Bring back ECOMOG

Maybe the terrorists that trouble Nigeria and the rest of West Africa can be contained if Nigeria leads the revival of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, ECOMOG, that restored peace to Sierra Leone and Liberia between the 1980s and 1990s. It will be in Nigeria’s enlightened best interest to combine its anti-terrorism efforts with those of other West African countries, gain their support and make a bigger bang for every buck spent on containing the internal and external terrorists who will then have no place to hide. Recall that the frontline nations, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and (faraway) Nigeria, provided haven, logistics support, and military training for the freedom fighters who took on South Africa’s apartheid regime. If mere South African freedom fighters could overwhelm the apartheid system and Nelson Mandela could become South Africa’s President, a second ECOMOG Force sponsored by nations could dislodge terrorists from West Africa. A successful ECOMOG II operation will not only dislodge terrorists and terrorism, but it should also allow the economy to prosper and flourish. It will keep the schools open and safe and defeat the retrogressive intention and philosophy of the terrorists and their sponsors to discourage the education of children and reduce the number of potential professionals who should contribute to the progress of the region. Nigeria, or any other West African country for that matter, should no longer work in silos, trying to stop the terrorists who appear determined to subdue the entire region for their radical Islamic religious ideology. When America (that hitherto practised the Isolationist Policy of keeping itself to itself) and Britain joined the rest of the world to fight the Second World War against Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the world received a resounding victory over Nazism and found enduring peace. As management experts suggest, a system is a sum of its parts. So if the countries in the West African sub-region agree to act as one man to contain the terrorists within, the force of the combined will exceed that of each of the parts. In traditional mathematics, one plus one equals two. But the output from the synergy of the combination of two entities will exceed the sum of the outcomes of the individual parts. That is, there is strength in combined efforts. It is increasingly looking as if Nigeria is losing the war against insurgency, just as the other ECOWAS countries are, and so, it may be wise for members of the sub-region to pool resources together once again to defeat this Al