"Buharification" of West Africa?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 7, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

It started just the other day; the other day when the former Nigerian military dictator turned elected civilian president, Mr. Muhammadu Buhari, was reported to have demanded the return of the control of that country's airspace from Ghana, which had reportedly been in control of the same since 1945, when Ghana was the erstwhile Gold Coast. I don't know why it took the Nigerians and their leader so long to come to the realization of Ghana's having been in control of their airspace for some 70 years now. The Nigerians have always boasted about being "The Giant of West Africa," both in geopolitical and military terms and I also suppose, in terms of population size and/or density as well. And so I was pleasantly surprised about the fact of Ghana's having been in control of Nigeria's airspace, as well as the airspaces of Benin and Togo since President Buhari was two years old.

Now, I don't know as yet who controls the Ivorian airspace. What piqued my attention and interest, though, was the fact that President Buhari, at least as implied by the news report, appeared to be prevailing on his two immediate western neighbors to also demand control of their airspaces from Ghana. You see, Mr. Buhari is widely known to be very hawkish. It was he who led the junta that overthrew the democratically elected government of President Shehu Shagari. His extortionate junta lasted less than two years, during which tempestuous period he was widely alleged to have caused a lot of human rights violations. Needless to say, the two, or so, juntas that followed the shortlived Buhari adventure were not particularly known to have been any remarkable improvement on the performance of their predecessor. And those juntas were, of course, led by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, late, the man whom I have affectionately dubbed "The Butcher of Kano."

We must quickly observe, at least in passing, that the former Maj.-Gen. Buhari, at 72 years old, still has the fighting spirit in him. Time and age have not conspired to any remarkably blunt his rough edges, as it were. He seems a bit more mature these days, but he is still pretty much the hawk that he used to be as a young senior military officer. This may primarily explain why it took him four excruciating and consecutive shots to clinch the presidency of his country. So witheringly eviscerated had his public image and trust dipped that the camp of the presidential incumbent that he unseated in his fourth try at the presidency, had not hesitated to remind voters of the Buhari-Reign-of-Terror. One enviable quality widely known about the man, however, is his economic modesty.

What I have decided to focus on in this column, though, regards his recently announced decision to facilitate the construction of a munitions manufacturing plant for the express use of the Nigeria Army which, as is globally known, has been engaged in a fierce battle for control of the northeastern part of the country with the Islamist terrorist organization called Boko Haram (See "Nigeria To Go Into Arms Manufacturing - Buhari" MgAfrica.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/7/15). Indeed, so effective has the latter group, widely alleged to be affiliated with either Al-Qaeda or ISIS/ISIL terror machines, become that the election of the now-President Buhari was widely envisaged by his supporters and sympathizers to be Abuja's best chance of permanently settling the Boko Haram Conundrum once and for all. And the former general had not hesitated to use the Boko Haram menace to good electioneering effect.

Going into Nigeria's Election 2015, then-Candidate Buhari had three factors in his favor, namely, the fact that like the leaders of Boko Haram, the former military strongman was a Muslim and also of Hausa-Fulani ethnicity. The latter group constitutes the single-largest ethnic polity in Nigeria, having also dominated that country's politics since independence from British colonial rule in 1960. And lastly, the decision by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, himself a former military ruler, to switch his backing from his successor, party-mate and then-incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, the academician and zoologist turned politician. It appears as if the two men had had some sort of serious misunderstanding. One could, however, also not totally rule out the old-soldier bond between Messrs. Buhari and Obasanjo.

President Buhari says that the establishment of a munitions factory has partly been necessitated by the flat refusal by the United States to make military weaponry accessible to Nigerian troops over the question of the latter's poor human rights record, in particular widespread allegations that some Nigerian military leaders have "aided and abetted" their Boko Haram clansmen and their dastardly and barbaric activities.

Now, the preceding state of affairs ought to be of great concern to Ghana and the other countries in the West African sub-region, particularly those closest to Nigeria. For starters, we don't know the caliber of weaponry that the proposed Buhari factory intends to produce. Nigeria is also not known to be among the most disciplined countries in the sub-region, when it comes the subject of the free circulation of assault weapons. We also cannot guarantee that a leader so feisty and hawkish such as President Buhari, even as eerily demonstrated by his summary decision to recapture Ghana's pre-independence control of Nigeria's airspace, can be counted upon to be a genial and mutually protective neighbor. Of course, we all know that the airspace-control issue came about as a direct result of the fact of Ghana's having served as the West African Headquarters for the Euro-American Allied Command Forces during World War II.

As an ECOWAS member, President Buhari could have gone about the process of repossessing Nigeria's airspace from Ghana's aviational control in a more diplomatic and civil manner. The major countries in the sub-region could even have agreed to a collaborative policing of our collective airspaces.

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