20.10.2020🇳🇬

ON HAITI. Nigeria is the only Army in modern history to end two civil wars, first in Liberia, and then in Sierra Leone and conduct elections that restored them to democracy. In Liberia, after years of brutal factional fighting that had destroyed the state, it was the Nigerian-led ECOMOG force that did the hard work: disarming the warlords, enforcing the peace, and holding the ground long enough for Liberians to go to the polls and choose their own government. In Sierra Leone, it was Nigeria again. Nigerian troops broke the back of the RUF, defeated the rebels who had amputated civilians and seized the diamond fields, restored the democratically elected government, and secured the country for elections and a return to civilian rule. No other army in the modern era has that record. Others have intervened. Others have peace-kept. Only the Nigerian Army has ended two full-scale civil wars in two different countries and stayed to midwife democracy in both. That is why Haiti would have been a cakewalk if not for the Boko Haram insurgency. Haiti's gangs are not an army. They are not Boko Haram. They have no ideology, no external state backing, no vast forest hideouts, and no territorial army to defend. They are criminal networks terrorizing a collapsed state. Nigeria has done harder. Nigeria has done it twice, in West Africa, against hardened, battle-tested rebel armies. Haiti needed a Nigeria that was not already at war.