Nigeria should avoid carrying ants in its pants, by Hassan Gimba

However, the revelation that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a sponsor of many global terrorist activities, including Boko Haram, may help us solve that aspect of our security problem. And who knows, perhaps even banditry and other separatist agitations?

READ ALSO: Between the Senator and the Soldier, by Hassan Gimba

The Donald Trump administration’s resolve to stop funding many charities may be a blessing in disguise. We need to wake up from our comforting slumber and find ways to become productive. We must become a nation of producers and innovators. Governments must encourage that, rather than emasculating citizens through taxation, taxing entrepreneurs out of business.

The government should know that a business employing one person is taking one person off the streets and making the community more secure because an unemployed person must survive too. By nature, a living being must try to survive by any means within easy reach. Bad elements look for the unemployed to recruit into their nefarious activities.

For long, there has been a suspicion that foreign funding was fuelling the Boko Haram insurgency, until it was heard (confirmed) from (by) US Congressman Scott Perry when he claimed that USAID funded terrorist bodies such as ISIS and Boko Haram, among others. The Chief of Defence Standards and Evaluations at the Defence Headquarters (DHQ), Major General Adekunle Ariyibi, recently acknowledged this claim when he said foreign collaborators are funding Boko Haram and other terrorists.

Speaking on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief, he said that “Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West African Province (ISWAP)’s foreign backing is one reason the war against terrorism has lingered in Nigeria…There’s no doubt that this sort of operation cannot be sustainable for the past 15 years without some external collaboration and assistance.”

Now, we have been told who that sponsor is.

READ ALSO: The Coincidence of CHI in CHIbok and DapCHI and the ills of NGOs By Hassan Gimba

This has stirred the hornet’s nest, with Borno State—the state that has borne the brunt of the brute wickedness of Boko Haram the most—asking for the expulsion of all non-governmental organisations from the state.

The Borno Elders Forum, in a statement signed by Dr Bulama Male Gubio, the forum’s secretary, called on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other NGOs to leave not only the state but the entire North-East region. It also urged the Nigerian government to allow President Donald Trump to proceed with his investigation into claims made by US Congressman Scott Perry.

Even though Richard Mills Jr., US Ambassador to Nigeria, has said USAID did not fund Boko Haram because the US government was the first country to declare Boko Haram a terrorist group, observers of world events would take his rebuttal with a pinch of salt.

In 2018, the US declared the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group a terrorist organisation, declaring its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, who was aligned with al-Qaeda, wanted. It placed a $10m bounty on his arrest. Yet this did not stop the US from funding him to topple President Bashar al-Assad and, thereafter, dropping the reward for his arrest and engaging him in “diplomatic” talks.

It is, however, only the naïve that would remain in delusion regarding the activities of NGOs because of allegations that most of their aid is presented in poisoned chalices. They fuel insurgents who halt farming, then come and offer us “free” food—a characteristic of agents of darkness used by colonial slave masters to keep subjugating people in the Third World and subverting their national interests.

READ ALSO: Nigeria’s ongoing war with Boko Haram, by Hassan Gimba

When a patriot like Patrice Lumumba, Murtala Mohammed or Ghaddafi is killed, you do not see a white man close to the scene of the crime; it is always the voice of Jacob and the hand of Esau at work.

NGOs, who are more likely than not agents of covert Western intelligence agencies, know our country—or any country they operate in—and its people better than the government of that country. The amount of data at their disposal, all provided by indigenous people, is enormous. They pose a danger to a nation beyond our imagination.

Most of those working for them have been conditioned, by design or subterfuge, to be spies against their country and people. Some information they gather may look harmless in isolation, but when combined with others from different sources, it becomes part of a complex jigsaw puzzle. Rearranged and harnessed and in the hands of slave masters, such information can shellac a well-intentioned leader into submission.

This is why it is shocking that, without the conclusions of thorough investigations by our security agencies and the US where the bombshell came from, Nigeria is planning to employ or “absorb” 28,000 staff of USAID, whose average salary for Nigerians in 2025 is ₦5,150,000, or between $13,000 and $79,457 per year, depending on position and location. The Minister of Health, Professor Ali Pate, thinks it is a good idea.

In a country where paying the minimum wage of ₦70,000 is a struggle because of lack of funds, how do they plan to pay them? In a country with millions of out-of-school children, with Pate’s North-East region accounting for the largest percentage, won’t funds be channelled toward that angle to erode the recruitment base of the insurgents funded by the employer of those he now wants to recruit?

The infant mortality rate (IMR) for Nigeria in 2023 was 54.740 deaths per 1000 live births—one of the highest in Africa—with Pate’s North-East being the highest in the country. In 2020, the maternal mortality rate in Nigeria was 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than 10 times higher than the UN’s 2030 target of 70 deaths per 100,000. The North-East still leads here.

In Borno State, a third of the over 700 health facilities have been destroyed, and another third damaged by Boko Haram, whose puppeteers the Federal Ministry of Health wants to “absorb”. Only 34 percent are intact, with many lacking basic amenities such as clean water and electricity.

Over 1.2 million people in Borno live without access to healthcare services. According to the Bauchi State Network of Civil Society Organisations, ninety-three percent of healthcare facilities across the 20 local government areas of Bauchi State lack basic water, sanitary, and hygienic facilities.

Rather than gathering killer ants and stashing them in the nation’s underwear, funds must be judiciously used to solve Nigeria’s multidimensional problems, mostly imposed on it by NGOs working for foreign secret services to destabilise and stunt the growth of nations.