On Monday afternoon, December 8, a Nigerian Air Force C-130 Hercules carrying eleven military personnel suddenly appeared over southwestern Burkina Faso – without permission, without a filed flight plan, and right in the middle of a region already on hair-trigger alert.
Burkinabè radars lit up. Fighter jets scrambled. The plane declared an in-flight emergency and was ordered straight to Bobo-Dioulasso airport. The moment the wheels touched tarmac, armed soldiers surrounded it.
All eleven Nigerians – two crew and nine passengers – were marched off and are still being held as Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s government fumes.
The timing could not be worse.
Just 24 hours earlier, Nigerian troops and aircraft helped Benin crush an alleged coup attempt against President Patrice Talon. The Sahel alliance (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger) watched that operation with suspicion, seeing it as ECOWAS muscle-flexing on their doorstep.
Now a Nigerian military plane is caught inside their airspace? The AES issued a blistering statement Monday night: any unauthorised aircraft will be “neutralised” next time.
Whispers in Abuja say it was a genuine emergency – engine trouble or fuel – and the crew simply picked the nearest suitable runway. But in Ouagadougou and Bamako, tongues are wagging: reconnaissance mission gone wrong? Message to the juntas? Or just spectacularly bad luck?
Nigeria has stayed eerily silent so far. No press release, no tweet, nothing. That silence is feeding the gossip mills from Lagos to Niamey.
Eleven Nigerian officers in detention, one seized C-130, and two West African blocs staring each other down.
This is not the last we’ve heard of the Bobo-Dioulasso incident. Not by a long shot.
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