Harnessing The Opportunities Inherent In Our Threats And Fears

One of the lessons that Africa and other regions like the continent need to learn is that seeds of transformation are contained in the threats and ugly circumstances that surround us. The United States amply demonstrated this when President Dwight Eisenhower treated the threat of USSR’s space mission with the urgency that it required. There was no need to run from pillar to post as Africans would do in the face of threat.
Until Africans learn to turn their threats and fears into opportunities that can push the fortunes of the society forward, the promise of development would continue to elude the continent. While the United States had to search for counter technologies that could dwarf the threat of USSR, technologies to solve the challenges faced by Africa are not remote.
It is shameful that Africa, with collaborators in both the West and the East, finds it more convenient to throw money at problems. This approach to problem solving feeds the grip and grid of corruption, which connects the so-called developed and developing worlds.
Let’s look at a threat that Nigeria has faced since 2009. Since 2009, Nigeria has faced the threat of Islamist terror groups, popularly known as Boko Haram. At the beginning of the asymmetric warfare, it was easy for the group to invade the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja from their base in faraway Borno State and bomb the police headquarters and the United Nations Building as well other prime locations within the centre of the city. It was easy then for security forces to argue that the Boko Haram warfare was not a conventional warfare. The asymmetric warfare that the group had engaged in was new to the country. The military commands had not prepared for the tactics adopted by the gorilla group.

Looking at the challenge from a perspective, the threat provided by the Islamist group provided the security forces an opportunity to acquire the competence to deal with insurgency, a competence that could have been perfected and exported to the rest of the world that could face such challenges in the future. Rather than seek to develop this competence, what happened was that few weeks to the 2015 general elections, the country reportedly hired mercenaries that helped to shoot the insurgents to temporary capitulation. That made it possible for national elections to be conducted in the troubled northeast region of the country.

Beyond the alleged hiring of mercenary to help with the war efforts, it was more bizarre when Nigeria flew hefty cash to South Africa in a private jet, searching for where to purchase arms to fight the insurgents. This was in spite of the existence of the organisation charged with the responsibility for manufacturing arms for Nigeria’s security forces – the Defence Industry Corporation of Nigeria (DICON).

DICON was established by an Act of Parliament, four years after Nigeria gained independence from the British Colonial Government. The corporation had a technical partner in the name of Fritz Werner, a German company. The German company helped DICON to establish a factory in Kaduna.

At inception, the Kaduna factory had the capacity to produce 5,000 units of riffles per annum; 18,0000 units of Submachine Guns per annum; 12,000,000 rounds of 7.62mm51 per annum and 4,000,000 rounds of 9mm19 per annum. Three years after the establishment of the establishment of DICON and its premium factory, the Nigerian civil war broke out on July 6, 1967. The war, which dragged on until January 15, 1970, lasted long enough to establish its capacity in meeting the armoury requirement of the nation.

Rather than build on the capacity it must (or it could have) have acquired in the production of military and security equipment which the advent of the civil war provided enough ground and challenge to spur the creativity of the people, Nigeria continued on the spree of importation of arms and ammunitions. Thus, when in 2015, the country was denied the opportunity of buying arms to fight insurgent Islamist militants, the country was going with outstretched alms begging for arms in exchange for raw cash.

The relevant question that anyone with a casual nationalistic fervour would ask is: Where is DICON? Should six years or 15 years of insurgency not have revived the manufacturing arm of the nation’s armed forces assuming it had been moribund after the civil war ended in 1970? Is the threat of Islamist terrorism not sufficient enough opportunity to reinvent the country’s capacity to arm itself? Threats provide opportunities for nations to enough, but when a country believes in outsourcing its challenges, it also squanders the opportunity to wing itself to be among self-respecting nations of the world.
…To be continued

Excerpt from Technology & Development: An African Perspective by Everest Amaefule, PhD

Disclaimer: This article is entirely the opinion of the writer and does not represent the views of The Whistler.