Out with Yanks; bring in Kamikaze

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

Minister of Defence General Christopher Musa, Minister of State for Defence Mohammed Bello Mutawalle, Chief of Defence Staff General Olufemi Oluyede, Army Chief Lt General Waidi Shaibu and Chief of Defence Intelligence Agency Lt General Emmanuel Undiandeye, are you guys sure that you gave the right advice to National Security Adviser and, through him, to the Commander-in-Chief, to allow Yankees and Limeys to put their boots on our ground allegedly to help us tackle our insecurity problems?

General Dagvin R.M. Anderson, head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command [AFRICOM], said on Tuesday last week that U.S. has sent “a small team of troops to Nigeria that brings some unique capabilities,” but he refused to provide details about the size and scope of their mission. Defense Minister General Musa confirmed that a US team was working in Nigeria but also did not provide further details. Around the same time, CDS General Oluyede said while receiving the United Kingdom High Commissioner to Nigeria Dr. Richard Montgomery at Defence Headquarters that Nigeria and UK “have reinforced their long-standing defence partnership as part of a strategic push to strengthen Nigeria’s capacity to address evolving security threats through sustained international collaboration.”

Putting Yankee and Limey boots on our ground at the same time; what makes you guys think they can pull our Boko Haram, ISWAP, Lakurawa, bandit, cattle rustler, herdsmen, IPOB, pipeline vandal, Yoruba Nation and reprisal attack chestnuts out of the raging insecurity fire? Who told you that AWACS can spot a suicide bomber sneaking from Mandara Mountains towards a busy market to detonate a bomb? Can the UK’s Avro Lancaster bomber chase Lakurawa terrorists in the bushes around Tafkin Kwato? A pipeline vandal in a small boat in the Bayelsa creeks, of what use is USS Gerald Ford and its 90 F-35s and Super Hornets, which is more useful in intimidating sovereign nations to bend to White House’s imperialist will? Who said you need sophisticated computers, drones and satellites to see a herdsman intent on revenge for his stolen cows? All the hundreds of school pupils that were kidnapped in Chibok, Dapchi, Katsina, Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna and lately in Kwara states, did Britain’s Special Air Service, US military’s Delta Force, Navy Seal Six and Green Berets, French Foreign Legion or even the German GSG 9 commandos raise a finger to bring them out?

Oga Chris Musa, did you ask the Yanks, if they are that powerful, why they deployed half a million troops in Vietnam, a country one-third Nigeria’s size, spent 14 years and billions of dollars, only to be driven out by the Vietcong, with Marines hanging on the tails of helicopters from the roof of the US’ Saigon embassy? Oga Mutawalle, did you ask the Yanks why they spent 16 years and $16 billion in Afghanistan, only to be thrown out by the ragtag Taliban army, or why they got a bloody nose in Iraq from the Fedayeen Saddam? Oga Oluyede, did you ask the Limeys why, right in their own backyard, Provisional Irish Republican Army kept them at bay for 30 years until they were rescued by the 1998 Good Friday Accords?

You guys should advise the Commander-in-Chief properly, to seek foreign help from the right quarters, from those who have demonstrable ability to fight and win irregular wars. Tell him to seek help from the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army, CPLA. What we need right now is not Western hi-tech equipment, but to borrow a leaf from the guerilla tactics that Chairman Mao Zedong and Marshal Zhu De deployed so well in the 1930s, namely to swamp the enemy with numbers. How many are they, them ISWAP and Boko Haram? A few hundred thousands, at best. With our population of over 200 million, all we need is to recruit a million and a half soldiers, train them and unleash them to occupy every inch of Sambisa Forest, Mandara Mountains and Lake Chad Timbus.

If we don’t want to try Chinese tactics, General Musa should go to Vietnam, locate old Viet Cong cadres and ship them here. We are thirteen years late because in 2004, when our then President Olusegun Obasanjo visited Hanoi, he was taken to meet the legendary Marshal Vo Nguyen Giap. By then the Marshal, who drove the French and then the Americans out of Vietnam, was sitting in a wheel chair and he died in 2013. If only Obasanjo, himself an old war commander, had asked him the right questions, he would have received a few tips about how to mount something akin to the Tet Offensive of 1968, which took the Americans and their supposedly hi-tech army completely unawares.

If General Musa does not want to go to Vietnam, he should go to Japan. The psychological advantage that Boko Haram has over our troops is that its cadres are not afraid to die, because they think they are going to heaven. Who said a regular army cannot be trained to be just as fanatical? In Japan, General Musa should seek out old Generals of the Imperial Japanese Army to teach him a thing or two about kamikaze tactics. During World War Two, Japanese pilots, shouting “Banzai!” [May the Emperor live ten thousand years!] flew their planes and rammed them directly into American warships. We should train our men at the Depot to shout, “May Emi lokan live ten thousand years!” and then ram an armoured car into an ISWAP bunker.

We need soldiers with the spirit of those old Nippon soldiers. In 1974, 29 years after the Imperial Japanese Army surrendered in World War Two, one Japanese Army Sergeant was still fighting in the Philippines because his commander sent him there in 1943 and told him to fight to the death. He only agreed to stop fighting when they went to Japan, located his old commander, who then brought with him Emperor Hirohito’s 1945 Proclamation which ordered all Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen to stop fighting and surrender to the Yanks.

In case General Musa cannot find any old kamikaze commanders, Army Chief General Waidi Shaibu should go to Sri Lanka, which is half as distant. Old Sri Lankan Army generals will happily tell him how they eradicated the Tamil Tigers after 26 years of civil war. How they surrounded Jaffna peninsula, cornered the Tigers’ redoubtable leader Veluppilai Prabakharan in a small farm house, killed him and brought the Sri Lankan civil war to an abrupt end. Can’t we do the same to Bello Turji, accost him just when he is busy recording a propaganda video clip and blast his terrorist head off?

When Minister of State for Defence Bello Mutawalle finishes marrying off his ten children, before he commences the wedding of another batch, he should go to Turkey. Turkish Generals will give him a quick tutorial on their 1998 special operation, how they captured Kurdish PKK leader Abdallah Ocalan in Kenya, bundled him into a plane and hauled him to Turkey, where he is still serving a life sentence. I believe Nigeria’s intelligence services borrowed a leaf from the Turks in 2021 when they grabbed IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu in Kenya and bundled him over to Nigeria, where he was recently convicted for terrorist offences.

American troops are only good at storming presidential palaces and abducting presidents. Mutawalle should learn from the Turks how to capture Dogo Gide from the forests of Zamfara State, haul him to court and onwards to Oguta prison in Imo State. If only Gide were to languish in Oguta while Kanu is languishing in Sokoto, agitators will finally concede that Nigeria Correctional Services’ prisoner line up now reflects the federal character, thus fulfilling the command of the 1999 Constitution as amended.

Another good place to go looking for help with our insecurity problems is Russia. All the Tucano planes that Yankees sold to us at great cost after doing yanga for a whole decade, of what use have they been? Have they done even a fraction of what the Russian Airforce did during the Chechen War, when it waited until guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev was making a phone call by the mountain side, then a plane sneaked in and blasted him off? You mean, ISWAP leaders are not making phone calls from inside dinghy boats in Lake Chad?

These Yanks are untested in Africa. I read in one book where an American General said it is logistics that win wars. I am not surprised. At the height of the Pacific War in 1943, Coca Cola Corporation followed US troops as they hopped from one island to another. It built a factory on every island that the US occupied so that Yankee troops will drink Coke. Which logistics have Boko Haram got, apart from water bottles that they refill from streams? When next Jagaban goes to France, he should get French Foreign Legionnaires to replicate here what they did in Shaba in 1977 and in Kolwezi in 1978.  I say throw out the Yanks and Limeys, and get help from the right places.