‘Buhari has made a strong start’

The Buhari Administration is barely 25 days old. But, a frank appraisal of the administration’s first steps has been made. In an interview monitored by ROBERT EGBE on Channels TV, United Kingdom High Commissioner to Nigeria Dr. Andrew Popcock shares his thoughts on a wide range of issues affecting Nigeria, including the prospects of the All Progressives Congress(APC) government led by President Muhammadu Buhari. 

Buhari’s win, a political earthquake

 President Muhammadu Buhari’s win was not just a political change, it was a political earthquake. I was present at President Buhari’s inauguration last month and the British Foreign Secretary came, the American Secretary of State and many African Heads of States came as well and the president made the most astonishing, ambitious, analytical and indeed self-critical inaugural speech I’ve ever heard.

It was remarkable. So, that is in itself an extremely good thing, but what he’s also done, of course, is, I think he recognises as well that it’s raised the bar. It’s lifted people’s expectations of what this new government is about and what it has promised to deliver. And I think we now need to move to delivery stage.

The president has made a ‘strong, focused start’

 The president looked at the country so critically (in his inaugural speech); he looked at the security situation, particularly in the North East (of Nigeria). But not just the North East, he looked at crime, at instability in the Middle Belt and The Delta. So, he looked at it pretty plainly and said, ‘This is not where we want to be.’ And he looked at governance both at the federal level and the state level and he made some very interesting observations about the federal government not wishing to interfere in the governance of the states, as that is the states’ issue, at the same time acting as a sort of referees, at least as a sort of element of oversight to make sure that the states were being managed properly and public money was being managed properly. He looked at the international agenda which, I must say, I think one thing this administration has done is to start very strongly on the diplomatic agenda. The first thing the president has done is with his neighbours. The second thing is to invite his neighbours to Abuja for a summit about the North East. He’s been to the G-7 where he met (Chancellor) Angela Merkel (of Germany) and our own prime minister (David Cameron) and other G-7 leaders. He’s been to South Africa, where I think it’s important not just for African Union purposes but to rebuild the diplomatic relationship between Nigeria and South Africa, the two power houses of the continent; they need to work together. That’s a very strong and well focused start. I think what people are now looking for, people want more of this. People are looking for the domestic agenda to develop.

Nigeria needs a ‘grown up form of politics’

I think the president has defined his own agenda here, I mean what needs to happen is, I mean the North East is a very complicated issue, the key thing, the key point that we made to our Nigerian friends is that the security response is only one of the many responses required in the north east. It’s an essential response but it’s not the single one. So, while the Nigerian army needs to approach this in as effective a way as possible, you need also to do a number of things, you need to get the politics right, for too long the federal and state governments have been at logger heads, to put it mildly, you need a more grown up form of politics recognising that Borno State and the surrounding states are an essential part of the country and need to be treated as such. Secondly, you need an element of economic uplift, people up there need hope, they need the prospects of employment, and you need to address the dire humanitarian situation with almost two million people internally displaced. So there’s an element of humanitarian as well as economic response. And the third area is, working with the neighbours, this is now a problem that’s overlapped borders, the neighbours wish to be engaged, indeed Chad has been immensely helpful on the military side. So, those four things; the security side, the development side, the political side and the cross border regional side have to come together in a synchronised approach.

I think president Buhari understands this, and the question is just to get the people and the mechanisms in place, and let me use this as a quick commercial for the UK, we want to help with this.

How The UK can help Nigeria recover stolen funds

I think the simple answer is, in any way we can. Some of it requires good old fashioned police work. What we would need to do is work closely with the federal authorities; with the EFCC, the federal police, with the Nigerian government in other aspects to learn as much about what they know, and we will help, as will other administrations in Europe and the United States, to try and trace funds like this. As you know (The late) General (Sani) Abacha’s stolen billions were tracked down to banks, I think, in Switzerland and the Swiss government has been reacting, returning a lot of this money. So, I think the question, this is an important question, but it’s also a multi-dimensional one, as you would expect. Part of the issue is to trace and return stolen money. But that is only the tip of the iceberg; the real question is (how) to break up the systems, the routines, organisations, individuals that contribute to the leeching of Nigerian public money (and taking it) overseas and even more important, I think, is to assault the mentality that regards public money as a free good and effectively drives large scale corruption.

Now that is an immensely complex business, and, I’m not here to give advice to the president of the federation, but, it just seems to us that to tackle corruption is a bit like launching a war on the Russian front, but, if you do it across the board, you are likely to succeed.

The way to do it is to pick areas of primary focus and zero in on that. So if you’re looking at military reform, it might be a good idea to look at procurement. If you’re looking at reforming the oil sector, it might do to look at revenue diversion of the money that ever reaches the federation account, never mind oil theft. So, to break up the great corruption cocoon, into project-size bites in which you can focus on particular difficulties. And I think what’s important is, nothing succeeds like success. If you begin to make an impact, if you begin to challenge the network or more importantly, the attitudes, and you begin to show that impunity – the ability to steal public money and get away with it – if you can show that impunity is no longer the norm, then things will begin to click in a different direction. So, a strong start, but a focused start, I think, is the key to this.

Security: The UK’s help in intelligence

Nothing’s gone wrong (with The UK’s assistance to Nigeria), it’s just gone slowly. President (François) Hollande of France convened a meeting in Paris, this was a while ago, after the kidnap of the Chibok girls in an attempt to pull together the friends of Nigeria, the international friends of Nigeria, and, we speak in shorthand, the P3 – the permanent members of the United Nations; France, The United States and The United Kingdom. We followed that up with a meeting in London, and that was then followed up by a meeting in Abuja, operationalising what we were trying to do from the concept to the structures, to activity. And in this activity, the United States, the United Kingdom in particular are contributing to intelligence gathering and what’s as important, intelligence analysis. Feeds from space don’t give you much until you know exactly how to make use of a good map in front of you.

And the second thing that we’ve been doing for a while now is working with the Nigerian Army, actually, training Nigerian soldiers to operate in cohesive units in a combat environment. We want to move from training companies to training battalions, we want to work up to divisional level which would see senior operating elements in Borno State and Adamawa. We’ve made some progress, we need to make a great deal more. But what we need above everything else, is access. Let us in, allow us to talk to the very senior people, allow us access to the crews and this is something the Nigerian Army needs to provide us, with the tools that are required (for training Nigerian soldiers), weapons and ammunitions, communications, uniforms. The troops are there but they have not been as well-equipped as they might have been.

That can be rectified. Nigeria has a military budget of five billion dollars a year. That is more than adequate to provide the basic inputs the troops need.

British trainers find Nigerian soldiers to be ‘really good material’

Nigerian Army Battalions and Brigades who are part of the third division based in Maiduguri, combatants. What we’ve found, and it’s worth saying this because the Nigerian Army has had a difficult time of late, and senior officers have often accused soldiers of being cowards and there have been court-martials and so forth. The British regiment that was training two companies of Nigerian soldiers recently, who then went on to do extremely well in Adamawa State, and push Boko Haram out of parts of in and around Mubi; the British regiment that trained them said they preferred working with Nigerian soldiers to working with soldiers they’ve trained in other countries, because they found the Nigerian soldier to be really good material; loyal, hardy and prepared to take risks. But he didn’t have, not just some basic equipment, but the training to give him confidence in two things: firstly, that he had a good chance of staying alive, and secondly, that he had a good chance of winning. You give a soldier those two things and you’ve created a much more effective unit. So, that is what we can offer and it’s not a theoretical thing, we’re not going to put British soldiers in Borno State. This is a Nigerian conflict, no Nigerian government, not least this one, has ever asked for someone to come and fight their battles, but what we can and will do, is train Nigerian soldiers to fight more effectively and we’ve seen that they can do it. So, our prime minister’s aide has offered to the president (Buhari), our foreign Secretary told me that recently.

What we’re waiting for is the access and whatever arrangements are going to be made by the command at the top of The Nigerian Armed Forces so that we can move forward.

Source: The Nation