Politics
Boko Haram Takes Advantage of Nigeria’s Slow Military Decline
A government advisor says there was some evidence a few senior officers were pocketing money meant for equipment, so corruption may also be a factor in the shortfalls. A senior security official, who declined to be identified, said the process of decline in the military has been gradual, starting when the military seized power in the 1960s.
He said Britain, France and the United States had been Nigeria’s main military assistance partners, but they gradually backed off from its increasingly quirky and corrupt military dictators, culminating with the venal Sani Abacha in the 1990s. In the 21st century, Nigeria, now democratic, can be prickly about meeting conditions on military assistance packages, Western diplomats and military officials say, such as giving Western trainers full access to its bases, intelligence sharing and improving its human rights record.
“The human rights issue has been a point of friction for a long time,” said one U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The military has repeatedly denied allegations of abuses such as summary executions, but Amnesty International condemned the alleged killing of hundreds of prisoners escaping from Giwa barracks last month. The military said it had no choice but to prevent their escape.
Foreign aid aside, decades of coups made unstable military regimes fear their own armed forces. Each coup plot led to a deliberate under-resourcing of any department under suspicion. A botched 1985 counter-coup against newly installed Ibrahim Babangida was rumored to involve planned aerial bombardments, so his junta cut funds to the air force, a security official who remembers the time says. Another failed coup in 1990 allegedly involved military police, so their budget was squeezed.
When democracy returned in 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo, himself a former military ruler, feared the army, too. “This starvation of the military has occurred since Obasanjo, as part of a strategy to ensure they couldn’t conduct more coups,” Campbell said.
Now, as families in Chibok pray for the return of their kidnapped daughters, some fear it may be beyond their armed forces to get them back, and welcome promises of assistance from China, Britain, the United States and France. “We don’t believe there is a serious effort at a rescue,” said Lawan Abana, whose two nieces are among the abductees. Abana concluded, “The Americans and the others are our last hope.”
Source: CNBC Africa
