The widely-read military blogger Defense News Nigeria explained in a multipart Twitter thread published yesterday why Abuja felt it necessary to negotiate a series of covert military procurement deals with Beijing.
The thread explains how U.S. export controls on attack drones and advanced Apache helicopters led the Nigerians to turn to the Chinese instead for these technologies. “The United States doesn’t export attack drones to Africa because Africans lack the capacity to handle high tech weaponry they decided,” wrote the contributor.