President Muhammadu Buhari has pledged that a regional joint task force to be led by Nigeria to fight the Boko Haram terrorists will be functional by the end of July. He further stated that troops from several of Nigeria’s neighbours could be deployed in operations against the militants.
He said this while granting an interview to Voice of America on Tuesday said that there has been progress in the fight, but he refused to predict imminent victory.
“We have killed the commanders,” he told VOA. “Certain troops have been trained and the multinational joint task force, comprising of troops from Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Benin Republic, are being heard in the theatre of operations so really this is the practical and the realistic way the problem can be fixed.”
In a similar vein, Buhari pledged to move forward on cleaning up corruption, particularly in the oil industry, which is a massive source of revenue for Nigeria and which has long been rife with siphoning and, more recently, theft by smugglers using illegally registered tankers.
Earlier this week, he signed a decree blacklisting more than 100 ships allegedly involved in oil smuggling; he also said the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation may have been involved in forging export documents.
“Certainly [Nigerian oil officials] can’t say they are loading Nigerian crude into an unknown unregistered ships, so there is a lot of disrespect for the laws of the country that had been taking place for more than 10 years and that shouldn’t frustrate us, or stop us from operating,” said Buhari, a former top oil industry executive.
“We just grow our lines, we continue, but wherever we uncover those public funds has been siphoned, or crude has been stolen, we will trace it through the movements of the ships, through the accounts of people it went through,” he said. “This cannot be done overnight. “