Interview: Experts back int'l military action against Nigeria's Boko Haram

Experts on peace building Thursday threw their weight behind the call for a multi-national military action to rout the dreaded Nigerian Militant group Boko-Haram.

Such a force, they said, was needed because the Boko Haram issue had assumed a multinational dimension.

Newly appointed Executive Director of the West African Network for Peace Building (WANEP) Chikwuemeka Eze said the call was in the right direction and as important as the one that led to the global response against the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in parts of West Africa.

Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama announced Friday that the sub-regional bloc, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) would present a proposal to the African Union (AU) later this month for a multi-national military action against Boko-Haram and all such insurgents on the continent.

Mahama is chair of the sub-regional body ECOWAS.

"President Mahama is showing leadership in this demand, as he did in the case of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). It goes a long way to disabuse the minds of people about the perception that West African leaders lack team spirit," Eze told Xinhua in an interview.

He urged that the world should begin to see Boko Haram not as a Nigerian issue but a threat to the whole world and that was the way it should be tackled.

On the recent unrest and civil action in Burkina Faso which forced former president, Blaise Compaore to abdicate, Eze said it was a signal to African leaders that their citizens would no more accept movement from democracy to autocracy.

He pointed out that some of the violence on the continent was the result of bad governance, politics of exclusion and corruption.

WANEP is a leading regional peace-building organization founded in 1998 in response to civil wars that plagued West Africa in the 1990s.

Through its Early Warning Signal mechanisms, WANEP has over the years succeeded in assisting countries and communities to restore peace in conflict situations.

ECOWAS and WANEP have signed various Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) where the Civil Society Organization would lead the peace building efforts of the sub-regional body.

Emmanuel Bombande, out-going Executive Director of WANEP, told Xinhua that the call for a multi-national force against Boko Haram was a necessity.

"The north-eastern part of Nigeria where Boko Haram is operating shares borders with Chad and Cameroon which are not members of ECOWAS. For that reason, any action that would involve the military on their lands should be sanctioned by the AU or United Nations," the peace-building and security expert pointed out.

He said it was time Africans acted together to overcome extremism on the continent to recapture the needed political space to deal with the cause of extremism.

"The time has come for African leaders to understand that their citizens would no longer accept nice words and names which are not seen in action.

"When our leaders talk about democracy and good governance, they should put it into practice, that is what Africans want to see," he declared.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the first Western leader to pledge support publicly for the proposed multinational military action against Boko Haram. Endi