The U.S. has asked Nigeria to boost its efforts to fight terrorism and offered to help the West African country improve airport security after authorities said a Nigerian man tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jet on Dec. 25.
Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa, said he asked Nigerian officials during a visit last week to allow U.S. sky marshals on flights from Nigeria to the U.S.
Nigerian legislators were also asked to pass tougher counter-terrorism laws, improve airport security with American assistance and to speak out publicly against terrorism, Carson told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington today.
Corruption, unresponsive local and national governments, the division of oil revenue and long-standing ethnic tensions between the country’s mainly Christian south and its largely Islamic north have helped fuel indigenous terror groups such as Boko Haram, which Carson said has attacked local police stations and other government installations.
“The emergence of organizations like Boko Haram will continue in Nigeria as long as there are social and economic issues that communities face that are not being addressed,” he said.
The U.S. doesn’t see linkages between Boko Haram and Islamic terror groups outside Nigeria including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African terror group, Carson said.
Al-Qaeda
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day, linked up with al-Qaeda in Yemen, according to the U.K. Yemen has disputed that account, saying the man was recruited in London.
The Nigerian connection with an alleged terrorist plot has drawn attention to Muslim tensions in the country. Carson said the U.S. plans to re-open a diplomatic outpost in northern Nigeria, probably in the city of Kano.
Nigeria was the fifth-largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S. in the first 11 months of 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The country increased crude output to 2.2 million barrels a day this month, Petroleum Minister of State Odein Ajumogobia said today at an oil and gas conference in the capital, Abuja.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the main militant group in the country’s oil-rich delta region, said Jan. 30 it had ended a cease-fire after three months and would resume assaults against energy producers.
Election Concerns
Carson also warned that Nigeria’s 2011 national elections must be more credible than the “embarrassing” vote in 2007.
“There is a need for good elections, there is a need for improvement and there is a need for change,” Carson said.
The U.S. is ready to assist Nigeria in preparing for the election, he added. Carson praised the peaceful transfer of power this month to acting President Goodluck Jonathan while elected President Umaru Yar’Adua is receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia.
Yar’Adua’s absence has raised questions inside and outside Nigeria about political stability in the country, the most populous in Africa.
Constitutional Need
The provisional appointment, which is not expressly provided for in Nigeria’s constitution, needs to be brought into line with the constitution, John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Senate panel.
“Nigerians care about the U.S.’s opinion of them,” Campbell said, “therefore it matters what the Obama administration and congressional leaders say to them about democracy and the rule of law.”
Nuhu Ribadu, the former head of a Nigerian anti-graft commission, told the Senate hearing that the U.S. should single out high-level Nigerians with ties to corruption. Corrupt Nigerians fear the reach of the U.S. government, he said.
The U.S. needs a strong Nigeria to protect its own political and economic interests in West Africa, said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, Africa analyst at the Eurasia Group in New York.
“If Nigeria is in a chaotic state then clearly it isn’t able to exercise any leadership in the region,” Spio-Garbrah said in an interview.