By Favour Ulebor

Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, has said, the country’s internal security challenges cannot be separated from wider regional crises, warning that instability in neighbouring states directly fuels insecurity at home.

Speaking at an ECOWAS ministerial briefing, yesterday in Abuja, Tuggar said Nigeria must intervene when nearby countries face threats to democratic stability, including the recent attempted coup in the Benin Republic, because the ripple effects inevitably reach Nigeria.

Tuggar explained that insecurity in Nigeria mirrors the wider instability across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, driven by conflicts, terrorism, and the flow of fighters and weapons across borders.

He said: “Nigeria’s internal problems are inextricably linked to the external problems. So, we would not be doing ourselves any good if Republic of Benin has a problem and we don’t help in tackling it and tackling it decisively.

“The insecurity problem that we’re facing today, like I said, is a regional problem. It is a Sahelian problem. It is a Lake Chad Basin problem and the factors that are affecting us are mostly exogenous.”
He said the collapse of Libya and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi created conditions that now drive terrorism and arms proliferation throughout West Africa.

“The security problem we’re facing today is tied to the dysfunctioning of Libya, the fall of the Gaddafi regime. It is tied also to the conflict in the Sahel and the fight against terrorism in the Sahel region, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, in Niger and beyond,” he said.

Tuggar noted that conflicts in Nigeria are often misinterpreted as religious or ethnic when in reality they are part of a continuous chain of violence spreading across the region.

He added that the situation worsened after the change of government in Niger Republic.