“The National Assembly shall have power to make laws for the regulation of—
(a) the powers exercisable by the President as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federation; and
(b) the appointment, promotion and disciplinary control of members of the Armed Forces of the Federation.” The Nigerian Constitution, Section 218(4).
The enthusiasm shown by Nigerian military officials as they outsource their responsibilities to their American counterparts is one of Africa’s tragedies in its most embarrassing form.
This absence of shame by our paid officials, especially those in charge of our security, is a great betrayal of what our parents fought for.
Nigeria is supposed to be an independent sovereign nation.
But here we are, close to 70 years of nationhood, and we cannot feed, clothe, or house ourselves without foreign assistance.
It is beyond belief that Nigerian officials were giddy with excitement as they outsourced the most basic of a government’s responsibilities – securing the security of citizens.
Bemedalled (Gbogbo irawo, as Orlando Owoh called it) Nigerian military officers line up like schoolboys and grin like village idiots as they pose with American military officers they believe will solve the country’s security challenges.
This is terribly sad on so many levels.
Our military officers attended the same military academies with the people they now look up to for deliverance.
The country is thus saddled with paying American military contractors – they don’t come cheap, and, at the end of the month, pay the lazy cows modern Askaris who, instead of upgrading their own skills, learn from the Iranians, look for the easiest way out. And at the end of the month, they would have no compunction in collecting their undeserved fat salaries and emoluments.
Africa!
Why are we cursed with mis-rulers with no self-dignity, no self-respect, and no shame?
When will the plantation supervisors misruling us in Africa develop some strategic depth?
When will they develop the brains to start asking basic questions?
Anyone with an IQ above that of an amoeba knows that it was the American-led destruction of Libya that caused the spike in insurgency in West Africa.
So, why are our mis-rulers contracting those who caused the problem to come and fix it?
More importantly, do these idiotic mis-rulers follow global geopolitics at all?
If they do, we can only conclude that their action is the worst perfidious treason ever committed against Nigeria.
The USA has zero record of successfully fighting insurgency anywhere.
The country spent twenty years and $1 trillion purportedly to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. We all saw the humiliating way they were evicted.
What is the record of the US in Somalia, Iraq, Syria??
May the gods help our plantation managers to grow some brains.
With American troops now embedded in Nigeria, the American military industrial complex can only salivate as they have been offered another golden opportunity and a veritable source of income in the promotion of their forever war.
In Nigeria, we have a self-declared Giant of Africa that cannot feed itself. A nation that cannot secure a single highway between Kaduna and Abuja without escorts. A nation whose farmers are chased from their land by bandits carrying weapons that did not fall from the sky.
And in the middle of this national humiliation, our shameless generals gather to smile for the camera as if reinforcements from Washington are the Second Coming.
They labeled it a partnership. To any discerning mind, it is a psychological surrender.
Our bemedaled military officers did not crawl out of the bush yesterday. Many of them trained at Sandhurst, considered the UK’s elite military academy. Some of them passed through Jaji. Some have attended courses in the United States itself. They read Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Sun Bin. They studied counterinsurgency doctrine. They can recite NATO acronyms like their catechism and their Koran.
So, ignorance is not their problem.
Their problem is something far deeper. Something colonial, positively neocolonial. A mental reflex that says: when trouble exceeds your comfort zone, call the white man.
So, when Boko Haram metastasized, banditry spread like rot through the North-West, and kidnapping became an industry. What did our generals do? Their collective colonized minds reached for the external crutch, the White Saviour.
Our pampered and overcompensated military officers, who are paid fat salaries to secure our borders and make citizens sleep securely in their homes, called on American advisers, American intelligence support, American hardware, and American “capacity building.”
They handed over our national security architecture to American contractors, those sleek private warriors who arrive with PowerPoint slides, six-figure invoices, and no stake whatsoever in the long-term stability of Nigeria.
Today, under a compromised Tinubu, Nigeria is now importing security the way we import toothpicks.
And these unashamed lazycows who cannot produce an indigenous military doctrine tailored to our terrain will, at month’s end, collect salaries fatter than the average Nigerian will see in ten years. They will sit in air-conditioned offices and nod gravely while military foreign consultants explain our own country to us.
Any serious student of geopolitics understands that the Sahel did not combust in a vacuum.
In 2011, NATO decided to democratize Libya and pulverized the country into the Stone Age. As the state collapsed, arms depots were looted, and fighters dispersed across porous borders. The Sahara became a conveyor belt of weapons and grievance.
From Mali to Niger to Burkina Faso, insurgency metastasized. The bandits’ blast radius did not respect colonial cartography.
And who led that intervention? Who insisted that regime change was a moral crusade? Who laughed, actually laughed, when Muammar Gaddafi was tortured to death?
Yet here we are, a decade and a half later, inviting the same White Crusaders into our security architecture as if history were a rumour.
I am not romanticizing Gaddafi. He was a cruel, erratic, and autocratic. But the Libyan state, however imperfect, functioned as a buffer in the Sahelian ecosystem. When that buffer was destroyed, the consequences were predictable to anyone who reads beyond headlines.
So, why did our generals invite an arsonist to manage our fire?
If they do not understand the chain of causality, they are incompetent. If they understand it and proceed anyway, then we are in the territory of something uglier, dereliction of duty bordering on treason.
This is the short audit of America’s fights around the world:
Afghanistan: twenty years, trillions of dollars, thousands of lives. The outcome? The Taliban back in Kabul, American helicopters evacuating personnel in scenes eerily reminiscent of Saigon.
Iraq: invasion premised on false intelligence. State collapse. Sectarian fragmentation. The birth of ISIS from the wreckage.
Somalia: intermittent intervention, tactical skirmishes, no durable state consolidation.
Syria: a chessboard of proxies, contradictions, and permanent instability.
No one disputes that Uncle Sam possesses formidable military power. But power is not synonymous with strategic wisdom. The American system is deeply entangled with what President Eisenhower himself called the military-industrial complex, a network that monetizes insecurity.
For that ecosystem, war is not an aberration. It is a revenue model.
So when American troops, advisers, or assets embed themselves in another country, we must ask: What is the end state? What is the exit strategy? What institutional dependencies are being created?
Every military arrangement comes with legal architecture – Status of Forces Agreements, intelligence-sharing protocols, basing rights, jurisdictional clauses, etc.
Who among our legislators (Legislooters, in Nigerian parlance) has dissected these documents line by line? Who has explained to Nigerians the implications for sovereignty, for legal jurisdiction, for operational command?
When foreign troops operate on Nigerian soil, the issue is no longer mere optics. It is that of authority. Who commands whom? Who is accountable to whom? In whose interest are operations prioritized?
These are not academic questions. They define the difference between cooperation and quiet subordination.
A self-respecting state can engage in strategic partnerships. But a state that outrightly outsources its core security function without developing indigenous capacity is not partnering. It is leasing its autonomy.
As we have lamented several times on this blog, our plantation managers rule on behalf of their curators in the West. That explains why we continue to import fuel even though we are an oil producer. We import rice despite the vast arable land. Our elites fly to London for routine medical procedures. Their children are educated abroad while local universities decay.
Dependency is not accidental; it is the hallmark of neocolonial states.
The tragedy is not that Nigeria faces complex security challenges. Many states do. The tragedy is that our reflex is to externalize rather than to internalize reform.
Where is the serious investment in intelligence reform? Is our border management technology tailored to Sahelian terrain, or in local defense industries or research institutions studying the dynamics of insurgency specific to our socio-economic fabric?
Unfortunately, in Africa, we always look for the easiest way out. It is easier to sign a memorandum of understanding with foreigners than to undertake the hard, unglamorous labour of institutional rebuilding.
Every October 1st, big drums are rolled out in celebration of a shambolic independence. High-falutin’ speeches are delivered. Parades are organized with obsolete foreign-built jets making a flypast. Flags are waved as we invoke the names of our founding parents.
Our mis-rulers forget that independence is not a date on a calendar but in having an indigenous capacity to take care of your affairs.
Independence means having the capacity to feed your people. To secure your territory. To formulate policy without glancing nervously at foreign capitals.
Our generals in agbada may continue to smile for cameras. They may enjoy the symbolism of standing beside the world’s preeminent military power. They may convince themselves that this is pragmatism. But they should be told that there is a difference between cooperation and capitulation. Between alliance and dependency. Between learning from others and surrendering strategic agency.
Until we cultivate strategic depth, institutional discipline, and intellectual honesty, no foreign partner will rescue us from ourselves.
All the troops in the world cannot compensate for a leadership class that lacks self-dignity.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.
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