advanced capitalist world.
There are those who believe that, if there is no fundamental change of course by Africa’s ruling elite, we may be on the path of a full-blown recolonisation of the continent, and there is no guarantee that the majority of Africans will be opposed to any such tragic historic reversals on the continent. It will not be surprising if many of those who belong to the hard-headed realist school of power in the West believe that badly governed African countries, which are cesspits of poverty, violence and varying degrees of state failure, have become liabilities to the world. Their societies are plagued by mass hunger, disease, poverty and joblessness even when they are situated atop some of the most precious mineral and natural resources on earth. Those who belong to this school of thought may well believe that external intervention to provide good governance in Africa may be in the interest of the vast majority of Africans and even humanity as a whole. It is time for Africa to stop being a liability to the world.
To decisively address the country’s security situation, President Tinubu has announced a raft of measures to improve the country’s security architecture, one of which is to accelerate the process of actualising state police. It is unfortunate that Trump’s threat of military intervention to combat religious terrorists and the inexplicable spike in attacks on schools and churches in some parts of the North have come at a time when the administration’s economic reforms have begun to yield concrete dividends. It will be naive and shortsighted for the opposition to welcome anything that will derail the reforms, destabilise the polity and threaten democracy. That will only play into the hands of anti-democratic elements, with the entire political class, not just the incumbent administration, being the ultimate losers.
President Trump’s threat must thus be seen as a timely wake up call to the political class. It is time to forge a greater elite consensus around a new commitment to the tenets of democracy, the rule of law and a higher level of governance that promotes prosperity and progress. The menace of rampant corruption, waste and misuse of public resources that compound the problem of poverty, deepen inequality, undermine national security and have become an existential threat for the nation must be more fundamentally tackled across political parties and tendencies.
