The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Maitama Tuggar, has advised the Nigeria Intelligence Agency (NIA) to take the lead in adequate information gathering processes in to resolve the challenges of insecurity in the Sahel region.
This was contained in a statement signed by the Special Assistant on Media and Strategy, Alkasim Abdulkadir and made available to Channel Network Afrique, CNA.
According to the statement, the Minister, while presenting a paper at the NIA Headquarters in Abuja entitled “Pathways to Peace, Security, & Stability in the Sahel: What Role for Nigeria?” said there was often an over-simplification that the Sahel is sparsely populated by nomadic groups such as Tuaregs, Bororo, Zaghawa, and the likes, and many of them tend towards terrorism and criminal activities.
He explained that a certain degree of laziness in information gathering processes and the wholesale adoption of Western taxonomy and labelling have often led to wrong decision-making
He said the commonly found expressions is “There are jihadist and organised crime groups operating in the Sahel; many jihadists and members of organised criminal groups are nomads; therefore, all Nomads in the Sahel are Jihadists or part of organised crime groups.”
The Minister, therefore, said Nigeria as the hegemon in the region, must lead the way in providing more accurate and factual analyses and interpretations of events in the Sahel.
“It is incumbent on the NIA to pave the way through its information collection process. This would begin with more accurate taxonomy and labelling of groups.”
“Not every act of crime—kidnapping for ransom, attack on a community, smuggling of weapons—must necessarily be attributed to a stand-alone jihadi or tribal group.”
“Quite often, such acts are driven by economic interests and not ideological or tribal associations. We have unwittingly been conditioned to feed into foreign “War on Terrorism” framing and narratives and Mary Kaldor’s open-ended ‘New Wars’ thesis.
“We must develop our own insights into what is happening in our neighbourhood instead of relying on those of outsiders, in order to find the right pathways to peace, security, and stability in the Sahel.”
“Nigeria must lead the way in establishing the guardrails. And we have seen the disastrous outcomes of allowing others to frame the narratives in the Sahel; the open-ended War on Terror in the aftermath of 9-11 attacks and the adoption of the Democratic Peace Thesis as the central plank of the Bush Doctrine (of unilateralism, pre-emptive war, and regime change) led to the toppling of Ghaddafi and disorder in Libya.”
Tuggar said the external framing of the situation in Libya was wrong, and Nigerians are still bearing the effects today.
“Deriving from similar erroneous framing came the European Union’s 2015 to 2020 Sahel Regional Action Plan, in which it decided to kill what it perceived to be the twin threats of terrorism and irregular migration with one stone by securitizing the region, thereby restricting movement in a region where seasonal migration is a life and death matter.
“The contiguous Sahara Desert has always made trade all the more important as a matter of survival, which was why trade tended to be divorced from politics.
“The fallout of the failed EU strategy contributed to the banditry and insurgency we are experiencing today. France, as the experienced former colonial Metropole, took the lead in implementing this strategy with Operation Barkhane and G5 Sahel.
“Significantly, Nigeria, with all its experience in leading ECOMOG to success in settling previous conflicts in the region, was left out of these initiatives.
“The end result is that MNJTF is thus far succeeding, and G5 Sahel cannot even be counted as a noble failure. We know our neighbourhood.”
“Others should follow our lead in framing, labelling, and proffering solutions.
“The second thing we must do is reposition ECOWAS into reverting to its founding ideals or raison d’être.
“The Treaty of Lagos, signed on May 28, 1975, begins with the overriding need to “foster and encourage the economic and social development of their states in order to improve the living standards of their peoples.”
“Note the emphasis on peoples and not systems of government. Whilst reaffirming the existence of nation-states as prime referents and units of analysis in international relations, it is equally important for us to be cognizant of the particularities of our regional environment.”
“One such is the concept of borders. In the Westphalian state system devolved out of Europe, borders are meant to be static, delimited, and delineated.
“Whereas in the Sahel and perhaps most of Africa, historian JC Anene says that prior to colonisation, there were no boundaries as lines separating states.
“What we had were Frontier Zones and there were essentially three types: Frontier of Contact—between distinct cultural and political groups, often trading with each other, Frontier of Separation—as a buffer zone between hostile neighbours, which neither side claims, such as deserts or uninhabitable forests like Dajin Rugu between Katsina and Zamfara; and Overlapping Frontier—where different tribes intermingle and nomads move back and forth In the Westphalian boundary system introduced by colonialism, river systems were more important than ethnology and, as such, were used to delimit borders,” he said.
