My Publication Makes High Impact On European Immigration Policy

By Biko Agozino

I am not on an ego trip when I suspect that my 2006 publication in the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies which I edit for the African Criminology and Justice Association may have tipped members of the European Community to adopt some of my urgent recommendations in response to the current immigration crisis (Photo, my participation in a May Day Rally for refugees in Glasgow, Scotland, 1992, while a graduate student in Edinburgh University).

 
I forwarded the paper to the European Commission on September 3 and they acknowledged receipt the same day and stated that the paper had been forwarded to their services as the following correspondence shows:

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Date: Thursday, 03/09/2015 19:08:13
From: "Biko Agozino" <bagozino@gmail.com>
Subject: [Case_ID: 1093134 / 6543762] Mass Deaths at Fortress Europe
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As we watch the tragedy of mass death among immigrants determined to enter fortress Europe, here are some ideas for possible solution from my personal experience and from social theory: http://www.umes.edu/cms300uploadedFiles/AJCJS/VoL2Issue1Edito

Two days later, on Saturday, September 5, Germany and Austria dramatically altered their policies by opening their borders with Hungary and letting in thousands of immigrants. France, which had been following the Fortress Europe policy of securing the borders, dramatically changed and offered to accept tens of thousands of immigrants. The UK which is not even part of the open borders policy joined by promising to take in 20,000 immigrants in 5 years. The EU President announced plans on September 9 to share 160,000 immigrants among the members of the EU but the foreign ministers are yet to agree on the formula for sharing the immigrants. The US came out with a pledge to resettle 8,000 more asylum seekers in the next year compared to 1,500 so far. One week after I sent the paper to the EU, the European Commissioner for Immigration, Dimitri Avramopulos, finally echoed my conclusion that the US policy on immigration is a good model for Europe to replicate:

“Everybody in Europe were caught by surprise. We could never imagine some years ago that we would be confronted with this crisis, and our systems were not well prepared. That's why I told you before that even the European Union did not have a comprehensive migration policy. Now we have it, and I can tell you that one of the models we would like to adopt in the future is the American immigration system. For me, it is one of the best in the world.”

I doubt that this is a coincidence given that the time-line for EU policies indicate a correlation (not necessarily a causation) between the timing of my forwarded paper and the dramatic tipping point in EU policies as shown in a statement from the EU president on September 14:

“The European Commission has been consistently and continuously working for a coordinated European response on the refugees and migration front:

“On 23 April 2014, in Malta, Jean-Claude Juncker presented a five point plan on immigration, calling for more solidarity in the EU's migration policy as part of his campaign to become European Commission President.

“Based on a proposal by the European Commission, in a European Council statement of 23 April 2015, Member States committed to taking rapid action to save lives and to step up EU action in the field of migration. A European Parliament Resolution followed a few days later.

“On 13 May 2015, the European Commission presented its European Agenda on Migration, setting out a comprehensive approach for improving the management of migration in all its aspects.

“On 27 May 2015, the European Commission already came forward with a first package of implementing measures of the European Agenda on Migration, including relocation and resettlement proposals, and an EU Action plan against migrant smugglers.

“On 25-26 June 2015, the European Council agreed to move forward on the proposals made by the European Commission in the European Agenda on Migration, focusing on relocation and resettlement, returns and cooperation with countries of origin and transit.

“On 20 July 2015, the Justice and Home Affairs Council agreed to implement the measures as proposed in the European Agenda on Migration, notably to relocate people in clear need of international protection from Italy and Greece over the next two years, starting with 32,256 in a first step, and to resettle 22,504 displaced persons in clear need of international protection from outside the EU.

“On 9 September 2015, the Commission proposed a new set of measures, including an emergency relocation mechanism for 120,000 refugees, as well as concrete tools to assist Member States in processing applications, returning economic migrants, and tackling the root causes of the refugee crisis.

“At today's Extraordinary Justice and Home Affairs Council, the Commission was represented by First Vice-President Frans Timmermans and Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, in charge of Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship. The High Representative Federica Mogherini also attended the meeting.”

It may all be a coincidence but I am not bragging when I say that I hope that my publication has helped to produce this dramatic impact on policy. If so, I hope that African states, Europe and the United States will follow up by addressing the other policy recommendations in my paper. This may contribute to the validation of the scholar-activism paradigm privileged in Africana Studies and in Liberation Sociology.

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

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.