Buhari: From Boko Haram to Boko Halal?

By Biko Agozin

In his April 14 2015 NYT Op Ed, General Muhammadu Buhari, the President-elect of Nigeria, appears to respond to some of my comments on what I called Buhari’s Chatham House Silences. He is still silent on some other silences but his Op Ed is an indication that he has attentive speech writers around him ready to respond to current affairs on international media platforms. However, it would have been more appropriate for him to publish such policy opinions in the Nigerian media first and let foreign media outlets pick up the stories from there (as Professor Obi Nwakanma opined in his Orbit column for The Vanguard. In my earlier comment the very day he made the Chatham House campaign speech, I had this to say on my blog:

‘This sounds like a speech written by Tony Blair with emphasis on militarism as the solution to insecurity and to its 'causes', without acknowledging that militarism is a big part of the problem. Nowhere in Buhari's Chatham House speech today is there a single recognition of the importance of education even though Boko Haram poses its challenge primarily as an educational one! This contrasts with the speech of Azikiwe, Nigeria's first president, to the colonial Legislative Council sitting in Kaduna in 1948 in which he disagreed with those who spoke out against education on the assumption that educated children tend to be disobedient. And by education, is not meant only text-book education, important as that is in a country with mass illiteracy, 80% failure in high school exams and no university ranked among the top 1000 in the world. Buhari also said that Nigeria has never been as insecure as it is today except during the civil war. So the question arises, which candidate for president has the courage in leadership to apologize to Nigerians for the atrocities committed by the Nigerian state during the civil war and commit to pay reparations to the survivors of the war that cost us 3.1 million of some of our most industrious, creative and intellectual youth in 30 months of carnage supported by Britain and the Soviet Union and led by soldiers like Buhari? Without admitting the wrongs done against the Igbo and making amends, Nigeria will continue to send the message to groups like Boko Haram that the mass killing of our people and mass abduction of our young girls are heroic acts to be rewarded with ill-gotten gains. Making atonement and allowing the history to be taught in schools, building monuments to the victimized, allowing the flag of Biafra to be flown on private property without the risk of extra judicial killings that go on with impunity unabated, authorization of commemorative car license plates and holding re-enactments of the war to re-educate the people and to attract tourists (one of the things that Buhari promises to stimulate), will be part of the necessary political education to emphasize to Nigerians that never again will any government wake up and slap the buttocks of soldiers, then send them into a genocidal rampage against fellow Nigerians. The cooperation of the neighboring countries' armies in fighting Boko Haram should also have been acknowledged by Buhari and a visionary leadership should seek to rebuild the larger polity that Nnamdi Azikiwe attempted to build with his National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons.’

In his NYT Op Ed, Buhari maintains that he plans to ‘Stop Boko Haram’ terrorists with the force of the Nigerian military first before addressing the underlying causes of the terrorism - including poverty, ignorance and illiteracy. To accomplish the first task of stopping Boko Haram, he plans to renew the training of Nigerian soldiers by the US military that the out-going administration cancelled after the US curiously refused to sell weapons to the regime that could not guarantee not to use them to commit human rights violations. Buhari also promised to equip the military with the necessary weapons that corruption apparently denied the troops and to coordinate with neighboring countries to avoid each country pushing the terrorists beyond their borders into the borders of their neighbors, only to have to fight them again another day.

I caution the president-elect against over-confidence in militarism as the solution to terrorism in Nigeria. The most powerful military in the world, Pax Americana, is yet to defeat terrorism militarily in any country and the deployment of US military might tends to escalate rather than diminish terrorist threats around the world. This is probably because the war on terror inevitably destroys numerous innocent human beings that are called collateral damages, resulting in some of their sympathizers, friends and family vowing revenge for the killing of their innocent ones. As a result, a big part of the US war on terror relies on diplomacy and to a smaller extent, on amnesty for enemy combatants who have been freed from detention after many years of being held without trial and also for active combatants who are offered dialogue. General Buhari needs to revive the amnesty program that President Umaru Yaradua adopted and which President Jonathan used to help to disarm the Niger Delta militants. No one believes that militarism, no matter how powerful, is enough to defeat terrorism, nor that you need to stop Boko Haram first before addressing the roots.

The solutions to the second task of tackling the root causes of terrorism were not outlined in as much detail in his NYT Op Ed. Nor is there a clear indication that Buhari's speech writers understand that a major part of the root causes is the normalization of mass violence since the Igbo genocide in Biafra and that part of the solutions to the current terrorism is to openly apologize to the survivors of the Igbo genocide and offer them reasonable reparations, as I suggested in my comment on his Chatham House speech. 

Given that Igbophobia still thrives in the country as indicated by the cruel threat of a Muslim Yoruba chief to commit genocide against the Igbo in Lagos unless they voted for his chosen governorship candidate (a rationalization of xenophobia cited by Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini to justify his refusal to apologize for inciting mass violence against African 'foreigners' in South Africa), Buhari needs to address the Igbo problem urgently as part of the efforts to turn a new page in the country. Other ethnic groups that have suffered lesser historic wrongs in Nigeria have been offered reparations but the big Igbo elephant in the room continues to be ignored at the expense of Nigerians.

Furthermore, the problem of education and poverty, though more acute in the North East base of Boko Haram, is a nationwide problem that cries out for enormous allocation of resources across the country. If Buhari succeeds in eliminating illiteracy from all parts of Nigeria in the next four years (turning Boko Haram into Boko Halal, as Professor Ken Harrow suggested on USAfricadialogue news group moderated by Professor Toyin Falola); if he has the courage to apologize on behalf of Nigerians for the Igbo genocide and if he offers reparations to the survivors, authorizes the teaching of the history of the genocide in schools, and amends the constitutional amendment that Jonathan vetoed to allow the creation of the sixth state in the South East for geopolitical equity among the zones, his legacy will stand out in the history of Nigeria without a doubt. If he adopts militarism as his major strategy and succeeds in making matters worse as militarism tends to do, history will not be kind to him because this is his second chance to do the right thing for the suffering masses of Nigeria.

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

The Poverty of Sycophancy

By Biko Agozino

Say that Chime did not say! (Shikwanu la Chime ashivo!)

While reporting that the Vice President of Nigeria, Namadi Sambo, brought the generous campaign promise from President Jonathan that Turkish Airlines will now fly to Enugu from Ankara, Governor Chime of Enugu was quoted as making the following unfortunate sycophantic assertion that he should repudiate as a mis-speak or misquotation:


"Chime urged the president not to waste energy and resources campaigning in Enugu State, rather the president should channel the resources to other states where there is need for campaign.



“You can go to neighboring states but not Enugu, Enugu is hundred percent for Jonathan and PDP, we started this journey in 2011, we have been doing it and we will be ready to deliver PDP in the forthcoming 2015 Presidential election” he stated.



Anambra State Governor, Chief Willy Obiano, who also spoke at the occasion, assured President Jonathan that the All Progressive Grand Alliance and Anambra State would deliver him hundred percent in 2015.


Obiano noted that APGA adopted Jonathan even before the ruling People’s Democratic Party and further called for collective support from the people of the South East Zone to ensure absolute realization of Jonathan’s reelection bid."

What was Governor Chime thinking when he said that devoting campaign resources to win Enugu was a waste of energy? With the state as the second to last in Federal allocations, we should be making huge demands on any candidate for president. The Promise of Turkish Airlines is an indication that the candidate will not take Enugu seriously if he wins. It is politically immature to promise 100% of the votes of Enugu to any candidate in a democratic election unless there is a plan for wuluwulu.But it is up to the electorate to prove this hubris wrong when the time comes.

The Jonathan administration commissioned the construction of seven new multi-billion dollar hydro electric power plants with none in the South East (which gave the administration the largest proportion of votes in the previous elections without much to show for it). The administration also established nine new universities with only one in the South East (which incidentally leads the country in educational attainment). The administration is also reported to have promised a coal-fired power plant in Enugu without any of the environmental health evaluations that have forced industrialized countries to increasingly rethink coal as a safe source of energy. Chime could have asked for a wind farm to be sited along the hilltop across the state to enable us to harvest energy from the wind more sustainably and supplement with solar for homes in more remote villages. 

The South East states should support the presidential candidate who commits to the implementation of the National Confab recommendation for a sixth state in the region to make it equitable with all the other five regions with six states each. Enugu state should insist on being classified as an oil-producing state because the state has oil and gas deposits in commercial quantities especially in the Awgu Shale Formation that is identified as part of the Niger Delta Basin in the geological maps but the state receives no derivation revenue while that oil is probably being siphoned down the river under our feet where it probably flows like an underground river. Only a presidential candidate who commits to paying reparations for the Igbo genocide deserves to expect overwhelming support from the South East.

Similarly, instead of Governor Willy Obiano of Anambra state beating his chest to announce that APGA was the first to endorse President Jonathan for re-election even before the PDP adopted him, he should have been demanding that PDP should endorse APGA for the governorship of Imo State in return, at least because his party won that state but the sitting governor chose to decamp to the APC. Azikiwe did form alliances with other parties but his own party also always fought to win the national election too.Why are the governors of the South East shying away so brazenly? Perhaps because the minority parties are not living up to their tasks.

What? Are they thinking at all? Uwawa (No)!

WAS OBASANJO’S LETTER PLAGIARIZED FROM ACHEBE?

By Biko Agozino

Did General Olusegun Obasanjo plagiarize his so long a letter from Achebe’s There Was A Country without crediting the author? Obasanjo cited an academic research paper on allegations that Nigerian politicians are protecting an indicted drug dealer who is a member of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party even after the trial and appeal courts ruled that he should be extradited to the US for trial. This unusual reference to an academic source in Obasanjo’s self-opinionated lambasting of an administration that he helped to arrange is the only content that appears original compared to the contents of pages 243 to 258 of There Was a Country, a book that Obasanjo pretends not to have read or heard about. According to Achebe in part 4 of the book:

‘The post Nigeria-Biafra civil war era saw a “unified” Nigeria saddled with a greater and more insidious reality. We were plagued by a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling class. Compounding the situation was the fact that Nigeria was now awash in oil-boom petrodollars, …. A new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day’ (p. 243).

 

If Obasanjo's ghost writer had done basic literature review for his term paper-like letter, he would not have tried to reinvent the wheel of Achebe and he would not have placed all the blame on one individual party leader, President Jonathan. Achebe saw the problem as a task not just for the politicians but also for the followership and especially the ‘intellectuals, particularly writers’ who faced the ‘conundrum’ and tried to find solutions instead of blaming the problem on ‘our complicated past and the cold war raging in the background.’ He charged the intellectuals with the task of developing a new program, from the grassroots, through which to rescue the nation. But Obasanjo atomized the problem by blaming it all on one man. To Achebe, Nigerians needed to fight this enemy with every means at our disposal rather than abandon it to the rulers as Obasanjo seems to suggest.

 

Of course, Obasanjo appears to be in agreement with Achebe that the first task for Nigerians is to ‘identify the right leader with the right kind of character, education and background.’ But whereas Obasanjo focused on Nigeria almost chauvinistically, Achebe saw the problem as one that faced all of Africa – the problem of ‘where Africa had been, and where it needed to go’ (p. 244). Goodluck Jonathan is not the president of every state in Africa but the problems identified by Obasanjo do not apply exclusively to Nigeria. Achebe correctly identified the problem as that of the second struggle for libration: ‘For the second time in our short history we had to face the disturbing fact that Nigeria (and Africa by extension) needed to liberate itself anew, this time not from a foreign power but from our own corrupt, inept brothers and sisters!’ (p. 244).

Achebe confessed that after waiting around for a while, he and other intellectuals decided to enter into partisan politics to see what difference they could make from within. He and others (such as Eskor Toyo, Bala Mohammed, Wole Soyinka, Bala Usman and S.G. Ikoku) joined the ‘left-of-center Peoples Redemption Party’ of Malam Aminu Kano and Achebe was elected the Deputy National President. Their goal was to stir Nigerians into asking critical questions such as how to conduct a free and fair election, how to elect the right kinds of leaders who would not seek to prolong their tenure or turn into a dynasty as Obasanjo attempted in his Third Term bid and as he now accuses Jonathan of planning to attempt. Achebe concluded that his 'sojourn in politics' was completely disappointing and that he was frustrated to realize that despite the fact that some upright politicians like Aminu Kano existed, the vast majority of the politicians were there for selfish greed (as Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe predicted in his 1983 essay on ‘Entreeism’). The intellectuals had grand ideas all right but Nigeria lacked the ‘strong leader’ who would implement them, an idea that Obasanjo echoes in his long-winded letter.

Unlike Obasanjo who obsessed with one single leader in his letter, Achebe declared that the problem of leadership exists at every level from the local government council to governors and all the way to the presidency. As a dictator, Obasanjo may be more accustomed to thinking of the leader as a maximum superhero who swoops down from Asokoro Mansion and takes care of his cronies but that is proof that he does not understand the extent of the systematic problem that Achebe analyzed. Achebe specifically identified the problem of godfatherism as one that Nigerians must get rid of from the political process but Obasanjo still fancies himself a godfather of sorts and asked Jonathan to forward his open letter to some other godfathers who allegedly share his concerns. Achebe used the model of Igbo democracy to illustrate the emphasis on achievement as opposed to ascribed monarchical privileges and challenged Nigerians to deepen democracy as the very antithesis of military rule whereas Obasanjo warns of the possibility of return to military dictatorship based on his understanding that it is one Ijaw man, rather than the ‘ruling class’ that Achebe fingered, who is destroying Nigeria, warning that he may be the first and last Ijaw man to rule the country. Why?

Whereas Obasanjo cited the Central Bank of Nigeria in accusing the Jonathan administration of not accounting for a mere $7 billion in oil revenue, Achebe quoted the World Bank as estimating that Nigerian rulers had stolen $400 billion from the public since independence. The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation immediately attempted to correct the accounting of the Central Bank of Nigeria and suggested that, ironically as Fela Kuti put it during Obasanjo’s military dictatorship when $12.2 billion went missing and they set up an enquiry that concluded that ‘money no loss o, them dabaroo everybody’, naming Obasanjo personally as the conductor of what Fela called a system of International Thief-Thief; NNPC suggests that no money is missing today.

Achebe indicated that Nigeria was ranked at number 14 on the Failed States Index in 2011 and while Obasanjo openly accused the Jonathan administration of running a killer squad, Achebe concluded that; ‘In many respects, Nigeria’s federal government has always tolerated terrorism’ by turning a blind eye to ‘ferocious and savage massacres of its citizens – mainly Christian Southerners; mostly Igbos and indigenes of the Middle Belt and others – with impunity’ (p. 251). Achebe saw the solution in the dismantling of the 'conveniently incompetent' Nigerian federal government and its culture of mediocrity through the democratic political process. Obasanjo’s solution appears to be that of entrenching his own discredited political party in power by humiliating the figure head out of office for a candidate of Obasanjo’s choice to enter and use what he called 'carrots and sticks' to fight insecurity rather than rely mainly on the militarist strategy of the present administration, a strategy that Obasanjo himself fashioned and implemented in his previous administrations.

It is welcome to know that President Jonathan has avoided a public mud-slinging response to Obasanjo’s letter and opted to pay him a personal visit to discuss the important issues raised in the letter. The president should thank Obasanjo for his rightful contribution to the national conversation but remind him that the problem goes beyond any individual and envelopes all Nigerians as Achebe pointed out. Obasanjo should also be advised to avoid claiming that it is African leaders and foreign investors who begged him to help the Nigerian government because it is his patriotic duty to help his country given his position as a past president who is a member of the national security council and also a leader of the ruling party. Obasanjo’s identification of quality education as one of the solutions to what he called a ‘culture of hatred’, insecurity and poverty is a solution that could have been lifted out of Achebe’s book except that Achebe privileged free and fair elections as the foundation for all the solutions, a foundation that Obasanjo failed to lay. Achebe concluded with a postscript in which he called on Africans to emulate the example of the great Madiba who was wronged but habored no bitterness and who relinquished power after only one term despite a claim recently by Obasanjo that he had tried to persuade Mandela to stay on in power.

Beyond Achebe’s focus on the ineffective rule by an inept ruling class, Biodun Jeyifo, in his epic review of There Was A Country, has also called attention to the exploitative nature of the economic system in the country as deserving a transformation. Three good pieces of advice that Obasanjo gave to all Nigerians, not just to Jonathan, are that those in leadership position should not see critics as enemies to be eliminated, that the military alone cannot defeat terrorism and so by implication, some carrots need to be extended to the victims of terrorism as reparations despite President Jonathan having inexplicably ruled out reparations, and that leaders should not see themselves as representing only their own ethnic groups. Such pieces of advice are straight out of Achebe’s There Was a Country. 

All Nigerians should be required to study Achebe's book and they will agree with me when I say that the answer to the question in the title of this blog is no, Obasanjo did not plagiarize from Achebe; some of his complaints are voiced by the masses in the country all the time. President Jonathan should respond to ex-President Obasanjo with humility, admit his short-comings and ask for even more constructive criticism from all Nigerians. Truly, Obasanjo has sinned (like all) and come short of the glory of critics but the testimony of a rogue who flips to become a prosecution witness against his accomplices remains admissible in a court of law and in the court of public opinion. Set a thief to catch a thief.

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

Azikiwe's Strange Prophecy About Jonathan

By Biko Agozino

'AMASSOMA

Sail on, my trusted ship,

Over this murky creek,

Bound for Amassoma,

In Ijaw land;

To forge the link of love

That blinds the fatherland

-Nnamdi Azikiwe, (On board the "   " sailing from Yenagoa to Amassoma, 1st March, 1957).'

About nine months later, precisely on November 20 that very same year, 1957, a little hungry baby boy was born stark naked (like even the Queen of England, as the Ethiopian-Eritrean-UK-based poet, Lemn Sissay, would say) in those same creeks. And he was named after the great Zik of Africa - Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan was the exact full name given to him by a perceptive grandmother.

That shoeless creek boy, with a nose as red as that of Rudolph the under-estimated reindeer of Santa later chosen to guide the sleigh, that boy whom very few gave any chance in life, went on to become the 14th Head of State of Nigeria, following in the footsteps of the statesman-poet, Azikiwe, the First Head of State. 

Was this a mere coincidence or was Nnamdi Azikiwe being prophetic as he was known to be by his friends and foes alike? Zik bu agbara (Zik is an oracle) as the Igbo used to say!

Was the nameless 'trusted ship' alluded to in Zik's poem a metaphor for the ship of state, the ship of Nigeria that continues to sail (or drift) over many murky creeks across the country but amazingly sure of its destination nevertheless? I mean, how has the country survived so much lack of clarity while sailing on such murky waters that lack any of the certainties in navigational charts characteristic of other nation states? We dey manage am so!

'Bound for Amassoma' as in bondage and not just in terms of a destination; the same sado-masochistic bondage written large into the national anthem: instead of 'one nation born in unity and struggle' as Cabral would insist, we are compelled to chant the macabre anthem to 'one nation bound in freedom, peace (for where) and unity'; as if we are hypnotized to chant of a beloved nation in bloody bondage rituals while we are all being screwed by sadists. Did the great Zik prophesy that too? You bet, it was predictable.

'In Ijaw land', he said, not Igboland or simply the Oritentalism of a geographical East that he could have claimed imperialistically as the Premier of the Eastern Region that he was. Rather he chose to respect local identity and simply seek to forge a 'link of love'. But wait, what kind of love was that?

The kind of true love that is blind - 'That blinds the fatherland'. Maybe that is why Oga Jona is bumbling and stumbling like a blind man from one foot in the mouth to another dissastrous pardon for his ruling class of pirates, sailing the murky creeks and chopping billions of naira in food alone while those same creeks that litter the country continue to be bloodied with the murky juice of the innocent shed by terroristic robbers and kidnappers. They have sobered up sufficiently from their ogogoro stupor, we are told.

So maybe we should pardon Jonathan as one brother recently urged; it is not his fault that he was prophesied to blind the fatherland with love. Jonathan was reported to have said that it was God that asked him to forgive those who are robbing us blind! Someday another prayer warrior will chop bribe and command bro Jona to kneel down and obey because God wants him to pardon ghosts, ghost workers and ghost projects as Baba Soyinka has hinted recently, long after he alerted us (in Ibadan: The Penkelmese Years) that Azikiwe was one of the 'bombastic poets of nationalism' that obviously influenced his own bombast (unknown to even some poetry professors in Nigeria - that Zik was among the poets).

Of course, the phrase, 'That blinds', could have been the printer's devil at work, the bent nail of the carpenter's apprentice (editors) mistaken for a new style. Maybe Zik actually wrote that the love 'binds the fatherland' (in bondage) rather than blinds it. Who knows? Professor Michael Echeruo certainly thinks that it is 'binds' as he cited the poem thus in his introduction to the collection. We are in a bind, it seems; ours is a binding freedom, an oxymoron.

The very next poem in the collection, Thoughts in Retreat: Further Compilation of Poems, compiled by his widow, Profesor Uche Azikiwe and published in 2003 by Triatlantic Books International, New York, however suggests that Azikiwe must have meant every word of this strange prophecy - the poem, 'Transformation', starts thus:

Before I was blind

But now I see...

'Glory glory', goes the chorus! Glory? Forgive me if I am reading too much meaning into a short poem here. After all, poems are open to as many legitimate interpretations as there are readers.

In There Was A Country, the everliving Chinua Achebe chronicled how the architecture for peace, reconciliation and rehabilitation that was presented by Zik as the framework for ending the Biafra war on the basis of no victor-no vanquished was rejected out of hand by those who were bent on crushing Biafra at all costs (precisely millions of lives) only for that same framework to become the blueprint for UN interventions in conflicts around the world. Achebe, nna anyi (our father), tell Zik of Africa that his beloved Africans are still living in the land of the blind in the bondage that he foresaw. 

Let us urge Goodluck Ebele Jonathan to shun deliberate jaundice and see the need for reparations to be paid to the Eastern survivors of that genocidal war as a signal to all the thieves and political abiku or ogbanje (changelings) that Zik, Clark, Okigbo, Achebe, Soyinka and Okri fingered in their self-fulfilling prophetic poems and prose; that the lives of our people are precious and should not be wantonly wasted without appropriate reparations being made by the authorities sworn to protect and to serve. 

Otherwise what exactly will be Jonathan's legacy after six years as the Executive President of Nigeria if he fails to attempt to deliver reparative social justice?

Gambian Kongi's Harvest: Mass Executions

By Biko Agozino

Gambia has embarked on what Wole Soyinka indelibly condemned as Kongi's Harvest: Mass Executions.

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria was reported as comparing the mass executions to the Rwanda genocide. All African states should avoid hypocrisy and appropriately respond to Gambia's display of barbarism by abolishing the death penalty in Africa the way Nelson Mandela did in South Africa at a time that the assassins of Chris Hani were still awaiting trial and could have been given the death penalty.

The reasons for abolishing the death penalty across Africa are:

1) The death penalty was imposed on Africans by colonial authorities and those colonizing countries have since abolished it in their own countries because the death penalty is barbaric and unconstitutional.

2) The death penalty leads to increased violence and homicide given that the states that have the death penalty also record higher rates of homicide. This is called the brutalization effect or the impact of state sanctioned killing on the psyche of citizens who tend to follow the example of the state by killing fellow citizens to settle disputes. Across Africa, the death penalty is no deterrent to violent crime maybe because the fear of the death penalty makes criminals to attempt to eliminate all witnesses.

3) The margin of error is huge in the death penalty and once executed, there is no way to correct the wrongful killing of innocent suspects like Ken Saro-Wiwa whereas a life sentence would give the innocent more chances of proving their innocence.

4) Violent criminals are more afraid of life sentences than the death penalty and some of them attempt suicide in prison rather than spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Life sentences would also allow society to attempt to reform dangerous criminals.

5) Nigeria should follow the good example of South Africa and immediately abolish the death penalty as contravening the human rights provisions in our constitution. Prof. Ben Nwabueze argued accordingly in his critique of the borrowing of the death penalty from the American Presidential Constitution by the drafters of the 1979 Nigerian Presidential Constitution.



6) The death penalty is biased against poor black men and is therefore arbitrary, cruel and unusual punishment.

For public discussions of the scholarly evidence, see the earlier post here: 

http://massliteracy.blogspot.com/2012/02/public-sociology-on-death-penalty.html   

Biko Agozino

Jonathan urges Africa to respond to Jammeh’s threats Africa » Gambiahttp://thepoint.gm/africa/gambia/article/jonathan-urges-africa-to-respond-to-jammehs-threats Friday, August 24, 2012 Reactions to President Yahya Jammeh’s threat that by the middle of next month (September 2012), all death penalties would have been carried out in The Gambia continues, with the latest coming from Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan, who arrived in neighbouring Senegal on a 24-hour working visit, told journalists in Dakar on Thursday that the entire African continent “should respond” to Jammeh’s threats to implement the death penalty, Senegalese daily Rewmi reported yesterday. “Such an act would mean genocide in Africa, after that of Rwanda,” Jonathan was quoted as saying. Jonathan’s reaction comes a day after France also condemned such a threat, saying The Gambia has applied a de facto moratorium on the death penalty since 1981. “France therefore urges Gambia to maintain this moratorium with a view toward the definitive abolition of the death penalty, and not to execute these death row prisoners. It also demands that Gambia commute all death sentences to custodial sentences,” France declared. The statement added: “France, in keeping with its opposition to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, believes that the death penalty is a cruel punishment and that its abolition contributes to strengthening human dignity.” It said considerable progress has been made in the fight to abolish the death penalty in recent years. In an address to the nation to mark the Muslim holy feast of Eid-al-Fitr, Jammeh said by the middle of next month (September 2012), all the death sentences would have been carried out to the letter, though he did not give the exact number of the prison inmates currently on death row. “All punishments prescribed by law will be maintained in the country to ensure that criminals get what they deserve; that is, that those who kill are killed, and those who deserve to be put away from society are put away according to the dictates of the law,” Jammeh said.

Authoritarianism

AUTHORITARIANISM

By Biko Agozino

‘Education, and education and education through conscientisation! Our people need to be aware of the power they have as citizens; their inalienable rights as people; the fact that the power enjoyed by the rulers should actually flow from the people. They should stop glamourising and beatifying the bad rulers that make life and living impossible for them and their children. Honestly, there is too much power-worship in this country, a habit I see as part of the Baba ki e pe (Boss, may you live long) syndrome. Just look at it: in Nigeria, the political ruler (and virtually anyone in a position of authority) is treated and venerated, like on with royal and/or priestly/divine powers, appeased with abject genuflections and lavish prostrations. Their birthday ‘felicitations’ take up substantial spaces in the newspapers; their oriki (praisename) is loud, lurid, and ludicrously extravagant...So, in a way, it is Nigerian people that tell their rulers: rule us forever; rule us the way you choose; rule us the way that pleases your whims. Surely, this is one of the terribly negative parts of our traditional culture that is blatantly antithetical to the idea of democracy.  For, the pervasive vestiges of divine kingship which tend to colour our concept of political power actually dis-empowers  the people by erecting their rulers into some kind of sacred, unquestionable Kabiyesi alaye lorun (the unquestionable on who has dominion over heaven and earth). From this apparent verbal hyperbole emerges a state of mind, a political habit, and followership style that makes democracy impossible by belittling the people while inflating the essence of their rulers. All over the world, we know that tyranny never flourishes without the people’s abasement.’ – Niyi Osundare.

Thanks to Niyi Osundare for his usually perceptive finger on the pulse of the nation. What he has identified is a major trouble with Nigeria that even Chinua Achebe overlooked in his classic on the theme – the trouble of authoritarianism. Yet, it is not true that the follow-follow mentality found in monarchical traditions in Nigeria is representative of all Nigerian cultures. We still have Nigerians who proudly say that they know no king and would try to hold anyone in authority accountable. By some kind of coincidence, they happen to be the very ones who are being attacked and massacred in the highly monarchical northern part of the country.

Authoritarianism is the biggest weakness that President Jonathan suffers from. He seems to think that an authoritarian leader is what Nigeria needs because Nigerians love to play the boss from the office to the market, the place of worship, the traffic and to the home. They brutalize their own spouses, children, employees, congregants, neighbours and even strangers because that is how the government treats them. Any Nigerian who preaches peace and non-violence today would be dismissed as weak and stupid because force is the lingua franca of the nation.

The very first act of power play that President Jonathan demonstrated once he finally took over as acting president under Yaradua was to lock out ministers who were late to a federal executive council meeting. Although Nigerian cheered this bossy move, it smacked of a village headmaster flogging pupils for lateness without asking if the ministers had anything worthwhile to contribute to the meeting or if they had any excusable reason for being tardy.

The second executive order from Jonathan was to ground all ministers from going home on holiday during the festive season, until they had worked out a solution to the electricity problem in the country. Again Nigerians cheered this authoritarian populism. But Rilwanu Lukman ignored the order and travelled abroad for a scheduled OPEC meeting without being fired or reprimanded. Travel or no travel, the electricity problem remains unsolved. The third major exhibition of this bigmanism by Jonathan was when he banned the national football teams from international competitions for two years without consulting to be advised that such childish tantrums after embarrassing losses would not be tolerated by FIFA. He had to back down and he did.

Now President Jonathan is getting power drunk absolutely as the executive presidency corrupts him further. He has slapped an unjust taxation on Nigerians without the due process of having the wuluwulu subsidy debated and approved by the legislature but this time he under-estimated the defiance of the long suffering people of Nigeria when it comes to what Gani Fawehinmi called executive lawlessness. He simply announced the withdrawal of a non-existent subsidy and thereby hiked up the prices of services and commodities for impoverished Nigerians.

Luckily for Nigerians, organized labour is ready this time to do battle not just for wages but for the suffering masses. The response of an authoritarian person like Jonathan is equally predictable – he tried to order the workers around by getting an injunction from a kangaroo court to say that the protest slated to intensify on Monday, January 9 2012, is not authorized by the boss. The workers called his bluff and told him that this is not a trade dispute within the jurisdiction of an industrial court that has a tendency to always rule on behalf of the bosses. Bravo to the working people of Nigeria.

This militancy by the workers should serve as a warning to any would-be coup plotters that Nigerians will not stomach another cynical ‘Fellow Nigerians’ broadcast. Instead the protesters should start gathering signatures for the recall of President Jonathan and for the holding of a recall election for all unrepresentative politicians. All legislators and all governors who support this sadistic policy of fleecing the impoverished should also be recalled. Those ministers who threatened to resign if the boss changed his mind and backed away from the abysmal policy should get their wish once their Oga is recalled and defeated democratically.

If Jonathan wishes to meet the legitimate demand of the workers by unleashing a kill-and-go police force on the unarmed civilians, let him be aware that once he is forced from office, he will be tried for murder like Mubarak in Egypt. Besides, authority killing simply sends the wrong message to the citizens that killing one another was a legitimate way to express grievances.

Niyi Osundare is right in pointing out that the reason why authoritarianism is killing our people is because of ignorance and illiteracy. Part of the reason why Ghana has a more democratic culture than Nigeria is because of the National School Movement that Nkrumah established across the country when the colonial administration suspended teachers and students who supported nationalist struggles. The mass protest that is on-going against the wicked policies of the Jonathan administration should include educational programs for teaching basic literacy and political, economic, legal and human rights literacy to the masses even during the street protests.

Finally, the Nigerian Government should immediately take steps to end the terrorization of Nigerian citizens in any part of the country. This cannot be done without addressing what Chinua Achebe identified as the Igbo problem. We cannot go on pretending that the genocide committed against the Igbo would not affect the psyche of the people by cheapening human life. The federal government should therefore set aside at least ten trillion naira as reparations and with unreserved apologies to be given to the Igbo of Nigeria for the past and continuing pogroms that are visited upon them. There should also be a law, as in Germany, to make the denial of the Igbo genocide a crime.

The cosmopolitan Igbo who are the vanguard of nationalism in Nigeria today by the risks they take in venturing to the remotest parts of the country should reciprocate in kind once they receive reparations by sponsoring scholarships and football trophies for schools to compete for in their places of residence. Fleeing back to Igboland is never going to be a lasting solution because the next day, they would return to the places of slaughter in search of opportunities to provide thankless services to their fellow citizens if they do not start killing each other over crumbs in Igboland. Instead of allowing themselves to be isolated and marginalized in Igboland, they should continue to fan out across the whole of Africa with a strategy to invest in goodwill among the people wherever they settle in Africa. That will not prevent murderous envy and jealousy but it may contribute to the further democratization of the whole continent for the benefit of all especially if they are empowered with a well-deserved reparations fund by the government.

ACHEBE’S REJECTION OF THE THIRD HIGHEST NATIONAL HONOUR TWICE.

By Dr. Biko Agozino

Achebe has again rejected the ‘third highest national honour’, CFR, from a second Nigerian President to make that offer to him in a row. The first time he was offered the honour by President Obasanjo, he turned it down on the ground that with the lack of attention to his thesis on The Trouble With Nigeria that he published decades ago during a period of his active participation in politics as the National Secretary of the Peoples Redemption Party, he did not see how the acceptance of a third highest national honor would make any difference to the suffering masses.

President Jonathan has just offered him the same prize and again Achebe turned it down with the remark that what is holding us down as a nation is still holding us down and so we should not dignify our incompetence in the face of abundant resources with the third highest national honor. President Jonathan did not understand this simple proverb of the wordsmith and so he came out with the allegation that the great writer is out of touch with reality. During the reign of Abacha, a Nigerian foreign minister used the same illogic to dismiss the campaigns of Wole Soyinka by telling journalists at the Commonwealth meeting in Edinburgh that Soyinka is a fiction writer who makes up things. 

President Jonathan should display more civility if he wishes to comprehend this public relations disaster fully. First of all, by offering the same honour to Achebe that he had rejected from Obasanjo, he was trying to personalize it as if it was rejected earlier due to any personal animosity towards Obasanjo. If Jonathan had good advisers, they would have consulted with Achebe before making the list public this time around. In fact, President Jonathan should have tried to demonstrate that he agreed with Achebe that the country was in a mess when he was first offered that third highest national honour and that the mess remains to be cleaned. He should have listened to the Brown University Achebe Colloquium on the 2010 election in Anambra state and at least demonstrated that he was willing to follow the simple conclusion that it was not a problem that could be fixed even with the most credible elections. 

Good advisers would have told President Jonathan to add jara or something extra to that third highest national honour before presenting it to the Eagle on the top of the Iroko once more. Why should the greatest writers from Nigeria be offered only the third highest national honour while kleptocrats and relative nobodies who managed to get away with treasonable felonies by ways of military coups and international-thief-thief are decorated with the highest honours of the land? What have they contributed to Nigeria to deserve such highest honours more than Achebe or Soyinka? Next time, the politicians should show humility by offering the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic to our greatest writers who have contributed more to the country than all the corrupt politicians put together. Next time, if they offer him the highest honor of the land after making credible moves to address the concerns he raised, Achebe should accept it because he has made the point clear enough and no one deserves the highest honour in Nigeria more than him.

Go to Scotland and you will find that the biggest monument was erected in a park to honour Sir Walter Scott for his novel Waverley after which the railway terminal in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, is named. England has both Shakespeare and Dickens on their pound notes while the US has Benjamin Franklin on the highest denomination dollar note. In Germany, Goethe’s name is used to market their culture internationally through their embassies. China has been building up the Confucius Institutes to teach the world about their language and culture. In Russia, a black man, Pushkin, is almost a Saint for being the first writer to use the Russian language. But in Nigeria, as Achebe stated in The Trouble with Nigeria, incompetence is celebrated and mediocrity is ranked over excellence. I believe that this is the major parable that Achebe is trying to convey but I may be wrong. The great man is likely to reject even the highest honor of the land if it is offered to him in this state of affairs where insecurity, poverty, illiteracy, ill-health and unemployment  are on the increase while World Bank economists tell us that there is no cause for alarm; that the economy is growing at over 7% per annum: growth of underdevelopment or growth without development.

Instead of seeking to quarrel with Achebe publicly, President Jonathan should make The Trouble With Nigeria a required book for social studies in Nigeria, set up a committee to study ways of addressing the concerns raised in the book, and start implementing the policy implications. Holding up the last general elections that remain contentious and also that engulfed the country into massive bloodshed as evidence of electoral reforms that should have persuaded Achebe to accept the third highest national honour is to display lack of appreciation for the enormity of the problems confronting Nigeria.

Having rejected a one million dollar donation from 50 Cents for the right to use the title of his iconic Things Fall Apart in his movie about the enslavement of African American men by the professional sports industry, Achebe is communicating the old Igbo adage that a good name is better than money at a time that people wrongly conclude that every Nigerian has a price and that the Igbo in particular will do anything for money. Personally, I think that Achebe should let 50 Cents use those three words because, although his rap music is misogynistic, this particular black film directed by Mario Van Peebles has a good moral message for young African Americans who are trapped in the elusive chase after the dream of sports super stardom (as far as I can tell from the trailer).  Moreover Achebe did not invent those three words, he borrowed them from ‘The Second Coming’, a poem by William Butler Yeats that was published at the end of the First World War. The Achebe Foundation should accept the donation from young African American Artists and use the money to award scholarships to poor students in the name of our father, The Odenigbo 1.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA.

The Artful Dodger Subsidy Withdrawal

By Biko Agozino

A colleague asked me to comment on his treatise on the just announced Nigerian policy of removing subsidies from petroleum products. The colleague started by stating that petrol is cheap in Nigeria and that the subsidies served as a form of wealth re-distribution especially given that there does not appear to be any other way of trickling down the oil wealth to the impoverished masses. He did not go the extra step in his logic to recognize that if his premise is right, then removing the subsidies is tantamount to raising taxation on Nigerians by executive fiat and without legislative authority. Not that it will be too difficult to obtain legislative rubber stamping with Ghana Must Go (or Imo Must Go from Abia and vice versa) bags.

I told him that his premise that petrol is cheap will probably be contested in Nigeria because the pump price in most locations is well above the #65.00 per litter that is the official price available only at the few NNPC Depots where you are more likely to run into ‘No Fuel’ cardboard notices. This means that when the government removes a subsidy that was not there in real terms to begin with, then the fuel hawker will put his own jara on top, the okada rider will raise his fares, the garri trader will inch up the cost of eba by factoring in the cost of transportation and the cost of kola at roadblocks, and the landlord will raise rents, schools and hospitals may charge more to cover the costs of gas; hence the inflation my colleague rightly predicted. 

The colleague had good advice for sister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to take it easy, because Nigeria is not the US where the World Bank and IMF are located and where the policies of those International Monetary Organizations are never imposed, no matter the level of their fiscal crisis. In the US, for instance, they have welfare policies for the unemployed and the aged but nothing like that exists in Nigeria despite the fact that the US owes tens of trillions of dollars as budget deficits. In the US, citizens are copying the popular struggles in North Africa by organizing the Occupy Wall Street campaign that has spread to cities across the country while in Nigeria, there does not appear to be a popular uprising against even worse income disparities and higher unemployment rates. 

Only the labour organizations in the country are mounting a credible opposition to the proposed subsidy withdrawal. The Nigerian Labour Congress has called on the government to cut  all 'unnecessary spending' as an alternative to the withdrawal of subsidies (This Day, 10/17/11). The NLC has been the leading voice campaigning for a starvation minimum wage of 18,000 per month that state governments are reluctant to implement. The Trade Union Congress has accused the government of corruption for claiming that it will spend #1.2 trillion this year on subsidy while only #240 billion was budgeted for that and the NNPC retaliated by calling organized labour 'enemies of the economy (The Punch, 10/17/11). The SSANU has termed the withdrawal of subsidies a 'declaration of war'. The Academic Staff Union of Universities threatens strikes over the refusal of the government to implement the extension of retirement age to 70 years at a time that the trend in other parts of the world is towards early retirement.

The US reduces gas prices by reducing taxation at the pump, compared to Europe. In addition, Europa and Americana give their corporations hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and stimulus packages, farm subsidies and business start-up capital, such as the $500,000,000 given to the solar company, Solyndra, that just folded up after pocketing half a billion (yes, with a b) US dollars from Uncle Santa. 

As Finance Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala had announced a fifty billion naira credit for cassava farmers, promising that 30% of that would go to female farmers but she was quickly moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and my guess is as good as yours that some big ogas simply chopped the 50 billion naira just like that. Similarly, Comrade President Yaradua ear-marked 200 billion naira to be disbursed as grants to Nigerians but he was quickly incapacitated by illness and his death was never investigated as Wole Soyinka demanded while the 200 billion naira he proposed just vanished without Nigerians asking questions.

In the US, the debate is whether to raise taxation on the richest one percent to the level being paid by the middle class but the Republicans, calling president Obama a class warrior to his delight, have vowed to maintain the Bush era tax cuts for the richest one percent and are seeking to cut welfare and Medicare entitlements for the poor as their preferred strategies for balancing the budget. Across Europe and Asia, huge sums of money are being doled out as corporate welfare while in Britain, welfare and social services have been drastically cut by the current Conservative government. The recent riots in England and in Greece and the current mass protests occupying Wall Street in America are obviously connected with on-going class warfare against the poor by the rich and the powerful as professor Stuart Hall clearly indicated in a recent article in the UK Guardian. Worse policies appear to be heaped on Nigerians and they continue to endure the hardship along with the insecurity that is bred by phantom capitalism.

My colleague outlined the projects on which the government intends to spend the savings from the withdrawn subsidies but none of the plans for the estimated six to ten billion dollars savings has any reference to the suffering people. Rather they propose to use it to patch up roads that they have multiple times budgeted to patch up with vanishing funds, open new refineries that would soon be handed over to private investors at a discount, generate electricity, build infrastructure, all euphemisms for sharing and chopping the savings because all those things they want to start doing are things they had revenues to do before. For instance, President Obasanjo spent $10b or more on power generation while generator tycoons continued to kill whole families with CO2 poisoning; power ko, power ni. 

No American president will wake up and slap a huge tax on the citizens in the guise of subsidy withdrawal without facing a recall election or mass protests even from members of his own party. What President Obama is trying to do is to get Congress to approve additional stimulus of $450b with which to help to create more jobs in America but Republicans in Senate and even two Democratic senators have blocked that move simply because it includes proposals to raise the taxation rates for millionaires back to what it was under President Clinton.

If you ask me for an alternative since President Jonathan has presented Nigerians with a fait accompli, then for the first five years, all the $10b annual savings should be disbursed directly to the Nigerian people for business start-ups, research budgets in the sciences and humanities, scholarships funding, welfare benefits, housing, free medical access and publicly funded education at all levels for all... That will work out at one thousand five hundred billion naira a year and so every corner of the country will be touched by the entrepreneurial and industrial revolution that will be unleashed when such grants are disbursed transparently. Some of the start-ups will fail but those that succeed will make all the differences in job creation and the government will eventually recoup the investment through corporate taxes and income taxes from the employees in addition to value-added taxes from their sales.

All those Egbesu, Area or Bakassi Boys running around looking for someone to kidnap for ransom or the Boko Haram activists looking for something to blow up may just go back to school, or go to any city and open up a small business or return to their villages and set up an agro business with their #1m naira grant and employ five or more desperadoes or team up with other grantees to set up medium sized cooperative businesses. After five years, then let the politicians give Nigerians half the savings and embezzle the rest as they always planned to do and let EFCC chase after them for that. Of course, as the NLC implied, the government could implement such a massive grants programs to Nigerians without imposing draconian taxes in the guise of withdrawing subsidies

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech. agozino@vt.edu