Why Obasanjo May Be Heading To Hell

By Biko Agozino

General Olusegun Obasanjo who misruled Nigeria for eleven years recently went to Ibadan to curse corrupt and inept rulers of Nigeria, including himself, when he stated: ‘Maybe we are all going to hell’. He may have intended the ‘we’ to refer to all Nigerians but if I understand him correctly, he was referring to those of them with full responsibility for the misgovernmentality that has bedeviled the country before and after independence. No sane person will include blessed and hard-working Nigerians, high achieving individual Nigerians who excel internationally against all the odds and the victimized impoverished Nigerians who suffer a life of hell on earth due to the wicked misrule or incompetence of General Olusegun Obasanjo and his class allies among those who are condemned to hell fire by his own mouth. And some Nigerians have already said Amen to Obasanjo’s self-curse.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, saw things differently as early as the 1930s when he wrote a ‘Beatitude to the Youth’ of Africa in which he said alliteratively that ‘Blessed Are the Youth’ but in which he also concluded by echoing that ‘Cursed are the Old Africa’ for obstructing the emergence of the Renascent Africa and the new Africa. Then again years before he died, Azikiwe renewed this clear distinction of his by stating that ‘History will vindicate the just’ in a statement that concluded by re-emphasizing that ‘God shall punish the wicked’.

In the curse against himself and people like him, Obasanjo actually revealed the open secret why he suspects that Nigerian misrulers are jinxed. He stated in that rambling self-righteous monologue that he went to visit Mwalimu Julius Nyerere because Nyerere recognized Biafra and Nyerere gave him a simple riddle that he is yet to unravel. According to him, Nyerere told him that his ministers in Tanzania will claim that they were not corrupt and yet their infant children had numerous choice properties in Europe and North America. Why would Nyerere say that to an ethnic war-lord like Obasanjo?

Perhaps Obasanjo was arrogantly campaigning for support for the ongoing genocide against fellow Africans and had the cheek to go and attempt to bribe the revered Nyerere to end his recognition of Biafra. Instead of ending the recognition, Nyerere went ahead and named major streets in Tanzania after Biafra in protest against that monumental injustice of the genocidal killing of more than three million Africans under the command of Obasanjo and his hell-bent misrulers who cruelly declared that ‘all is fair in warfare’. Those iconic street names remain today in Tanzania while Obasanjo and his cursed fellow misgovernors abolished the historic name of the Bight of Biafra as if that will wipe away the evidence of their genocidal crimes against humanity. Today, simply flying the flag of Biafra in commemoration of the innocent dead in Nigeria (as is done in enlightened countries that use the opportunity to create flourishing tourist industries) will invite extra judicial killings that go on unabated.

If you are superstitious, you may point to the Igbo genocide as the cause of the curse that Obasanjo said was upon him and his class of ‘irresponsible’ marauders. The Bible commands that ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ and I understand that the Koran teaches that ‘If you kill one of God’s children, you kill all of God’s children.’ What part of that commandment do self-accursed misrulers like Obasanjo and his ilk not understand? They did not just kill one or two or three of God’s children which is bad enough – they killed three million plus. And yet more than forty years later, they have not offered any apology and they have not offered any reparations. As Nigerians always say, God is not asleep, and so it is no surprise that Nigerian misrulers are a condemned bunch, from their own horse’s mouth. They are all going to burn in hell for their evil deeds, according to Obasanjo. Why not? Except that God is a loving and forgiving God, quite unlike the unrepentant tyrants who are only paranoid about their deserved place in the afterlife. Repent!

It is not only Nigerian tyrants that appear to be cursed due to what Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe relentlessly condemns as the foundational genocide of post-colonial Africa – the Igbo genocide. All the countries that facilitated that genocide have apparently also been cursed: The Soviet Union has vanished from the world map and its successor, Russia, continues to battle insurgents in some of its regions; the UK is about to be dismembered given the impending vote for independence by oil-rich Scotland which will probably be followed by Wales and by Northern Ireland all of which already have their devolved governments; and Egypt which provided the air force pilots that bombed Igbo women in market places during the war now appears to welcome the chickens back to its own roost as the same officers trained by Mubarak when he was the commander of the air force college during the Biafra war now devour their own people in the thousands. What goes around comes around also in Northern Nigeria where the pogrom against the Igbo started and in the Middle Belt where most the killings took place when train-loads of escapees were waylaid and slaughtered. But the native doctor who concocts diarrhea cannot hide his own buttocks in the sky according to an Igbo proverb because when the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop, sang Bob Marley.

General Gowon who presided over that genocide has gone around the country asking people to pray for Nigeria. I wonder what kind of prayers Nigerians pray for their country. It is likely to be the same self-glorious prayer that they say on their televangelist call-ins when they always ask god to destroy their enemies. Rarely do Nigerians admit wrong-doing and ask for forgiveness of their sins. 

When Chinua Achebe tried to heal the sore-ridden conscience of the nation in There Was a Country, the unrepentant blood-thirsty tyrants that were still alive and their phantom ‘intellectual’ lackeys pretended to be offended by the objective truth and went on boasting that the genocide against the Igbo was justifiable. Gowon’s initial ignorant comment was that he ‘did not know if Achebe will be getting a penny from that book’, a baffling response from someone who holds a doctoral degree from a top UK university.

Of course, no genocide is ever justifiable and condemning genocide is not about getting pennies. Thus General Gowon who reacted emotionally to There Was A Country without reading a single page of the damning book, has recently started singing a different tune. Perhaps for the first time, he now admits that lots of innocent fellow Nigerians were killed and their properties destroyed due to the abuse of power during the war and that there is a need for justice to be done to our fellow citizens. Belatedly, Ohaneze Ndigbo has set up a reparations committee to seek the reparations that were demanded in the recommendations of the official Justice Oputa Panel report which President Obasanjo attempted to suppress but was unofficially published online.

It is tempting to agree with the superstition that Nigerians, nay Africans and people of African descent globally are cursed. I have heard highly educated Africans explore this hypothesis that everywhere black people are in power, nothing seems to work because, as a pejorative saying among Diaspora people of African descent puts it, black people can’t run snow. Some of the people who hold this mistaken belief yearn for the re-subjection of black people to the terror of oppressive white rule or direct colonialism as the panacea for the perceived ineptitude or wickedness of black misrulers. But history is not a mystery.

Personally, I do not agree that Nigeria is cursed, for as Ola Rotimi would put it, The Gods Are Not to Blame. There are historical and structural reasons why people of African descent are suffering the incompetent leadership that we are burdened with today.  As Obi Igwe put it in one of his gospel songs, what we need are leaders (Ndi ndu, also literally, forces of life) and not rulers (Ndi ochichi, also literally, forces of darkness). There are some concrete steps we can take to reverse the ineptitude at the leadership level and uplift our people from avoidable penury in the midst of plenty:

First, I call for a National Day of Igbo Mourning to be declared as a public holiday in memory of the millions who were genocidized in Biafra. During that day, every year, let all Nigerians embark on a general fasting and all the money saved on food and drinks should be donated to the Igbo reparations fund while parents will use the opportunity of the national demonstration of penance to teach future generations that what was done to the Igbo must not be allowed to happen again in Africa. This could be done also by using the day of mourning to promote history literacy through the communal reading of the history of the genocide.

Secondly, the Federal Government of Nigeria should allocate 100 billion naira every year for at least 40 years to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate (FIRM) as a token recognition of the inhumane crimes committed against our people by our own government. No group of Nigerians would lose anything when the government eventually recognizes that killing three million of our people was completely wrong and pays reparations. The amount suggested here annually is chicken feed compared to what one of these hell-bent misrulers steal with impunity relentlessly.

The Federal Government of Nigeria and Ohaneze Ndigbo should demand for the foreign countries that supported the genocide to contribute to the Fair Igbo Reparations Mandate because when this evil is recognized and forgiveness is requested through the token payment of reparations, the knock-on effects in the national conscience will yield a greater consideration for human life, create massive wealth that the cosmopolitan Igbo will spread across the country and across Africa for the benefit of all, and help to produce conscientious leaders who will help Nigerians and Africans to reach their full potentials.

Finally, Nigerians should follow the example of Nyerere, Nkrumah and Du Bois and recognize that evil against any African anywhere is not an internal affair of any country or state. Rather, we should fast forward the unification of Africa into the People’s Republic of Africa in a way similar to democracies of scale that are more viable because unity is strength. When Africa is finally united in a continental government, no single group of Africans will ever be able to wake up one morning, slap their buttocks, and embark on ethnic cleansing in Africa because the rest of us will rise to put an end to any attempted genocide in Africa by internal or external forces.

Racist Motive of Boston Bombers?

By Biko Agozino

Why did the Boston Bombers target the finish line of the Boston Marathon? Perhaps, because the winners were most likely to be people of African descent! In the process, they killed three spectators and later executed a campus police officer but none of the dead was exactly an African even though one of the bombers carefully selected a spot with lots of Africans, in the picture on the right below, to plant his pressure-cooker bomb. The video footage of the first blast shows that it went off coincidentally just as a black-looking runner was passing but he appeared to have been unhurt. That is how racism works – it is a danger to everyone and not a problem for only those who are targeted because, as Bob Marley put it, ‘When the rain falls, it won’t fall on one man’s housetop.’

The Boston Bombers came from a violently racist Russia. Simply Google ‘Racism in Russia’ and you will find the most disgusting news items including one about a young man who distributed a video online about the execution of a Muslim by Neo-Nazis and only got one year sentence to a labor camp while the convicted executioners got only 10 years in labor camps. A few years ago Putin reacted to a comment that Russians and Africans have a lot in common by protesting vehemently that Russians were not cannibals. Surprise, surprise, just Google ‘Russian Cannibal’ and you will see the news of a former school teacher who cooked up a storm of human flesh for food. African university students in Russia were recently asked to be moved away from their hostel near a summer camp because the officials feared that they may rape the children.

That is the kind of country where the Boston Bombers were born and partly raised. They fled from war and violence there with their family to come to the US a mere decade ago. In Russia, Caucasus people like them are routinely targeted by the Neo-Nazi’s for elimination perhaps in reaction to the violent Chechen war against Russians since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I hypothesize that this background could help to explain why they targeted the Boston Marathon and as is the case with all hypotheses, this one might be wrong. 

There is a theory by bell hooks that one way many immigrants try to assimilate into white America is often by buying into the racism against African Americans. Joan Walsh concurs in her April 22 Salon.com column: 'Embracing racism and xenophobia, sadly, could be a shortcut to white status for previously non-white European immigrants.' This is not an argument against immigration but a testimony that racism is a problem for the entire society and not just for the targeted groups, calling for all to be committed against racism in all its manifestations.

What does racism have to do with the Boston Bombing? The two brothers came to the US and chose to specialize in sporting events that are dominated by black people. The older brother chose to become a boxer and the younger brother chose to become an athlete. Maybe they hoped to become the great white hope to beat black people in the events where they remain dominant Just as Hitler refused to shake the hand of Olympic gold-medalist, Jesse Owens, and also hoped against hope that Joe Louis would lose to Max Schmeling twice and thereby affirm the discredited Nazi ideology of white supremacy. Maybe the Boston Bombers hoped to qualify for the London Olympics and thereby win acceptance as honorary white Americans but blamed their failure on African American athletes. I wrote this on April 22 and on April 27, the New York Times confirmed my hypothesis in a detailed report.

 

Their problem may be that they did not stand much chance competing with a strong pool of African Americans in boxing and tracks. As the racist saying goes, they might have been going about complaining that they would have made it to the Olympics if not for those black sportsmen. So the big brother got radicalized quickly around the time of the conclusion of the Olympics trials in the US where he and his kid brother probably got their behinds whooped by world class performers. Lawrence O'Donnel reported on April 23 that the elder brother got suspended from his Boston Mosque after he disrupted a Martin Luther King Jr Day lecture by heckling the speaker for saying that Martin Luther King Jr was a prophet.

If indeed the hypothesis that the Boston Bombers were motivated by racism is supported by sufficient evidence, it should serve as a lesson to everyone that racism does not affect only the targeted group. One of the Boston Bombers is already dead and the other is on life-support possibly as direct victims of their own racial hatred. Timothy McVeigh killed a dozen black children or so but the vast majority of his victims were white. Hitler set out to find the final solution to the Jewish question and in the process wasted the lives of nearly 20 million Germans.

The Boston Bombers may have dreamed of finding the final solution to the domination of their chosen sports by people of African descent. This does not make every Chechen a threat given that the uncle of the Boston bombers denounced his nephews. It only goes to call for broad coalitions against racism even among immigrants because the cancer of racism affects everyone in the end. The media should also be more vigilant against racism instead of burying their talking heads in the sand and pretending that racism has nothing to do with the Boston bombings while the dots are there to be connected past the initial racial profiling of the suspect as a 'dark skinned man in a hoodie'.

As Series Editor of the Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender, and Class Relations, I wrote the following in 2001 (but before 9/11) as my Series Editor’s Preface to The Globalization of Terrorism by Ihekwoaba Onwudiwe:

‘I was intrigued by Dr. Onwudiwe’s use of World System Theory (WST) to explain global terrorism and we discussed his work as an African resident of San Diego offered to give us a ride across to Tijuana in Mexico before our departure. On that trip, evidence of the WST was everywhere before us. For example, there was no immigration check on the Mexico side where the poorer government was only too glad to have us come and spend our welcome dollars in their economy. However, on our return to San Diego that day, the queue to the border control was very long and when we eventually got there, the uniformed official checked the identity papers of the five Africans in the Mercedes Benz car but not those of the only Caucasian who was with us. This omission occupied us in discussion as to whether it was a simple error by a tired official or whether it was an indication of the racial profiling characteristic of the World System that treated individuals perceived to be peripheral with more suspicion than individuals perceived to be core. For all you know, the white guy could have been a rebel from Albania or Chechnya sneaking into the US while some of the Africans quizzed were actually American citizens.’ 

This is the original hypothesis: There is a relationship between x and y. Scientific minds will proceed cautiously by testing the null hypothesis: there is no relationship between x and y. If we find significant evidence to affirm the null hypothesis, then we will reject the original hypothesis. If we reject the null hypothesis, then we will affirm the original.

Let x be racism and y be terrorism. The news reporters overwhelmingly suggest that the x is religious extremism. Let us assume that they are right. Then let us ask if religious extremists tend to be anti-racist or virulently racist? That is a tendency, mind you; we cannot condemn all religious extremists as racist nor can we conclude that all racists tend to be religious extremists.

It may be argued that if they wanted to target fast-running Africans, they would have detonated their bombs one hour earlier. The brothers were apparently lone wolves who did not have a time-keeper to ensure that they targeted the winners alone. They had six more bombs with them in the police car chase but only two were successfully detonated. So their timing was off by 2 hours from the winners, but that is no proof that they did not have a racist grudge against Africans, perhaps for dominating their chosen sports. Yes, even some of those who come last in the race will be Africans (as the video of the first blast showed a black man running past) but it is no secret that the marathon is an event with disproportionate African participation.

The original hypothesis of a link between x and y may be a stretch but when you are born and raised in a country where the President calls Africans cannibals and where African students complain that monkey noises are so common that they no longer bother to report them, it is not such a huge stretch to hypothesize that young people socialized into white supremacy in such a society will tend to be racist.

Terrorism is a hate crime, so the hypothesized link between x and y appears logical. It was not too long ago that religious extremists rounded up black skinned citizens in Libya and executed them in front of video cameras. Religious extremists may try to convert non-believers to their faith but they cannot convert blackness to whiteness - hence the will to the final solution.

My suggestion is that we should not ignore possible racist motives (among other motives) because the disease of racism will spread and affect everyone. The bombers may have targeted black people but the whole society is paying the price. Racism-sexism-classism are challenges to all.