Lagos — The United States (US) would this year train about 12,000 Nigerian troops for peacekeeping operations under the United Nations and African Union (AU) banners.

The troops, to be drawn from 14 battalions of the Nigerian Army, are to be trained at the Nigerian Army Peacekeeping Centre, Jaji, Kaduna State. This is just as the US says it spends about $250 million yearly for assistance programmes to partner militaries in Africa.

U.S Defence Attache in Nigeria, Col Charles Hoffman said the amount is being spent primarily in the areas of peacekeeping capacity building, border and coastal security capacity building, logistics and airlift support to peacekeeping operations, and joint training exercises and bilateral events.

He told participants of the National Defence College (NDC) Course 17 in Abuja that the US security cooperation is designed to work with its African partners toward the accomplishment of three primary goals. They include the following: to enable nations and regional security organisations have the capacity to resolve conflicts and crises, and to mitigate violent extremism; to enable African nations and organisations provide for their own individual and regional security; and to enable African nations maintain professional militaries that respond to civilian authorities, respect the rule of law and international human rights norms.

Hoffman, who spoke on the topic - "U.S and Africa Relations," enumerated the areas the US security assistance is channeled, to include the International Military Education and Training (IMET), Counterterrorism Fellowship programme, Africa Partnership Station (APS) and the Africa Contingency Operations Training & Assistance (ACOTA) programme.

IMET provides African military personnel attendance to military schools in the United States, as well as mobile training teams which travel to the host country. Under IMET, international students train with US students, on the same equipment, and to the same standard. Courses under IMET include professional military education such as War Colleges, Command & Staff Colleges, NCO development as well as military skills training like Infantry, Armour and Artillery courses. Over all, the US spent a total of $17 million on the IMET programme for Africa last year for over 500 students.

The Counterterrorism Fellowship programme is used to fund foreign military officers to attend US military educational institutions and selected regional centres for training in order to learn the tools to grow and sustain counterterrorism capabilities. An example include - Africa Endeavour - a weeklong communications interoperability and information exchange exercise held in July 2008 and jointly sponsored by Nigeria, the United States and more than 20 other countries.