CHAPTER THREE
3.5 Three Alternative Explanation(s) for Nigeria’s Involvement in Liberia
ostensibly to build the improved political relationship that had blossomed at a time when the war had already begun.
Against the backdrop of the analysis presented by both schools of thought, this study concludes that there are three alternative explanations for Nigeria‟s intervention in Liberia;
these are presented below. The below explanations are drawn from the seeming correlation between the arguments presented by scholars and records from that particular point in time.
prove that the country under his leadership possessed everything it takes be a peacemaker.
This suggests that leadership aspirations were a centrifugal determinant of Nigeria‟s foreign policy. General Babangida saw Liberia as the most suitable platform to showcase his charismatic traits and morale and also to boost his ego.
A graphic illustration of Babangida‟s drive for power and recognition as a statesman was made by Soyinka (1996:14):
Babangida’s love for power was visualized in actual terms to mean: power over Nigeria, over the nation’s impressive size, its potential, over the nation’s powerful status and within the committee of nations. The potency of Nigeria was an augmentation of his own sense of power (Soyinka 1996:14).
Alluding to the amount of power and influence wielded by Babangida between 1985 and 1993, Othman (1989:142-143) observed that “no other Nigerian leader had established such a firmer grip over the military hierarchy and the country than the way Babangida did”.
Babangida, he said, relished his personal contribution to Nigeria‟s contemporary history, together with the way he exerted his influence and personal authority on matters of state and those concerning Nigeria‟s relationship with Liberia.
Adebajo (2008:188) further argues that Babangida‟s desire to demonstrate his leadership potential to West Africa and indeed the world, led to the use of Liberia as a centerpiece of his administration‟s foreign policy focus; a development which further exacerbated the already strained relationship between Nigeria and the Charles Taylor-led NPFL rebels. Consequently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Babangida became an instrument in the hands of the presidency rather than an „engine room‟ for foreign policy articulation and propagation.
Power was so concentrated in the Presidency that no one, not even the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs could tell exactly how much Nigeria had spent on the ECOMOG mission in Liberia (Adebajo, 2008:188).
Citing a final reason which influenced Nigeria‟s interventionist role in the Liberian crisis, Kupolati (1990:327) noted that the Nigerian Army has been extremely keen to demonstrate to the international community that it possesses the required professionalism, manpower and resources to maintain peace even outside the Nigerian territory. This was necessary to dispel insinuations that the Nigerian army was only proficient in coup making, particularly given the historical antecedents of Nigeria with coup d'états. Considering the fact that the army had
been largely inactive after the completion of its mission in Chad between 1980 and 1984, Liberia therefore offered the Nigerian military a suitable environment to demonstrate that it remained an effective peace keeper that could maintain peace as well as exert its authority within a sub-region it considers its primary constituency.
This role was further informed by the successes recorded by the Nigerian military in its United Nations (UN) supervised international peace keeping efforts in the Congo, Balkans, Lebanon, Kuwait, Western Sahara, Somalia and Rwanda, and Sudan. Nigeria also saw Liberia as an opportunity to promote its pursuit of a permanent Security Council seat at the United Nations and as a platform to assert its status and authority as a regional power. Furthermore, as Omede (1995:51) notes, “the Nigerian military made use of the Liberian civil war as a testing ground for both its effectiveness and the viability of its arsenals and to also act as a deterrent to any hypothetical enemy”; an aspiration that was made possible by the oil boom enjoyed by Nigeria in the 1970s (Omede, 1995:51). A combination of all these factors led to Nigeria‟s involvement in Liberia between 1990 and 1997, under the auspices of ECOMOG.
By October 1999, ECOMOG had withdrawn its final contingent from a conflict which for most of its seven-year duration hardly touched on Western consciousness. The conflict was a manifestation of a post-cold-war intra-state conflict with all the attendant signs and defining characteristics of state failure; tribal conflict and political disintegration; and a rather overdue response from the UN. ECOMOG`s impact in Liberia was felt more in the area of peacekeeping, whose absence would have seen the conflict drag on unnecessarily, leading to the loss of more innocent lives to a feud occasioned by Charles Taylor and Samuel Doe‟s lust and desire for power.
It is however, instructive to note that all this happened at a cost to the ECOMOG and, by extension, Nigeria. Charles Taylor had always nursed ill feelings towards Nigeria for the latter‟s role in denying him the „harvest‟ of his conquest which he felt was inevitable against Samuel Doe before the peace keeping force stepped in, in 1990. This led to the hostility, maltreatment and open confrontation faced by the remaining Nigeria-led ECOMOG troops that stayed back under the terms of the Abuja settlement, as well as the molestation of law- abiding Nigerians resident in Liberia.
It can thus be inferred that Nigeria‟s role in Liberia was fuelled primarily by the leadership and international recognition aspirations of the Babangida regime. Through the use of the
army and in terms of the practical interpretation of Nigeria‟s theory of four concentric circles (particularly the notion of the need to maintain peace with its contiguous states and West Africa), the regime, as Adebajo (2008:189) notes, assumed the responsibility of restoring peace to Liberia in spite of its huge cost implications. The Babangida administration estimated this cost at more than $4 billion, although it is believed that it might have been as high as $10 billion. It is important to note that this happened at a time when the country‟s debt profile was rising, when average Nigerians was barely living from hand to mouth, when electricity and other key social infrastructure were virtually non-existent and more importantly at a time when Nigeria had (and still has) not escaped the appellation of a but
„poor‟ nations (Adebajo, 2008:189).
The following section examines the role played by other state and non-state actors in the Liberian impasse.
3.6The International Dimension to the Crisis