Buhari To Visit Cameroon Over Boko Haram

Muhammadu Buhari is planning to visit Cameroon to
cement a regional fighting force against Boko
Haram, he told AFP on Monday.
Buhari met his counterparts from Niger, Chad and
Benin at a summit in Abuja last week but
Cameroon’s leader Paul Biya was noticeably absent
and represented by his defence minister.
The two countries have long had strained ties, in
part over a bitter territorial dispute but also after
Boko Haram mounted cross-border raids into
northeast Nigeria from Cameroon’s far north.
Buhari visited Niger and Chad in his first week in
office and said he would have gone to Cameroon’s
capital Yaounde for talks with Biya had he not
been invited to attend the G7 summit in Germany.
“But on my return to Nigeria now, I will try to go
to Cameroon,” he said on the sidelines of the
African Union summit in Johannesburg.
Last week’s Abuja summit rubber-stamped an
8,700-strong regional force involving the five
countries to replace an ad hoc coalition of Nigeria,
Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
The current force came into being after Chad’s
President Idriss Deby sent troops to assist their
Cameroonian counteparts against a wave of attacks
by the Islamist militants.
Troops from Niger and Chad have crossed into
Nigerian territory but those from Cameroon have
not in an indication of the strained relations
between the neighbours.
But Buhari indicated last Thursday that soldiers
from the new Multi-National Joint Task Force
(MNJTF) would not be restricted in terms of
movement.
The MNJTF will be headed by a Nigerian officer for
the duration of the mission, with his deputy from
Cameroon for an initial 12 months once troops are
deployed from July 30.
Buhari has made crushing Boko Haram his
immediate priority since coming to power on May
29 and he said in the interview that foreign
support was vital.
“The most important support is intelligence. What
we are looking for from the G7… is intelligence. We
want help in terms of logistics,” he said.
“Boko Haram declared that they are in alliance
with ISIS, so terrorism has gone international. They
are in Mali, they are in Nigeria, they are in Syria,
they are in Iraq, they are in Yemen…
“It’s an international problem now,” he said.