Nigeria's presidential election has been delayed from Feb. 14 to March 28, a postponement owed, according to the country's electoral commission, to the military's inability to maintain security at voting booths. Nigerian security forces are stretched too thinly, having been deployed to the northeast to counter Boko Haram, or so the commission argued.
And indeed there is some veracity to its argument. Recently Boko Haram has consolidated the gains made in Borno state. An attack near Lake Chad received a great deal of attention for forcing Nigerian soldiers to abandon their positions in Baga. Though that attack was less notable than many other attacks executed by Boko Haram, it received an undue amount of attention. And so, over the weekend, the governments of Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Benin and Chad agreed to create a multinational force of 8,700 troops to combat Boko Haram in places where fighting has been particularly fierce. Niger's parliament voted unanimously Feb. 9 to contribute 750 troops to the unit after Boko Haram raided a prison and detonated a bomb in Diffa, a city on Niger's side of the border with Nigeria.
But the truth is that delaying the presidential election will neither make the affected areas safer nor prevent attacks on polling stations. Instead, the delay is meant to buy President Goodluck Jonathan time to recover after a month of political difficulties, which, in addition to Boko Haram, include economic malaise brought on by low oil prices and the depreciation of the naira. Deploying an international military force to fight militants will do little to solve these problems.
