NEARLY two months ago, while giving evidence before a judicial commission on the Benue-Taraba crisis, the erstwhile Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Victor Malu, disclosed the shocking piece of news of the pauper's burial given to some 800 Nigerian soldiers killed in an ECOMOG peacekeeping operation. That latter-day revelation only served to deepen the mystery of the financial and human cost incurred by Nigeria in its 12-year ECOMOG operations. It bespeaks our terrible state of living that we are yet to know how many Nigerian peacekeeping soldiers perished in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and how much it cost the Nigerian people to save Liberians and Sierra Leoneans from themselves. The trite argument that these were brotherly expeditions embarked upon to save our West African brethren in deep trouble fails to reckon that in some ways the ECOMOG operations, headed and principally financed by Nigeria, have wrought such grievous opportunity cost that we must begin to wonder why we have to be in pain in order to make others overcome their self-inflicted anguish.

If the ECOMOG operations were cavalier undertaking by military regimes that were accountable to nobody, Nigerians are nevertheless entitled to assume that great circumspection will attend any future attempt to operationalise ECOMOG under our prevailing democracy. That assumption however may be misplaced. At the weekend, the Minister of Co-operation and Integration in Africa, Abimbola Ogunkelu, told the News Agency of Nigeria that the Federal Government was not ruling out the deployment of troops to Liberia. As a first step, he said, Nigeria was facilitating dialogue between the Charles Taylor-led government and the rebels of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). But where the negotiations flounder, peacekeepers will move in, although, according to Ogunkelu, "we won't get embroiled in a prolonged military intervention". The minister's statement is an amplification of that made in May by the Senegalese President, Abdoulaye Wade, who is the current ECOWAS chairman. He had said at the end of an ECOWAS extraordinary meeting in Yamoussoukvo that ECOMOG might be sent to Liberia if dialogue failed. Whereas Wade spoke of ECOMOG troops, Ogunkelu, has spoken of Nigerian troops, because "Nigeria had never shied away from the responsibility of maintaining peace in the West African sub-region". It is sad that what was a costly misadventure is now being peddled as a sub-regional responsibility by a country that wants to look great outside but is rotten internally.

The recent history of Nigeria's role as the policeman of West Africa began in 1990, a few months after Charles Taylor, then a rebel, initiated a bush war against President Samuel Doe of Liberia. I do not know what strategic interest Nigeria was pursuing in Liberia, other than the widely held view that President Ibrahim Babangida wanted to save his kindred dictator, Samuel Doe. Liberia was basically an American problem. It has been speculated, however, that the Babangida regime took up the task partly because the junta wanted a higher approval rating for itself by Washington. As the ECOMOG operation became a quagmire, there was the rationalisation that a domino effect loomed over the sub-region if the rebel onslaught succeeded. But the domino-effect that was feared was mere hallucination or bare-faced rationalisation to justify an adventure that had gone awry.


Of course, the ECOMOG operation in Liberia, which later extended to Sierra Leone (where our boys and men are still on peacekeeping mission) was a goldmine for military contractors who supplied equipment and rations. Although Nigeria was largely instrumental to the Abuja Peace Accord by which the factions in the Liberian civil war eventually agreed to a cease-fire, elections and a new government, Charles Taylor was always suspected of nursing an abiding grudge against Nigeria for delaying the harvest of his conquest that seemed well-assured against Doe before ECOMOG stepped in in 1990. If Taylor's hostility towards Nigeria was mere speculation, his maltreatment of and open confrontation with the residual ECOMOG (read: Nigerian) troops that stayed back under the terms of the Abuja settlement, showed up Charles Taylor as an ingrate soon after he was sworn in as President in 1997. This was aside reported cases of the rampant molestation of ordinary, law-abiding Nigerians resident in that country.

Is it the same Charles Taylor we want to send our boys to go and die for? Peacekeeping is not war. But it is war by another name. Inside the bushes of Liberia and Sierra Leone where children are field commanders and the rules of armed conflict are neither known nor respected, any peacekeeper in such a terrain is literally at war. If peacekeeping were not so hazardous, our boys would go on such missions and return in equal number. According to Gen. Malu, when he was ECOMOG Force Commander, he brought home 800 corpses of Nigerian soldiers killed in peacekeeping operations in Liberia. He said he directed their secret burial in order to avoid national uproar and panic. Even if the nation did not know about it at the time, the dependants and survivors of those killed were invariably thrown into misery - all because the country was pursuing some ill-defined foreign policy objective in another land from which she could never benefit.

After the Liberian operation, Nigeria was deeply involved in the Sierra Leone mission. There again, Charles Taylor displayed his treachery. He was dealing in arms and diamonds - the so-called blood diamonds - with Sierra Leonean rebels even while ECOMOG troops, mainly Nigerian soldiers, were under sniper fire. Sometime in September 2000, 59 of such Nigerian soldiers were wounded and flown to Nasr City, Egypt, for treatment. The wounded soldiers grabbed the headlines after they staged a public protest over unpaid allowances. It was on account of Charles Taylor's perfidy that the United Nations imposed sanctions on Liberia - an embargo on diamond exports and a travel ban on Taylor and his henchmen, which was recently extended for another year.

Because our premium on life is cheap, it would be no big deal if we sent our boys to go and die again for Charles Taylor and Liberians. We would have no compunction in making instant widows and orphans of the wives and children of the men and officers the Federal Government is contemplating sending to Liberia. Because we are a nation that is hopelessly wasteful, the Government is yet to calculate what it costs to train and maintain an officer or a non-commissioned officer and how much will be lost thereby if one of them was killed in the pointless mission being contemplated for Liberia. At a time when Nigerians are sick and hungry and dying, it would be the epic of waste if our soldiers were to be sent to Liberia for any peacekeeping mission now or in the near future. Linkages have been speculated between the proliferation of illicit light weapons in Nigeria and the return of Nigerian troops from peacekeeping missions abroad, particularly in West Africa. Linkages have also been speculated between the prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS among members of the armed forces and the deployment of officers and men for cross border peacekeeping missions. Ordinarily, these are worrisome social consequences which any serious government ought to be concerned about, rather than trifling with a policy measure that is bound to compound the problem. Ethnic militias are threatening to tear Nigeria asunder, and the government instead of deploying resources and time to get on top of the problem wants to play the ostrich by embarking upon Afghanistanism.

n 1991, one year after Gen. Babangida began the ECOMOG mission, he declared in a newspaper interview that he was surprised that despite the ravages it had suffered, the Nigerian economy was yet to collapse. He had expected to see immediate signs of rot and disintegration. Those signs were there, except that Gen. Babangida didn't look hard enough. As the ECOMOG operation progressed, so did the Nigerian condition worsen. Compare the exchange rate in 1990 with that of 2002. Compare the interest rate of 1990 with 2002. Social infrastructure has decayed almost beyond repair. Armed robbers are on the rampage. Electricity is a luxury. Our future is hardly assured. Fuel prices have risen several fold since 1990, because the government needed money. And the government still wants more money. This time to go and burn in Liberia? Nigerians must resist this mission.

....this article was published in Sept 2002, years before the terrorism in north and the kidnappings in east. we are worse now than we were then and we still havent learnt the lessons which those deployments and outcomes were meant to teach.