Abuja — Last Friday several newspapers reported that President Umaru Yar'adua has agreed to work with the U.S. in its plans to establish its African Command (AFRICOM) essentially for the West African sub-region. This was during his recent trip to the U.S. during which he met America's president, George Bush, for the first time.

According to The Punch (December 14), Yar'adua told journalists inside the Oval Office of the White House at the end of his meeting with Bush, that Nigeria "will partner with AFRICOM not only in Nigeria but also on the continent to actualize the peace and security initiatives which is an initiative to help standby forces in each of the regional groupings in Africa."

However, in a subsequent interview with the Hausa Service of the VOA, the president denied he had accepted AFRICOM. "I did not," he said, "accept AFRICOM in my discussions with Bush. I asked for assistance and told Bush that we have our plans to establish bases for African countries. We asked for training on weapons and training to establish our bases to be managed by our people."

Most listeners would have seen the president's clarification as a difference between six of one and half a dozen of the other, especially considering the fact that Americans, like most of the rest of the human race, have little or no history of helping out fellow human beings without strings attached.

Any which way you look at it Yar'adua's White House statement was a departure from what seemed to have been his administration's initial opposition to AFRICOM. Only recently the Council of State which he chairs expressed unqualified opposition to the command. Soon after that his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, also expressed similar sentiments.

This reversal of Nigeria's position by a president that was apparently overwhelmed by his munificent reception - THE PUNCH quoted him as telling journalists in the Oval Office that he was "highly impressed and honoured to be here. I will never forget this moment in my life" - would have come as a surprise to most Nigerians most of whom probably regard AFRICOM with suspicion - not without good reason.

As is usual with such initiatives, AFRICOM has come dressed as a force for peace and security in the region. Scratch the surface, however, and what you see is a force to help Americans secure oil in the West African sub-region on which they have increasingly become dependent.

Right now, America imports between 10-15% of its oil consumption from the region, mostly from Nigeria. According to Time magazine (June 11) quoting sources from the National Intelligence Council, a U.S. government think tank, by 2020, the region will be supplying America with 20-25% of its oil consumption. For the Americans this supply is cheaper, safer and more accessible than oil from the more volatile, albeit more endowed and more prolific, Middle East.

AFRICOM did not, of course, happen just out of the blues. According to Toby Shelly, a reporter with the London Financial Times in his 2005 book, Oil: POLITICS, POVERTY AND THE PLANET, AFRICOM may have emerged from an initiative by "the right wing" Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli organization that "places researchers in both the Knesset (Israeli parliament) and the U.S. Congress."

In July 2002, Shelly said, the organization sponsored a press conference on Capitol Hill to "discuss the strategic importance of West African oil to the U.S." It then helped to establish an African Oil Initiative Group whose main objective is to help wean America from its dependence on Middle-Eastern, particularly Arab, oil.

Among the IASPS's recommendations to the U.S. authorities were (1) declaring the Gulf of Guinea as an area of American strategic interest (2) establishing a regional command for the area and (3) deterring U.S. rivals such as China from the area.

By 2004 the American European Command, with headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, had embarked upon the Pan-Sahel Initiative, the precursor to AFRICOM. Through this initiative the command trained troops in Mauritania, Chad, Niger, Mali and Nigeria, countries with majority Muslim populations which the Americans regard as vulnerable to terrorism and therefore important as potential allies in its global war on 'Islamic extremism'.

Once fully established, AFRICOM will bring to six the total number of American commands world wide. The current five are (1) the European Command, (2) the Pacific Command at Honolulu, in charge of Asia and the Pacific, (3) the Northern Command at Colorado Springs, in charge of northern America, (4) the Southern Command at Miami, Florida, in charge of southern America and (5) the Central Command at Tampa, Florida, in charge of the central region between Europe and Asia that stretches from Egypt to Kyrgyzstan and includes the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, the Caspian Sea basin and South West Asia.

AFRICOM is being modeled after Central Command (CENTCOM) in that its remit is to secure America's access to cheap oil, something which, as The Economist has said over the years, the Americans have become addicted to; the CENTCOM does not have troops of its own but borrows from other commands to quell fires in trouble spots, of which there are plenty in its oil and gas rich area of responsibility (AOR). However, far from bringing peace and security to the region CENTCOM has, predictably, brought only more trouble.

The real battle in CENTCOM's area of remit is for the hearts and minds of its people, long pauperized, oppressed and alienated by their leaders. However, as the cover story in Time (September 1, 2003) titled "IS AMERICA STRETCHED TOO THIN", pointed out, "Peacekeeping is not what the U.S. troops were trained to do. Soldiers whose combat edge has been honed inside an M-1 tank are not well equipped to provide a war's victims with food and water."

Whatever its intentions, CENTCOM has since come to be identified at the street level as an instrument for helping the ruling classes in its AOR to stay in power by hook and crook. And as it has been with CENTCOM so will it invariably be with AFRICOM, whatever its guise.

Whatever its pretences about maintaining peace and security and spreading democracy in the world, there is clear evidence that America's primary concern is to secure cheap oil and gas to sustain its economic, social and cultural pre-eminence in the world.

For example, the London Independent on Sunday of January 7 this year revealed that it was in possession of a 40-page document written by the Americans which set out the legal framework for production and profit sharing of Iraqi oil for the next 30 years. The framework, the newspaper said, gave the big oil companies 75% of the profit margin until they recoup their production costs and 20% thereafter. The latter percentage, the newspaper pointed out, is twice the industry average.

The cost to America of access to cheap oil has been enormous in terms of its military expenditure alone. In a survey in The Economist (March 23, 2002) titled "The new Rome meets the new barbarians", Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, pointed out that America is the only country in the world with both nuclear weapons and conventional forces with global reach. Its military expenditure, he said, was "greater than those of the next eight countries combined." And these included Russia, China, Germany and Britain.

Yet this enormous military outlay has not made America's external sources of its energy any more secure than when its addiction to cheap oil and gas started many decades ago. If anything, the Americans' presence has only made matters worse. This obviously means the solution to its energy problems cannot lie in the use of military force even when it is camouflaged as a benign force for peace.

The solution is for America to curb its demand for cheap oil. No one, I think, put this argument more succinctly than The Economist when it said in its August 27, 2005 edition that "America and China in their different ways are drunk on oil consumption. The longer they put off taking the steps needed to curb their habit, the worse the headaches will be. George Bush once learned that lesson about alcohol. It is time for him to wean America off oiloholism too." This, the self-styled newspaper said, the Americans can do by taxing petrol and by heavily funding research into alternatives to oil.

President Yar'adua ought to be reminding the Americans of such wise counsel as The Economist's instead of welcoming American troops to establish their presence on our continent in whatever guise. The presence of American, or for that matter that of any foreign troops, history has shown, only brings trouble, which, as things are at the moment, we already have enough of.

In short the trouble with AFRICOM is that it can only bring more trouble to Africa.