At the Donors’ Conference organised at the end of the 20th Ordinary Session of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last Tuesday, President Goodluck Jonathan disclosed that besides providing 900 combat soldiers and 300 air force personnel as part of the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA), Nigeria had so far committed about $34million (about N7billion) towards the deployment of troops and logistics support. He also committed the country to making an additional pledge of $5million. What he didn’t say was the time frame to make this new release and how much more would be given at different intervals.
Given that the 1,200 troops had spent merely a week in Mali, the implication is that Nigeria spends an average of N1bn daily on this charity expedition. The government should control its spending spree and avoid the image of “Father Christmas” that its predecessors were notorious for. It is illegal to incur some expenses before the president transmited his letter dated January 16, 2013, and tagged “Notification to the Senate on the deployment of members of the Armed Forces on a limited combat duty to Mali and request for consent” to the Senate as provided for in Section 4 (5) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amended.
The swift dispatch of troops belies the security and infrastructural challenges at home, and the frenzy with which a government that scores poorly on its budget financing suggests some entrenched interest by some powerful persons in places where funds are released. Our intervention in Mali may be noble and considered as a humanitarian necessity, but we deplore a situation where some smart alecs would make the funds go astray. Twenty-eight soldiers who held a protest over non-payment of their peacekeeping allowances were sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2008. They claimed they were owed as much as $25,000 (about N4.25m) each by the army. But the court-martial in Lagos said the protest breached military discipline. Last June, Nigerian soldiers on a United Nations peacekeeping operation in Dafur, the Sudan, threatened to go on rampage if they were not airlifted and paid allowances owed them. These instances suggest that some people benefit from the toil and sweat of peacekeepers.
A situation where the Nigerian factor pushes up our financial commitment to these humanitarian gestures is neither good for the image of the country nor the soldiers sent on these missions. Clearly, that did not form part of the basis for the Senate endorsement of the president’s request “to combat armed and terrorist groups including Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and their activities, as well as the proliferation of weapons from within and outside the region, with grave consequences on the security and stability in the northern parts of Mali and beyond, including Nigeria”. It is also not the reason for the UN Security Council Resolution 2085 of December 20, 2012.
Nigeria has enough financial strain of sustaining its developmental projects. Becoming spendthrift on account of peacekeeping would make a mess of our assistance and leave us worse off. If, by 1997, Nigeria had reportedly spent between US $1 and $2 billion on the Liberian war and contributed 70 per cent of the force capacity over a period of eight years and still it was criticised, surely, spending N7bn in one week is unacceptable. The Senate should keep it in check.