NIGERIA DID FRANCE\S DIRTY WORK IN BENIN In another segment of our wide-ranging interview, Booker Omole, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kenya, explains how France and the US worked together to turn Nigeria into their proxy force against the apparent anti-imperialist coup in Benin on 7 December. Effectively, France provided the political direction, desperate to maintain one of its last remaining West African footholds and to prevent the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) from gaining access to the sea.

Meanwhile, the United States provided Nigeria with most of the military hardware involved. As David Hundeyin of West Africa Weekly revealed in a previous interview, much of this equipment had never been deployed in Nigeria's own internal war against takfiri extremism. It is a clear sign that the country's neocolonial masters had dictated one—and only one - use case: the crushing of anti-imperialist resistance in a neighbouring African country.