The last stage of US President George Bush’s first tour of Africa will be a politically risky foray into the troubled world of Africa’s number one oil producer: Nigeria.
His visit is seen as an endorsement of President Olusegun Obasanjo, just three months after he was re-elected in a poll which US observers said was marred by ”obvious premeditated electoral manipulation”.
Relations between Washington and Abuja have gone through a bumpy patch recently, with Nigeria opposing the war in Iraq and the US Congress cutting military aid in protest over the massacre of several hundred villagers.
But when Bush steps out onto the tarmac at Abuja airport on Friday and gives Obasanjo his all important handshake photo opportunity it will be seen as a signal that US-Nigerian ties are back on track.
Professor Bola Akinterinwa of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs said that despite the fierce criticism of his election victory at home, Obasanjo still enjoys uncritical support abroad.
”Obasanjo has no problems of legitimacy at all on the international level,” he said. ”The Obasanjo government has been at its strongest in international fora. That is where it is strongest.”
Cynical observers both inside and outside Nigeria point to one obvious reason why Nigeria is, in the words of a senior Lagos-based oil executive, ”a key American strategic target”: its vast oil reserves.
The United States buys 1,5-million barrels of Nigerian crude per day, and the US Department of Energy predicts that by 2015 west Africa will supply 25% of US oil needs.
At a time when Washington is keen to diversify energy supplies and reduce its dependence on the unstable Middle East, Bush has a clear interest in maintaining good ties with Abuja.
But there are other pressing reasons why Bush is ready to take the risk of coming to Nigeria. The White House is under intense international pressure to intervene in Liberia to help bring about peace in a war-torn country set up in the nineteenth century as a homeland for freed US slaves.
Whatever role the United States takes in a peace-keeping force, they will be going in alongside the Nigerian troops in a west African force.
And Obasanjo has a key role to play in taking Liberia’s warlord-turned-president out of the equation. Bush wants him out of Liberia. Obasanjo has offered him a safe haven in exile.
US planners are also concerned that parts of Africa might become bases and training grounds for al-Qaeda-style Islamist militant groups.
Al-Qaeda’s Saudi mastermind, Osama bin Laden, has called for Nigerian Muslims to rise up against their government, and demonstrators in the country’s Muslim north celebrated the September 11 attacks.
Bush will seek reassurance that this is as far as support for terror extends in Nigeria, and increase the pressure on Abuja to reform the notoriously corrupt finance sector, a potential source of terrorist funds.
Clearly the White House has decided that the benefits of being able to address these shared interests are worth the political risk of giving Obasanjo such unqualified support, but the trip will be criticised.
Already opposition supporters have held a minor demonstration outside the US embassy in Abuja, accusing Bush of endorsing a ”stolen election”.
The International Republican Institute (IRI), set up by Bush’s predecessor and ideological stablemate Ronald Reagan, was scathing about Obasanjo’s tainted re-election.
In some areas IRI found ”material evidence of planned and in some cases executed ballot fraud … direct evidence of ballot box stuffing and gross falsification of results forms.”
And the US Congress felt so concerned about the October 2001attack by Nigerian troops on the village of Zaki Biam, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians were slaughtered, that earlier this year it cut military aid.
But not all aid was severed. Earlier this year the United States delivered the US Navy two recently refurbished warships. Their role? To protect oil fields in the Niger Delta from unrest. – Sapa-AFP