By Clifford Ndujihe, Deputy Political Editor

FORMER Consul-General of Nigeria in Atlanta, United States of America and Charge d’Affaires, Embassy of Nigeria, The Hague, Netherlands, Ambassador Joe Keshi, has advised the Federal Government to change strategy and rejig its foreign policy in response to what he describes as the U.S’ double standards.

Peeved by the comments attributed to United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, during his visit to Nigeria, last week that US Governmeny would deny Nigerians who promote any form of violence during the 2015 elections U.S. Visa,” Keshi said it was a wrong message at a time the country is battling with the Boko Haram insurgency.

The erudite diplomat, who complained that the U.S has not lifted a finger to help Nigeria out of the Boko Haram war, said in an exclusive interview with Vanguard that Kerry’s visit is ill-timed and his message out of sync.

On John Kerry’s visit to Nigeria

This is the second time I am speaking on John Kerry’s visit to Nigeria. The first time I spoke about it I used pidgin English to say ‘Kerry come show face’ because for me, the timimg of the visit was wrong and above all the messsage was even worse.

In view of a recent article I wrote, I am not anti-America in any way. But I believe as a Nigerian that the Americans, if they claim as they often say that Nigeria is their strategic partner, then they must treat us as geniune partner and respond to our needs.

Critical period

You cannot treat one partner differently and treat us differently, except they are fooling us. You cannot say you are interested in the future of Nigeria and at this most critical period of our history that we need help, we invited you to help us with the training of our military men and women and to rebuild our military but you have spent the better period of the training virtually insulting the military, disparaging the military, saying they are corrupt, ‘we cannot share intelligence with you because your military is not good,’ etc.

Let us break this to the simplest level for you to understand my feelings. If I invite you as a lesson teacher for my son or daughter and everytime I ask how he is progressing, you keep telling me that my child is an idiot, he is a never do well, I will be annoyed with you. Why did I employ you? I employed you to help me bring up the child but instead you spend the better part of the time telling me how bad my child is. Of course I will fire you.

If we are strategic partners and you actually respect us, there are channels of communication. For exmple, if you are training the military they are not doing well, there are so many ways you can get your ambassador to take this matter up, up to the level of the president so that the president will know that the military is not doing what you guys want them to do and that is why they are having problems. But when you go and publicise this things, who gains? You open the whole country and its people to complete ridicule. I am against that because when I served in the United States, it was during the debate on whether or not they should go to war in the Middle-East. There were many diplomats who were not in favour of going to war but they did not go up to the level of CNN and ABC screaming against the United States that they were going to destabilise the Middle East region.

I am sure that many countries made their protest to caution America and backed off. They did not take it and the consequenses of that is what we are seeing today, the whole of Middle East is destabilised.

When Kerry came here, ostensibly he came to warn people against violence. That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard. You are saying that anybody who causes violence will not be granted American Visa. The people who are going to cause this violence don’t apply for American visas. They are unlikely to apply for visas.

In the meantime, in the last four years, we have had problem with Boko Haram. You are our strategic partner. In comparison with what you have done to other regions where there is terrorism, you stepped in, tried to distrupt the flow of arms to the terrorists, you have revealed who their financiers and sponsors are, you have revealed where they are getting arms from. But in the Nigerian case, nothing has been done to assist us in all these.

Getting arms and amunition

This is one hell of a crisis we do not know who the financiers and sponsors are. We dont’ know how they get their arms and ammunition apart from the ones abandoned by the Nigerian Military. We do not know who is actually the brain behind this operation. And it is impossible to tell anybody that nobody is behind this.

Those who have the super-intelligence and have helped people all over the world, suddenly, when it comes to Nigeria they just give us lectures. Hundreds and thousands of people have died. You have not threatened the sponsors, you are threatening some Almajiris that if they do anything against the election you will not give them visa. How many of them has applied for visa in the last four years? So the message is wrong.

When Kerry came what I expected him to deal with is, first of all, they announced that Nigeria has cancelled the training programme. I expected that security would be the main issue, not vacuous election issue which I believe we can handle very well.

His take on comments that America is not buying our crude oil as a form of purnishment Let’s not go into this conspiracy theory. Technology is improving in the way we do things all over the world. When it comes to oil, we must blame successive Nigeria leaders for investing our oil proceed in critical infrastructure that will enable us confront any oil glut or decline in oil production.

For many years we have been paying lip service to diverification, it is only now that some efforts are being made to diversify the economy even though the media is not giving the Jonathan Administration due credit for doing this, at least, they are doing something.

Driving the economy

America is not buying our oil not because they want to purnish us. They now have a new technology to go into a new area of oil production and they have done it to their advantage. What we should do here is to build refineries, refine our oil, use it properly in this country and sell the rest. America has nothing to do with the fate of our oil at all.

Could you throw more light on Jonathan diversification of the economy?

According to the government itself in the last couple of days, it is the non-oil sector that has been driving the economy. It, interestingly, means that a lot has been happening in agriculture. Now, they are trying to revive the auto industry, I think he last one died over 20 years ago. These are part of the efforts but they can accelerate it and do more.

I take a different view to a number of things we say in this country. The narrative that things are so bad in the country is not the correct narrative. I blame the media for the wrong narratives. The media today in Nigeria will tell you there is no infrastructure; the same media will tell you of infrastructural gap, that nothing is happening in Nigeria.

However, the same media, every year give awards to the best governor in agriculture, health, education, security, good governance, etc. Most of the leading newspapers do the awards every year. And you have been doing it in the last 16 years. Are you doing it because these governors have actually done something or for the fun of it?

If they have actually done something then there is a total aggregate improvement in the conditions of Nigeria. So why do the media present the Nigerian narrative as hopeless?

We have 36 states in the country, if every year, the media and NGOs honour governors on various issues and then the same people sit down and say nothing is happening, then something is wrong with all of us. The narrative of Nigeria is far better than what we read in the media. That is why this election will probably not be decided by what Jonathan has done or failed to do but by that same clamour that nothing is happening, we need a change. The media should try to be accurate. There is a difference between there are no roads and the roads are bad. Let’s be specific on the things we want to say. When you present a better narrative of your country that is the way people look at you.

When we scream corruption, corruption and nobody can really nail it down, the rest of the world write about the same corruption and when you ask somebody they cannot give you an example. Last November , I was at an event in the United States and an ex-officer who had served at the military wing of the US embassy was delivering a lecture on Nigeria’s security.

Lecture on security

He said of Nigeria military is corruption ridden throughout, that he visits some officers at home and the cars parked in front of their houses are ‘choicy cars I dream of riding,’ that in Nigeria, from Lagos to Port-Harcourt or Abuja to Port-Harcourt takes about eight hours but sometimes because of bad roads it takes about eight days.

I said to the colonel, ‘are you talking about Nigeria or where? By the way how many officers have you visited in their homes to see their choicy cars? At least I have had occasions to go to the Ministry of Defence, I did not see those choicy cars at the Ministry of Defence in Abuja.’

I told him, tell everybody here how many officers you visisted their homes and how many choicy cars you saw in their homes.

He started murmuring ‘you know, there is corruption in the U.S…’ I said, ‘I am not interested, the one you said about Nigeria back it up with evidence.’

These are some of the things they read on the net and so on. Or is it one clown, Peter Loius at John Hopkins University. These are the people the United States, State Departments and Ministries listen to and judge Nigeria. They read the newspapers in this country and judge Nigeria without knowing where the newspapers are coming from. They listen to the wrong people and then conclude about what is going on in Nigeria.

I am not saying there is no corruption in the military, my position is in a period of war like we are now, it is difficult to probe the military and fight a war. In any case, the people you want to probe are no longer in the military so it will be a distraction for the current leadership of the military to be going to probe sessions and fighting a war. After the war, we can overhaul the whole military.

The point is, we must find a way of giving a proper narrative of this country. The media need to help people to understand these things and make informed decision.

When you say nothing is happening in Nigeria, it is wrong because a lot is happening in this country. Our roads are improving. There are still a number of roads that need to be rehabilitated but significantly, our roads are improving. When I lived in Ibadan as a young boy, we lived by the rail line and we knew how often the trains passed. By the time I became an adult, there were no more trains. Now, in my old age, the trains are back, through the same old rails but the trains are back.

The All Progressives Congress, APC Candidate, Major-General Mauhammadu Buhari (retd) challenged President Jonathan to produce evidence that the trains are working?

That is where I want to challenge the media. When any government says it has built roads, the media should go and find out if it is true.

I will use the United States as an example. When the boys doing the Watergate scandal started, nobody believed them. Their boss, the owner of the newspaper, who was a friend to the president listened to them and said ‘I would be damned if you guys are wrong.’ But he said, go and find out and the boys pursued the case to logical conclusion. So why do our editors sit down and write ‘where are the roads?’ Why not send your reporters to go and find out?

Still on Boko Haram, what is your take on U.S. refusal to sell weapons to us and blocking others from selling to us?

The argument of the US is that it is constrained by some laws against selling weapons to us because of the human rights violation of the military and so on. I don’t have a problem with the law but I know that the United States has sold arms and ammunitions to countries with worse human rights records than Nigeria, I don’t have to name them.

Strategic partner

Again that goes back to what I said earlier. There comes a time when you have to look at it: this is a country you claim is your strategic partner, a country you have interest in, a country you do not want to break up, a country that is being threathened by terrorism. And when you trace the history of Islamic fundamentalism in Nigeria, you can actually trace it to the situation in the Middle East. Anytime our people watch television, particularly if they are moslems, if they felt moslems are been maltreated there, some of them will start their own wahala (trouble) here.

It is because of these extended influence. So, you (U.S.) have an obligation irrespective of your laws, since you have found a way to sell weapons to countries which have far worse human rights records than Nigeria, you should also use that same channel to sell arms to Nigeria. For me, that is fundamental. I have always been against US double standard in dealing with people.

Given their double standard, are you suggesting we call their bluff?

No! Why should we call their bluff? What we need to do is to be strategic. I am coming from that (U.S) background. When we execute our foreign policy, it must be from a position of confidence and assertiveness. This country has every reason to be confident of itself, this country has the power to be assertive in the pursuit of its foreign policy. When you do that and make it clear to your partners what you want, what you accept and what you cannot tolerate, they will respect you.

I was a youngman during the civil war. When we had the same situation with the British, we just did not waste our time. We went to Russia, bought the weapons, came back, fought the war and when it was over, it was the same British who started rushing back here to us.

So, they (U.S) are not the only ones selling weapons. You can go to any where in the world and buy what you need. You dont have to give anybody an impression that he is doing you a favour. So, we must project the image of a confident and assertive nation, that if Country A does not sell, no big deal, we can even go to North Korea, they will sell arms to us.

Democratic dispensation

When you look at the military itself, I see where people are coming from when they blame the president. If you have been in government and know how the system works, sometime it is by accident that the president discovers how bad things are in the respective ministries. Again, that is where I quarrel with the media.

Before the current democratic dispensation, the media has always reported what former heads of states had done to the military to ensure that the military was not strong enough to stage a coup. Of course, that has a a ripple effect and has weakened the military. My gut feeling is that when Jonathan needed the military, he discovered they had a weak military.

When you say that the president is incompetent, is he the one that is going to fight? If he has no military what is he going to fight with? If the military has no arms, the first thing is to repurchase weapons and they are doing that now. If we eventually go with the change we are looking for, I want to see how they are going to retool the military because anything you want to buy for the military is expensive. if you want to buy an helicopter, it is enormous. If you want to buy a fighter is quite enormous. The worst is if you want to buy a ship. It is an expensive venture. You cannot retool the military with one budgetary allocation. It has to be over a period of five to six years.

So, what I believe they are doing now, which was what I knew they did during the Liberian and Sierra Leonian crises is to go and buy exactly what they need for the operation immediately. After the war, we can settle down and rebuild the military, but it is going to for a long period of time before you can really have a military you will be very proud of. We were lucky that during the civil war, we bought a lot which surrvived us with time until the same military people began to destroy the military.

Destroying the military

For me, let us focus on the issue, let everybody speak with one voice, that is let’s do away with Boko Haram. I don’t think the president started it, I don’t think he has any reason to start it, we all know how it started. When we speak with disturbing voices and cast headlines that ‘the president is killing northerners,’ he did not go there to kill anybody. The war was already there before he started to use the military. He has the constitutional right to use the military to sort out the problem. If we all can focus, whether PDPor APC wins, we must all unite to defeat Boko Haram and send them out of this country.

His perspective on how Boko Haram started?

Before 1999, we have had incidents of Matatsine, etc. These are all part of the origins of this fundamentalism and extremism but the mistake that was made was nobody took it serious enough to nip it in the bud. If you allow a crisis to fester for a long time it becomes too difficult to handle.

When political leaders in the North in 1999, beginning from Zamfara and later 12 states came up that they wanted to impose sharia, what sort of sharia did they impose? In a way, they inadvertently aided the whole process. Some said that poverty has fuelled the whole thing. It is true but we have to ask a fundamental question. Every state gets allocation from the Federal Government, what have they done with the allocations?