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

Zero-Tolerance, Control-Freaks and UK 'Riots'

The War on Drugs Done It.

By Biko Agozino

The uprising and the looting that occurred across England recently have renewed calls for zero-tolerance policing and get tough approaches to law and order. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, set the tone when he suggested that police tactics were ineffective and he reportedly threatened to cut off social media and authorize the police to use water cannons and rubber bullets. He blamed the ‘riots’ on hooligans, criminals and badly brought up kids who had no respect for the authorities. This was quickly followed by newspaper opinions suggesting that the police did nothing to stop the disturbances whereas the police protested that they did the best they could in a democracy that prides itself with policing by consent rather than by force. In this chatter, it is easily forgotten that the disturbances were ignited by a police killing of a black man.

In the Global Commission on Drug Policy Report, there is reference to research reports which concluded that more intensive policing of the drugs market leads to increased violence on the streets. The conclusion appears to be supported by the circumstances that sparked the disturbances in England recently. For instance, if the British government was not waging a lost war on drugs, the police may not have assumed automatically that the young black father of four that they executed must have been an armed member of Yardie drug gangs. Rather than push the police into using more force to police the people, a sober reflection on the chain of events would call for more restraint on the powers of the police as a more lasting solution to the problem of unsafe streets: End the war on drugs as many, including police officers, have been demanding.

Paul Gilroy, Professor of Sociology at LSE, prefaced his classic essay, ‘The Myth of Black Criminality’ in the 1982 issue of The Socialist Register, with the view of a top London police officer, who claimed that policing was like a cricket match in which you were expected not just to win but to ‘thrash’ the other side, contrary to the claim of CLR James that cricket is a game of sportsmanship in which you are expected to be nice to the other side even when you win. In the article, Gilroy cautioned left-wing criminologists who thought that they were being realists when they proclaimed that they had discovered something called ‘black criminality’ in official crime statistics and victimization surveys. He warned that such a way of thinking would embolden the police to intensify repressive ‘fire-brigade policing’ and also extend surveillance strategies that were concentrated mainly on black communities through ‘community policing’. In reality there is no such thing as ‘black criminality’ just as there is no such thing as ‘white criminality’ because no crime is committed exclusively by any racial group and no such group is made up entirely of criminals. Yet the police set up Operation Trident exclusively targeting the black community.

The point that Gilroy was making is that the responsibility for abuse of power is not borne exclusively by brutal officials but also by the intellectuals who provide the ideological justification for ‘taking crime seriously at the working class level’ while remaining silent about crimes of the powerful. This was indirectly brought up in the viral internet video clip of a BBC interview with Darcus Howe in which the former moderator of the Devil’s Advocate series of debates on BBC television was accused of being fond of rioting himself after he complained of the harassment of his grandson by the police on numerous occasions. He calmly explained to the female interviewer that there was no need to ‘insult an old West Indian Negro’ and added that he organized peaceful demonstrations in the past for which he was often arrested but acquitted because he broke no law. He called that type of activism an uprising and differentiated it from a riot. The BBC reportedly apologized to Mr. Darcus Howe for the offensive interview but David Cameron is yet to apologize to parents in England for suggesting that only badly brought up children joined the protest. Gilroy could have cited Stuart Hall on Policing the Crisis if only to demonstrate that not all left-wing intellectuals buy into the myth of black criminality.

While blaming the problem on poor parenting, Mr. Cameron promised to consult with a former New York police chief on how to reduce gang crime in London without realizing that even after the reductions in New York, London was still much safer compared to New York and Los Angeles. Before Mr. Cameron rushes off to Uncle Sam for magical solutions that do not exist in volatile American cities, he should do very well to consult someone like Professor Stuart Hall who was warning 25 years ago that Britain was Drifting Into a Law and Order Society with a brand of neo-conservatism that was both authoritarian and populist; relying on a mobilization of ‘nation’, ‘Britishness’, culture and commerce as metaphors for whiteness, wealth, privilege and rank; to construct a society structured in race-class-gender dominance. Cameron should also read Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Professor Stan Cohen, lest he creates more problems in the guise of solutions by, for example, supporting the control-freak sentencing of an eleven year old to nearly two years of detention for being found with a garbage can and sentencing a 12 year old to nearly the same time for taking a chocolate bar during the uprising.

I recommend the Global Report on Drug Policy published recently by world leaders including Richard Branson, Kofi Annan and Professor Cardoso, the eminent sociologist and former president of Brazil, calling for an end to the war on drugs because the war has only succeeded in ruining the lives of poor youth around the world without reducing access to drugs. The youth who looted shops in England may have been indirectly asking for farm subsidies-type of grants to run their own businesses and or be left alone to lawfully sell their little bags of marihuana on the streets of London and create wealth without being harassed by ‘BabyLondon’ forces while we use education to get young people to say no to drugs as we do with tobacco. Rather than look to New York for solutions, Mr. Cameron should look to Amsterdam and ask himself why it is a relatively safer city than New York. Young people are no longer simply looking for jobs, they want to be their own bosses!

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=91y9KqvVggY

Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. agozino@vt.edu 1-540-231-7699

AU Press Release on Libya

AU Press Release on Libya

Suggested By Biko Agozino

Whereas the conflict in Libya arose over the legitimate demand for increased democratization of the country in line with the mainly peaceful democratic revolutions sweeping across the world, it was quickly hijacked by an armed gang of rebels and metamorphosed into a civil war with the help of NATO countries that took military action in support of their sponsored UN resolutions 1970 and 1973 supposedly to protect civilian lives but inevitably killing Libyans and drowning hundreds of fleeing African refugees;

The African Union hereby orders an immediate stop to the bombing of any African country by NATO forces or there will be a complete break in diplomatic relations with all the countries participating in the military aggression against Africa. If the bombing does not cease by the weekend, all members of the African Union are hereby directed to recall their diplomats from the offending NATO countries and expel their diplomats from Africa until further notice.

Since the NATO forces claim to be acting on behalf of UN resolutions, we have resolved to remain in the UN to voice our opposition to this neo-imperialist aggression against Africa. The arrogance with which the NATO countries are bombing Africa would not be tolerated by any other region of the world and neither would the African Union stomach such a naked grab for the natural resources of Africa in the guise of humanitarian intervention.

NATO forces have continued to bomb the African State of Libya for more than three months in total disregard of the reasonable call for a cease-fire by the African Union Commission, using the excuse of a resolution by the Arab League as an additional justification. We call on African Union members of the Arab League to immediately break ties with that unrepresentative and unaccountable organization which has never called for the bombing of any repressive Arab country outside Africa and which remained silent when black African citizens of Libya were being murdered by racist rebels who dubbed them mercenaries.

 Rather than rush to join NATO neocolonialist in recognizing an unelected band of rebels hired and equipped by aggressive NATO countries as the only legitimate representatives of the proud people of Libya, the African Union hereby calls on the rebels to lay down their foreign arms and engage in the African philosophy of non-violence as the best way to resolve the crisis in Libya.

We demand that the NATO countries that are bombing Libya must bear the full cost of reparations for the people assassinated and for the reconstruction of the homes and infrastructure destroyed in the country as a precondition before any renewal of diplomatic relations between those countries and member states of the African Union.

It is a fact that Libya is the African country ranked highest on the Human Development Index of the UNDP for decades and it is true that Gaddafi has been the most vocal advocate for African Union government. Now, the NATO imperialists are taking pride in bragging about degrading the infrastructure of the country, with the greedy wish that their own companies would be awarded oil contracts and contracts for the reconstruction of the country. We condemn such violent greed and hold the NATO countries accountable for the damage being done on African soil.

The African Union reiterates the call for a comprehensive cease-fire by NATO forces, the rebels and by the Libyan army to enable political negotiations by the people of Libya on the way forward for their country under the supervision of AU Peacekeepers. The NATO forces claim that they will continue to bomb Africa until Gaddafi steps down but as Africans, we cannot accept such an imperialist ultimatum any longer. It is not up to a gang of imperialist bullies to determine when any leader steps down in an African state; only the citizens should decide that through a peaceful democratic process.

We call on our brother leader, Gaddafi, to heed the call for change in Libya by initiating a process of transition, starting with a national constituent assembly to draw up a multi-party constitution which would provide for equal representation of men and women in all arms of government, give all Africans at home and abroad the right of citizenship in the state of Libya as a model for the African Union Government, allow elections to be held before the end of the year and allow a new leadership to transition in the country peacefully.

We call on all members of the African Union to witness the ongoing fantasy of re-colonization being performed by NATO war-mongers and therefore speed up the process of reconstituting the people of Africa into the People’s Republic of Africa United Democratically (PRAUD). That is the only guarantee we will have that no small ants, foreign or native, will ever again attempt to swallow the African elephant without thinking twice.

When we are reunited as the African republic, citizens at home and in the Diaspora can move to any state of their choice and settle without fear, state governors and the president of Africa will have term limits, we will pool our resources together to provide decent living for Africans and we will be able to demand successfully for the countries that enslaved and colonized Africa for centuries to pay reparations to Africa.

This will be a win-win for the entire world because a united Africa will be able to buy more from and sell more to the rest of the world with our convertible common currency – the Afro, save resources by ending the duplication of foreign embassies and armies by the fifty-four states, reduce corruption, prevent civil wars, deter foreign invasions, provide additional internal revenues for poorer states and foreign aid for poor countries in other parts of the world, and ‘defossilize’ the genius that made Africa the origin of civilization for the benefit of all humanity.

Do not agonize; organize!

Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, Agozino@vt.edu

VIOLENCE AND LITERACY

By Biko Agozino

The political violence and geopolitical dichotomy that emerged with the results of the recent general elections in Nigeria compel me to recommend a program in scholar activism similar to the one led by Comrades Eskor Toyo and Bassey Ekpo Bassey in the late 1980s. The program was called the Directorate For Literacy and I was one of those involved in the organization of weekly literacy classes for workers and monthly public enlightenment lectures in Calabar municipality in addition to the National Literacy Conference with delegates from all over the country. We also published the free monthly cyclostyled newsletter, Mass Line, that was edited by Eskor Toyo with me as associate editor, following my appointment as the unpaid Director of Administration for the Directorate. Other leaders of the project included Comrades Akpan Ekpo, Edwin Madunagu, Bene Madunagu, Okonete Ekanem, Princewill Alozie, and leaders of trade union branches,   all working on voluntary bases without payment. We even had a Youth Corps Member assigned to the project and we eventually acquired an office building with a clerk and a messenger on the payroll.

I remember when we started, how we used to sit under a tree and listen to Eskor as he clarified one political economy principle or another for the workers, journalists and the university teachers alike during passionate debates. One lesson that Eskor taught us was that contrary to the assumption by the ruling class and the masses alike that ethnicity and religion were the most important principles in Nigerian politics, the dominant principle remained class consciousness. This was because, according to him, whatever your religion or ethnicity, you would have privileged access to the governor or the top traditional ruler in any state if you are rich whereas the indigenes would never have that if they are poor. Hence, the masses should transcend ethnicity and sectarianism and join their fellow sufferers to break the chains of suffering in the land because our people had suffered enough (the motto of Mass Line).

Working with the Calabar Municipal Government of the late Bassey Ekpo Bassey, the Directorate for Literacy supported the setting up of micro industries, the construction of new school buildings, the abolition of refuse-collection levies and the abolition of school fees in elementary schools even against the opposition of the military governor of the state. Imagine what could have been achieved if every university in the country embarked on similar outreach projects to combat literacy across the country in alliance with popular organizations, with every local government authority and with the additional support of every state government and the federal government. Corporate citizens and wealthy individuals could also endow funds to support such literacy campaigns.

Similar projects should be set up in partnership with popular organizations across the country to help us to address the shameful statistics that the National Population Council announced recently – that in some states of the country, more than 70% of the adults remain illiterate while the better states could only boast of about 70% literacy rates and many of the children are dropping out from school. With support from the federal, state and local government authorities, in addition to organized labour and other popular organizations, I am certain that we could launch a similar program nation-wide with a target of 100% literacy rate within four years. Cuba did something similar after the revolution of 1959 by mobilizing the literate youth and funding them to go across the country and emancipate the entire population from illiteracy. I believe that Nigerians are capable of achieving this feat even without waiting for a Cuba-type revolution if the political will is there to tackle illiteracy decisively.

The above assumption is based on the hypotheses that anyone who completes four years of schooling should be able to read and write. Thus, if we embark on an aggressive literacy campaign from now, by the time the Jonathan-Sambo presidency completes its term in four years, we would have a 100% literacy rate in the country. This would be a major achievement by Nigerians and the effects would be felt across the country given that illiteracy is correlated with higher infant mortality, higher maternal mortality, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of violence in the polity, as Festus Iyayi inferred in his novel, Violence.

Some commentators have suggested that the problems of illiteracy and political violence are mainly Northern problems to be addressed there only. I beg to disagree. Illiteracy is a problem for us all and we all should be concerned about it in every corner of the nation. Moreover, political violence took place in every part of the country during the elections and not exclusively in the north. If the results of the elections had been dichotomized as it was but with Buhari emerging as the winner, it is predictable that parts of the south could have exploded in violence the way the north did. I agree that the ones who orchestrate political violence are frequently the members of the elite who are themselves relatively well educated. However, if we educate all our people, it will be more difficult for politicians to mobilize educated youth and ask them to go and kill and die for them when they know that the corrupt politicians are not worth dying for.

It is true that literacy is not all that it takes to end a culture of violence given that the most literate societies are far from being violence–free. In that connection, we will need to plan to go beyond mass literacy towards higher learning for at least 10% of our population as WEB Du Bois once demanded for the former enslaved African Americans. Hence more scholarships should be made available for poor students with courses on study skills to help them to master the arts and science of higher learning, thereby improving their life chances but also making them more likely to resort to dialogue as the preferred solution to disagreements. On graduation from higher education institutions, those who complete the National Youth Service Corps should be invited to enter for business plan competitions and the ones with the best business plans should be given grants, not loans, to set up their businesses with support from business extension services to help them to succeed and thereby create more jobs for their fellow youth.

The cowardly killing of Youth Service Corps members during the violence comes from the mindset that sees them as educated people and so the only way for the illiterate to rise up was by pulling down those who had risen rather than rising with the brethren and sisteren. The allocation of payment to their families is commendable but I agree with those who say that the payment should be increased at least four times to twenty million naira per family. In addition, the innocent poor who were killed during the violence should also have at least one million naira paid to their families as compensation. Finally, the victims of similar political violence in our history should also be paid damages that would be token reminders to all that we value the lives of all our people and to discourage violent agitators from unleashing this brutal orgy of violence periodically.

Violence may be endemic because the country is yet to address the pogroms that led to the civil war in any meaningful way, suggesting that such mass violence is tolerated with impunity. Since we cannot punish every perpetrator of mass violence as Rwanda discovered after the genocide, we need a policy of reparative justice by allocating huge funds for the rehabilitation of our fellow citizens any time and every time ignorance leads to massacres. Perhaps, if Yakubu Gowon had announced billions of pounds with which to rehabilitate the survivors of the pogrom as Chukwuemeka Ojukwu and Nnamdi Azikiwe had called for at the time, and as Wole Soyinka advocates, we may never have experienced a genocidal war in which the lives of Nigerians were cheapened enough to be wasted every now and then as part of the national psyche. It is not yet too late to address that monumental injustice the way submissions at the Justice Oputa Panel recommended.

Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061: agozino@vt.edu

Libya Minus One

Libya­­­ Minus One

By Biko Agozino

‘If a continuous function is observed to be positive at a certain point in time, and then observed to be negative at a later point, then there must be at least one point between the two observed points where the function is zero, where it crosses the line separating the positive sphere from the negative sphere. That point of “transition,” that critical point, can always be determined to any degree of approximation desired. I remember this theorem because it is true not only for mathematical functions but also for historical processes. It is, in particular, true for Libya – and, of course, Egypt’. Madunagu, March 17, The Guardian.

Edwin Madunagu has taken the unprecedented step of setting a problem to be solved by his teaming readers instead of attempting to provide all the answers as usual. As someone who hardly ever misses reading his weekly column, I cannot wait to weigh in with an attempt to answer his question about when Gaddafi’s Libyan Revolution passed the point of transition from being a positive event, if ever it was, to become a negative one. My very limited knowledge of mathematics will probably result in errors here that I am sure a mathematician like Madunagu would forgive and correct.

An internet search tells me that zero was the newest number borrowed by European mathematicians because the African inventors of geometry dealt with real construction problems like the construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt and so did not have to worry about a zero pyramid or a minus one pyramid for that matter. The ancient Egyptians, of course, knew about the quantity zero and represented it with the symbol, cypher, as the code for the body when the soul had departed to the world of the ancestors to continue its life in eternity, a condition that is far from zero life or minus one life. The Arabs later called this number safir before the Greeks learned of it and called it zero. An Indian finally used the notation 0 to represent it and the number has revolutionized mathematics both as a numeral and as a place-holder as in 101. Roman numerals still do not have a zero but their numbering system is consequently cumbersome.

Mathematicians have written theses on the square root of minus one and concluded that it is an irrational number that is assumed for the sake of argumentation but Cheikh Anta Diop concluded convincingly that there was no need to go to negative functions in search of irrational numbers because the ancient Egyptians already knew that the number two, though positive, remains an irrational number because it has no rational square root that would yield the number two when multiplied by itself. We may never discover the square root of minus one but we know that there is no such thing as a zero or minus one person, nor zero or minus one country.

I wish to contribute to the solution by starting with a concrete reformulation of the abstract theorem of Olubummo as summarized above by Madunagu. Mathematicians are always proud of the exactness of their science because one plus one is always equal to two. But what if the quantity in the theorem is one woman plus one cruise missile? Surely, the answer is not two! Two objects; two things; two creatures; two phenomena? Not at all, the answer remains one woman and one cruise missile. Even if the missile explodes and kills the woman, the resulting sum is not zero given that there are many more where they came from. In other words, it is logically difficult to find a minus one human being or minus one cruise missile as a negative function that passed through the hypothetical transition point of zero.

Similarly, Libya cannot be said to have moved from a positive function to a zero and finally to a negative function as an explanation for the mass uprising that quickly turned into an armed insurrection, leading to a ‘humanitarian’ intervention by NATO forces to enforce a UN no-fly zone (no-fly suggests zero flying but paradoxically, they fly numerous sorties over the no-fly zone) that the African Union urged to be halted for a comprehensive cease-fire and that Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin dismissed as a call to crusade, while the Arab League had second thoughts about supporting it earlier. I am sure that you have heard the joke: if a vegetarian lives on vegetables, what does a humanitarian live on?

Seriously, Libya cannot be said to be a zero nation or a failing (negative) one given that the country has been consistently ranked highest among African countries on the Human Development Index of the UNDP. With only six million people, however, the size of the population of Libya is equal to or less than that of Lagos state in Nigeria and so the fact that the health, education, transportation, employment, housing and military infrastructures of the country are much better than those of most African countries can only be expected, given the huge oil and gas revenues accruing to the country, the people deserve to expect more.

Gaddafi, like any leader in the world, like any individual human being, is full contradictions that resulted in many mistakes but he is far from zero or a negative function as a human being or leader. He will always be remembered as the African leader who has pushed the project of African Union government more energetically than almost all others with the significant exception of Nkrumah. Rather than always focusing on their micro-nationalism, progressive Africans should contribute to the campaign for African Union government to help Africans prevent any attempts at genocidal violence internally and rule out foreign military interventions that have contributed to the underdevelopment of Africa over the years.

Without recounting the achievements of Gaddafi and his errors in the past four decades, I agree with those Libyans who say that 41 years in office must be more than enough for him and so he should step down and allow a democratic election to choose his successor in a free and fair election. The rebels who reportedly killed black Africans and labeled them mercenaries before inviting foreigners to bomb their own country should be ordered by the UN to back off and lay down their arms while Gaddafi should order the troops back to the barracks and allow the formation of political parties, the draft of a new constitution with provisions for equal representation of men and women in the government and a general election in which any African should be allowed to move to the state of Libya and contest for office, work, study or do business as an African Union government citizenship model to be emulated across Africa. It was reported that when the demonstrations started in Libya, Gaddafi joined the demonstration and declared his support for the revolution. If this report is true, he should step back from his defiance and re-embrace the legitimate uprising of the masses so long as the opposition sticks to non-violent methods of democratic struggles.

In conclusion, the reason why the masses have risen up to demand for increased democratization of their societies is not because the governments of North Africa are zero or negative in their function but because, as CLR James pointed out, human beings are not like lower animals that may be satisfied with food and shelter, human beings deserve a say in how their society is governed and they will demand this irrespective of the intentions or records of the rulers. This is not due to the influence of outside or domestic agitators but the result of human consciousness that problems of democracy could only be solved through greater democracy and not less.

President Obama made a similar point in his speech in Cairo in 2009 and he should be reminded of this doctrine of his and urged to back away from the blunder of being the first black president of America only to authorize the bombing of Africa supposedly to aid democratization. The African philosophy of non-violence is a proven better alternative strategy for democratic struggles worldwide. As Horace Campbell has argued in his book on the method of organization that made the election of Obama possible and in his essays on the North African mass uprisings, what is at work is the African Fractal technology of non-lineal geometry characterized by self-similarity, recursion, self-organization, infinity, and scaling of far from equilibrium states of orderly chaos that will be difficult for any Cartesian geometry of militaristic or monetary lineal power to defeat, distort, destroy or neutralize with bribery or delusions of humanitarianism.

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

Obama's Moral Victory

Obama's Moral Victory

Dr Biko AgozinoMon, 29 Nov 2010

Obama's star has not faded at all, contrary to some speculations, it continues to shine bright, but many viewers are deliberately wearing blinkers, and are blinded by hate and anger and cannot see that in reality, we are witnessing one of the most historic presidencies of all time. In two years, Obama has achieved more than most presidents have achieved in four years, despite having to deal with intense opposition, not only from the other party, but also from within his own.

He has passed the biggest health reform act of all time in American history to extend health coverage to millions of Americans, but the Tea Party activists and some so-called Bluedog Democrats campaigned against what they dubbed 'Obama Care'.  Well, 70% of Tea Party candidates lost in the recent midterm elections, as well as most of the Bluedog Democrats. The surprising thing is that the Tea Party losers are prancing about claiming victory and the humble Obama was forced to concede that he got a Schellacking. What Schellacking?

Obama promised to end the war in Iraq responsibly, and he is on his way to accomplishing this with over 100,000 US troops removed from harm's way; with the remaining 50,000 scheduled to leave Iraq by August 2011. This is also the time that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan would commence in earnest.  Stanley McKrystal, the military commander in Afghanistan who disagreed his Commander in Chief was wisely fired and replaced. It is an example of the African philosophy of non-violence which Obama exhibited in opposing a war of choice that America was fighting even while he was just a candidate. He went on to win the election by beating the decorated war veteran John McCain who was out of touch with the mood of the electorate.

Obama has lowered taxes for the middle class several times in his two years in office, by reducing the rates of federal tax with-holding from earnings. He has also used the stimulus package to save the American banking system and the car manufacturing industry; saving jobs while also making a profit of over $28 billion dollars on the interests from the loans.

Obama announced a plan to close Guantanamo Bay on day one, but he has been blocked by ideologues who do not want to see suspects tried in civilian courts, and jailed in conventional prisons if convicted. He has given Cuban Americans greater opportunity to remit money to their families in Cuba, and to visit them without undue restriction. He has reached out to Muslims to open dialogues and offer intellectual and moral leadership rather than the threat of force alone. Obama has helped many Americans to save their homes or to buy a home with the $8,000 tax credit to new home buyers, and he has increased the grants to those who want to go to university to improve their skills.

The reason why many Americans are angry with Obama is because he inherited the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, and many have amnesia of the fact that this mess was created by the Republicans over eight years, turning record surpluses into record deficits by giving huge tax cuts to the richest 2% of the population, and by waging a wasteful war of choice.

Now that Obama has pushed the American family car out from the deep ditch into which the reckless Republicans plunged it, they swagger back and ask to be given the key again. He is right to tell them to get in the passenger seat because it is obvious that, as one West Indian calypsonian once put it, their drivers can't drive!

Many are blaming Obama for trying to reach a compromise with the other party, but he is right to do so. There are liberals in the Republican party just as there are conservative Democrats.  His job description says that he is President of the United states of America, and not just for his party, his race, or his friends alone.

Once the unemployment rate is reduced significantly, many Americans would see Obama more for his accomplishments. He might even be able to reduce unemployment further by giving billions of dollars to fund business start-ups for the unemployed.

However, he still needs to deliver a policy success for people of African descent, specifically by endowing the slavery reparations fund, ending capital punishment in America, and ending the war on drugs in the next two years to guarantee that his Presidency would rank among the best ever.

Passing the funding in Congress for the damages won by African American farmers against the department of Agriculture despite calculated racist insults from several Teabaggers in congress is an indication that the Obama presidency will yet deliver more historic achievements for the American people.

An earlier version of this opinion was published in caribbeanicon.com in response to an editorial opinion suggesting the contrary.