Against prediction, America’s President Donald Trump’s first passage to Africa is positive.
The shift in America’s policy to sell military aircraft to Nigeria for onslaught against the Islamist Boko Haram, nearly two years after the Africa’s largest economy showed interest in acquiring the jet fighters is something that should cheer us.
Predictably, Trump’s extended hands to Nigeria may be located in his determination to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS and their affiliates like Boko Haram Islamist group.
But that Trump is taking the initiative to support Nigeria in its fight against terrorism early in his administration is commendable and charitable.
Yes, Trump consistently made it clear during his campaign that he will destroy ISIS by whatever means and we saw the volume of his anger go up last week after the Syrian regime bombed its own citizens with chemical weapons.
Already, the chemical weapons attack may have a far reaching implication for the Bashar Al-Assad regime in Syria and by extension Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose government has been accused of complicity by the White House.
Specifically, the White House accused the Russian government on Tuesday of engaging in a cover-up by conflicting the account on the chemical weapons attack.
“Moscow’s response to the April 4 attack follows a familiar pattern of its responses to other egregious actions,” United States intelligence report on the chemical weapons attack said. “It spins out multiple, conflicting accounts in order to create confusion and sow doubt within the international community.”
But hey, we are equally confronted by human rights violation, though not to be compared in any way with the horrible situation in Syria, but to the extent that the world cares about just any form of human rights violation.
Sadly, more lives have been lost since two years that the United States held back on the sale of the fighter’s jets, but the serious issue of human rights violation that costs us the deal in the first instance has not been addressed.
In Nigeria, court decisions on people held without trial or those undergoing trial whose bails have been granted by courts of competent jurisdictions are not being obeyed by the government.
In one instance, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, and other members of his group have been languishing in detention since 2015, despite rulings granting them unconditional bail.
Their continued incarceration triggered street protests in which the police freely shot at demonstrators with many killed and nothing was done to charge the police who killed our citizens.
The other piece of the pie is the continued detention of the leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, whose members were brutally killed in Zaria, Kaduna State, by state actors.
El-Zakzaky himself was shot and had one of his eyes ripped, but despite repeated calls for his release, the Nigerian authorities have refused.
Curiously, after 350 members of El-Zakzaky’s IMN were killed and dumped in mass grave, the Nigerian government has not come up with a report of its own investigation now more than a year since the clash between IMN and the Nigerian military in which soldiers slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.
Imagine! On January 16, a 45-day ultimatum handed down to the government by an Abuja Federal High Court to release El-Zakzaky and his wife, Malama Zeenah Ibrahim, elapsed with continued disobedience to court order by the government.
The court described their detention, which began in December 2015, as illegal and unconstitutional, but the Buhari government has continued to show no respect for the judiciary in all of these cases.
To the case of the former National Security Adviser, Colonel Sambo Dasuki, all competent courts, including ECOWAS court delivered same judgments to release him on bail, but that has not happened. Since December 2015, Dasuki has been held on fraud charges with the government failing to honour court decisions.
And this, series of human rights violation that prompted the US to invoke its Leahy Law which prohibits the US defence sector from providing military assistance to countries involved in rights violations are still commonplace in the country as Amnesty International noted in its report.
But this window of opportunity from Trump is all Buhari needs for a recast—to reform human rights
The military needs to prosecute those who have violated the rights of innocent citizens in its fight against Boko Haram and the federal government needs to obey court orders on all issues involving human rights.
But there’s one more thing, we don’t have an ambassador in Washington D.C, and that should be a big issue in this new deal with America.
Let’s be reminded that it is at the Capitol Hill that the final decision will be made on the sale of the 12 Embraer A-29 Super Tucano aircrafts that will cost our country nearly $600 million, and there’s need to parley the senators who may want to oppose “anything Trump” and to hold on to champions like Senators John McCain and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who have signified support for the deal.
Definitely, the aircraft deal is a bridge between Nigeria and America and one that will provide oasis needed in the Sahel, where Islamic extremists such as Boko Haram may have found a nest after suffering dislocation.
Honestly, the A-29 deal will do serious damage to Abubakar Shekau and his men who appears to have converted to an underground guerrilla strategy to launch attacks in recent time after the fall of Sambisa Forest and their crushing defeat in urban strongholds of Madagali and Maiduguri.
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