Abubakar Hashim
As Nigeria celebrates its 65th Independence Anniversary on Wednesday October 1 2025, there are many areas the country prides itself in the promotion of development, peace and stability.
As a reporter, covering West Africa for many decades, I saw and recorded at first hand how Nigeria paid the supreme price to bring back peace and sustain stability in the region.
How Nigeria Sustained Stability In West Africa
After disengaging from Daily Times at Ikeja in Lagos, as a Staff Writer with Times International Magazine, I joined the African Concord Magazine as its West Africa Correspondent, based in Sierra Leone.
That was at the beginning of the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Nigeria demonstrated significant role in these countries, along with other neighbouring countries like The Gambia, Guinea, Cotedivoire, and Guinea Bissau.
In these countries, Nigeria spent billions of US Dollars and sacrificed unaccountable number of military personnel to sustain stability in the region.
Despite ongoing reforms by the Bola Tinubu administration, today, Nigeria still embarks on development assistance to the region, in the form of technical aid corps TAC volunteers in education, health and other essential services.
Eminent personalities that played significant roles in facilitating Nigeria’s success story in region are worth mentioning:
The late High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, Amb MC Abubakar, Amb Joe Keshi, Amb Joe Blell, Chief Tony Chinyere, and many more.
While the diplomats were busy in facilitating diplomatic dispatches between West African countries and then Lagos, later Abuja, Chief Tony Chinyere was using his helicopter services to ferry ECOMOG military personnel to the war zones at free costs.
At 65, despite existential challenges like terrorism and banditry in Nigeria, the country should be celebrated in bringing back peace and stability in the West African region.
A western diplomat friend of mine chuckled few days ago, that if Nigeria were a European country, it would have annexed the West African region, to extend its territory!
I disagreed with him, responding that Nigeria remains a big brother to the region
*Abubakar Hashim is the West Africa Bureau Chief of News Magazine, based in Sierra Leone
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