Nigeria can expect little help with Boko Haram: analysts

LAGOS (AFP) ― Nigeria requires more regional help to tackle Boko Haram militants in its restive northeast but the country is likely to have to shoulder most of the burden on its own for now, according to analysts.

A senior Nigerian military official last week urged neighboring Cameroon to do more to help tackle the Islamist insurgency, which has claimed thousands of lives since 2009 and caused international concern over its potential to spread.

The multi-national force enforcing emergency rule in Nigeria’s extreme northeast and tasked with hunting down militants is currently made up of Nigerian troops, assisted by soldiers from Chad and Niger.

“Cameroon has not contributed troops. Cameroon ought to be on board and it is seen as the weak link in the fight against Boko Haram,” said Kyari Mohammed, a Boko Haram specialist at the Modibbo Adama University in Yola, Adamawa state.

“If Cameroon decides to close its borders, it would help,” Mohammed, who is director of the University’s Center for Peace Studies, told AFP.

Emergency rule, backed for extension by Nigeria’s upper house of parliament last week, has largely pushed Boko Haram fighters from urban areas into the countryside over the last six months but attacks have continued unabated.

The three states under special measures ― Yobe, Borno and Adamawa ― share frontiers with Niger, Chad and Cameroon and the military has said that insurgents have struck in Nigeria then fled across the porous borders.

As such, regional co-operation was vital to tackle the issue, said Marc-Antoine Perouse de Montclos, a Nigeria specialist at the Institute of Development Research (IRD) in Paris.

Nigeria and Cameroon, whose ties have been strained in a sovereignty dispute over the territory of Bakassi, last week created a joint body aimed at securing their common border from Boko Haram and pirates in the Gulf of Guinea.

Experts recommended joint military operations and better intelligence sharing to police the more than 1,000-kilometer-long shared frontier. Both countries agreed to meet again in Abuja next May.

“It (the fight against Boko Haram) needs a regional resolution of the problem,” said Perouse de Montclos.

“It’s not the first time that Nigeria has asked for the help of its neighbors. But there’s a problem of capacity.”

Elizabeth Donnelly, assistant head of the Africa program at the Chatham House international affairs think-tank in London, agreed.

“Cameroon, Niger and Chad ... have competing pressures. Niger and Chad are very concerned about the fall-out from (the conflicts in) Mali and Libya. They certainly don’t want another problem from another border,” she said.

Mohammed said Cameroon had been reluctant to engage further for fear of Boko Haram reprisals within its own borders.