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

Liberation Sociology

Colleagues,

I was told that Joe Feagin mentioned me in his Plenary at the Southern Sociological Society meeting last year. This year, the Third Edition of his Liberation Sociology text has just come out from Paradigm Publishers and I am one of the sociologists profiled multiple times in the book. As if this is not enough honor for me, I am credited in the book as developing a paradigm that the authors called 'Liberation Criminology: The Decolonization Paradigm' which was highlighted in a couple of pages of their book.

https://paradigm.presswarehouse.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=409713

I recommend the book to all social scientists and all those working to make the world a better place. Here is my personal description of the book:

Numerous sociologists have exhaustively analyzed multiple systems of oppression that plague society in many ways; the entire point, however, to paraphrase some pioneer liberation sociologists, is to free the entire global society from all systems of oppression. Enter Liberation Sociology as a major contribution from a long line of critical activist intellectuals who were mostly sidelined by mainstream bourgeois sociologists until Joe Feagin and colleagues courageously came out with the eye-opening innovative eponymous text. Now in its third edition, it comes with extensive highlighting of even more contributions from hitherto relatively marginalized critical sociologists for the benefit of every discipline of social science and as a contribution to the liberation of the entire global society from all systems of oppression.

This kind of recognition did not happen overnight but resulted from the support of colleagues that deserve to be mentioned: Thanks to you all for making this happen especially in the ASC round-table review of Counter-Colonial Criminology that we later published in maiden issue of our journal, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, that I continue to edit as the founding editor-in-chief. Professor Ihekwoaba Onwudiwe started the ball rolling in 1998 when he reviewed my first book, Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (which started the Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations that I continue to edit), and identified what he called the Decolonization paradigm as my major contribution.

In 1995, an excerpt from the doctoral dissertation that led to the book was awarded the Mike Brake Memorial Prize in Radical Social Policy and Social work by an international jury of eminent scholars. This was followed by Professor Shaun Gabbidon in 2007 when he devoted several pages to my work in one of his book. Then Professor Emmanuel Onyeozili had the audacity  to mention my name in the same sentence as intellectual giants in his contribution to the round-table review. Dr. Mark Christian was generous in the African Studies Review for crediting Counter-Colonial Criminology with making an original contribution to the discipline of Black Studies even while critiquing the choice to focus on feminist theory rather than on Africana Womanism. Professor Temitope Oriola followed up (whilst still a graduate student) with that rave review essay on Counter-Colonial Criminology that credited me with founding Post-Colonial Criminology and colleagues from around the world kept it up as you can see from the current special issue of our journal honoring the 10th anniversary of Counter-colonial Criminology. May others support your work the way you have supported mine

Biko

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.

Methodologies Of A Master Mentor

By Biko Agozino

Which mentor or teacher contributed most to your academic success? It is difficult to choose without diminishing all those teachers who formally and informally contributed towards making me what I am today. After reflecting on this question for a while, I recently called my Form 4 History teacher at Awgu High School, Nenwe, in Nigeria to thank him for being the best mentor that I ever had and for sharing the skills that I continue to pass on to younger scholars. He instantly told me that another student of his who is now a Professor of Medicine paid similar compliments to him recently. Good to know that I am in good company.

Mr. Simon Okolo was then a young ex-Seminarian who came to us in the middle of the year when we had no History teacher. In the one term that he spent with us, he instantly departed from the tradition of dictating or copying verbose notes on the blackboard for us to take down and memorize, then regurgitate in the exams. The young Auxiliary Teacher, who was probably younger than some of his students, chose to give us bullet-points, or what would pass for Powerpoint slides today, as notes and assured us that once we can remember the key points and explain them in our own words with illustrations, we would pass any examination with flying colors.

We were incredulous and thought that either the young man, who had just completed the equivalent of High School himself, did not know how to teach or he was a lazy teacher. In our Senior year, again we had no History teacher but since history was my best subject (a shame that Nigeria has banned the teaching of history probably out of paranoia that the history of Biafra will creep up sooner or later), I registered for history in the O’Level examination for West African School Certificate. This is not as daring as it sounds because I also registered for Igbo language without any teacher in the subject and I also registered for Commerce, a subject that I was never taught formally.

Thanks to the skills that Mr. Okolo taught us, I aced History with A1 and I must have applied similar skills to Economics where I got A3, same as English where I had a good ear for grammar but never learned the formal rules. In all, I passed my nine subjects and made First Division in WASC but I was still hooked on cramming large chunks of information that took a lot of efforts to memorize and remember.

It was not until my Freshman year at the University of Calabar that I was formally introduced to study skills as part of the Use of English 101 compulsory course. The memory aids and note-taking skills vaguely reminded me of the note-giving methods of Mr. Okolo but I continued to cram for decent grades.

Then in my Sophormore year, Mr. Okolo gained admission as a Freshman in the same university and since we hail from the same Awgu Local Government Area, we became like family in our small association for the handful of students from Awgu. He is now called Simon Okolochukwu but we called him Brother Si. The day he matriculated, we contributed money to buy drinks and have a small party for him and other freshmen from Awgu who also matriculated that day.

When we returned to Hall 4 where we all resided, in Malabo, the name given to the residence halls by the students in recognition of what we saw as harsh living conditions with eight students per room, I asked one of the brothers to take a picture that I had been composing in my head. I told him to wait until I had posed on the balcony in a contemplative mood before he took the picture from the ground floor. While I was posing, ‘denge pause’, I did not know that Bro Si had contrived with the photographer to wait for him to bomb my picture. After the negative was developed and the picture printed, I was a little pissed off but looking at the picture again recently, I realized that Bro Si was trying to tell me something. With his academic gown, he stood like an angel behind me and the window of Hall 4 appeared to be smiling upon us like a gigantic Calabar mask.

When I shared this impression about the picture with Bro Si, he told me that it is a calling of his since childhood when he had an encounter with Our Lady of Fatima. He sees his mission as that of a peer mentor. Then I reminded him that he was the one who convinced me that I was a First Class student. He had seen my results and immediately exclaimed that I was a straight A student. ‘Na lie’, I told him, I only got a few As and lots of Bs. ‘Surely’, he insisted, ‘if you repeat what you did to get the As systematically, you will get straight As’. I did so in my Junior year and my grades shot through the roofs because I stopped cramming and started applying the mnemonics and note-taking skills across all my courses. Just as he said, I ended up with First Class Honors in Sociology.

When I shared this testimony with him over the phone, he said that he wished that I had told him earlier so that he too could try for a First Class Hons despite our shared condition of skipping subsidized meals to make ends meet as poor students. But I thought that he already knew since he was the one who taught me the successful study skills.

He is now retired as a High School teacher with a Master’s Degree and he has published two books on English composition to continue doing what he does best, mentoring his students and peers. Anyone with funding for a deserving doctoral student in English composition should contact this exceptional young man. Thank you Bro Si for your mentorship. May someone else mentor you too.