Sunday, January 28, 2024

The Afrocentricity of Marx

By Onwubiko Agozino 

I was delighted to receive this attached clip from my daughter telling me about a mention of my work by the 'social media sensation, @theconsciouslee. It is a moving commentary on my paper about how much Karl Marx admitted that African history was at the center of his own intellectual activism. My paper was first published in the Review of African Political Economy in 2014. I was invited by roape.net editors in 2020 to blog a summary and update of the article after several authors cited it as ground-breaking. Monthly Review republished the blog in 2020. A graduate student at Cornell University interviewed me for the Unequal Exchange YouTube Channel about the article and the interview audio was made available on Spotify in 2022. Now, this awesome commentary by NAACP Image Award Winner, George Lee Jr. on TikTok has convincingly called attention to the same article. It is about time that I completed the promised book follow-up.




Monday, January 15, 2024

Salute To Courage

 By Onwubiko Agozino

Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors. We must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share all in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture still observed among the Igbo. It requires communal ritual selections of representatives to go into the forest and commune with the spirits of the ancestors for days. They return to restructure and reconstruct the miniature Mbari world (mud) house every now and then. When the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled, a new one was collectively created to replace it. The new Mbari is  repopulated as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community, since they coexist; as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the science, arts, and cultural politics of African Fractals. Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Soyinka Is Right

Soyinka Is Right In a Sense 
By Onwubiko Agozino 

Do you agree with anything or everything that Wole Soyinka said about the embarrassingly disorganized and badly marred 2023 elections in Nigeria in which he singled out one party for apparently undeserved harsh words? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed her disagreement with the ‘strong words’ that Soyinka used in describing one of the candidates, but Adichie did not point out if there is any area of agreement with Soyinka. 

Baba Sho done old now. But no matter what he says, he will remain a hero for many; and whatever he says matters to most. We may not always agree with him; but even when we disagree, there may be areas of agreement with his views that must be pointed out in recognition of his complex narratives that are open to interpretation at different levels of analysis. 

 Personally, I agree with Soyinka that the slogan, Obidient, is inappropriate for a democratic society or for a party seeking to be taken seriously by the people. Obedience is more correlated with fascist regimes than with democratic societies prone to debates and freedom of expression without fear. Perhaps, M-Obi-lized could have been more grammatical to Soyinka but he is entitled to say that he is not Obidient to anyone. He could have added that he was not Batified nor Atikulated either. He should have said it better but what he said has progressive implications. 

 The Obidient movement is wider than the Labour Party and it is not an ethnic movement of the Igbo, contrary to comments that wrongly suggest so, perhaps to incite Igbophobia. The Igbo voted more for Obasanjo than some Yoruba did. They voted more for Yar’adua than some Hausa and Fulani did. They voted for Jonathan more than some Ijaw did. Even when they voted against Buhari, some of them voted for him too. They did so even when there were Igbo candidates contesting against the candidates they voted for. The Igbo were not the only ones who voted for Peter Obi for president across the country. All parties should commit to offer apologies to the Igbo for the hatred and violence against them and offer them reparative justice. 

 The task of the Labour Party is to mobilize the masses of workers, farmers, traders and youth through a closer link with the organized labour that has offices already across the country. Peter Obi can commit his significant shishi towards building the party up by, for example, helping to hire full time staff, funding training and workshops for party workers, and helping to open offices across the country. The party can build beyond the organized labour and the Obidients and should mobilize to defend its mandate and be ready to contest every seat in every election going forward. Obi cannot always be on the ballot paper. Labour Party should organize beyond the colonial boundaries of Nigeria and mobilize across Africa for Union Government.

 About 26% of the electorate were reported as coming out to vote. Perhaps this figure would have been higher if there was no voter intimidation, ballot box snatching, and violence. To raise this poor turn-out percentage, I have suggested elsewhere that there should be an INEC lottery at every general election. The voters whose numbers are electronically selected would win the prizes in their own senatorial zones. For example, if INEC budgets one billion naira per senatorial zone to be awarded to 1000 voters at the rate of one million each, I bet that the turn-out will be almost 100%. 

Such an incentive to vote is small compared to the reported nearly one trillion naira budget of INEC. It is a small price to pay for increased voter awareness and against vote buying. Nigeria should consider abolishing INEC and allowing the state electoral commissions to run all elections, including the presidency and national legislatures elections. Just add the state governor and state assembly elections to the ballot for the federal elections on the same day. Allow voters to be identified with any government-issued ID and not just with the PVC. Allow early and absentee voting. Allow the Diaspora to vote. Allow a citizen like Nnamdi Kanu to campaign for referenda of his choice without being locked up even after the courts freed him. 

 Nigeria should move away from the divisive imperial presidency model and adapt the presidential committee of Switzerland. Each geo-political region should elect one candidate to the presidential council. Each of them will get a chance to chair the council for one year while serving on the committee, then there is another general election every six years. Any region that elects a male president to the presidential committee will automatically elect a female vice president from the region to the committee of vice presidents and vice versa. Proportional representation will allow smaller parties to be represented in parliament, as in South Africa. 

 Collective leadership may help to reduce the heat over which region produces the president and focus our attention on what matters. No matter where the president comes from, no region enjoys 100% literacy, poverty eradication, security, electricity, water supply, sewage service, garbage collection, healthcare, motorable roads, employment, gender equity, agricultural subsidies, etc. 

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Monday, February 6, 2023

The Case for the Prosecution of the Ekweremadus?

The prosecutor, in the case of the Ekweremadus, opened on February 6, 2023 by saying that the donor must have been coached to call the defendants, cousins, uncles and aunties. Is that all they have got after more than 200 days in detention? 

It is completely normal for all younger people to call all older people uncles, aunties, daddies and mamas; and call one another brothers, sisters, cousins, in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton emphasized this point in their classic book, Black Power, to show that people of African descent are unique in the way that we relate to one another communally as family. The only exception is when calling a Black man an 'Uncle Tom', is frowned upon as a derogatory term.

The prosecutor should be forgiven for not knowing this basic cultural fact after months in detention but the lack of this awareness does not count against the defendants. In any case, being called a cousin, uncle, aunt, daddy, or mommy is not an evidence of deception or criminal conspiracy in either England and Wales, or anywhere else. 

Testifying on 02/27/23, Dr. Obeta admitted to his defense attorney that he traveled from Nigeria with his own kidney donor in 2021. He apologized for saying that they were cousins when they were no blood relations. He desperately needed a donor, he said. It is still not a criminal offense to call someone a cousin or son. He said that he treats his donor as a son now and keeps in touch with him. 

Anyone who believes that two African brothers are not related by blood should go ahead and prove the null hypothesis. We are all related by blood, actually. That is why the law does not require blood relationship to qualify as an altruistic donor.

 The prosecutor also said that the defendants had money and power but that justice cannot be bought. In the eyes of the law, the defendants remain innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. 

 The claim that the doctor himself had received a kidney donation recently in the UK and that his donor allegedly recruited the unnamed donor for the Ekweremadus does not prove the defendants guilty of the perfectly legal procedure of organ donation under UK law. Even the prosecutor admitted that any family would do what they could to save a daughter that the prosecutor said had a deteriorating kidney disease. 

 Hence the prosecution avoided charging a case under the organ donation law and chose to charge the defendants with the violation of the understandably more severe modern slavery act. 

The evidence being simply that they bought clothes for the young man (for a colder climate) and gave him pocket money that the prosecutor admitted was small but was a lot of money in Nigeria. Is that all the evidence the prosecution has after all the delays and detention without bail?

The Defense Attorney countered the allegations of the prosecution on 02/08/23 as follows: 

"In Nigerian society there is an expression ‘everyone is each other’s keeper’ and the altruistic donation of organs is not regarded there as such a rare event as it is in this country.

“He will also say he was told (the donor) had offered to altruistically donate a kidney to Sonia.

“He denies he put directly or indirectly any reward to (the donor) or offered to do so and throughout he believed (the donor) was content to do so without reward.”


The prosecution engaged in misconduct on Thursday, 2/16/23, by abusing the enormous powers of search and seizure by the Crown in violation of the privacy rights of the defendants. 

Apparently having no case against the defendants, the prosecution stooped low by trying to use text messages between a father and his daughters on Fathers Day against the father and against one of the daughters who was critically ill. Inadmissible in a criminal court and litigatatable in a civil court.

It is clear to anyone who can read reports of the closing arguments of the prosecution that what the daughters asked for in their Fathers Day messages was not more money but more time with their busy father and the father understandably promised to spare no expenses (of time) with them. What kind of father would answer otherwise? 

The parents arrived London on June 23, 2022, two days after those texts, to spend more time with the children and they were promptly arrested, proclaimed the prosecutor. 

Why did the prosecution try to use those very private and absolutely lawful expressions of love between an African man and his daughters on Fathers Day against the father, the mother, and against their critically ill daughter who needed care, not biased prosecution? 

Was that all the 'evidence' the prosecution had against the defendants for which they detained the father and mother without bail for hundreds of days and counting (in the case of the father), and even during Christmas, Kwanzaas, and New Year celebrations? No case to answer.

Testifying on 2/20/23, the alleged victim said that it was Dr. Obeta who gave him money to travel and that when he went to the London hospital for tests, it was the first time he heard of kidney donation and the first time he heard the name, Ekweremadu. No evidence against Ekweremadu in his testimony. No case submission.

The alleged victim testified that he was told to lie that he and Sonia were cousins to facilitate the organ transplant. Was he told to lie about anything else? The defense counsel for Obeta reminded the court that he had lied about his age to the police to make him look more vulnerable, he also lied that both his parents were dead when they were still alive, and he lied about living on the street when he shared a room with two others in Lagos. 

Whether he was a reliable witness or not, he should be given leave to remain in the UK indefinitely after being used by the Crown to try and criminalize the innocent. Case closed. 

On March 6, 2023, the Distinguished Senator from Nigeria, Dr. Ike Ekweremadu, testified that he paid the expenses of Dr. Obeta who undertook to find a donor for his daughter, having found one for himself in 2021. 

Ekweremadu insisted that he made it clear that the kidney donation must abide by the law, the donor must not be paid or coerced and must be willing to act altruistically, he told his brother who was a class mate of Dr. Obeta. He was hopeful that such an altruistic donor could be found in Nigeria because of the compassionate nature of the society. 

On March 7, Ekweremadu told the court that he was afraid that people were trying to take advantage of his family but he continued the process for the sake of the life of his daughter. 

On March 9, the prosecutor cross-examined Senator Ekweremadu on why he did not get a donor from his family and alleged that he must have preferred to buy one from someone less fortunate. But the defendant said that it was not true, he simply followed the advice of the more knowledgeable doctors. 

Obviously, a family with a history of kidney disease is better off looking for a donor outside the family. In any case, it is not a crime to accept an altruistic donor from outside the family and the law never stipulated that the donor must be a family member. 

On 03/13/23, Dr. Beatrice Ekweremadu testified that she played no role in the search for a kidney donor. She said that, as a mother, she visited her children in the UK regularly while her husband handled the family finances. There is no need for the Ekweremadus to take the witness stand because they have no burden of proof if they are innocent.

No allegation of crime has been proven by the prosecution in the case of Crown v. Ekweremadu. On 03/16/23 the Judge gave final instructions to the jury and stated that no defendant should be convicted for telling a lie because lying is not necessarily proof of guilt. 

On 03/23/23, three of the four defendants were found guilty by the jury while Sonia Ekweremadu was found not guilty. On May 5 2023, the judge sentenced Dr. Obeta to 10 years in prison and sentenced Senator Ekweremadu to 9 years and 8 months in Prison while his wife got 4 years and 6 months.

In my humble layman opinion, the convicts have legal grounds for appeal. Using the innocent expressions of love between father and daughters on Fathers Day to try and incriminate both parents and the critically ill daughter is prosecutorial misconduct. 

The final instruction to the jury by the judge erred in law by misleading the jury into believing that the defendants lied but could still be found not guilty. It is not a lie when Africans call one another cousins and the Organ Donor Act does not require blood relationships to be lawful. 

The case should have been filed under the 2020 Organ Donor Act which allows for a living donor and not under the 2015 Modern Slavery Act which states in section 2 subsection 2 that even if the victim consented to the travel as a child or as an adult, it is still illegal if the travel was intended to facilitate exploitation. Altruistic organ donations are not for the purpose of exploitation or slavery. The inconsistency between the two Acts should be examined by the appeal court in favor of the more recent legislation.

The mother should not have said that she was not involved in the search for a donor but it may be true that the patriarch controlled the family finances and relied on advice from doctors. The Senator should not have denied being wealthy but that does not amount to a crime. 

The defense attorneys should not have put them on the stand since they claimed that they had no case to answer. The smart Nigerian lawyer who represented Sonia did not allow her to testify and she was acquitted. The Royal Free Hospital needs to be investigated for apparently running a scam. The Ekweremadus were obviously victims of a fraud and not the alleged offenders. 

The UK Supreme Court ruled in July 2023 that a bank is not liable for a fraudulent transfer by a customer to a fraudster's account. But the Crown Prosecution Service did not follow up on the civil case with a criminal case against the customer by bringing a chartge of conspiracy for fraud the way the Ekweremadus were prosecuted for being duped while seeking helop for their ill daughter.

The Ekweremadus should appeal their conviction and also pursue litigation in the civil courts for hefty damages against the Crown Prosecution Service for prosecutorial misconduct and against the hospital for the scam.

Dr. Onwubiko Agozino
Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies
Virginia Tech is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, Routledge, 2018; and of Counter-Colonial Criminology, Pluto, 2003.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Ekweremadus: British Justice System Is Still Racist-Sexist-Imperialist

 By Onwubiko Agozino 

 The detention of Ike Ekweremadu (along with his wife, Beatrice) is a racist-sexist-imperialist act. They are detained on allegations of a conspiracy to traffic a 'minor' for the modern-day slavery plot to harvest the organs of a ‘homeless minor’ for transplant to their own ailing daughter. 

Ekweremadu is the Nigerian Senator representing my home constituency of Enugu West but I am writing as a scholar and not as a political supporter. I express some reasonable doubts about the case.

 This scandal raises the neglected question of whether the legal system in the UK remains institutionally discriminatory, unknown to many in Nigeria who hail the trial uncritically as proof that the British justice system is fair to all contrqary to a UN experts finding that racism is 'structural, institutionalized, and systemic' in the UK criminal justice system. 

Lawyers for the detainees have filed suits in Nigeria to force banks and government agencies to disclose the private details of the registration of the alleged donor to help them to establish their innocence whereas they should know that they have nothing to prove as defendants in a criminal case: the burden of proof lies with the prosecution beyond all reasonable doubts. The UK government should explain why they doubted the age shown on the Nigerian ECOWAS passport in the first place before the young adult allegedly confirmed it to the court as his real age.

 Since the aim of their travel to London was stated in an alleged letter to the High Commission visa officers who could have refused a visa if the donor looked like a minor, or if they suspected that it was a plot against the laws regulating organ donations, it could not have been a 'conspiracy' unless the High Commission staff were co-conspirators, or the Ekweremadus were set up. 

Based on the Common Law principle of the presumption of marital coercion, Section 34 of the Nigerian Criminal Code says that a married couple cannot be charged with conspiracy unless a third party is involved because (e.g., in Canada) matrimony makes a couple one legal personality. US and Australian Courts have allowed prosecution to proceed in serious cases like terrorism or fraud conspiracy.  In the case of the Ekweremadus who openly planned to save a child lawfully with an organ allegedly offered freely by an alleged adult donor, where is the mens rea or criminal mind?

 In the UK, all adults are presumed to be organ donors (Organ Donor Act 2020) when they die unless they opted out while alive, and all in need are registered to wait in a queue to prevent material inducements from the rich to influence poor people to donate organs to the rich. About 7000 patients are waiting for organ transplants in the UK and hundreds die a year while awaiting organ donations. 

Donors can still volunteer to help individuals, especially if they are related, though relatives may not always be the best match. Relatives still need to give approval in the case of harvesting organs from the dead. In the case of living donors, no one is dead but the voluntary donor can withdraw the offer at any time before the surgery. 

 If the young donor lied about his age in order to obtain a passport as an adult, or did not know his age as many births go unrecorded in Nigeria, or lied to the UK police about his age in order to gain asylum, he should now be granted asylum because he may have been used as a bait by the UK to entrap the Ekweremadus. He should not be deported to Nigeria nor trafficked to Rwanda by the government of the UK for 'processing'. 

 The blame lies with conditions in Africa that are forcing many to flee abroad for better chances. This includes rich people who go in search of medical treatments not available in the exploited rich continent. They are often attended to by medical doctors and nurses initially trained with the scarce resources produced by African workers at home before they checked out to provide technical foreign aid to industrialized countries in exchange for huge remittances. 

Ekweremadu has individually tried to improve the lives of some of his constituents through his Ikeoha Foundation NGO that awards university bursaries and scholarships and provides adult literacy programming and free medical services to thousands in the face of government failures. 

He moved the famous motion on the doctrine of necessity to allow the swearing in of Vice President Jonathan as President following the demise of President Yar'adua. He was physically attacked in public in Germany by some of his detractors in 2019. He is not a saint but even a devil deserves his advocate.

 It is understandable that any parents who have a sick child could be taken advantage of by anyone claiming to be a willing organ donor. But if it is discovered that the volunteer is under-age, this should be thoroughly investigated without remanding the Ekweremadus in custody pending weeks of fishy investigations with apparent prejudicial, racist, sexist, and imperialist implications. 

Though rich and powerful, the assumptions of white supremacy and patriarchy may have helped to disarticulate their privileged class relations in this case. If the Ekweremadus were of different skin color or even from different ethnic groups in Nigeria itself, it is unlikely that they would be denied bail, given that they have family in the UK, surrendered their passports, and are recognizable in their own rights. 

 Remanding both of them in custody shows no concern for the care of their sick daughter. Even if the man is proven to have done something wrong, why detain his wife too, why not detain their daughter and the doctor too if it is a ‘conspiracy’? This discrimination deserves to be denounced by all. 

 If the couple had $20,000 on them without declaring the amount, it is within the limits of $10,000 maximum each that can be carried without declaration in some jurisdictions. It is patriarchal for the media to report that the confiscated money was found only on the man. 

 After centuries of imposing modern-day slavery on Africans (not to mention the not so ancient slavery of the Trans Atlantic slavery), no British law-maker has ever been arrested in Africa and denied bail based on an allegation of a conspiracy for human trafficking or for any alleged offense. To do so in Africa would have triggered a major diplomatic row but the neocolonial Nigerian regime is silent about the arrest of a prominent politician because of the assumptions of imperialism and dependency. 

 I published a book on Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation in 1997 to show that race-class-gender discrimination is alive and kicking in the UK justice systems. It was republished in 2018. 

Let the investigation into this case include an enquiry into alleged racism-sexism-imperialism by the British legal system to help hold the system accountable.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

 Special Broadcast on Critical Race Theory, including an interview with me by producers in Northern Michigan:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1RQ_tb_hIs


Biko