Punchng:

Nigeria won’t break up this year –US

The United States Government has said that there are no
signs that Nigeria will disintegrate before, during or after the
February general elections.
While explaining that Nigeria was indeed facing “big
challenges,” the US Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. James
Entwistle, stated that the problems at stake were
surmountable.
According to the top American envoy, Nigerians should
“throw out of the window” the idea from “some think-tank or
somebody outside the (US) government” stating that Nigeria
was going to fall apart in 2015.
Entwistle spoke in Lagos on Thursday, during an interactive
session with select journalists on the recent donation of a US
naval ship, christened, “NNS Okpabana” to the Nigerian
Navy.
The US diplomat said, “I have been plagued by the question
(on Nigeria’s 2015 disintegration) and I have gone back to
look and I can’t find any government report that said Nigeria
would disintegrate in 2015. Maybe some think-tank or
somebody outside the government said it; I don’t know.
“But in my opinion as the US Ambassador to this country, I
am not worried in the least that Nigeria is going to
disintegrate in 2015. Regardless of what someone may have
said, the question is that we are now here in 2015: Do we
see signs that Nigeria is going to disintegrate or fall apart or
something? I don’t know what you think. But I don’t see
those signs.
“But I see signs of growth, optimism and I see that to
minimise the challenges that you have, in this life, you have
to keep on keeping on, and I think the future is quite bright.”
Entwistle added that if the Federal Government did what was
needed to be done in the coming years, especially as
pertaining to “security, corruption and all of these things,”
the future of Nigeria would be “very bright.”
He debunked the insinuation that the President Barack
Obama administration had imposed “an arms embargo” on
Nigeria following the reported refusal of the American
government to sell Cobra helicopters to the Federal
Government to prosecute the ongoing war against terrorism.
Citing human rights considerations for the development,
Entwistle hinted that the US Diplomatic Mission to Nigeria
was “still talking about a number of other types of
equipment and different types of helicopters that might be
more appropriate” for the Nigerian military services.
Respecting human rights among the civilian population, he
argued, should not be an impediment to fighting terrorism
in the three north-eastern states of Adamawa, Borno and
Yobe.
He added, “Sometimes the criticism of us (the United States)
is that we don’t care about fighting terrorism, but we care
about human rights. My reaction is that I don’t believe that
you have to choose between fighting terror and protecting
the civilian population. I think you can do both at the same
time.
“As you fight terror, you also have to protect the civilian
population and keep them on your side. We have learnt the
hard way in our own counter-terrorism experience that if
you lose the trust and support of the civilian population, you
have lost everything. We (Nigeria and America) have had
that conversation and indeed much of the (military) training
that we have done with the army over the years have
focused on this kind of thing.”