Thread by @DefenseNigeria

Understanding the French phsyche.

In the last three decades France has carried out military interventions in Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, Gabon, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, and Zaire.

France has also been at loggerheads with its allies. The French by nature have an outsized ego. They resented the fact the United States was forced to clean out Europes mess twice in 2 world wars. They presence of U.S troops in Normand hurt their pride.

Resentments grew during the Suez Canal crises. They once pulled out of NATO. During our civil war French covert support on the side of the separatists drew the ire of London, who didnt take lightly French desire to breakup the biggest Anglophone state in Africa.

Britain, the Soviet Union Egypt and later the United States, by virtue of its disdain of the legacy of coloniallsn came to the aid of Nigeria. Relations between Nigeria and the U.S soared after the war as the U.S became more involved in West Africa to France's displeasure

French antipathy towards American political and economic expansion into France’s “traditional” spheres of influence was obvious. Lets not forget a century of competition with Great Britain. Their dream of supplanting Britain prestige on the global stage never materialised.

In fact, Paris’s aversion to Anglophone influence in Africa, the so called Fashoda complex, is frequently attributed to a 1898 incident at Fashoda, in Sudan, where a British military challenge thwarted French dreams of building an empire from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

They suffered two humiliating defeats at the hands of the Germans. Suffered an even more humiliating experience of having anglophone America liberate Paris TWICE.

Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, we have independent anglophone giant Nigeria, calling out France for testing nuclear weapons in the Sahara, and after several unheeded warnings the French ambassador was summoned and bundled into the next flight back to Paris.

Even after the dissolution of its empire in the 1950s and 1960s, France stubbornly still considered its former colonies private domain, off limits to other powers,

To safeguard its supremacy, France expanded its sphere of influence to include Francophone countries that had been colonized and sought to undermine the influence of English speaking giant Nigeria and Uganda which it considered to be British and American surrogates. The lives of

Two million people died needlessly during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70 because France was the main source of arms. They covertly supplied the separatists with 350 tons of weapons, transferred through Gabon and

forced the Gabon to recognize the Biafran secessionists and to permit France to use Gabon as a resupply area. Over the course of the war. Needlessly prolonging a war whose outcome was never in doubt.

In 2014 the French government still pulled the same stunt of using Gabon as a transit hub to launder weapons in our battle against Boko Haram. The unusually heavy traffic of transport planes from Gabon to Chad caught the attention of Nigerian intelligence.

One such flight was intercepted by the NAF in Kano. The French pilots and crew denied weapons were on board and refused to release the cargo manifest, until they were promptly arrested and detained. Sure enough the inspection crew uncovered crates upon crates of munitions.

France pulled the same stunt supported a Hutu regime in Rwanda. It was these very same brutal Hutu extremists who perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide that claimed nearly one million lives.

Enter Niger. Rich in deposits of uranium, which France desired for both weapons and energy production.

Protection of France’s privileged access to uranium was a factor in French intervention in Niger, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Chad, .

In 1974 Niger was cash strapped& needed money. Nigers president attempted to negotiate more favorable terms for uranium sales, at a time when Nigers uranium constituted two thirds of that used by French reactors and French firms held shares in Niger’s uranium exploration

and production. Shortly after negotiations began, Nigers President was overthrown by a military coup. The French military did not intervene to support him.

Nigeria is France’s Anglophone nemesis in the region and the failure of the Nigerian government yo realize this fact has to be one of the greatest tragedy in the modern history of this country.