 Good afternoon. My name is Cyril Lovie, and I will be moderating the session. This session is on politics, democracy, and peace building in the Sahel. It's very interesting how democracy, security, and governance come together. And I will say that it's quite significant what is happening in the Sahel. Several of the countries in the Sahel that will be spoken about today have either just had elections or had elections maybe two years ago or one year ago. So democracy is new and fresh in town. What does this mean? Will democracy make all the problems go away? How can democracy do this? How can governance address a lot of the issues that have been raised in the earlier two sessions and also by the keynote speaker? To weigh in on this and to help us do the thinking and also coming up with possible solutions, I have a distinguished panel of Mohammed Fraser Rahim, who is a program officer for countering violent extremism or CVE in Africa at the USIP, United States Institute for Peace. He's sitting to my left, followed by Sherry Baker, who is a subject matter expert on human rights and the protection of civilians. And he's also with ACOTA, the African Contingency Operations Streaming and Assistant Program with the US State Department. She's also to my right. To my, well, pardon the term, extreme right, I have Kamisa Kamara, and she's a senior program officer for Western Central Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy. And then to the extreme left is Professor Charles K.J., who is only from the International Relations Department of Bafu Niawuluwa University in Nigeria and is currently with the Institute for Peace and Security Studies at Isababa University. And on that score, it's my pleasure to start from my extreme right by inviting Kamisa Kamara to please go on with the presentation. Thank you very much and good afternoon, everyone. So I would like first to thank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and particularly Anwar for co-partnering with the National Democracy and this excellent, excellent conference on the Sahel. The Sahel is of prime importance for the NED because the civil society partners that we fund in that region actually struggle with politics, with democracy and peace building in the subregion. So this is a great honor for me and for the NED to be here represented today. So in the context of democracy and politics in the Sahel, I would like to focus on a country that was mentioned a few times throughout the day, and that is Niger. So Niger is situated in the exact middle of Northern Mali, Southern Libya, and Northern Nigeria. And we can say that Niger is at the very center of turbulence in the Sahel, and yet the country has managed to remain relatively stable. However, the combined presidential and legislative election that the country held this past Sunday, and already the protests coming out from civil society partners and other civil society groups in the opposition remind us that Niger is a very fragile country and that the security situation is quite volatile still. What I would like to argue here is that since Mali's military coup in 2012 in the Sahel more than anywhere else in the world, political campaigns and political victories have been predominantly contingent upon the candidate's ability to bring back security in the country and to manage his national borders. Monsieur Bouba-Kardiyai this morning mentioned the case of Mali, and it is true that one of the only reasons why Ibeka was elected in 2013 is Mali was because he was considered as the candidate who had the clout who was capable of bringing back security in Mali. His slogan was the Mali d'abord, which is Mali first, so I will bring back honor to the country. And that was done in contracts to Atete, his predecessor, Amadou to Manitoure, who was seen as a unique president who wasn't strong enough to manage the Tartuari rebellion. So that was Ibeka's slogan. And again, in my opinion, the only reason why he was elected, so whether he's successful or not and managing the promises that he made in his campaign, I think that's another question. The example of Nigeria, I would say that the security issue, the Boko Haram issue played a role in the election, even small, in getting Bohari elected. So Bohari run on the issues of corruption and the issue of security. And had the Boko Haram issue not existed, first of all, the elections would have happened on time and the outcome might have been quite different. In the case of Niger, we have pretty much the same situation. Mohammad Ussifu is running for his second term as president. And in the period leading up to the presidential election, the issue of security definitely played in his favor. For example, in the border town of Difa, which is right at the south of Niger and at the border of Nigeria, Boko Haram had attacked the Niger military several times. And for this reason, the state of emergency was extended three times already when the election happened. And that prevented political candidates from campaigning during late hours. And I should mention that Difa is in the position stronghold. And as part of the state of emergency measures, security forces in Niger have had additional powers to conduct day and night home searches without a warrant. And conveniently last month on January 5th, the Niger military chief of staff announced that Boko Haram had almost been defeated. And that was done just a few days, I guess before the election. Again, that might have played in favor of Ussifu. We still don't know the results yet, but I doubt that he will lose these elections. The issue of security also helped Mohammad Ussifu get rid of any credible opposition in the country. In the past Sunday election, besides Mohammad Ussifu who is currently in prison for a baby trafficking issue that his second wife was allegedly involved in, Ussifu did not have any serious opponent. And the main reason for Ussifu not facing any credible opposition is because of that security situation itself. After the multiple suicide attacks that took place in May 2013 in Zander, Arlit and Agadez, in Northern Niger, President Ussifu called for the formation of a national unity government, which was a sort of strategy to bring back security in the country and dealing with the country's security threats. However, the subsequent cabinet shakeup that took place created divisions within the opposition, and it weakened it to the point where Ussifu didn't have any serious opponent in the presidential elections besides Mohammad Agadez again who's in prison and who wasn't able to campaign in the presidential election. Now several voices have come from within Niger, especially from human rights and society groups to denounce the abuses of the current security apparatus. So as a consequence of the government's security priorities, domestically, other issues such as the economy, health, education or even human rights have taken a backseat during the campaign period and after the election. And this is dramatic because Niger and most Sahel countries really sit at the bottom of the UN Development Index. I would like to provide you with a few figures here. So following the military coup in Mali, Niger's defense budget jumped from $50 million to $72 million. Added to that $37 million in May, 2013 to finance Niger's participation in the French-led intervention in northern Mali. And for 2015, the defense sector received a bill over $200 million directly at the expense of education and health, which is an enormous sum for a country whose natural budget is only $3.8 billion. Some of the complaints we've heard from our civil society partners on the ground is that the security apparatus appears especially strong on intelligence collection, which means that there is an unknown degree of surveillance and monitoring in regions such as Defa, Agadez or Alit. So in the light of the terrorist threats that we're seeing in Niger, there was this re-emergence of what we call in French, Amita policier, a Nigerian security state which had disappeared after the death of military ruler, Saini Kunche back in 87. So there has definitely been a shift, a recent shift that I believe all started with the Mali crisis in 2012 where security just trumps everything else and I've heard that this morning. As an example, just a few days ago, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls traveled to both Mali and Burkina. And the interesting thing about this is that he didn't take his foreign minister with him. He didn't take his minister of economy with him. He took his minister of defense, Jean-Yves Medrillon. So this is, in my opinion, an indication of the importance of France's military role in the Sahel. But also that security is maybe that one issue that the international community can relate to when it comes to the Sahel. So maybe to conclude quickly, I would say that both international and domestic political support in the Sahel has been contingent upon a president's or a candidate's ability to manage and to secure borders on a day-to-day basis. The deteriorating security situation in the Sahel has coincidentally increased the powers of its leaders within the borders and internationally. I'm not sure that debut, Isufu or even Buhari have ever been as powerful in Bamako, in Paris, in Brussels, in London or in Washington as they are today. And that's because security has not only become a cross-cutting issue in the Sahel, but security is also a king-maker in the region. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kamara. Without much ado, I'll quickly move to my left. Where Mohammed Fraser Rahim is getting ready to start his presentation. So go ahead. Great, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be able to be here and engage on a very timely topic. So I'm gonna sort of set the scene a bit. I think it's a bit important to talk about some of the security issues and sort of the militarized dynamic just to kind of move forward. So I want to just take a step back and think about 2011 and just thinking about the security issue with AQIM, al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb as a security, or excuse me, a terrorist organization that when an offshoot group by the name of Tuwizullah also known as Majal mentioned in their statement in a video that came out, they said, we are the ideological descendants of al-Hajj Umar Taal, Usman Donfolio and Sheikh Ahmadinef. And anyone who knows West African history, we know these three individuals are very important figures in terms of their intellectual thought, in terms of Islam in West Africa. So the question is, why would terrorist organizations start with these three names unless they were seeking to resonate and impact a new group of recruitment tactics for young people. And so part of my argument is saying that this terrorist group was seeking to appeal and find new recruits. And in many cases, this organization, Tuwizullah Mujal was created because Black Africans wanted to find legitimate soft targets in their home countries of West Africa. The Car Senegal, Banjil Gambia, Bamako, Mali, et cetera, you get the drift. And so what I think we have now as sort of a baseline is that now more than ever, my analytical position at some time we get wrong, but we have a particular position on it is that this is a time in which African nation states are most, West African nation states are most vulnerable, more than ever. I think soft targets, we've seen the attacks certainly in Mali and Bamako, we saw the attacks in Lovajadu, et cetera, that these are certainly a very trying times. And so I say that because when we look at other reasons and other, we look at countries like Chad, which I'm using as a case study, Idris Debi, he has been taking a very proactive stance on his foreign policy position and many ways to deflect what's taking place internally. And so his foreign policy agenda seems very interventionist. We have the perfect example in 2013 in which he was, Chad was involved with helping to withdraw or serving the excitement of helping to repel back AQIM, obviously with the French-led intervention in 2013. And in 2014, we saw Chad went into car but was seen as working too closely with select rebels and then they fired on civilians in which, including some who were 80 forces. So this shows you that Chad, in particular Debi is taking a very practical position. Certainly we know Chad has been one of the more capable military forces in the region in the Sahelian countries, which certainly shows that they are trying to use that as a momentous occasion for them to take a leadership role. What took place in Nigeria with Chad was at the forefront of it. Certainly shows a strategic view, despite, certainly we know another mandate that Debi wants to request to extend his presidential term. So this is interesting, this sort of forefront where he's certainly being accused in being pushed back in terms of his human rights records, but he is moving forward in terms of an aggressive regional approach in terms of Chad staying involved. So this is important. Again, we don't have enough time to totally unpack that we'll have time for Q and A, but I just want us to think a big 30,000, 50,000 foot in terms of that issue right there. As we move on and just to think sort of larger in terms of regionally speaking to as well and looking at this idea of sort of militancy and then peace building aspects as well, which is certainly important in close trust at US Institute of Peace. If we've looked in the past, I should say in the last five years following 9-11, we've seen a number of CT legislation that's been invoked in many West African nations. I think that's very important to look at, driven primarily by external factors. The UN Committee on Counterterrorism issues along with donor support organizations have assisted West African nations to put in place counterterrorism policies. So it's been driven by that and because the previous, when we think about counterterrorism from a West African landscape, it's not been this sort of transnational terrorism concept. It's much been, the concept of terrorism has been much more politically motivated as well. So that's important to highlight and certainly we've seen some of the case examples of French, Moroccans, et cetera, who have assisted some West African nations to address this threat. As we move forward, because I think it's important to look at ways in which we can address some of the peace building or conflict mitigation elements of it as well. Some of the efforts that we've been doing at U.S. Institute of Peace that I think is really interesting is addressing the issue of local concerns, that local realities, local dynamics, whether you're in Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, et cetera, you have to have a tailored response. So the Hedaya Center, many international organizations in using the umbrella of countergrabbing and treemism have been launching this new initiative called the Resolve Network where it is saying that to resolve some of these challenges that we're seeing politically, certainly these issues that are transnational, you have to think local in terms of addressing these concerns. So this is very interesting. It goes to academic research that we've seen, policy members within the U.S. government or international community, and the practitioners who are saying that you have to have local tailored responses that are nuanced, that address the issue of preventing violent extremism as well. So one of the elements that we've been doing that I think that's sort of interesting and there's many other organizations that are doing some work is this intersection between justice and security. So we've come up with justice and security dialogues. So certainly you've heard of throughout the continent, certainly West Africa, this extra judicial crackdown, these notions of governments themselves who are not allowing organizations to fully express themselves. So there's a disconnect between security organizations and then also the general public. So what we've been doing is making sure to put the pressure on these government organization security services to make sure that they're held accountable and that there's a dynamic or at least an exchange, is one element, a community driven approach to address these concerns as well. I'll stop there. I think we'll have plenty of time to sort of unpack that more in Q and A. Megan, thanks. Yeah, thank you very much for saving us three minutes. I hope you don't come back for your three minutes later. I will. Now that note, I have a pleasure of inviting Professor Kijie. Ah, sorry. I think I was looking too far to the left. I need to come back to the right. Excuse me there. It's my pleasure to invite the chair to give her talk. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Like Dr. Obie said, my name is Sherry Baker and I am currently working as the senior subject matter expert on human rights and protection of civilians for the Department of State's ACOTA program. The ACOTA program is the updated version of ACRI, the African Crisis Response Initiative, which was started in 1997 and it transformed into ACOTA in 2004 and we work with approximately 25 partner nations in sub-Saharan Africa to enhance their nation's military's capabilities to resolve some of their own regional issues. Some of our troops that we have trained have deployed to Unimid, Unmiss, UNISFA, Manusco and Manusma, among many others. While my coworkers train operational military tactics, my part of the training focuses on international humanitarian law, their specific rules of engagement, escalation of force tactics and their mandate for their mission. We also talk about how to prevent and respond to child soldiers, human trafficking victims and conflict related sexual violence. We use lectures, small group discussions, command post exercises and field training exercises with a strong focus on how we are supposed to operationalize protecting vulnerable populations. We are training the military leaders of a country on what they are legally allowed and expected to do on their mission. This can and should directly relate to what their country expects of them at home in times of peace and in potential conflict. The human rights component of the peacekeeping training is a form of peace building in that it sets out human rights norms for a country's military. Decade ago peacekeepers were usually asked to deploy to areas with post conflict peace agreement implementation under chapter six mandate. Today, more than two thirds of peacekeepers are deployed to ongoing conflict zones, including to Manusma. As many of you may know, Manusma is currently the deadliest peacekeeping mission in the world for peacekeepers. In two of my last three trainings to Burkina Faso, we trained a battalion to deploy to Manusma. On my first trip there with the Dakota program, it was immediately after the popular uprising when then-President Kamporia tried to amend Article 7 of the country's constitution and extend his 27-year rule. While he was in power, his semi-authoritarian regime combined democratization with repression to ensure political stability more or less for 27 years. When I was tasked to go there with the rest of my team, it was a 12-week training that we had to take approximately a five-week break while the dust kind of settled in the country after the uprising. And we finished up with the final two weeks of the training and it was difficult because of the five-week interruption and all of the political dynamics happening in the country. In addition, at the time, there was military reform starting to take place about how to integrate the presidential security component into the rest of the military. On my second trip, well, my third trip to Burkina Faso for the Dakota program most recently, I was there for two months at the end of 2015 to train another battalion to deploy to Timbuktu. And I was there during the delayed presidential elections. While I was there, I saw a very high expectation for change, particularly among the youth. The presidential campaign had approximately 24 candidates. There was a lot of organized events and a lot of campaign rallies that were very exciting, but they were at times very tense. And also during this time, the RSP had started to reintegrate into the rest of the army. So it was interesting to watch the army who had split sort of at one point start to be a unified, cohesive military again. In my work with the Dakota program, over the last three years, I have seen some challenges on the ground, but I have also been very impressed with the resiliency and work ethic of many of the peacekeepers we have trained. We've trained, I think, 300,000 or more since ACRI started. I personally have been involved in training 3,500 of them. In Burkina Faso in particular, I was extremely impressed with the tactical level commanders. The company commanders and the platoon leaders are very engaged and they absolutely want to do the best job that they can on the ground to protect the local population and keep their units alive. They are very, the company commanders are very motivated and intelligent and the platoon leaders are really doing as much as they possibly can to take in some brand new information before they deploy. I also think another strength of the Dakota program happens when we work with a sustained professional cadre from the country. The goal is to have these military trainings happen and led by the host nation military. With a cadre changing every training cycle or they don't come every day to work or their commander's tasks, them to do something else in a different part of the country for a week, it really leads to some trouble on the ground during our training, but if we can work with a sustained cadre, then I think it would definitely help improve the Dakota program. And sometimes we do get the chance to do that. However, there never seems to be enough time and money for these trainings, which I think is the case for most security assistance programs. On this last mission, we were supposed to do a 10 or 12 week training. It got cut down to eight, but we were expected to have the same outcome. So we worked very hard basically every day of the week. And even then there was a political decision made that UNMOS, the UNMINE Action Service came to conduct a training in the country with other Burkina Bay soldiers. And at the last minute, they actually worked with our one company for three days at a time. So it's really caused some trouble in our training there as well. We also periodically work with old equipment, which I think is the norm in a lot of these countries, but when we were working this last time in Burkina Faso rumor was that the reason we were using such old equipment was because the newer equipment was diverted to protect the capital around the elections, but it went off peacefully. So everybody was thankful for that. Also the equipment has poor maintenance, of course. So we have to work on a lot more maintenance training. Also, a unit is only as strong as its weakest link. And some of the younger soldiers in a lot of the units that we train don't know how to use the radio. They don't know the military phonetic alphabet. They don't know how to use a GPS. And without that type of basic training under their belt before we start our training, we have to kind of go backwards and make sure that everybody understands what they're doing so that we can all move forward together. Burkina Faso has been a key ally in the fight against terror. They have played an important diplomatic and security role in the region. And now they've just had their first truly democratic presidential elections in over 27 years. In some ways, they are a great role model for the rest of the countries in the Sahel. Many locals thought that their role in diplomacy made them immune to terrorism. However, the recent attack in Wagadogo proved otherwise. The Sahel is a vast place with porous borders and many lawless regions, as we all know. Elisa activities in the Sahel are estimated to bring in $3.8 billion annually. So it is difficult to work with rule of law institutions and try to get people to stay on the right side of the law when there is so much money to be had by doing things that are illegal. In addition, there are 150 million people in the Sahel today, with 70% of them under 25 years old. By 2030, that number is expected to grow to a quarter of a billion. So we need to do as much as we can now to prepare for the influx in the population and to try to develop the areas economically and in terms of security. The US and France have been working in the Sahel since the early 2000s with military strategy. And that is wonderful, but it is nothing without the rest of the diplomatic and political and economic strategies also at play. There are currently 16 different stabilization strategies in the Sahel. Some of them include the African Union, the UN, ECOWAS, the EU, the G5 Sahel, France, USA, and Denmark, among many others. Each of these strategies has a slightly different focus and they also have a different grouping of countries. So there is very little coordination between all of these strategies. And sometimes they have competing priorities and there can be a duplication of efforts. A lot of them don't work very well with the host country government as well. And obviously that needs to change as quickly as possible. I just wanted to wrap up by saying that the US State Department has a budget request or their budget request for 2016 showed a 63% increase in security and justice aid to the Sahel. So we need to work with our partners to make sure there's less duplication of efforts. And we need to coordinate our strategies with the political, diplomatic, and economic strategies to make all of them more effective. Thank you. Thank you very much, Erie. And now, again, Professor Cajie. Thank you very much. I think the advantage of speaking last is that without taking the sale of the window of the moderator you can do a beautiful summary of what everybody has said. But if you'll permit me, I want to start by saying that my reading of militancy, revolts, and the challenges that we face in the Sahel suggests to me that our understanding or notion of militancy is the one that focuses on subaltern actions that portrays revolts. And much less looking at militancy as an attempt by different movements to negotiate the space. If we move our, if we cast our gaze from militancy as a form of revolt to militancy as a form of, as an attempt by groups to negotiate for space for several different reasons, tangible and intangible reasons. Perhaps we will be asking differences of questions and perhaps we'll be harvesting differences of answers. This is just a side comment, a kind of footnote. But we should not really pretend as if subaltern actions of the kinds that we're seeing in the Sahel, whether you refer to smuggling, trafficking insurgencies, that this are all, I mean, that threatens the state and maybe the international community, we should not pretend as if they came upon us overnight. She had mentioned, for instance, that we have over 150 million people in the Sahel. But what is the status of the people? Economic status, social status. And for me, my reading of the situation is that you could almost see a similar similarities in the pathologies. What do you see? Decaying capacity of the state, bring livelihoods and access to subsidized socioeconomic opportunities. We see reversals in democratic governance and development. And you could see this especially across the Sahel, from the 1990s in the context of the drought. Many countries have now recovered from the drought of the 1970s. And sadly so because it's completely took the window of the sale of a vast majority of population, whether you're from the northeast of Nigeria as far as Mauritania. So for me, and so if we want to have a better understanding of the challenges and how this in turn reflect on politics, governance, and peace building, I think it's important to have an appreciation of how long these problems are felt faster and how we have allowed them to go on without proper management. And the vital statistics, the vital signs are there. Most Sahel countries, as I rightly said, human development index in terms of life expectancy, education, income per capita, they're probably the lowest of the bottom. There's limited access to subsidized socioeconomic opportunities, especially for young people who are in the majority of the population. You have shrinking space for popular expressions and civic engagement, if not democracy, as we conceive it. And you could see how the history of social movements have told us. The lesson that all rather warned us that when people find themselves in situations where they do not have access to subsidized socioeconomic opportunities, what happens? The chance to throw stones becomes attractive. And whether you're looking at it in Burkina Faso or you're looking at it, not Eastern Nigeria, or across the continent, especially so across the Sahara, you could see that the chance to throw stones have become very attractive. And if you substitute the chance to throw stones with a chance to carry 8K47, you'll probably have a better grasp of it. And if you do not address historically rooted contradictions that many of our countries face, whether contradictions that are linked to how people are denied access to the political space over a long period of time, how historically rooted problems are not addressed be they ethnic or social or religious, you can have a better sense of why most countries in the Sahara find themselves in the kind of quagmire that they are today. There is also a point to be made about the legitimacy of the state. And you could see that over the last, say, 30 years, there has been a growing disconnect between the citizenry and the state. People are becoming more and more, the state is now virtually an empty shell. You will find that in places where you have big companies, those are the states that the people see. So the state has become increasingly distant. And I do think that one way to, and I'm gonna remind concluding remarks I would say this, that one way to address this is for to close the gap between the state and the citizenry. Because the gap has become so long and all kinds of actors, all kinds of developments are filling in these processes. And you could see this, for instance, in when you look at how the more you move away from the capitals and major cities and towns in most of our countries across Sahara, you will see that the rate of the state becomes thinner and thinner. So you can understand why, for instance, in the mountains of Nigeria, you had the kind of challenge that I have. You can understand why most parts of Northern Mali, you can understand why parts of Bokina Faso, all of these places have become zones where the rate of the state is very lean. And once it becomes that lean, it creates a space for the kind of insurgent movements that we've always talked about, you know, to create, if you like, a terrorist franchise as we have seen in most of those countries or gangsters' paradise. So the other point I'd like to make, say is, if you look at the state of politics, governance, democracy, peace building in the Sahel, it's a very worrisome situation, especially in the context of spreading insurgency. And you could see this in the manner in which elections have become not just keenly contested, but elections have become a size of contestation. It has become a very zero-summer fair, not just between and amongst elites, but also between elites and the citizenry and between elites and growing insurgent movements, such that at the end of the day, elections does not really represent what people's expectations for it will be, but another opportunity just to vote without necessarily making a choice. The other point I'd like to raise is that as the state becomes increasingly unable, or as the state increasingly abdicates its responsibility to protect, to provide for the people, new groups find gain traction. Why is it that we never anticipated the challenge in the notice, for instance? Why did we wait for almost 20 years? Why did it take wait for almost 20 years before everything imploded in its face without being able to effectively contain the Boko Haram movement, or indeed any other groups across board? So for me, I think that as a way of moving forward, a number of proposals, yeah, a number of proposals. Of course, the worst case scenario is to continue what, you know, to allow situations to continue the way it is. It is only a fold that will continue to do the same thing over and over and expected different results. I think that one immediate response is to close the gap between the state and the citizenry. Look, no matter the challenge that the state might face on the continent in Africa, including even in the Sahel, the state is still probably, the state is still alive. It might not be well. And so what do we do to the state to create better connections with the citizenry? And I think here that there's a point to be made about the role that the international community can play, not necessarily in the military sense, but in a much more developmental sense. What kind of engagements should the international community come up with in terms of better engagement with government, with the state in the Sahel or across Africa? Because if you don't engage with the state, if you don't create an opportunity to reinflate the state, okay, it is going to, we're going to continue to, this situation is going to fester. And sadly, so it probably will become more and more complicated. So I don't think that a military response as necessary as it might seem, you know, is sufficient in the long term. So if you're gonna put more money in the point of defense, for instance, to be able to create, to be able to fight terror in the Sahel, it is necessary, but not sufficiently in the long run. Because for a growing number of people, the best form that God can appear is in form of food. And this is the reality across the continent. And if they do not have that space of self-actualization, the space where they can get access to subsidized socioeconomic opportunity, a sense of alienation will continue to creep in, perhaps even become overwhelming such that an alternative source of protection, an alternative ideology becomes very attractive. I just want to stop at the point, I have a colleague of mine in Adiz, Amir Abdullah, just one minute, started, was talking to me recently about how it's important that as part of trying to create an alternative ideology, you know, why we should pursue very strongly a process of radicalization. And he was talking, giving the experience of Egypt where, and I think you may also mentioned it in the context of Mauritania, where the state actually went to engage with those who had been arrested, who had been put in prison, to make them to come up with a counter ideology, because the space is very wide. And you know, the minds of men, you know, conflict is incubated in the minds of men, and it is only in the minds of men that you can unravel it. And I do think that as part of the effort to make the state much more alive to its responsibility, includes also making sure that a counter ideology that is much more appealing than the current prevailing, creeping in ideology of extremist movements, you know, in terms of engaging with the people will be a better way of creating a better space, not just for better governance, but also for the kind of peace that we all aspire to, you know, in the Sahel and across Africa. Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much. These have been fascinating presentations. Before I open the floor, I have a couple of poses for the presenters. The first is to Camisa. Somewhere along the line, I expected you to touch on the question of political leadership. Most of the time, whether it's security, whether it's development, whether it's democracy, the leadership plays a key role. From your experience and the countries that you have worked with, particularly the country you presented a call, how important do you think the question of political leadership is? And what kinds of leadership do you think can help consolidate democracy without compromising security and also promoting development? You'll be surprised that I have yet another question for you. And that has to do with the question of the relationship between security and democracy. And you spoke about the emergence of the security state in Niger. I find this very interesting. At what point do you think that security over-securitization, so to speak, threatens democracy? And how do you democratize security while also strengthening democracy but without compromising security? It's a bit complicated, but I think that somewhere within this relationship there's something for us. Secondly, I go to Muhammad and yours is very easy. How do you deal with, in terms of the local context, which I found the way you presented it was very fascinating. How do you then begin to deal with issues of inequality and unemployment, which seem to go to the point that Cherry also made about the youth? A lot of them are angry. How do you make them happy? What kind of programs do you think would make the young people happy? What kind of governance systems are likely to bring out the creative energies of the young people rather than the destructive energies, particularly in the line of your work? I also have a second question for you. What we have seen is the way three worlds have met. The Sahel, or West Africa, has met with North Africa. The Sahel meets with not just West Africa, but Central Africa and the Horn of Africa. We talk about Akul, Mujahou and other and Boko Haram in Nigeria. And yet in the Horn you have El Shabab and you have other groups in the CAR, which people are not really talking about to do. And it's all along that belt of the Sahel. The youth foresee a situation if things are not properly managed. Where the bridge from North Africa, which has connected the Sahel in West Africa, will now extend to East and the Horn. That bridge will be a disaster. What would you say in terms of what do we need to do now to make sure that that doesn't happen? To cherry. My question to you is very interesting. I noticed that although the African Union and all the African regional economic communities have declared on constitutional changes of power, illegal, we're beginning to witness the changing of constitutions to remove term limits. But we also have seen attempts by soldiers, professional armies, to make coup d'etat, to intervene militarily and to seize power. The most interesting case recently was in Burkina Faso, but it failed. Would you say that the kind of training that you do helps to give the military sector the kind of capacity to submit themselves to civilian authorities? How do you think this works out? And how do you think we can actually reinforce this aspect of the training? The other question is resources. You mentioned resources. Given what you know about where the resources come from and the short, the resource deficit, what do you think can be done in terms of generating resources? Where will these extra resources likely come from? Finally, Charles, elections. Elections are the gateway to democracy. And yet when you look at what happened in La Côte d'Ivoire, what almost happened in Togo and what was aborted in Nigeria, you begin to see that elections can be very divisive. And some of the conflicts that have opened up the space to the insecurities we talk about have emerged out of either hotly contested elections or disputed election electoral outcomes. How do you think that elections, what is missing from the way elections are managed and how do we manage the risks that are attendant to hotly disputed elections? And the second thing is a tricky one. I must warn you that the second question would then be, you talk about closing the gap between the state and the citizens. What kind of programs would you recommend if you're doing this? Sounds very easy and straightforward, but what practical steps do you think we can take, what kind of programs? And on that note, I think I'll wait for your responses. Okay, should I start? Yes, please. Okay, so I think that the reason why your question are complicated is that there are philosophical questions. When it comes to political leadership in the Sahel, the first thing that came to my mind is that when you go to Maui or Burkina Faso, when we talk about the ideal political leaders these countries have known, the model that they often refer to are the Thomas Sankara, the Mojibu Keita, who seemed to be totally selfless, not interested in monetary gains, who had an ideology and really wanted to move their countries forward. So when you compare a Thomas Sankara or a Mojibu Keita to an Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, who buys planes for himself, for his son, who makes sure that his son is in the parliament, who drives in Rolls Royce in Bamako while the country is at war, I'm not sure that we can talk about political leadership. So I think that, yeah, so when it comes to political leadership, we often revisit our history and we go back to the first leaders that we had in these countries. So I think that this is the type of political leadership that probably citizens in the Sahel are looking for. And I doubt that in this modern day, they will find it, but we can still dream about it, right? In terms of the boundary between security and over, what's the word that you seek? Secretization of a country. I think there is definitely a fine line. And again, I believe that this is a philosophical question because the state should have the monopoly of force in any democracy. But at the same time, in the concept of democracy, private liberties are quite important or have a very strong bond with the country. And these policies are quite important or have, I think, a big place. So how do you balance the monopoly of force of the state and the private liberties that citizens should have in a country? I have no answer to that. Okay. Thank you. I think this is a really good question. So full disclosure, I think this will help me answer the question posed to me. So I worked in government for 10 years. I worked on counterterrorism issues. Worked on radicalization. I worked at the National Counterterrorism Center. So for my optic in government life, I am very familiar from the role of the full spectrum of what the US government probably has available to them in terms of dealing with counterterrorism issue from that optic. Now let's unpack that because I'm no longer in that area anymore. You know, from my hat, looking at USIP, looking at peace building and addressing the issue of local context. And I'm writing my dissertation right now to is what Howard on counterterrorism, countering violent extremism policy and after. So I'm coming in from a couple of different aspects. You know, I think the best response which was a fascinating article that I highly recommend you all to read is Ambassador Cynthia Snyder's piece that was in foreign policy a few days ago. And she talked about the role of certainly the State Department engaging Silicon Valley and trying to come up with a, sorry, turn it, engage Hollywood to deal with this issue of how do we work on radicalization and how do we deal with violent extremism. And her response actually captured it best which is there are organic alternatives. I don't use counter alternative narratives that are in place within locations. So Mali has a great tradition of grill speakers that can be organically used in a creative fashion that speaks to concern in Mali. In Senegal, you're gonna do it different. I was in Mogadishu in Somalia in December. You're gonna do a different there. And I think that increasingly what we're finding is that when you throw something like a, if you throw something like a sticky at something you think it's gonna stick, it's not gonna necessarily work because it's nuance. People and human beings are very different in how they react. And so just like they're gonna make you feel a certain way based off of food. It makes you feel a certain way. Music will make you feel a certain way depending on where you are. And so I think increasingly this evidence-based research that we're seeing and the growing body of this field is that it has to be adaptive creative. And so what my argument I would say if you took nothing away from this is you have to get out the box. Getting out the box allows you to tap into music, arts, entertainment, cultural expression. The Sham ID has an interesting book came out about two years ago on rebel music. The use of music and hip hop, et cetera, entrepreneurship. There's a wealth of things we could sit down and flush it out. But I think that increasingly you're looking at the local context to find alternative narratives that work, that stick, that are well-grounded and cultural, theological, religious interpretations, et cetera, societal, that you have to get to that nuanced granular level. So that's the response to the first question. The next response I would say in terms of the spreading of sort of these transnational threats or the evolution of you will, I would argue to say that, you know, yeah, the videos are slick, right? That's the catching phrase to say the videos are slick. Boko Haram, if you just watched and monitored and just did an evaluation analysis of the video from just 2010 to 2016, you've seen a tremendous amount of money put in, a tremendous amount of media, public relations campaign, internally that we haven't seen before. So certainly they're being adapted. I would say that who knows that the ability of fiber optic cables going all around Africa may have added toward their ability to spread that, to increase a Bluetooth technology from DIFA to Agadez and certainly increasing that in terms of exchange and being able to have a point-to-point contact with individuals. So this certainly adds to it. And then just the evolution of the change of tactics and procedures of these organizations. If you look at Al Qaeda being much more of a rigid model courier network to now having a do-it-yourself Jihad framework being used by ISIS, which Boko Haram is certainly adding into or getting some of the technical expertise. So I would say increasingly, we're gonna see this linkages of these groups and these movements and is this a disastrous situation? I think it's already happening. So the question is, how do you continue to get ahead of the curve to plan to be able to deal with this because the African consulate isn't just the fertile ground for China. We didn't open that up. But this is the new frontier for terrorists and others who are using it for their own affairs purposes. Well, thank you very much, Mohamed. All right, so to address the question about if my piece of the training hopefully helps eliminate the chance of a coup in a country that is the goal, the human rights part of the Dakota program became a mandatory and priority part of the program about three and a half years ago. Before that, people, former US soldiers would train African militaries to focus more on the laws of war and the rules of engagement and kind of stop there. And now it is a much bigger component of the training. It's integrated throughout. I actually work with some of my colleagues when they're on the range and we talk about the principle of distinction and what that means. So we don't just have it for an hour during a two-month training. It is many days during the training, full days with different groups of different sizes and we teach different components of it. One of the interesting things that I have tried to do in some of my trainings is I compare it periodically to how the US Army works. And I say that you are supposed to follow what your commander says. If it is legal, moral, and ethical, that's what US soldiers are taught. But sometimes when I say that in the countries I'm working in, I get a laugh. Like that will never work here. So I still say it and we have a discussion about it and what that means for them. But I get a lot of very interesting questions what they are legally allowed to do and why. In addition, it does seem that a lot of military leaders start coups in West Africa and all of Sub-Saharan Africa really. We, okay, so the rank of the people that start the coups, they have usually been outside of their host nation but outside of their own country for some sort of military training in the West. In the US and France and Denmark or somewhere. And so they've seen how another segment of the world operates and they are very motivated and they're excited and they truly think that they can bring some of those changes back. So I think at times it is a power grab for the sake of power but at times I think that there is an intrinsic motivation from some of these coup leaders to try to fix a broken system. So it is difficult but we try to talk a lot about following what their commanders say and following rule of law and we work with effective governance in their country and we talk about some of the other programs that are happening as much as possible. And then to address your question about resource deficit, the biggest thing that I have seen is that there needs to be a lot more training on maintenance. There needs to be a little bit less of just giving equipment, brand new equipment without teaching how to fix it. We see a lot of broken equipment in the country. We hear about warehouses full of brand new equipment that we don't even know where the key is because whoever has the key to the warehouse has a lot of political power because they have access to the equipment. So we sometimes have to deal with some difficult issues on the ground related to the resource deficit but if we can just focus on maintenance I really think that would be a big deal. Specifically a couple of missions ago we were training a battalion and Burkina Faso to deploy to Unimid in Darfur and at the graduation ceremony we overheard in one of the speeches one of the commanders say that they think their eight-year-old tanks are too old. The U.S. Army uses 25-year-old military equipment because we keep working on it and I know it's a different culture, it's a different area, different current ability to do maintenance but we really need to stop just giving equipment away without teaching people how to maintain it. Thank you very much Charles. Thank you very much. Your first question is what is missing about missing in the way elections are managed and what are the risks? I want to start by saying that it's important that the rest of the world should cut should cut a country like Nigeria's slag by acknowledging how the last elections went. Unfortunately, this is against all the expectations of everyone, you know, for every 10 people you speak to, you spoke to before the elections, it's always that Nigeria was going to include but I think what comes out of that is the fact that if Nigeria, if an election that everyone had predicted would turn sour, actually has turned the exact opposite. I think that there is hope for most countries on the continent that they can also have elections that will not, I'm not saying that the election was perfect, don't get me wrong, okay? But that the kind of transition that most people had predicted did not come to pass. I think it's cherry news for elections and democracy on the continent. I do agree with you that elections can be a gateway to democracy but it can also be very divisive and it can create new sets of insecurity challenges. But the truth is that the African experience has shown that elections are not necessarily one size fits all affair. It does not necessarily represent or bring the what you call the proverbial magical wand. Every country that has successfully, has successful elections, you know, are hardly out of the woods. The next, the day after the election, the reality begins to dawn, you know, that elections only represents one part, a very important, very significant part, but it does not solve all the problems. And that you still have to attend to very important problems of, you know, several different, you know, how do people survive, how do people go about, you know, their daily lives and so on and so forth. So yes, I do agree that elections might not, but I want to say that elections might not lead necessarily lead to the democratic promised land, but I do see that it is a far better route rather than through the bails of a gun. I think that if elections are their aftermath, if they do not deliver meaningful change, it becomes hollow and can have the exact opposite effect. And this is where you see the kind of contentions in many countries that have gone through elections, you know, we are several months down the line and Nigeria is also facing the same kind of challenge. You know, there's a very big expectation gap now. If you, I was just having discussions with my friends earlier and the talk is about, look, if you get popular opinion in the first few weeks after elections and you do the same thing now, you're probably going to get complete different figures. The expectation from the government is getting very low, but there are those who believe that government should have, you know, responded quicker in a more qualitative and meaningful sense. Perhaps this is also expecting too much of government, you know, in the light of, you know, the challenges, the huge challenges that the country actually faces. How do you close the gap between citizens and the state? I don't know how many of you have seen the last year, towards the end of last year, Afrobarometer published the report on the state of democracy on the continent. But the first point I want to make is, you know, don't let us assume that citizens across African countries expect, would that what they expect is substantial. Let me give you an example of Nigeria. What do Nigerians expect? If I ask Nigerians in this room, electricity, water, security, basic security. I tell my people, my friends, that I'm even a local government. I have all of those provided by myself, okay? So what do people really expect from the state? It is nothing grandiose. The expectations of the citizens from the state is not so huge. They just want basic security. They want to be able to have access, to be able to send their kids to school, okay? Or the kids work to school at the nearest neighborhood school, and so on and so forth. And I don't think that these are things that cannot be delivered within the resources that the state have. So where do we have the challenge? And I do believe that if you address those basic things, people can live outside of the state and engage with the state when it's necessary. Although the ideal situation will be a greater, meaningful, a more robust engagement with the state. But people are very happy to engage with the state when there's need for it, for as long as they have access to those basic things. And so at the end of the day, they find that the situation is more or less that elections becomes a kind of motion without movement. A motion that you go through every cycle, every four years, where you queue up to vote, but it does not deliver the kind of meaningful expectations that people want. And until elections and the aftermath of elections are able to deliver on basic things that people want, not grand just things, not building several billion dollars worth of rail line, which is important by the way, but being able to give people an opportunity to exercise themselves freedom as choice in the context of the post-election state. This for me, just very irreducible minimum of what the people need. And until the state is able to create those bases, the tension between it and its citizens is we continue to fester, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa. Yeah, thank you very much. Very quickly, we will go to the audience. Our questions will start from this side of the room. I have one, two, three. Is there a fourth hand up on this side? No, there are three people. So please, you have the floor. Thank you. Excellent presentations. My questions are for Kamisa and Sherry. Probably this morning that I've been for quite a few years engaged in security sector and security governance. Now, one of the things that was constant for a long time has been the complete refusal of organizations just as the endowment to come anywhere close to security issues. And clearly that's not the case, just based on what you have said. Now, how did that each translate into programs on the ground engaging security sector reform capable organizations? And did you realize, I hope, that you waited a long time before you jumped on that particular bandwagon? And again, not to say that your objections were not valid, but clearly a lot of time was missed on bad organizations as the endowment. Or a quota. One of the criticism has been that training was basically divorced, just practical training, the one you mentioned, was divorced from the broader need for transformation, serious reform of the security sector in a variety of areas. Particularly the involvement of the parliament, the involvement of society in the governance of security. So how would you respond to that? Were you able over the years to integrate that in the way you approach training? Thank you. Thank you. I thought there were three people. You want to, okay? Thank you. And this is a quick question for Charles. And this is one of the conundrum that we have in West Africa in terms of the relationship between security and development. The question of even when countries are getting it right, that you don't always have the development if you're then following through. So for example, in the case of Nigeria with the high hopes that Boa came to power with, the latest news is, of course, our crisis is unbuckled on the ground, and the government is really sort of faced with the conundrum of not having enough resources and in conversation and in discussion with the IMF, all of this and like that has not come out very clearly, but definitely Nigeria is under pressure to float in Iraq, which Boa is saying that we're not going to float in Iraq because it's got tremendous issues. So again, I want you to just personally elaborate in the talk on the internet. I'm not going between security and development, but I think we're safe against being in your question about sort of the question of how far security is. Hi, everybody, my name is Manal Taha. I work for USIP. So, I came from Nigeria January 20th, so just last month. And I was in Agadis, where I met people on the ground. And one of the things that I observed, just second your opinion about the fragility on major situation, I will start with the trafficking, the human trafficking and how it is being reflected differently here in America. We think that it's like extreme, I've been hearing extreme is taking a chance with these trafficking routes and with the gangs and armed group for trafficking. But the reality what I observed in the ground is totally different. What I observed is the trafficking for vehicles, groups of trafficking for vehicles are different from trafficking goods and food from Libya or from Algeria. They are different from the groups that trafficking cocaine. They are different from the extremist groups. They may meet on the desert and just wave to each others, but they don't interact. So that's what I learned from the reality from the ground. Also the involvement of the security forces, the Niger security forces. Indirectly, every Monday there is a convoy, they call them travelers, but actually they are immigrants. This convoy is called by military. To cross the road to Kuwait, either they came from West Africa countries, either they go to Kuwait region where is the new gold mining, which is also adding another security aspect to the ungovernment region of North and Niger. Plus, or some of them they go up to Libya and they just proceed to Europe. So this convoy is when I was there and Monday, every Monday I went to the market and I saw the cars that being filled by traffickers or immigrants, every person they pay like 2000 sefa. It depends on your nationalities. If you're from Niger, different, you pay different from Western African countries. This money goes to some of the security forces and police officers to protect and to facilitate for protection of this movement. So, and at the same time, the trick point of it, you can't stop that because you can't stop not to protect that convoy, plus, if you can't prevent those security officers to get money and benefits out of that, they turn against you and you have experience of Phukaharam in Nigeria. Then the other part also I see you have the madrasa. The madrasas, it may not be connected now announcing the jihadist ideology in Niger, but it's taking the way, the same way was in Nigeria in 1999's, by, by embodying or embodying one way of thinking, will have the methods of thinking upon people. So I'm taking advantage or taking advantage of people that they are poor so they send their kids to these madrasas. Here in the U.S., we spend a lot of money in security training and responding to military response and training. At the same time, we see the madrasas here are preparing these kids for the future to be more radicalized. It's, we're saving money actually if we respond to the education now in Niger. More than just now is spending money in preparing the army so they can act and counter those kids when they grow up after four years. So that could be also one of those alternatives for the, for our interventions and just deal with the local aspects for safety. Yeah, I have a lot to say, but thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Is there any other person from this side of the room who wants to ask a question? Anybody on the side of the room? Yes, please, at the far back and then we'll come back for your responses. Thank you. Hi, I'm Katie Camp. Yes, also from the National Endowment for Democracy. My question, well, it's a little bit broad but, and you've touched on some of this, but just looking at the saw hell, it's such a huge swath of territory that it would be impossible for any military or police force to be able to really patrol every single area and keep every single area secure. So what are your thoughts on community policing or volunteer police forces at the local level? How would you train them and how would you prevent them from turning into little vigilante authoritarian bodies of their own becoming just as bad as some of the groups that they're meant to fight? Thank you very much. Well, we are pressed for time. I have a question. Do we collect questions from the side of the room and then you respond to all the questions? Or do you want to respond for a minute each now so that people on this side of the room can have an opportunity to answer questions from this side? Sorry. So what do you say? Maybe we can answer these first and then go to the next. Yeah, okay, but you have to be really, really good. Very concise. Thank you. Okay, to answer the question about NED, important things to know, NED is not an implementer. We fund the programs, we fund programs based on the proposals that we receive. So I haven't worked for NED for such a long time. I've been there for close to four years. My director's here has been there for over 25 years. I'm sure he can tell you about our programs. But since I have been working for the NED, we have been funding programs on security sector reform, especially in the Sahel. There is one that I can mention, which has been implemented by partners West Africa based in Dakar. And they have worked in Guinea and now they're working on Mali on civil security, civil, what is it? Military, civil military dialogue in both Mali and Guinea. So again, we fund based on the proposals that we receive, if we have not funded programs on security sector reform before it's maybe because we have not received proposals on the topic. One other thing that I would like to mention, actually partners for democratic change, I believe is in this building. And we have been working with them also over the years on developing a tool to ease security sector reform in the Sahel. So this is really an important aspect of our programming and certainly an important aspect of our strategy in the Sahel region. All right. Thank you very much. Very quickly, you're to respond to your question about Dakota being a separate effort from security sector reform as a whole. It does appear that that is the case at the tactical level. Our training can be done for a number of different ranks of African soldiers. Sometimes we work with a full battalion, which is 800 to a thousand people. Sometimes we work with just the brigade commandant staff or the battalion commandant staff or sometimes we work at the company level. So with what we're doing on the ground there with a battalion level and below, I think that working on security sector reform wouldn't be as useful at that level. But the information that we provide back to the State Department of what we're seeing on the ground and what's happened in discussions can be useful to create strategies for security sector reform as a whole. Thank you very much. As it relates to the community policing, I think it's a great topic. It's something that USFP we do, we've done. In West Africa and the Sahel along with East Africa, I'm heading to Nairobi on Saturday to do conductive training as it relates to that. So certainly with communities like along the coast which have seen certainly extra judicial crackdown by the government itself trying to empower communities themselves to be able to resist if you are to find other means to work in conjunction with the security apparatus as well and take ownership themselves as well. Thank you. Let me start with the last one, community policing. I agree with you only to the extent that you said that the Sahel is a huge space that policing is going to be a challenge. But the question that I would pose back to you is to say, do you really need community policing? I think that if we have a better understanding of the Sahel and indeed the entire African continent, you will see that communities have historically designed for themselves suitable and plural self-help security regimes. So I think the challenge is for us to be much more attentive to those, to understand them, to identify them and see how we can support them. Otherwise, we will be going back and forth with sexy ideas of community policing that means everything but not really things that help people to solve their immediate security challenges. For thousands of years, hundreds of years at least people have solved, tried to solve their problems. I do accept that most of these problems are beginning to have modern ramifications, transnational dimensions, but I think we should not ignore the agency of the people to understand where the shoe pinches and how they might respond to it. Very quickly to the point that you risked about security and development and the fact that the collapse in oil prices seem to have taken the wind of the sale of the government in Nigeria and perhaps the same thing for countries that depend on commodities whose prices have gone down drastically. But my response would be to say that it is not really the case. I think that there is a window of opportunity, let me put it that way, for the Nigerian government or indeed countries that have witnessed this kind of collapse in the accumulative base because these things derive from a kind of fixation with rent from single commodities, whether it's diamond or crude oil or whatever. I think there's something positive about what has happened with the collapse in price of oil. Let me give you an example. Crisa, you can help me here. We're talking about stamp duties in Nigeria. Can you imagine how much money Nigeria can make just for charging $15,000 for stamp duties, even though it's controversial? There's a lot of money. So rather than being fixated with oil, I think that this is the best time for Nigeria to begin to think about how it can sustain itself away from oil. And there are several different ways. You pluck the corruption hole, which is very huge. I see the state relying more and more on non-oil sector, sanitizing the fiscal policy environment and beginning to realize that once you are able to de-emphasize oil and emphasize areas of collaboration, it creates a kind of women's situation for citizens and the state. So if, for instance, the state realizes that it must rely on the citizens to support and to sustain it, it means that the citizens can demand greater accountability. Yeah, thank you very much. I think it's best that we follow that. Thank you very much at that point. I would now have to invite this side of the hall. And there are two people, two questions. Three, and one, two, and three at the back. And please make it brief. Thank you very much. I'm Ben-Sola Aniwashan. My question is on Professor Rahim on country of the land extremes. Two, two questions. One, what are you doing in northern Nigeria? The second, are you engaging local malams? What are malams? Clerics. Clerics. Thank you very much. Yes. The next question, please. My name is Chris. Thank you. My question goes to Cherry. Sometime last year, Amnesty International released a report pretty much accusing the Nigerian military of huge, huge levels of human rights abuses. That was met with a lot of public handle. An anal organization after years of pretty much non-assistance from the international. I hear you talk about the training you're carrying out across Western Africa. The question I put to you here is this. Where is the balance? Where are we to find the balance between insurgency in a country like Nigeria dealing with Boko Haram and balancing human rights, human rights of the communities, especially because Boko Haram, like many of these terrorists, are pretty much embedded in the communities and it's difficult, if not impossible, to separate the communities from the terrorists. Thank you very much. And last but definitely not the least. James Cohn, USIP again. We USIP people seem to have invaded here. This question is for Cherry on military assistance training. We heard from Deputy Assistant Secretary State about the ties to other reform programs, security governance programs like SGI. But there's also, there's increasing recognition of corruption undermining security efforts, despite the amount of training and equip programs going in. And then governance programs seem to be this kind of secondary thought, not always tied to the very training and equip program that's going on. Are there any efforts or any introspection on these efforts to tie, just like Leahy vetting requires that everybody who wants to go in for military training needs to be vetted on human rights accounts. Is there an idea of doing vetting on maybe a national scale, not an individual scale, an institutional scale against metrics of corruption in order to actually receive training that otherwise is going to not be used appropriately? Yes, thank you very much. And with that, we will come back to the side of the hall and start with Camisa and we take the entire spectrum. But there was no specific question. Yes, but do you have any famous last words? Any famous last words. So because I work for the National Endowment for Democracy, the words of Muhammad really resonate with me when he says that every single program that we implement on the ground or that link fund on the ground needs to be tailored. And I know that I've said that over and over again and even here at Carnegie a few months back. I think that the challenge of most international donors or even bilateral partners is really to understand the cultural sensitivities on the ground. I don't know that any program that you implement on the ground, whether it is on security, on human rights, on democracy or anything else, can be implemented successfully without having, without mastering these cultural sensitivities. The net has a very great approach to that and they hire people like me, like Katie, like Sarah who know the continent, who have worked on the continent, who have parents who come from the continent, which really allows us to fund programs that really directly address the real issues on the ground. These are my team sports. Thank you very much, Kamisa. It's your turn now, Cherry, you're on the famous last words. In response to the question about security governance, programs, perhaps doing some vetting at the institutional level, I have not personally heard of that being the case in my work, but that does not mean that it's not happening elsewhere in the State Department and other security assistance programs, although that does sound like a pretty good idea. I'm not quite sure how it would work exactly though. I know corruption happens of course at all levels of society. And I've heard stories about militaries getting their salary for going through a training. Some of it skimmed off the top by the pay master when they hand the money over. So the people on the ground try to change the system and maybe make it go to an ATM, but then some soldiers will stand near the ATM and make it a fee once you get the money out of the ATM. So it happens at all levels and I think that the best answer for now, for that question that I have, is that the people on the ground need to be given some authority to handle the situation, of course report on it, but they're the ones that are seeing it happen and they need to catch it and respond to it and report it and address it as best as possible. And the other question about finding the balance between quelling violence and human rights, I believe, that is a very important balance to strike in these military trainings. But in my opinion, I have to address this a lot in my training anyway, but I'm working with professional soldiers overseas and sometimes when they ask like, why can't we just kill somebody that's doing something that looks wrong? There's a lot that has to go into that decision-making process and I have to say over and over that what separates the national military from an insurgency is their respect for human rights and that is one of the things that helps national militaries get funding from other governments as well when they are respecting human rights. So I think that the line should be very clear for national professional militaries about always respecting human rights under every circumstance. Yes, thank you very much. As a relation to Northern Nigeria, I would say that, yes, we are doing work. We are in beginning to get involved in Northern Nigeria. Our president, Nancy Lindbergh, was just there last week. That's sort of Johnny Carson was there with her and as well as some other colleagues. So Nigeria is becoming a top priority. As you can imagine, now we have a really, the Buhari administration is a partner and I think that the timing is right to engage this partnership and on this particular issue. As it relates to, and we can unpack that more but we'll do that maybe on the sideline. As it relates to the education engagement with Malibs, certainly a priority right now. I mean, as you know, the al-Madri system and reforming that and addressing some of the roles of just curriculum, pedagogy, critical thinking, which we can talk more about later. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. I just want to say that the question about the nexus between corruption, how corruption undermines insecurity is a very important one. If you ask me actually, corruption is the most recurrent and cross-cutting issue when you talk about security. Not the least because corruption, when it comes to security issues, for instance, purchase of weapons and so on and so forth, it is perhaps the most opaque of it all. But it is also paradoxically weird. International community seem to have looked the other way. Yes, if you take Nigeria, for instance, what has happened in Nigeria in recent times, suddenly somebody realizes that 2.1 billion US dollars, which is about 10% of the budget of Kenya, was signed off by one person. And if this new admission had not come in, we probably wouldn't have heard about it. So yes, I do accept that corruption is writ large in the process of trying to maintain security or in the security sector. But I also think that this is one area where our friends in international community can play a role, not just in identifying and helping to break the corruption value chain. Thank you. Thank you very much. All good things must come to an end. And on this note, on behalf of the organizers, I want to thank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the African Peace Building Network of the Social Science Research Council. I want to, on behalf of half, also thank you, you've been an amazing and a wonderful audience. You've stuck right through to the very end. In spite of everything said, I want to leave you with a message of hope that with all the great ideas that have come out of this discussion, your contributions from the floor, that I feel very happy because I know there is hope. There are solutions. We just have to keep working on that. I also want to thank members of this distinguished audience. And on that note, I wish you a very good evening and have a nice rest of the day. Thank you very much. Do you think you're happy? Yeah. Thank you so much. It's why I'm here to meet you. Because I'm just around the corner. Thank you so much. Have a nice trip. Have a nice trip. Have a nice trip. Have a nice trip. Have a nice trip. Thank you. Have a nice trip. Have a nice trip.