What US rescue mission in Nigeria exposed

 (Link on Daily Trust site)

The recent United States rescue mission, on Nigerian territories, where a team of US elite commandos rescued one Philip Walton, an American citizen, from kidnappers made headlines in many countries around the world including Nigeria, of course.

The US Defence Department announced the successful early-morning rescue operation, which took place barely 96 hours after Walton’s kidnapping in Massalata, a village in southern Niger near the border with Nigeria.  

As a typical US clandestine operation, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had tracked the kidnappers through the signals of their mobile phones while the US “Marine Special Operations elements in Africa helped locate him” as reported by ABC News.

Based on that intelligence about 30 US commandos were, according to The New York Times, “parachuted into the remote area where the kidnappers had taken Walton early Saturday morning. They hiked about three miles until they came upon the captors’ small encampment. An intense but brief gunfight followed in which one captor escaped. Walton was not harmed and whisked from the camp to a makeshift landing zone where a U.S. helicopter brought him to safety.”

The US conducts daring clandestine operations in many countries without necessarily the knowledge of their respective governments, thanks to its world’s most sophisticated espionage technology and the world’s best-trained and best-equipped undercover operatives and commandos.   

Even when it conducts such an operation in a supposedly friendly country, many a time, the US only informs the government of the country when the operation has been done already. Also, even in the event when it’s absolutely unavoidable to involve the government in some stages of the process, the US operatives would manage it in a way that the government concerned wouldn’t necessarily figure out what was going on exactly until the operation has been done. 

Sometimes, the US claims that the operation was conducted in coordination with the country where the operation has been done to save it the embarrassment of dealing with its aftermath. 

Since the beginning of the outgoing Trump administration, it has “rescued over 55 hostages and detainees in more than 24 countries” according to the outgoing President. Of course, some operations fail and sometimes the US runs out of options but to reluctantly negotiate or even pay ransom for the release of its kidnapped citizens in foreign lands.   

Regardless of the legality or otherwise of such operations, they suggest how a serious-minded government prioritizes the security, wellbeing and other interests of its citizens at any cost. They suggest the extent to which any responsible government can go to save and protect the lives of its citizens. 

Now, though the US claimed that its recent rescue operation in Nigeria was conducted with the aid of Niger and Nigerian governments, that wasn’t necessarily the case. And even if it did indeed involve Nigerian authorities in the process, the Nigerian government didn’t manage its involvement the way any responsible government with its interests in mind would have done. 

If it were elsewhere, the government would have demanded, as a precondition for its cooperation, that the rescue operation equally target other kidnappers’ campsite to simultaneously rescue many kidnapped Nigerians languishing out there.  

Yet, while the Nigerian government squandered that opportunity, it also never showed the slightest shame that it has effectively left its citizens to the mercy of kidnappers while another country rescued its kidnapped citizen on its (Nigerian) own territories. After all, Nigerians have resigned themselves to their fate in the face of government failure to protect them from bandits, terrorists and kidnappers.  

A recent incident involving a security patrol team and a group of relatives on their way to pay ransom for the release of their relatives who had been kidnapped among other Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) students while travelling to Lagos represented that miserable situation. 

One of the relatives was quoted by the Daily Trust narrating that “We met with security agents who were patrolling the area while on our way and they asked us where we were going to because it was late at night. We told them we were going on our way to pay ransom for the release of our relatives and the security agents wished us good luck” (Daily Trust, November 23, 2020). 

Even in the absence of any grounds for comparison between the US and Nigeria in terms of military, intelligence-gathering and processing capabilities, no one can rightly excuse the ineptitude of the Nigerian government in its supposed tackling of bandits and kidnappers unleashing misery across particularly the northern part of the country.

Because the criminals operate with basic communication technology and maintain a consistent hence predictable modus operandi. 

Besides, their typical manoeuvre after kidnapping people is always to hike along with the victims in the nighttime for days across the bush while hiding for the whole daytime apparently on the assumption that they cannot be detected from the sky in the nighttime. They are too clueless to realize that they are actually more exposed to aerial detection in the nighttime than the daytime. 

From whatever angle one looks at the recent US rescue mission in Nigeria, one observes the urgent need for Nigerian defence, security and intelligence strategists to prioritize intelligence-based strategies in tackling the activities of kidnappers, bandits and terrorists in the country. Such strategies are by far more effective than the current conventional personnel-intensive combat strategies.   

There was equally a display of inexcusable diplomatic naivety in Nigeria’s supposed cooperation with the US in conducting the operation without apparently anything in return.

Dynamics of Trump’s fall

(Link on Daily Trust site)

Following what was described as the tensest presidential election in the United States in more than a century, which culminated in the defeat of arguably the most controversial US president, Donald Trump, the dynamics behind his fall explained why he couldn’t evade it.

As an aspirant to the US presidency in 2016, and though an elitist and indeed wolfish capitalist to the core, Donald Trump had successfully adopted the façade of a populist politician using populist rhetoric that resonated with a significant segment of particularly the lower and middle-class conservative White Americans.    

He will go down in history as not only the first US president from outside the establishment but also the first anti-establishment populist US president. 

In other words, he would be remembered by both admirers and foes as a US president who challenged the establishment and had his own way on many occasions, earning himself the anger of a considerable section of the country’s political elite, corporate businesses, the media and even the Hollywood entertainment industry, which has produced tens of movies against him. 

After all, no sooner had his presidency begun than most of the most influential media organizations in the United States including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post etc. adopted Trump-bashing as their obsession ending up literally campaigning against him in the recently-concluded election. While in his relentless retaliation, he dubbed them “Fakes News”, and has since then never missed a chance to dismiss them in his attempt to discredit them. 

Interestingly, Donald Trump never got along with even his Republican Party establishment. Since 2016 when he surprisingly emerged as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, many high-profile party members who had all along tried unsuccessfully to foil his emergence have left the party. 

Many more had similarly, albeit equally unsuccessfully, opposed his nomination for the just-concluded presidential election; and even after his nomination, tens of other senior party members e.g. John Bolton, Colin Powel and many others of their calibre declared their opposition to his reelection bid. 

Likewise, many nonpartisan statesmen, former senior diplomats, retired high-ranking military, security, intelligence officers and others had all opposed him. 

Also, many otherwise Republican voters voted for Joe Biden in what’s known in Nigerian political context as “anti-party” making trump perhaps the highest-profile victim of “anti-party” in the history of US politics. 

In short, there was an unprecedented elite gang-up against Donald Trump; a gang-up that put aside partisan differences to frustrate his reelection bid. Obviously, no politician could have prevailed over a gang-up of such influence.  

Besides, as expected, African American and other non-white American communities who have been affected the most by Trump’s controversial sabotage of the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as the Obamacare, which he systematically bastardized following his failure to get the Act repealed, voted massively against him. 

Trump’s persistent criticism of the Act was widely viewed as a show of blatant insensitivity to the peculiar plight of disadvantaged Americans most of whom come from those communities. After all, his characteristic racist utterances and insinuations, and xenophobic immigration policies had already earned him stinking notoriety among them.  

On a lighter note, that explains why the euphoria that erupted in many cities and towns across the US following the announcement of the result was particularly passionate in those communities. 

Having said that, Donald Trump has performed incredibly well for the US economy as a whole, even though the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and his poor handling of it did indeed further undermine his reelection chances.  

Though US foreign policy and its international engagements hardly influence the voting behaviour of the average American voter, he isn’t absolutely free from the underlying influence of foreign interests, which have always had interests in who becomes the US President, and have always discreetly pursued their respective interests in this regard.  

Also, though Trump's “America First” foreign policy and his protectionist economic policies have reduced US foreign involvement, which has saved a lot for the US economy, the Washington establishment sees it as an inadvertent undermining of the US global influence especially in the face of the growing influence of China and Russia on the world stage, and the growing ambitions of countries with geopolitical expansionist agendas like Iran and Turkey. 

The establishment is more interested in maintaining the superiority of the US global influence at any cost, as opposed to Donald Trump who only approaches issues from the perspective of a typical Wall Street elite capitalist. 

Now, as Donald Trump’s drama-laden presidency comes to end, he will leave the White House without necessarily conceding defeat voluntarily. And just as he has always been controversial, he isn’t likely to lead a quiet and controversy-free post-presidency life like other former presidents. 

In any case, observers would eagerly look forward to reading his memoirs; after all, being that recklessly blunt, overly insensitive and less pretending compared to mainstream politicians, his memoirs would almost certainly turn out to be the most revealing hence most controversial.