By Obi Nwakanma, Vanguard
My attempt this week is to bring some attention to the subject of the Asaba massacres, one of the haunting ghosts of Nigeria’s last civil war. I pay particular tribute to Emma Okocha – Onye Amuma Cable – author of Blood on the Niger, the chilling account of the Asaba massacres of October 7, 1967.
More than any other individual, Okocha has pursued the Asaba story with the temerity of a survivor, and the hardnosed instincts of a well-trained journalist. He has brought attention to the great evil that Nigerians love to forget: the attempt at selective annihilation of a people through acts of terrible war crimes.
Asaba has become Okocha’s life work; an obsession. He says it is to bring closure, and give final rest to those who perished that day in Asaba. But I suspect something much deeper and personal. Of course it is up close and personal for Emma Okocha. He is from Asaba; he survived the massacres; but his entire family perished.
The Igbo name their children, “Echezona/Echezola”- never forget, and “Odoemene/Ozoemena”- May this never happen again. These are names in recoil from harsh memory.
These I think are the profound sentiments that propel Okocha’s pursuit to reopen the case of the Asaba mass killings, compel the official acknowledgement of war crimes by the Nigerian government, and force a visible war memorial in honour of the dead of October 1967 – the “Asaba Memorial.”
Happily, Emma Okocha’s work is drawing attention to one of modern Africa’s darkest war crimes. Last week, the University of Southern Florida, Tampa, convened the Asaba Memorial symposium to reopen the issue, and unveil “the long-buried tragedy” led by the anthropologists Elizabeth Bird and Erin Kimmerle and Fraser Ottanelli, chairman of the department of history, in collaboration with the USF Libraries Holocaust and Genocide Studies Centre.
They have also recruited a Tampa Police homicide detective Charles Massucci to gather documents, record oral histories and to examine mass graves and recover evidence of the Asaba genocide.
Let me briefly place the Asaba tragedy in context for those who may either have forgotten, or who may not know about it, especially many contemporary Nigerians who may have been born after the war, and who ought to know the many evils that haunt Nigeria.
In May 1967, Eastern Nigeria declared secession from the old federation of Nigeria and declared itself the republic of Biafra. Eastern Nigerian secession naturally culminated in the Nigerian political crisis leading to the January 15, 1966 coup led by Emma Ifeajuna that overthrew the government of the first republic, and the July 29, 1966, led by Murtala Muhammed, and directed by Yakubu Gowon who subsequently took over as military head of state.
The July coup spiraled into the selective annihilation of all Igbo military officers and snowballed into a pogrom of the Igbo.
The Aburi agreements reached to stem the slide collapsed, and the Gowon administration in Lagos peremptorily dissolved the regions and created the twelve states on May 27, 1967, thus subverting as the government in the East saw it, the fundamental authority and rights of the regional governments, and complicating the East’s capacity to offer security to its people who had fled to it.
Odumegwu-Ojukwu, military governor of the Eastern region, on advise from the Eastern Nigerian Consultative Assembly declared secession, and announced the independent republic of Biafra three days later, on May 30, 1967.
The stage was set for an epic conflict. The government in Lagos declared war and attacked Biafra on July 6, fighting from Ogoja and Nsukka. By September, the Biafran capital was threatened.
That September, however, Biafra launched its own attack, a diversionary and tactical move through the Midwest; brilliant in conception, but poor in execution.
Brigadier Victor Banjo, leading the “Liberation Army” from Onitsha, made a lightning move into Benin City and was close to taking Lagos and Ibadan, in what then seemed a cake walk, when he suddenly lost the will to fight.
Old Biafra intelligence sources hint that Banjo had been told in unmistakable terms, in his meeting with the deputy British high commissioner in Benin, that the Brits might be forced to provide logistical support to Gowon from the sea, and attack Lagos with its special forces already nearby, off the coasts.
The prospects of the Brits bombing Lagos and turning “Yorubaland” into a bloody battle field forced Banjo to stymie the Liberation Army in Benin City, and order a hasty withdrawal. It also allowed the federal troops led by Murtala Muhammed to reorganize and retake the Midwest. Asaba was doomed from that moment.
The massacre of Igbo civilians began from Benin City with the arrival of the federal forces. Folks in Benin went house by house identifying and killing their Igbo neighbours. Murtala’s Army already war drunk thus arrived Asaba with bloodlust.
The account of what happened in Asaba is well documented in Emma Okocha’s Blood on the Niger. It is also the subject of my poem, The Horsemen, an elegy to that era.
But to put it quite simply, the troops under Murtala Muhammed and the late Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo, both of whom also ironically met death on the same day in 1976, supervised the killing of the adult males of Asaba.
They had ordered them to dance at the town square, separated the men from the women, and killed them.
Ironically, one of those killed was Sydney Asiodu, a potential Olympic medalist and undergraduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His brother, Philip Asiodu was then a super permanent secretary in Gowon’s administration in Lagos.
Even then, Asaba was only one of the places where the Nigerian military committed war crimes of such horrendous magnitude during that war, and have sought to cover it up and even erase them.
Many of those who have strutted about as Nigeria’s military heroes indeed ought to be brought to account for their war crimes.
It is the legacy of impunity that continues to haunt Nigeria, and continues to breed the kind of viciousness that would lead to the mindless destruction of people be it at Umuechem, Odi or Gboko because no one yet has been brought to account for such horrendous acts.
The Asaba memorial will be an important first step towards full disclosure and possible restitution.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Death of a Missionary Priest, Father Aengus Finucane
Written by John O'Shaughnessy, Limerick Post
FATHER Aengus Finucane, the former Chief Executive of the Third World charity Concern, and a native of Limerick, where he was made a Freeman of the City, has died, aged 77. He died in the Spiritan Fathers’ nursing home in Kimmage after a short illness. The late Fr Finucane is survived by two sisters and three brothers.
He was a product of Limerick CBS and later studied Philosophy, and was ordained a Holy Ghost priest in 1958.
The Nigerian civil war four decades ago catapulted him into emergency aid.
As a Spiritan missionary in Biafra, a region that was trying to breakaway from Nigeria, he was confronted with famine.
He joined parishioners in braving bombing raids to unload relief cargoes at a local airstrip.
Supporters of Fr Finucane and his fellow missionaries raised almost €4m and sent four shiploads of humanitarian aid. They founded Africa Concern.
Minister of State for Overseas Development, Peter Power, expressed deep regret at the death of Fr Aengus Finucane.
He said:
“As a fellow Limerick man, I would like to pay particular tribute to Fr Aengus Finucane, who always retained a great interest in the cultural and sporting life of the city, although he was often thousands of miles away.
“He was a marvellous ambassador for the city and this was recognised by the University of Limerick, who conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws. His passing will be much mourned in Limerick.
“He had been a tireless force for good across the globe for more than four decades. As a founder member of Concern, Fr Finucane harnessed his great energy, commitment and kindness to effect real improvements in the lives of the poor and those devastated by war and disaster.
“From Biafra in the late 1960s to Bangladesh in the 1970s and Rwanda more recently, Fr Finucane brought relief and hope to millions of people whose lives were blighted by poverty and injustice.
“More than three decades after he worked in Bangladesh, locals recently remembered him as a “giant of a man”, who not only provided food and clean water, but established training centres for women and schools for children. He provided material help, but also brought them hope and the opportunity to build their own lives.
“This is Fr Finucane’s legacy and we in Ireland, along with millions of people across the world, owe him a debt of gratitude. We extend our sympathies to his brother, Fr Jack, his family and his many friends and colleagues across the world”.
Concern’s current CEO Tom Arnold described Fr Finucane as one of the greatest men of his generation who used his gifts for the welfare of the world’s poorest people.
‘He had an absolute commitment to the poorest of the poor: his work with Concern saved countless lives and improved the lives of many millions of people”.
An Taoiseach Brian Cowen, described Fr Aengus as a great humanitarian and his life’s work was to help alleviate the suffering of the poorest of the poor.
“He has made a truly impressive contribution to improving the quality of life of people in the Third World and his courageous efforts saved a huge number of lives”.
President of the University of Limerick, Professor Don Barry, paid the following tribute: “Father Finucane worked tirelessly in the service of the world’s most disadvantaged peoples.
“His passing will leave a void that is as immeasurable as the number of lives touched by his contributions.
“He was champion for the poor, an advocate for the downtrodden and risked his life working in many of the world’s worst war zones. Father Finucane was an inspirational figure who never despaired in the face of new challenges. We would like to offer our condolences to Father Finucane’s family at this very sad time”.
Co-founder of photographic agency Press 22, Liam Burke spoke fondly of Father Finucane, “He was one of the most remarkable men I ever met. He inspired everyone who met him”.
Mr Burke, who first met Fr Finucane in 1989, said they recently watched the All-Ireland final together, “He was in great spirits, although he was a bit disappointed that Tipperary lost. He was always a great supporter of Limerick GAA”.
Although Father Finucane travelled to many nations carrying out humanitarian work, Mr Burke, who had travelled abroad with him in a professional capacity, said he had a soft spot for one country. “One of his favourite countries was Bangladesh, he spent many years there and always took any opportunity he had to go back”.
Liam described Father Finucane as a proud Limerickman, “He was very very proud of Limerick and he always defended it against its critics”.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Biafran Retrospect: Umu-Igbo Express Gratitude to a Man Who Saved Them
By Rev. Father Tobe Nnamani
Dr George Hussler and Rev Father Tobe Nnamani
Gabon 1970: A gift given to Dr Hussler by the Biafran children at "Village KM 11"
Rev. Dr. Hussler and Chief Joseph Mmeh
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
- Cicero-
Preamble
In April 1968, the survival of the nascent Republic of Biafra was hanging on the balance. After the fall of Enugu in September 1967, Biafran major cities continued to fall one after the other into the hands of the enemy. Consequently, what was left of the Biafran Secretariat consisted of a mobile van moved from one corner to the other. While major world powers watched with folded arms, debating on the proper interpretation and application of the principles of territorial sovereignty and non-intervention in the OAU Charter, the Federal soldiers continued their ferocious onslaught on the defenseless Biafran population. They rampaged, pounded, bombed and shelled villages and towns including hospitals and schools with reckless abandon. The level of death-toll and human misery shocked the conscience of the international community. And, as Biafran borders continued to shrink by the day, the population density jumped from its pre-war level of 500 persons per square kilometer to 2,000. In spite of all these seemingly insurmountable odds, the Biafrans were determined to defend themselves to the last man or so it seemed. However, as a result of the total and suffocating blockade by land, sea and air, the resultant crushing effect of hunger and disease threatened to snuff life out of the fledging republic and its traumatized citizens. It was in the midst of this excruciating situation that the Christian Churches all over the world including Jewish Synagogues in America launched one of the greatest relief assistance in the history of humanitarian intervention.
One man who played a leading role in this timely intervention was Rev. Fr. Dr. Georg Hüssler, former President of Caritas International. This kind-hearted man of God celebrated his 88th Birthday on July 7, 2009. Prior to this date, the Co-ordinator of Nzuko Umuigbo World-Wide Inc., Chief Joe Mmeh did an effective networking; he sent out emails to many Umuigbo both home and abroad requesting them to send a congratulatory birthday message and _expression of gratitude to a man who gave them food when they were starving to death and thereby saved them from total annihilation. For, according to the Roman Poet Cicero, “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but, the parent of all others;” it is also an attitude that leads to beatitude. The response to this appeal was over-whelming as post-cards and emails poured into Dr. Hüssler’s letter and email boxes in waves. The content of this parent of all virtues was laden with emotions as many of those who sent them recounted the agony they or their parents and relatives went through and how they might not have seen the light of day without his timely intervention. To crown this out-pouring of gratitude and give it a somewhat personal touch, Chief Mmeh and the author paid a courtesy call on Father Hüssler on July 23, 2009 in his home in Freiburg/Breisgau, south-west Germany . The Octogenarian - still relatively strong, came to the door to meet us. After exchanging pleasantries, he took us down the memory lane and recounted with passion and astonishing picturesque details how Caritas (Relief Organisation founded in May 1946 in Germany) in tandem with other relief agencies and good-spirited individuals airlifted thousands of tons of relief materials to Uli Airstrip. The following is a sketch of the tit-bits from the meeting.
Who is Rev. Fr. Dr. Georg Hüssler?
Father Georg Hüssler was born on July 7, 1921 in Einöd , Saarland , Germany and grew up in Elsass. He was a medical student when World War II broke out; he enlisted into the Germany army and worked as a Sanitary Inspector. When the war ended, he proceeded to Rome where he studied Theology and was ordained priest in 1951. After his doctoral studies, he became an Assistant to the then President of German Caritas with Headquarters in Freiburg . He rose through the ranks to become the Secretary-General and later the President of German Caritas, a post he held for 22 years from 1969 to 1991.In between the time , he was also appoint President of Caritas International. Dr. Hüssler was decorated with three Honours by the three tiers of government in Germany , namely; the local government of his city Freiburg , the State government of Baden-Württemberg and the Federal Republic of Germany. Dr. Hüssler was interested in both aspects of the Catholic Social Teaching. On the practical side, he distinguished himself in the excellent way he managed the affairs of Caritas in the whole world bringing relief and succor to thousands of people ravaged by war and natural disasters. On the theoretical level, he authored five insightful books among which are Caritas and Pastoral Work (1985), Life in the 20th Century (1998) and Humanity as Spirituality (2006). He has retired from active service and lives a quiet life in Freiburg
The saving Role of Relief Agencies in Biafra:TheJoint Church Aid (JCA)
It is pertinent to get a glimpse of the complex and dangerous circumstances in which the relief agencies operated. In fact, all the contentious elements in complex humanitarian emergencies interplayed in the Biafran war such as the possibility of exploiting existing differences within the civil society; the issue of disputed legitimacy of host authorities; high prevalence of hunger and disease; keen and probing journalistic interest; the likelihood of manipulating relief for military and diplomatic advantages and apparent division among the international relief agencies. While all these complex issues were being discussed in high and low quarters, the estimated monthly death-toll in Biafra was put at 750,000.
The first major huddle was the non-agreement of Biafran and Nigerian governments on the route through which relief aid should be supplied. While Nigeria wanted relief to pass through Lagos , Biafra on the other hand saw it as suicidal to let their food pass through enemy hands. When Obilagu Airstrip came as a compromise, the federal troops captured it within a few weeks and Uli was now the only outlet through which relief came to Biafra . The Nigerian government strongly opposed it and refused to guarantee safety of flights landing at Uli. The Red Cross was the first to airlift food in August 1968 but was compelled to stop after one of its planes was shot down by the Nigerian government killing the entire crew.
At this juncture, the JCA which was made up of 37 international Church bodies from 28countries picked up the gauntlet. It defied the federal governments order and began one of the most efficient and effective relief Airlifts in the history of humanitarian intervention. Fr. Hüssler told us that this was the first time relief agencies charted their own planes to supply relief materials. He recounted how he and Father Tony Byrne the Deputy Director of JCA with representatives from the Churches went to France to purchase four planes. According to Fr. Hussler, “initially, we hired one experienced Pilot, Frank Wharton (an American of Latvian descent) who was later joined by Gustav von Rosen another pilot from Sweden among others.” Von Rosen brought four of his own planes and flew relief aids into Biafra free of charge. However, as the Nigerian government was vehemently against this life-line, Uli Airstrip which was only 8,000 foot was bombarded day and night but after each bombardment, it was quickly repaired to received the next flights. In the end, JCA airlifted about 60,000 tons of assorted relief materials in 5,300 flights. The Red Cross, before its short-lived assistance, ferried 41,000 tons of food and medical equipment in 4,000 flights. There were also significant contributions by other smaller relief agencies. The entire relief action mounted by JCA gulped the sum of about $116 million dollars and another $250 million dollars was invested in it by American private interests. This wonderful work of mercy was accomplished but not without heavy human loses on the part of the helpers. Thus, by the end of 1969, 27 pilots had lost their lives with 10 planes short down by the Nigerian Air Force.
JCA’s assistance was not limited to sending food to Biafra ; it also came in some other significant ways. For example, when in January 1968, the Nigeria government changed its currency, Biafra became literally bankcrupt. Even though it printed its own currency, the purchasing power of the Biafran money worth little or nothing. The relief agencies exchanged the Biafran pounds at the rate of $2.80. In this regard, Fr. Hüssler made a handsome donation in cash even after the war had ended. According to him “unknown to me, on January 15, 1970, when I flew to Lagos to meet Gowon, the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war was announced that day. Now, the Biafrans were left with no money since the Biafran Currency had become worthless. I had 100,000 Deutsche Mark in my bag which I changed into Nigerian Currency, chartered a Taxi and drove down to Onitsha where the money was handed over the Church through the then Archbishop Arinze, who took it with two hands and expressed his gratitude.”
The relief planes did not lift relief materials alone. “We discovered that the planes were flying empty back to Europe, so we quickly loaded children and the sick into the planes and flew them to safety in Europe and some African countries such as Gabon , Sao- Tomé etc.” Fr. Hüssler personally took two children from Okporo in Orlu to Europe - Roseline and Moses. Roseline had a hole in her head while Moses had a broken jaw. Unfortunately, Roseline did not survive but Moses is still alive today. Dr. Hüssler related to us that one of the things that touched him during those turbulent days was the magnanimity shown to 3,000 Biafran children by late Oma Bongo of Gabon . He gave the JCA a very large expanse of land where an English school was built. Bongo personally gathered about 56 competent personnel from different countries to give the children sound education. Another 1,000 children were also airlifted to Sao-Tomé – a Portuguese Island perching on the Atlantic Ocean . Fr. Hüssler also told us that he was delighted by the way Gowon spontaneously gave permission for the children airlifted to Gabon to come back to Nigeria .
Conclusion
This was how we spent the two and half hours with him and his former secretary –Frau Engesser, when he was Caritas President . It was indeed a pleasant company. As Dr. Hüssler re-lived this intense experience, tears of joy rolled down his chicks and he ended by saying in German Language “also, das war doch eine schöne Arbeit und ich bin Gott dankbar” – that was indeed a nice work and I thank God for that. We were very glad that we met him in person. There are still a lot of other people out there who played decisive roles during those 30 months of horror and degradation. One such person is John Doyle – a Holy Ghost Father who is now over 80 years old and lives in Reutershügelweg4, D-18069, Rostock , Germany . It would be good for Umuigbo who live in this area to pay him a visit and, on behalf of all Biafrans in general and, Ndiigbo in particular, personally express our heart-felt gratitude to him. Finally, we wish Father Hüssler a happy Birth-day, more healthy days ahead and God’s choicest blessings.
(Rev. Fr. Dr. Tobe Nnamani, MSP, is a priest of the Missionaries of St. Paul. He studied in Germany and Belgium and now teaches at the National Missionary Seminary of St. Paul, Abuja . Contact:ecomat23@yahoo.co.uk, GSM: +234-80-36-37-88-03).
Dr George Hussler and Rev Father Tobe Nnamani
Gabon 1970: A gift given to Dr Hussler by the Biafran children at "Village KM 11"
Rev. Dr. Hussler and Chief Joseph Mmeh“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
- Cicero-
Preamble
In April 1968, the survival of the nascent Republic of Biafra was hanging on the balance. After the fall of Enugu in September 1967, Biafran major cities continued to fall one after the other into the hands of the enemy. Consequently, what was left of the Biafran Secretariat consisted of a mobile van moved from one corner to the other. While major world powers watched with folded arms, debating on the proper interpretation and application of the principles of territorial sovereignty and non-intervention in the OAU Charter, the Federal soldiers continued their ferocious onslaught on the defenseless Biafran population. They rampaged, pounded, bombed and shelled villages and towns including hospitals and schools with reckless abandon. The level of death-toll and human misery shocked the conscience of the international community. And, as Biafran borders continued to shrink by the day, the population density jumped from its pre-war level of 500 persons per square kilometer to 2,000. In spite of all these seemingly insurmountable odds, the Biafrans were determined to defend themselves to the last man or so it seemed. However, as a result of the total and suffocating blockade by land, sea and air, the resultant crushing effect of hunger and disease threatened to snuff life out of the fledging republic and its traumatized citizens. It was in the midst of this excruciating situation that the Christian Churches all over the world including Jewish Synagogues in America launched one of the greatest relief assistance in the history of humanitarian intervention.
One man who played a leading role in this timely intervention was Rev. Fr. Dr. Georg Hüssler, former President of Caritas International. This kind-hearted man of God celebrated his 88th Birthday on July 7, 2009. Prior to this date, the Co-ordinator of Nzuko Umuigbo World-Wide Inc., Chief Joe Mmeh did an effective networking; he sent out emails to many Umuigbo both home and abroad requesting them to send a congratulatory birthday message and _expression of gratitude to a man who gave them food when they were starving to death and thereby saved them from total annihilation. For, according to the Roman Poet Cicero, “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but, the parent of all others;” it is also an attitude that leads to beatitude. The response to this appeal was over-whelming as post-cards and emails poured into Dr. Hüssler’s letter and email boxes in waves. The content of this parent of all virtues was laden with emotions as many of those who sent them recounted the agony they or their parents and relatives went through and how they might not have seen the light of day without his timely intervention. To crown this out-pouring of gratitude and give it a somewhat personal touch, Chief Mmeh and the author paid a courtesy call on Father Hüssler on July 23, 2009 in his home in Freiburg/Breisgau, south-west Germany . The Octogenarian - still relatively strong, came to the door to meet us. After exchanging pleasantries, he took us down the memory lane and recounted with passion and astonishing picturesque details how Caritas (Relief Organisation founded in May 1946 in Germany) in tandem with other relief agencies and good-spirited individuals airlifted thousands of tons of relief materials to Uli Airstrip. The following is a sketch of the tit-bits from the meeting.
Who is Rev. Fr. Dr. Georg Hüssler?
Father Georg Hüssler was born on July 7, 1921 in Einöd , Saarland , Germany and grew up in Elsass. He was a medical student when World War II broke out; he enlisted into the Germany army and worked as a Sanitary Inspector. When the war ended, he proceeded to Rome where he studied Theology and was ordained priest in 1951. After his doctoral studies, he became an Assistant to the then President of German Caritas with Headquarters in Freiburg . He rose through the ranks to become the Secretary-General and later the President of German Caritas, a post he held for 22 years from 1969 to 1991.In between the time , he was also appoint President of Caritas International. Dr. Hüssler was decorated with three Honours by the three tiers of government in Germany , namely; the local government of his city Freiburg , the State government of Baden-Württemberg and the Federal Republic of Germany. Dr. Hüssler was interested in both aspects of the Catholic Social Teaching. On the practical side, he distinguished himself in the excellent way he managed the affairs of Caritas in the whole world bringing relief and succor to thousands of people ravaged by war and natural disasters. On the theoretical level, he authored five insightful books among which are Caritas and Pastoral Work (1985), Life in the 20th Century (1998) and Humanity as Spirituality (2006). He has retired from active service and lives a quiet life in Freiburg
The saving Role of Relief Agencies in Biafra:TheJoint Church Aid (JCA)
It is pertinent to get a glimpse of the complex and dangerous circumstances in which the relief agencies operated. In fact, all the contentious elements in complex humanitarian emergencies interplayed in the Biafran war such as the possibility of exploiting existing differences within the civil society; the issue of disputed legitimacy of host authorities; high prevalence of hunger and disease; keen and probing journalistic interest; the likelihood of manipulating relief for military and diplomatic advantages and apparent division among the international relief agencies. While all these complex issues were being discussed in high and low quarters, the estimated monthly death-toll in Biafra was put at 750,000.
The first major huddle was the non-agreement of Biafran and Nigerian governments on the route through which relief aid should be supplied. While Nigeria wanted relief to pass through Lagos , Biafra on the other hand saw it as suicidal to let their food pass through enemy hands. When Obilagu Airstrip came as a compromise, the federal troops captured it within a few weeks and Uli was now the only outlet through which relief came to Biafra . The Nigerian government strongly opposed it and refused to guarantee safety of flights landing at Uli. The Red Cross was the first to airlift food in August 1968 but was compelled to stop after one of its planes was shot down by the Nigerian government killing the entire crew.
At this juncture, the JCA which was made up of 37 international Church bodies from 28countries picked up the gauntlet. It defied the federal governments order and began one of the most efficient and effective relief Airlifts in the history of humanitarian intervention. Fr. Hüssler told us that this was the first time relief agencies charted their own planes to supply relief materials. He recounted how he and Father Tony Byrne the Deputy Director of JCA with representatives from the Churches went to France to purchase four planes. According to Fr. Hussler, “initially, we hired one experienced Pilot, Frank Wharton (an American of Latvian descent) who was later joined by Gustav von Rosen another pilot from Sweden among others.” Von Rosen brought four of his own planes and flew relief aids into Biafra free of charge. However, as the Nigerian government was vehemently against this life-line, Uli Airstrip which was only 8,000 foot was bombarded day and night but after each bombardment, it was quickly repaired to received the next flights. In the end, JCA airlifted about 60,000 tons of assorted relief materials in 5,300 flights. The Red Cross, before its short-lived assistance, ferried 41,000 tons of food and medical equipment in 4,000 flights. There were also significant contributions by other smaller relief agencies. The entire relief action mounted by JCA gulped the sum of about $116 million dollars and another $250 million dollars was invested in it by American private interests. This wonderful work of mercy was accomplished but not without heavy human loses on the part of the helpers. Thus, by the end of 1969, 27 pilots had lost their lives with 10 planes short down by the Nigerian Air Force.
JCA’s assistance was not limited to sending food to Biafra ; it also came in some other significant ways. For example, when in January 1968, the Nigeria government changed its currency, Biafra became literally bankcrupt. Even though it printed its own currency, the purchasing power of the Biafran money worth little or nothing. The relief agencies exchanged the Biafran pounds at the rate of $2.80. In this regard, Fr. Hüssler made a handsome donation in cash even after the war had ended. According to him “unknown to me, on January 15, 1970, when I flew to Lagos to meet Gowon, the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war was announced that day. Now, the Biafrans were left with no money since the Biafran Currency had become worthless. I had 100,000 Deutsche Mark in my bag which I changed into Nigerian Currency, chartered a Taxi and drove down to Onitsha where the money was handed over the Church through the then Archbishop Arinze, who took it with two hands and expressed his gratitude.”
The relief planes did not lift relief materials alone. “We discovered that the planes were flying empty back to Europe, so we quickly loaded children and the sick into the planes and flew them to safety in Europe and some African countries such as Gabon , Sao- Tomé etc.” Fr. Hüssler personally took two children from Okporo in Orlu to Europe - Roseline and Moses. Roseline had a hole in her head while Moses had a broken jaw. Unfortunately, Roseline did not survive but Moses is still alive today. Dr. Hüssler related to us that one of the things that touched him during those turbulent days was the magnanimity shown to 3,000 Biafran children by late Oma Bongo of Gabon . He gave the JCA a very large expanse of land where an English school was built. Bongo personally gathered about 56 competent personnel from different countries to give the children sound education. Another 1,000 children were also airlifted to Sao-Tomé – a Portuguese Island perching on the Atlantic Ocean . Fr. Hüssler also told us that he was delighted by the way Gowon spontaneously gave permission for the children airlifted to Gabon to come back to Nigeria .
Conclusion
This was how we spent the two and half hours with him and his former secretary –Frau Engesser, when he was Caritas President . It was indeed a pleasant company. As Dr. Hüssler re-lived this intense experience, tears of joy rolled down his chicks and he ended by saying in German Language “also, das war doch eine schöne Arbeit und ich bin Gott dankbar” – that was indeed a nice work and I thank God for that. We were very glad that we met him in person. There are still a lot of other people out there who played decisive roles during those 30 months of horror and degradation. One such person is John Doyle – a Holy Ghost Father who is now over 80 years old and lives in Reutershügelweg4, D-18069, Rostock , Germany . It would be good for Umuigbo who live in this area to pay him a visit and, on behalf of all Biafrans in general and, Ndiigbo in particular, personally express our heart-felt gratitude to him. Finally, we wish Father Hüssler a happy Birth-day, more healthy days ahead and God’s choicest blessings.
(Rev. Fr. Dr. Tobe Nnamani, MSP, is a priest of the Missionaries of St. Paul. He studied in Germany and Belgium and now teaches at the National Missionary Seminary of St. Paul, Abuja . Contact:ecomat23@yahoo.co.uk, GSM: +234-80-36-37-88-03).
Florida Autumn Retreat: Asaba, Kingdom on the Niger, Unites to Bury Her Dead
BY Emma Okocha, The Vanguard,
Forwarded by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
“On the grant of the Charter to the company in July 10, 1886, the man to whom Goldie turned to as Chief Justice was Sir James Marshall. The headquarters was at Asaba.’’ — Oluwole, T. S. Elias, Makers of Nigerian Law, Lagos 1963. Also See Gills Geography, Text in use up to 1912, it was clearly stated that Asaba was the capital of Southern Nigeria.
“The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where 700 Ibo male were lined up and shot’’ — London Observer, January 21, 1968.
“There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres…. Two areas have suffered badly …Firstly, the region between Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain. Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men. Accordingly to eyewitnesses of that massacre the Nigeria commander ordered the execution of every Ibo male over the age of ten years’’ — Monsignor Georges [sent down on a fact -finding mission by His Holiness The Pope,] Le Monde, April 5, 1968.
“In every Sport, SBA, other wise called the Hurricane, brought into the game three elements; speed, strength and his own unique style of playing the game, once he mastered the techniques. Despite his star status, and unequaled achievements, he was unassuming. Nobody who was his contemporary at Igbobi College, Lagos, who knew Sydney Asiodu can fail to end up feeling that in him the civil war, took not just somebody, but a great leader of men.’’ — Dele Sobowale, Impressionistic Columnist, Vanguard, and Editor In Chief, The Igbobian, lamenting the wanton waste of young men and the senseless killing of the Nigerian decorated Olympian, Sydney Asiodu on the day of the Asaba Massacre.
“The Western Ibos became the most vulnerable Nigerians… required ten positive acts of loyalty to one of the rest of the nation to prove themselves human beings. Ever since the Midwest invasion, they had been hounded, killed and considered greater security risk than the real Igbos themselves’’ — Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, The Man Died.
“In the spirit of Christian reconciliation accept my apologies on behalf of the Federal Military Government on the activities of the soldiers in Asaba during the Nigerian Civil war. I’m sorry for what happened especially to those who lost families…. I hope Asaba people will accept this apology even if it is belated….” — General Yakubu Gowon, Apology To Asaba, Nigeria Prays, The Guardian, September 21, 2001.
THERE were families like the Chukwurahs of Umuaji, who at the end of the mayhem had fifteen dead. Another Chukwurah family from the different village of Umunaje, that is the quarters of the late, renowned Nigerian Constitutional lawyer, Olisa Chukwurah, SAN, counted their relations’ dead bodies, watching the horrible footage on the Western Nigeria Television.
Pa Chukwurah and all his sons, including Eddy, the handsome engineer who had just returned from England, his first son who was a veteran of the West African Force, were not spared as the soldiers painted the household with blood.
Others like the Ezeadeife family of Ugbomanta, did not fare better. They were simply wiped out! University of Ife undergraduate brothers, Akazua Oyana and Uwaegbunam Oyana were shot, wounded, and when the illiterate soldiers figured out that they were undergraduates, they furiously before their pleading mother, buried the bleeding brothers alive.
There were the pathetic cases of victims whose death caused revolution and sympathies even from their butchers. Until their death some twenty years after, the Omoko parents never recovered from the traumatic loss of their only son, Barrister Richard Omoko. Their constant mourning and inconsolable hopelessness eventually led to their deaths.
The mother of another only born, Chukwumah killed at Ogbeosowah was for many years in a state disbelief, refusing to acknowledge the fact that her only and innocent son had gone. When she eventually summoned courage to accept his passage she ran amock and since has been roaming the streets like a mad woman.
Indeed, Barrister Omoko’s death was so pathetic and more saddening when the parents learnt that they could not find his body.
The parents had continued to pray and hoped that he had escaped to Biafra. Unable to bear the personal guilt anymore, the Omoko parents were accosted one morning, by the same soldiers that dispatched their son into the River Niger. They confessed their murder of their son and presented the shocked parents with the Barrister’s golden watch, which they had forcefully taken from him before shooting him into the Niger.
They were countless professionals, medical doctors, like Dr. Eugene Akwule, and his brothers, educationists, like irreplaceable E.C. Philips MBE. top civil servants like my uncle, the late Vincent Iweze, former territorial Controller, P&T, Northern Nigeria. This man who had a red line with the mighty Sardauna was murdered with my father and his sons, to the chagrin of the commanders when the deed was over.
The big men in town on October 7, 1967, were not spared. On the other hand, Asaba was almost spared as the richest black man of that era stepped out to buy the town away from trouble. Michael Ugo who was the pioneer business mogul that owned the Ike Chukwuka Transport Lines that preceded the Ojukwu group or the Ekene Dili Transport Lines, also owned the Nigeria Airmails and was the first African to establish the Export /Import business at Apapa.
His real estate empire was so vast, that any young man who came down to Lagos and had no place to shelter him, Chief Ugo would provide him with a place under the sun. He offered the soldiers some millions of pounds. There was initial agreement to save the town from mostly Northern officers who were negotiating in Hausa with Ugo.
Suddenly, this time from predominantly officers of Niger Delta origin a master list of prominent Asaba indigenes were circulated. These red-eyed officers burnt the Mercedes car with the cash and came for him. Before he left for the killing ground he asked for his friend Ogbueshi Leo Okogwu. He was aware that this famous father of Nneka Mariam Babangida had prepared the Community’s Welcome Address.
They had planned to give the victorious Nigerian soldiers the traditional Asaba welcome reverie the latter would never forget. After all, Ugo had unlimited resources, started as the Army’s Paymaster General and he Leo Okogwu is very well known in the north, had worked all his life in the region and was their peerless in law.
His fourth wife is a northerner and she had adapted very well in Asaba and could speak the sexy Ibo dialect like Queen Elizabeth could speak the Queens English.
Forwarded by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
“On the grant of the Charter to the company in July 10, 1886, the man to whom Goldie turned to as Chief Justice was Sir James Marshall. The headquarters was at Asaba.’’ — Oluwole, T. S. Elias, Makers of Nigerian Law, Lagos 1963. Also See Gills Geography, Text in use up to 1912, it was clearly stated that Asaba was the capital of Southern Nigeria.
“The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where 700 Ibo male were lined up and shot’’ — London Observer, January 21, 1968.
“There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres…. Two areas have suffered badly …Firstly, the region between Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain. Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men. Accordingly to eyewitnesses of that massacre the Nigeria commander ordered the execution of every Ibo male over the age of ten years’’ — Monsignor Georges [sent down on a fact -finding mission by His Holiness The Pope,] Le Monde, April 5, 1968.
“In every Sport, SBA, other wise called the Hurricane, brought into the game three elements; speed, strength and his own unique style of playing the game, once he mastered the techniques. Despite his star status, and unequaled achievements, he was unassuming. Nobody who was his contemporary at Igbobi College, Lagos, who knew Sydney Asiodu can fail to end up feeling that in him the civil war, took not just somebody, but a great leader of men.’’ — Dele Sobowale, Impressionistic Columnist, Vanguard, and Editor In Chief, The Igbobian, lamenting the wanton waste of young men and the senseless killing of the Nigerian decorated Olympian, Sydney Asiodu on the day of the Asaba Massacre.
“The Western Ibos became the most vulnerable Nigerians… required ten positive acts of loyalty to one of the rest of the nation to prove themselves human beings. Ever since the Midwest invasion, they had been hounded, killed and considered greater security risk than the real Igbos themselves’’ — Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, The Man Died.
“In the spirit of Christian reconciliation accept my apologies on behalf of the Federal Military Government on the activities of the soldiers in Asaba during the Nigerian Civil war. I’m sorry for what happened especially to those who lost families…. I hope Asaba people will accept this apology even if it is belated….” — General Yakubu Gowon, Apology To Asaba, Nigeria Prays, The Guardian, September 21, 2001.
THERE were families like the Chukwurahs of Umuaji, who at the end of the mayhem had fifteen dead. Another Chukwurah family from the different village of Umunaje, that is the quarters of the late, renowned Nigerian Constitutional lawyer, Olisa Chukwurah, SAN, counted their relations’ dead bodies, watching the horrible footage on the Western Nigeria Television.
Pa Chukwurah and all his sons, including Eddy, the handsome engineer who had just returned from England, his first son who was a veteran of the West African Force, were not spared as the soldiers painted the household with blood.
Others like the Ezeadeife family of Ugbomanta, did not fare better. They were simply wiped out! University of Ife undergraduate brothers, Akazua Oyana and Uwaegbunam Oyana were shot, wounded, and when the illiterate soldiers figured out that they were undergraduates, they furiously before their pleading mother, buried the bleeding brothers alive.
There were the pathetic cases of victims whose death caused revolution and sympathies even from their butchers. Until their death some twenty years after, the Omoko parents never recovered from the traumatic loss of their only son, Barrister Richard Omoko. Their constant mourning and inconsolable hopelessness eventually led to their deaths.
The mother of another only born, Chukwumah killed at Ogbeosowah was for many years in a state disbelief, refusing to acknowledge the fact that her only and innocent son had gone. When she eventually summoned courage to accept his passage she ran amock and since has been roaming the streets like a mad woman.
Indeed, Barrister Omoko’s death was so pathetic and more saddening when the parents learnt that they could not find his body.
The parents had continued to pray and hoped that he had escaped to Biafra. Unable to bear the personal guilt anymore, the Omoko parents were accosted one morning, by the same soldiers that dispatched their son into the River Niger. They confessed their murder of their son and presented the shocked parents with the Barrister’s golden watch, which they had forcefully taken from him before shooting him into the Niger.
They were countless professionals, medical doctors, like Dr. Eugene Akwule, and his brothers, educationists, like irreplaceable E.C. Philips MBE. top civil servants like my uncle, the late Vincent Iweze, former territorial Controller, P&T, Northern Nigeria. This man who had a red line with the mighty Sardauna was murdered with my father and his sons, to the chagrin of the commanders when the deed was over.
The big men in town on October 7, 1967, were not spared. On the other hand, Asaba was almost spared as the richest black man of that era stepped out to buy the town away from trouble. Michael Ugo who was the pioneer business mogul that owned the Ike Chukwuka Transport Lines that preceded the Ojukwu group or the Ekene Dili Transport Lines, also owned the Nigeria Airmails and was the first African to establish the Export /Import business at Apapa.
His real estate empire was so vast, that any young man who came down to Lagos and had no place to shelter him, Chief Ugo would provide him with a place under the sun. He offered the soldiers some millions of pounds. There was initial agreement to save the town from mostly Northern officers who were negotiating in Hausa with Ugo.
Suddenly, this time from predominantly officers of Niger Delta origin a master list of prominent Asaba indigenes were circulated. These red-eyed officers burnt the Mercedes car with the cash and came for him. Before he left for the killing ground he asked for his friend Ogbueshi Leo Okogwu. He was aware that this famous father of Nneka Mariam Babangida had prepared the Community’s Welcome Address.
They had planned to give the victorious Nigerian soldiers the traditional Asaba welcome reverie the latter would never forget. After all, Ugo had unlimited resources, started as the Army’s Paymaster General and he Leo Okogwu is very well known in the north, had worked all his life in the region and was their peerless in law.
His fourth wife is a northerner and she had adapted very well in Asaba and could speak the sexy Ibo dialect like Queen Elizabeth could speak the Queens English.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Nigeria: Ali Mazrui's Diagnosis and Prescriptions
By Ali Mazrui
Ali Mazrui, Africa's most famous political scientist, dissects the history of Nigeria to make comparative statements. Professor Ali Mazrui is the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and The Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of over twenty five books, including Towards A Pax Africana. He was author and narrator of the acclaimed nine-part television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. He is also a senior scholar in African Studies at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, the A. D. White Professor-At-Large Emeritus at Cornell University, the Albert Luthuli Professor-At-Large, University of Jos, Nigeria,and Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Washington, D. C. USA.
The Path to Nigeria Greatness: Between Exceptionalism and Typicality
The cohesion of the United States as one country rests on the roles of two personalities - George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Paradoxically, the survival of Nigeria as one country also rests on two personalities ’ Lord Lugard and General Yakubu Gowon. George Washington was a rebel against British rule, but laid the foundation of post-colonial American unification. Lord Lugard was a representative of the British colonial order, but served the destiny of amalgamating Northern and Southern Nigeria into one country in 1914. This event launched Mega-Nigeria, an enlargement of political scale.
When George Washington's achievement was threatened by separatism and secession in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln came to the rescue and saved the Union. When Lord Lugard's amalgamation of North South was threatened by separatism and secession in the 1960s, Yakubu Gowon came to the rescue and helped to save the Union and to preserve Mega-Nigeria.
>From World War 1 To The Biafra War The year 2004 has marked the 90th anniversary of the amalgamation of Northern Nigeria with Southern. In 1914 Lord Lugard, the British Administrator, had unified what could have been two separate countries each destined to have at least 50 million people by the end of the 20th century. It is an open question which of the two halves of the country would finally have retained Nigeria as its name.
But because Lugard amalgamated the two haves into one entity, Nigeria developed into a country of 120 million people by the beginning of this new millennium.
It is a surprise of historic proportions that the amalgamation has survived these ninety years. It has survived the vagaries of differentiated colonial policies when the North was governed differently from the South.
Nigeria's amalgamation has survived Northern separatism after World War II when Northern Nigeria wanted to attain independence as a separate country form the South. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian Leader, described Northern separatism at that time as a form of "Pakistanism" ’Äì’Äì with the goal of religiously inspired partition. Yakubu Gowon was at the time a mere child and a Christian and was not involved in Muslim separatism.
Nigeria's amalgamation survived Eastern separatism in the first decade of independence when the Eastern region attempted to invent Biafra and helped to unleash a civil war from 1967 to 1970. On this occasion, Yakubu Gowon was called upon to play his supreme historical role ’Äì’Äì the role of saving the Union of a singular Mega-Nigeria.
As Governor-General of Nigeria during the period of World War 1, Lord Lugard has contradictory effects on the future of Nigeria's unity. Lugard was the architect of Nigeria's national amalgamation, but his policies were detrimental of Nigeria's national integration. Amalgamation broadened the national boundaries and merged north and south into one country. National integration was supposed to be the process by which ethnic and religious division would be softened or ameliorated as the people acquired a sense of shared citizenship and national consciousness.
Lord Lugard virtually invented the British policy of Indirect Rule in Africa, which attempted to govern Africans through their own "native authorities". Indirect rule was particularly successful in Nigeria, leaving the Emirates of the north especially strong. As a colonial policy which respected indigenous institutions, Indirect Rule was more humane than the assimilation policies pursued by France and Portugal. But by helping to preserve indigenous cultures and native institutions, Indirect Rule also helped to sustain "tribal identities" in Nigeria, and thus made national integration more difficult. It might, therefore, be said that while Lord Lugard was a hero of national amalgamation, he was inadvertently an adversary of national integration.
At independence amalgamation had given Nigeria an ethnically mixed single national army. But inadequate national integration had made ethnic consciousness a little too strong within the armed forces. Amalgamation had made the Nigeria army strong enough to control both halves of the country, North and South. But ethnic divisions within the armed forces turned Nigeria's first military coup in January 1966 into an ethnic bloodbath (essentially in favour of the Igbo). The counter-coup which followed a few months later deepened the ethnic and regional divide. The country remained amalgamated, but not adequately integrated.
Onto this stressful national stage stepped young Yakubu Gowon, then in his early thirties. His twin tasks were first to prevent the break-up of Nigeria's amalgamation and, secondly, to try to promote greater national integration.
A major set-back to both ambitions was the anti-Igbo pogrom which broke out in northern Nigeria in October 1966, killing many people and triggering off large-scale migration of the Igbo back to the Eastern region. Igbo separatism entered a new phase. The break up of Nigeria's amalgamation was ominously on the horizon.
One solution was a looser federation, what was described as confederation at the Aburi meeting in Ghana between Yakubu Gowon and the Igbo leader, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Gowon failed to persuade Ojukwu to drop his secessionist aspirations. Ojukwu declared the separation of Baifra from Nigeria. Ojukwu hoped that the Yoruba of the Western region would join him and also secede, thus ending the egacy of 1914.
General Gowon made a shrewd and brilliant move. He abolished the old regions of Nigeria and divided the country into twelve new states. This help to diffuse fear of Northern domination among the Yoruba and other groups, and encouraged Eastern minorities to turn against Igbo leadership and pray for a Federal victory.
Weakening the original political regions of post-colonial Nigeria helped the cause of national integration. But what about saving the Union which had been created in 1914? General Gowon succeeded in keeping the Yoruba and other group within the Nigerian Federation. By July 1967 Gowon was ready to declare "police action" to stop the secession.
But Yakubu Gowon was constantly aware that saving the territorial integrity of Nigeria was useless without simultaneously pursuing the national integration of its people. He was emphatic about a "code of conduct" and sensitive rules of engagement. He insisted that the so-called Biafrans should not be called "enemies", but should be regarded as fellow Nigerians who needed to be won back into the national fold. He was a benign war leader who was against the so-called 'quick kill'. He could have made the illegal night-flying to Biafra dangerous for the aircraft. But for almost a year and a half he shut a blind eye to these night-flights of relief supplies to Biafra.
Yakubu Gowon had triumphed in saving the Union, but he still needed to promote greater national integration. His leadership helped to avert another anti-Igbo bloodbath in the wake of Biafra's defeat. He permitted mercy missions to be rushed to the former Biafra. Within a single year the agonies of widespread disease and starvation were reversed in the Eastern region.
On the tenth anniversary of Nigeria's independence he declared plans for new elections, a new constitution and a new populations census. He said military rule would be needed until 1976. He wanted time to consolidate civil reconstruction as part of the process of national integration. He later made the mistake of asking for even more time at a moment in history when the country was impatient or a return to civilian rule. His fellow solders, led by Murtala Muhammad, overthrew him in July 1975.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Yakubu Gowon has saved the Union of his country. Like Lincoln, Gowon's tenure of office was ended by force. But while Lincoln was assassinated, Yakubu Gowon went into exile for a least a decade.
Our main focus in this paper is, of course, Nigeria rather than the United States, but the hope to conclude with a discussion of whether Nigeria is a future African equivalent of the United States, and whether Yakubu Gowon is Africa's equivalent of Abraham Lincoln.
Between Exceptionalism and Typicality
There are indeed certain attributes which make Nigeria strikingly unique in Africa-setting it apart in configuration from all other African Countries. This aspect might be called Nigeria's exceptionalism. Many of those attributes are a consequence of the policies of Lord Lugard, on one side, and General Gowon, on the other.
There are other attributes, however, which make Nigeria a mirror of the African experience as a whole ’ making Nigeria a good illustration of what the whole of Africa is all about. This side of Nigeria might be called Nigeria's typicality. Some particular ups and-downs of the country may be typical of the entire continent. To understand Nigeria is to comprehend this dialectic between the exceptionalism of Nigeria in the African configuration and the typicality of Nigeria as a mirror of the continent.
The exceptionalism of Nigeria includes of course the huge size of its population in relation to its neighbours. It is by far the most populous country in Africa. This is a central aspect of the 1914 amalgamation. The next country in size on the African continent is Egypt ’and yet Egypt is only a little more than half of Nigeria's population.
When ECOWAS was formed in 1975 upon the initiative of Nigeria and Togo, its population comprised 150 million people in sixteen countries; more than half of that total population were Nigerians. The Gross National Product of ECOWAS in 1975 was $85 billion U.S. dollars ’ the bulk of that came from Nigeria. General Yakubu Gowon was a major architect of this ambitious African regional organisation. He was strengthened by the legacy of enlargement from 1914.
Nigeria's exceptionalism also includes the combination of immense human resources (youthful and potentially gifted population) with immense natural resources (led by oil and gas). In 1914 Lord Lugard knew about Nigeria's palm oil. Nigeria's other oil ’ petroleum, had yet to reveal itself.
Towards A Pax Nigerian
Almost from independence Nigeria's exceptionalism included a potential leadership role to hope keep the peace in West Africa a kind of Pax Nigeriana. For better or for worse, Nigeria''s regional rival in this peace-keeping role has not been another West African Country. It has in fact been France. It has been France, combined with Nigeria's own internal problems, which have prevented Pax Nigeriana from fulfilling its regional mission to the full.
Opinion is divided within France in this new millennium as to whether to continue Paris's historic role in Africa or whether to find a new mission for French destiny in the newly emerging countries of Eastern and Central Europe. If France is beginning to withdraw from African (as the devaluation of the C.F.A. franc portended) the so-called regional "vacuum" left behind is likely to be increasingly filled by Pax Nigeriana.
On the evidence so far, Pax Nigeriana ’ keeping the peace in West Africa under Nigeria's auspices ’ is better fulfilled when Nigeria is under military rule than when it is under the politicians. The most spectacular exercises in Pax Nigeriana occurred in the 1990s when Nigeria led the forces of ECOWAS (the ECOMOG troops) into Liberia first to restore peace and then to help re-start electoral democracy. The final result were elections in Liberia in 1997, which returned Charles Taylor to power for a while.
In 1998 Nigeria more unilaterally took on the army in Sierra Leone, which had overthrown the elected government of President Kaba. Nigeria reversed the military takeover and restored the constitutionally elected government. But what had made it possible for Nigeria to play this role of "Big Brother" in West Africa? Mega-Nigeria's enlargement of scale went straight back to the unification of 1914 and to the preservation of the Nigerian Union under the leadership of Yakubu Gowon.
For most of the 1990s Nigeria paradoxically became a force for democracy abroad but remained a dictatorship at home. Nigerian forces helped to restore relative freedom to the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone ’but the Nigeria forces were slow to extend freedom to the Nigerian people at home.
This does not mean that Nigeria should not have helped to re-democratize Liberia and Sierra Leone. General Sani Abacha's regional role was one of the positive aspects of Pax Nigeriana. But doing good abroad is no excuse for not doing better at home. Fortunately, there were indications that the military government after Abacha wanted an honorable way towards re-civilization. The last elections of the end of the 20th century brought a former soldier to head the new democracy’ General Olusegun Obasanjo.
It is arguable that one of the first exercises of Pax Nigeriana occurred in Tanzania in1964. Army mutinies in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika had forced the three governments to invite British troops to return to East Africa and disarm their own mutinous solders.
President Julius K. Nyerere understandably disbanded the whole mutinous army once order was restored. But who was going to keep the peace in a Tanganyika without an army? Julius Nyerere called upon fraternal troops from Nigeria to fill the vacuum while Nyerere set about creating an alternate indigenous security force. It is arguable that the beginnings of Pax Nigeriana lie in a voluntary partnership between Nigeria and what later became Tanzania. Nigerians helped Tanzanians keep the peace in their own country in 1964. Ironically, this marked the 50th anniversary of the amalgamation of Nigeria into one country.
Nigerian Politics: Between The Sublime And The Theatrical
Perhaps it is also part of Nigeria's exceptionalism that it has not just one pivotal ethnic group in a national configuration but three. Uganda has one pivotal group ’ the Baganda. Kenya has in reality Two outstanding pivotal group- the Luo and Kikuyu. Senegal's outstanding pivotal group are the Wolof.
Is Nigeria exceptional in having three very large pivot ethnic groups, each with a dazzling record of achievement? Nigeria would not have had such a triad of vanguard ethnic groups if the 1914 amalgamation had not occurred, and if it had not been preserved by Yakubu Gowon''s government.
The Hausa are by far the largest linguistic group not only in Nigeria but in West Africa as a whole. Within Nigeria itself the Hausa also have a long record of skill of governance from precolonial days, right through colonialism until postcolonial days. The Yoruba have in many ways the most complex indigenous culture of them all. The Yoruba impact on global Africa and the rest of the Black world is less about the Yoruba language and more about the Yoruba religion and culture. Yoruba religious rites are to be witnessed in countries as diverse as Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Surinam, Nigeria, Dahomey (now Republic of Benin) and the United States.
The Igbo were the great technologists of Nigeria in the second half of the twentieth century. Their triumph in economic skills in Northern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to their vulnerability as a people in 1966. During the Nigerian Civil war the Igbo's innovativeness also produced Africa's first locally made gun-vehicles.
During the Civil War the Igbo displayed levels of innovative daring unknown in post-colonial African History. The Igbo created rough-and-ready armed militarized vehicles as well as the beginnings of African's industrial revolution. This renaissance was aborted by the oil bonanza from the 1970s onwards.
During the Biafra War Nigeria was more internally innovative than externally prosperous. The Nigerian Civil War produced some of the high points of Nigeria's experience with technological innovation. The Nigerian oil bonanza after the 1973 OPEC price escalation created disincentives to Nigerian enterprise.
War had brought out both the best and the worst of Nigeria in human terms. But technologically the power of spilt blood in Nigeria produced greater innovation than the power of sprouting petroleum. The pain of Biafra was technologically more fruitful than the profit of OPEC. While Commander-in-chief Yakubu Gowon was mobilizing the Federal forces, Colonel Emeka Ojukwu was inspiring and motivating Igbo innovation.
Nigeria's exceptionalism in 1998 included the extraordinary phenomenon of five political parties choosing the same man as their Presidential candidate ’ Sani Abacha even when Abacha was not even A member of any of these parties. This was unprecedented any where in the world. At one level this showed political opportunism at its most glaring, and where in the world. At one level this showed political opportunism at its most glaring, and was not a credit to the complex size of Nigeria. But at another level this could have been a defensible constitutional experiment if it had been presented as such.
When Africa had one-party states (as in Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast), the real choice for voters involved elections to the legislature. The choice of the Head of State was never in doubt in those African on-party states. The legislative choice was between individual candidates within the same party.
What Nigeria might have evolved in 1998 was a system a little more pluralistic than the one-party state but a little less pluralistic than a system of full-blown electoral competition at all levels. At the presidential level, the people of Nigeria would have no more choice than the electorates of Africa's one-party states had before the 1990s. But at the level of legislative elections the people of Nigeria could choose between arties and not simply between individuals. At least theoretically the people of Nigeria would have had more choice in 1998 than the people of one-party Kenya had before 1992. However, the Nigerian voter was not impressed. And Abacha did not live long enough to be the Head of five political parties. Let us now shift from Nigeria's exceptionalism, its uniqueness, to Nigeria's typicality in the African context.
Ideologies: The Cultural And The Economic
Nigeria's typicality includes the fact that Nigerians are more strongly moved by socio-cultural ideologies than by socio-economic ideologies. Socio-cultural ideologies appeal to such cultural forces as ethnicity, religion, nationalism, race-consciousness and regional allegiance.
Socio-economic ideologies try to appeal to such economic interest at class, economic equity, trade union right and the like. Marxism, ujamaa and most other forms of socialism are socio-economic ideologies. Ethnicity, nationalism and regional allegiance are socio-cultural ideologies.
In Nigeria ’ as in most other parts of Africa ’ ethno-cultural ideologies are much stronger than ethno-economic ones. My favorite Nigerian example was Obafemi Awolowo's effort to move Nigeria a little to the left. When he looked to see who was following him, it was not the dispossessed of all ethnic groups Nigeria who followed; it was his fellow Yoruba of all social classes and levels of income.
My favorite Kenyan example was Oginga Odinga's modest attempt to move Kenyans a little to the left. When Oginga looked to see who was following him, once again it was not the dispossessed of Kenya of all ethnic groups. It was his fellow Luo of all social classes and levels of income.
Africa is a continent of surplus passion but deficit power. Nigerians as Africans feel strongly about many aspirations. In the controversial words of a very distinguished African philosopher president ’a king of philosopher king ’ Leopold Senghor of Senegal: "Emotion Is Black’ Reason Is Greek."
Nigeria is typical of Africans also because of the swings between tyranny (too much government) and anarchy (too little government). When under military rule, Nigeria leans towards tyranny (too much government), when under civilian administration, Nigeria leans towards anarchy (too little government).
In spite of the fact the country was at war from 1967 to 1970, military rule under Yakubu Gowon was more benign than military rule either before the Gowon regime or subsequent to it.
Nigeria's triple heritage is a convergence of indigenous African values, Islamic culture, and the impact of the West (both secular and Christian). In one sense, this convergence of the three legacies is part of Nigeria's typicality.
But Nigeria is exceptional in having those three civilizations (Africanity, Islam and the West) almost equal in power. Can we measure political development by the yardstick of declining scale of political violence? Let us try with Nigeria. The first two decades of Nigeria's independence were the age of regicide and primary violence. The killing of the King or Head Executive
as a trend as regicide. Of the eight supreme leaders of Nigeria in the first 20 years, four has been assassinated.
The eight supreme leaders were Azikwe, Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Ironsi, Gowon, Murtala, Obansanjo and Shagari. The 50% who were assassinated were of course Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Ironsi and Murtala Muhammed. Regicide was at a 50% rate ’ a high rate indeed. Ahmadu Bellow was technically a regional leader but with immense federal and national power. In all, three Northern leaders were killed, as compared with one Southern.
The next 20 years of Nigeria's independence (1980 to the year 2000) were to be of militarism and constitutional experimentation. These were the last years of Shagari, those of Shagari, those of Buhari, those of Babangida and his immediate successors, and the emergence of Sani Abacha. The most promising experiment was the Babangida transition, which collapsed ignominiously with the aborted election of June 1993. The transition would apparently have bought M.K.O Abiola into power. It would have been a remarkable stage in the electoral amalgamation of the two halves of Nigeria. For the first time a Southern Muslim would have presided over Nigeria. Under Abacha the years of Militarism and constitutional experimentation could have continued, on the other hand, with a new concept of presidential recycling from military ruler to elected Head of State.
If Abacha had lived and run for the Presidency, he would have been partially following the precedent of Jerry Rawlings who captured power twice by the barrel of gun and later gained legitimacy through the ballot box and electoral process. But Abacha died in June 1998 before the scenario could be attempted in Nigeria. The experiment in North South amalgamation was inconclusive and was still subject to ups and downs.
Ali Mazrui, Africa's most famous political scientist, dissects the history of Nigeria to make comparative statements. Professor Ali Mazrui is the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and The Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of over twenty five books, including Towards A Pax Africana. He was author and narrator of the acclaimed nine-part television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. He is also a senior scholar in African Studies at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, the A. D. White Professor-At-Large Emeritus at Cornell University, the Albert Luthuli Professor-At-Large, University of Jos, Nigeria,and Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Washington, D. C. USA.
The Path to Nigeria Greatness: Between Exceptionalism and Typicality
The cohesion of the United States as one country rests on the roles of two personalities - George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Paradoxically, the survival of Nigeria as one country also rests on two personalities ’ Lord Lugard and General Yakubu Gowon. George Washington was a rebel against British rule, but laid the foundation of post-colonial American unification. Lord Lugard was a representative of the British colonial order, but served the destiny of amalgamating Northern and Southern Nigeria into one country in 1914. This event launched Mega-Nigeria, an enlargement of political scale.
When George Washington's achievement was threatened by separatism and secession in the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln came to the rescue and saved the Union. When Lord Lugard's amalgamation of North South was threatened by separatism and secession in the 1960s, Yakubu Gowon came to the rescue and helped to save the Union and to preserve Mega-Nigeria.
>From World War 1 To The Biafra War The year 2004 has marked the 90th anniversary of the amalgamation of Northern Nigeria with Southern. In 1914 Lord Lugard, the British Administrator, had unified what could have been two separate countries each destined to have at least 50 million people by the end of the 20th century. It is an open question which of the two halves of the country would finally have retained Nigeria as its name.
But because Lugard amalgamated the two haves into one entity, Nigeria developed into a country of 120 million people by the beginning of this new millennium.
It is a surprise of historic proportions that the amalgamation has survived these ninety years. It has survived the vagaries of differentiated colonial policies when the North was governed differently from the South.
Nigeria's amalgamation has survived Northern separatism after World War II when Northern Nigeria wanted to attain independence as a separate country form the South. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian Leader, described Northern separatism at that time as a form of "Pakistanism" ’Äì’Äì with the goal of religiously inspired partition. Yakubu Gowon was at the time a mere child and a Christian and was not involved in Muslim separatism.
Nigeria's amalgamation survived Eastern separatism in the first decade of independence when the Eastern region attempted to invent Biafra and helped to unleash a civil war from 1967 to 1970. On this occasion, Yakubu Gowon was called upon to play his supreme historical role ’Äì’Äì the role of saving the Union of a singular Mega-Nigeria.
As Governor-General of Nigeria during the period of World War 1, Lord Lugard has contradictory effects on the future of Nigeria's unity. Lugard was the architect of Nigeria's national amalgamation, but his policies were detrimental of Nigeria's national integration. Amalgamation broadened the national boundaries and merged north and south into one country. National integration was supposed to be the process by which ethnic and religious division would be softened or ameliorated as the people acquired a sense of shared citizenship and national consciousness.
Lord Lugard virtually invented the British policy of Indirect Rule in Africa, which attempted to govern Africans through their own "native authorities". Indirect rule was particularly successful in Nigeria, leaving the Emirates of the north especially strong. As a colonial policy which respected indigenous institutions, Indirect Rule was more humane than the assimilation policies pursued by France and Portugal. But by helping to preserve indigenous cultures and native institutions, Indirect Rule also helped to sustain "tribal identities" in Nigeria, and thus made national integration more difficult. It might, therefore, be said that while Lord Lugard was a hero of national amalgamation, he was inadvertently an adversary of national integration.
At independence amalgamation had given Nigeria an ethnically mixed single national army. But inadequate national integration had made ethnic consciousness a little too strong within the armed forces. Amalgamation had made the Nigeria army strong enough to control both halves of the country, North and South. But ethnic divisions within the armed forces turned Nigeria's first military coup in January 1966 into an ethnic bloodbath (essentially in favour of the Igbo). The counter-coup which followed a few months later deepened the ethnic and regional divide. The country remained amalgamated, but not adequately integrated.
Onto this stressful national stage stepped young Yakubu Gowon, then in his early thirties. His twin tasks were first to prevent the break-up of Nigeria's amalgamation and, secondly, to try to promote greater national integration.
A major set-back to both ambitions was the anti-Igbo pogrom which broke out in northern Nigeria in October 1966, killing many people and triggering off large-scale migration of the Igbo back to the Eastern region. Igbo separatism entered a new phase. The break up of Nigeria's amalgamation was ominously on the horizon.
One solution was a looser federation, what was described as confederation at the Aburi meeting in Ghana between Yakubu Gowon and the Igbo leader, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu. Gowon failed to persuade Ojukwu to drop his secessionist aspirations. Ojukwu declared the separation of Baifra from Nigeria. Ojukwu hoped that the Yoruba of the Western region would join him and also secede, thus ending the egacy of 1914.
General Gowon made a shrewd and brilliant move. He abolished the old regions of Nigeria and divided the country into twelve new states. This help to diffuse fear of Northern domination among the Yoruba and other groups, and encouraged Eastern minorities to turn against Igbo leadership and pray for a Federal victory.
Weakening the original political regions of post-colonial Nigeria helped the cause of national integration. But what about saving the Union which had been created in 1914? General Gowon succeeded in keeping the Yoruba and other group within the Nigerian Federation. By July 1967 Gowon was ready to declare "police action" to stop the secession.
But Yakubu Gowon was constantly aware that saving the territorial integrity of Nigeria was useless without simultaneously pursuing the national integration of its people. He was emphatic about a "code of conduct" and sensitive rules of engagement. He insisted that the so-called Biafrans should not be called "enemies", but should be regarded as fellow Nigerians who needed to be won back into the national fold. He was a benign war leader who was against the so-called 'quick kill'. He could have made the illegal night-flying to Biafra dangerous for the aircraft. But for almost a year and a half he shut a blind eye to these night-flights of relief supplies to Biafra.
Yakubu Gowon had triumphed in saving the Union, but he still needed to promote greater national integration. His leadership helped to avert another anti-Igbo bloodbath in the wake of Biafra's defeat. He permitted mercy missions to be rushed to the former Biafra. Within a single year the agonies of widespread disease and starvation were reversed in the Eastern region.
On the tenth anniversary of Nigeria's independence he declared plans for new elections, a new constitution and a new populations census. He said military rule would be needed until 1976. He wanted time to consolidate civil reconstruction as part of the process of national integration. He later made the mistake of asking for even more time at a moment in history when the country was impatient or a return to civilian rule. His fellow solders, led by Murtala Muhammad, overthrew him in July 1975.
Like Abraham Lincoln, Yakubu Gowon has saved the Union of his country. Like Lincoln, Gowon's tenure of office was ended by force. But while Lincoln was assassinated, Yakubu Gowon went into exile for a least a decade.
Our main focus in this paper is, of course, Nigeria rather than the United States, but the hope to conclude with a discussion of whether Nigeria is a future African equivalent of the United States, and whether Yakubu Gowon is Africa's equivalent of Abraham Lincoln.
Between Exceptionalism and Typicality
There are indeed certain attributes which make Nigeria strikingly unique in Africa-setting it apart in configuration from all other African Countries. This aspect might be called Nigeria's exceptionalism. Many of those attributes are a consequence of the policies of Lord Lugard, on one side, and General Gowon, on the other.
There are other attributes, however, which make Nigeria a mirror of the African experience as a whole ’ making Nigeria a good illustration of what the whole of Africa is all about. This side of Nigeria might be called Nigeria's typicality. Some particular ups and-downs of the country may be typical of the entire continent. To understand Nigeria is to comprehend this dialectic between the exceptionalism of Nigeria in the African configuration and the typicality of Nigeria as a mirror of the continent.
The exceptionalism of Nigeria includes of course the huge size of its population in relation to its neighbours. It is by far the most populous country in Africa. This is a central aspect of the 1914 amalgamation. The next country in size on the African continent is Egypt ’and yet Egypt is only a little more than half of Nigeria's population.
When ECOWAS was formed in 1975 upon the initiative of Nigeria and Togo, its population comprised 150 million people in sixteen countries; more than half of that total population were Nigerians. The Gross National Product of ECOWAS in 1975 was $85 billion U.S. dollars ’ the bulk of that came from Nigeria. General Yakubu Gowon was a major architect of this ambitious African regional organisation. He was strengthened by the legacy of enlargement from 1914.
Nigeria's exceptionalism also includes the combination of immense human resources (youthful and potentially gifted population) with immense natural resources (led by oil and gas). In 1914 Lord Lugard knew about Nigeria's palm oil. Nigeria's other oil ’ petroleum, had yet to reveal itself.
Towards A Pax Nigerian
Almost from independence Nigeria's exceptionalism included a potential leadership role to hope keep the peace in West Africa a kind of Pax Nigeriana. For better or for worse, Nigeria''s regional rival in this peace-keeping role has not been another West African Country. It has in fact been France. It has been France, combined with Nigeria's own internal problems, which have prevented Pax Nigeriana from fulfilling its regional mission to the full.
Opinion is divided within France in this new millennium as to whether to continue Paris's historic role in Africa or whether to find a new mission for French destiny in the newly emerging countries of Eastern and Central Europe. If France is beginning to withdraw from African (as the devaluation of the C.F.A. franc portended) the so-called regional "vacuum" left behind is likely to be increasingly filled by Pax Nigeriana.
On the evidence so far, Pax Nigeriana ’ keeping the peace in West Africa under Nigeria's auspices ’ is better fulfilled when Nigeria is under military rule than when it is under the politicians. The most spectacular exercises in Pax Nigeriana occurred in the 1990s when Nigeria led the forces of ECOWAS (the ECOMOG troops) into Liberia first to restore peace and then to help re-start electoral democracy. The final result were elections in Liberia in 1997, which returned Charles Taylor to power for a while.
In 1998 Nigeria more unilaterally took on the army in Sierra Leone, which had overthrown the elected government of President Kaba. Nigeria reversed the military takeover and restored the constitutionally elected government. But what had made it possible for Nigeria to play this role of "Big Brother" in West Africa? Mega-Nigeria's enlargement of scale went straight back to the unification of 1914 and to the preservation of the Nigerian Union under the leadership of Yakubu Gowon.
For most of the 1990s Nigeria paradoxically became a force for democracy abroad but remained a dictatorship at home. Nigerian forces helped to restore relative freedom to the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone ’but the Nigeria forces were slow to extend freedom to the Nigerian people at home.
This does not mean that Nigeria should not have helped to re-democratize Liberia and Sierra Leone. General Sani Abacha's regional role was one of the positive aspects of Pax Nigeriana. But doing good abroad is no excuse for not doing better at home. Fortunately, there were indications that the military government after Abacha wanted an honorable way towards re-civilization. The last elections of the end of the 20th century brought a former soldier to head the new democracy’ General Olusegun Obasanjo.
It is arguable that one of the first exercises of Pax Nigeriana occurred in Tanzania in1964. Army mutinies in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika had forced the three governments to invite British troops to return to East Africa and disarm their own mutinous solders.
President Julius K. Nyerere understandably disbanded the whole mutinous army once order was restored. But who was going to keep the peace in a Tanganyika without an army? Julius Nyerere called upon fraternal troops from Nigeria to fill the vacuum while Nyerere set about creating an alternate indigenous security force. It is arguable that the beginnings of Pax Nigeriana lie in a voluntary partnership between Nigeria and what later became Tanzania. Nigerians helped Tanzanians keep the peace in their own country in 1964. Ironically, this marked the 50th anniversary of the amalgamation of Nigeria into one country.
Nigerian Politics: Between The Sublime And The Theatrical
Perhaps it is also part of Nigeria's exceptionalism that it has not just one pivotal ethnic group in a national configuration but three. Uganda has one pivotal group ’ the Baganda. Kenya has in reality Two outstanding pivotal group- the Luo and Kikuyu. Senegal's outstanding pivotal group are the Wolof.
Is Nigeria exceptional in having three very large pivot ethnic groups, each with a dazzling record of achievement? Nigeria would not have had such a triad of vanguard ethnic groups if the 1914 amalgamation had not occurred, and if it had not been preserved by Yakubu Gowon''s government.
The Hausa are by far the largest linguistic group not only in Nigeria but in West Africa as a whole. Within Nigeria itself the Hausa also have a long record of skill of governance from precolonial days, right through colonialism until postcolonial days. The Yoruba have in many ways the most complex indigenous culture of them all. The Yoruba impact on global Africa and the rest of the Black world is less about the Yoruba language and more about the Yoruba religion and culture. Yoruba religious rites are to be witnessed in countries as diverse as Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Surinam, Nigeria, Dahomey (now Republic of Benin) and the United States.
The Igbo were the great technologists of Nigeria in the second half of the twentieth century. Their triumph in economic skills in Northern Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to their vulnerability as a people in 1966. During the Nigerian Civil war the Igbo's innovativeness also produced Africa's first locally made gun-vehicles.
During the Civil War the Igbo displayed levels of innovative daring unknown in post-colonial African History. The Igbo created rough-and-ready armed militarized vehicles as well as the beginnings of African's industrial revolution. This renaissance was aborted by the oil bonanza from the 1970s onwards.
During the Biafra War Nigeria was more internally innovative than externally prosperous. The Nigerian Civil War produced some of the high points of Nigeria's experience with technological innovation. The Nigerian oil bonanza after the 1973 OPEC price escalation created disincentives to Nigerian enterprise.
War had brought out both the best and the worst of Nigeria in human terms. But technologically the power of spilt blood in Nigeria produced greater innovation than the power of sprouting petroleum. The pain of Biafra was technologically more fruitful than the profit of OPEC. While Commander-in-chief Yakubu Gowon was mobilizing the Federal forces, Colonel Emeka Ojukwu was inspiring and motivating Igbo innovation.
Nigeria's exceptionalism in 1998 included the extraordinary phenomenon of five political parties choosing the same man as their Presidential candidate ’ Sani Abacha even when Abacha was not even A member of any of these parties. This was unprecedented any where in the world. At one level this showed political opportunism at its most glaring, and where in the world. At one level this showed political opportunism at its most glaring, and was not a credit to the complex size of Nigeria. But at another level this could have been a defensible constitutional experiment if it had been presented as such.
When Africa had one-party states (as in Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast), the real choice for voters involved elections to the legislature. The choice of the Head of State was never in doubt in those African on-party states. The legislative choice was between individual candidates within the same party.
What Nigeria might have evolved in 1998 was a system a little more pluralistic than the one-party state but a little less pluralistic than a system of full-blown electoral competition at all levels. At the presidential level, the people of Nigeria would have no more choice than the electorates of Africa's one-party states had before the 1990s. But at the level of legislative elections the people of Nigeria could choose between arties and not simply between individuals. At least theoretically the people of Nigeria would have had more choice in 1998 than the people of one-party Kenya had before 1992. However, the Nigerian voter was not impressed. And Abacha did not live long enough to be the Head of five political parties. Let us now shift from Nigeria's exceptionalism, its uniqueness, to Nigeria's typicality in the African context.
Ideologies: The Cultural And The Economic
Nigeria's typicality includes the fact that Nigerians are more strongly moved by socio-cultural ideologies than by socio-economic ideologies. Socio-cultural ideologies appeal to such cultural forces as ethnicity, religion, nationalism, race-consciousness and regional allegiance.
Socio-economic ideologies try to appeal to such economic interest at class, economic equity, trade union right and the like. Marxism, ujamaa and most other forms of socialism are socio-economic ideologies. Ethnicity, nationalism and regional allegiance are socio-cultural ideologies.
In Nigeria ’ as in most other parts of Africa ’ ethno-cultural ideologies are much stronger than ethno-economic ones. My favorite Nigerian example was Obafemi Awolowo's effort to move Nigeria a little to the left. When he looked to see who was following him, it was not the dispossessed of all ethnic groups Nigeria who followed; it was his fellow Yoruba of all social classes and levels of income.
My favorite Kenyan example was Oginga Odinga's modest attempt to move Kenyans a little to the left. When Oginga looked to see who was following him, once again it was not the dispossessed of Kenya of all ethnic groups. It was his fellow Luo of all social classes and levels of income.
Africa is a continent of surplus passion but deficit power. Nigerians as Africans feel strongly about many aspirations. In the controversial words of a very distinguished African philosopher president ’a king of philosopher king ’ Leopold Senghor of Senegal: "Emotion Is Black’ Reason Is Greek."
Nigeria is typical of Africans also because of the swings between tyranny (too much government) and anarchy (too little government). When under military rule, Nigeria leans towards tyranny (too much government), when under civilian administration, Nigeria leans towards anarchy (too little government).
In spite of the fact the country was at war from 1967 to 1970, military rule under Yakubu Gowon was more benign than military rule either before the Gowon regime or subsequent to it.
Nigeria's triple heritage is a convergence of indigenous African values, Islamic culture, and the impact of the West (both secular and Christian). In one sense, this convergence of the three legacies is part of Nigeria's typicality.
But Nigeria is exceptional in having those three civilizations (Africanity, Islam and the West) almost equal in power. Can we measure political development by the yardstick of declining scale of political violence? Let us try with Nigeria. The first two decades of Nigeria's independence were the age of regicide and primary violence. The killing of the King or Head Executive
as a trend as regicide. Of the eight supreme leaders of Nigeria in the first 20 years, four has been assassinated.
The eight supreme leaders were Azikwe, Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Ironsi, Gowon, Murtala, Obansanjo and Shagari. The 50% who were assassinated were of course Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, Ironsi and Murtala Muhammed. Regicide was at a 50% rate ’ a high rate indeed. Ahmadu Bellow was technically a regional leader but with immense federal and national power. In all, three Northern leaders were killed, as compared with one Southern.
The next 20 years of Nigeria's independence (1980 to the year 2000) were to be of militarism and constitutional experimentation. These were the last years of Shagari, those of Shagari, those of Buhari, those of Babangida and his immediate successors, and the emergence of Sani Abacha. The most promising experiment was the Babangida transition, which collapsed ignominiously with the aborted election of June 1993. The transition would apparently have bought M.K.O Abiola into power. It would have been a remarkable stage in the electoral amalgamation of the two halves of Nigeria. For the first time a Southern Muslim would have presided over Nigeria. Under Abacha the years of Militarism and constitutional experimentation could have continued, on the other hand, with a new concept of presidential recycling from military ruler to elected Head of State.
If Abacha had lived and run for the Presidency, he would have been partially following the precedent of Jerry Rawlings who captured power twice by the barrel of gun and later gained legitimacy through the ballot box and electoral process. But Abacha died in June 1998 before the scenario could be attempted in Nigeria. The experiment in North South amalgamation was inconclusive and was still subject to ups and downs.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Brazil Discourses -- Africa, the state, genocide and the Future
By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Text of 10 lectures on Africa delivered between 13 June and 10 July 2009 at the following universities in Brazil: Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Aracaju, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo. I wish to thank Alyxandra Gomes Nunes of the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, for her excellent planning and coordination of the lecture tour and to Professors Paula Barreto, Eliane Veras Soares, Claudio Pereira, Antonio Mota, Walteir Silva, Hypolite Brice, Luiz Eduardo Oliveira, Marie Teresa Salgado, César Nunes, Fábio Akcelrud Durão, Jose Augusto Alburquerque and Jamie Ginzburg for their stimulating contributions and exchanges during the lively post-lecture question & discussion sessions and for creating the enabling environment in their various universities which made the tour such a resounding intellectual success. To you all, I say, “Obrigado. Tchau!” All notes and references are in the original – HE-E]
Arms, arming, armies and armed conflicts as well as a deleterious political economy characterise the tragedy of contemporary Africa. With 10 major ongoing-armed conflicts, including the genocide in Darfur being perpetrated by the Arab-led state in the Sudan, Africa has more wars raging on its territory than any other continent in the world. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, more than 120 wars have been fought in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America/the Caribbean resulting in the death of 40 million people. This figure represents about 80 per cent of the total number of those killed during the Second World War. Of these 40 million fatalities, well over one-third or 15 million are Africans, killed in the genocidal murders and other so-called “internal-based” wars that have been fought across Africa since the 1960s – notably the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide executed by the Nigeria state and its allies, the foundational and most gruesome genocide in Africa to date where 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered, the 1996 Rwanda genocide, the ongoing Darfur genocide, and the wars in the Congos (Congo Democratic Republic, Republic of Congo), Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Senegal (southern Casamance province), Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Guinea Bissau, southern Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. Elsewhere, the war theatre fatalities of the period that complete the grisly tally of 15 million occurred in the following countries where Africans waged wars against occupying European conquest regimes: South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya and Angola. Presently, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Angola, Central Africa Republic, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea are still ravaged by simmering conflict or the aftermath of one, and the spill-over consequences on contiguous states and regions have been devastating. The displacement of millions of people and the prevailing extensive food shortages and desperate famine conditions in west, central, east and southern Africa that affect 38 million people have indeed been exacerbated by these varied war and post-war situations.
In essence, the state in Africa that emerged on the morrow of the late 1950s/early 1960s’ “termination” of direct European conquest occupation of the continent demonstrates a glaring inability to fulfil its basic role. This state does not provide security and welfare nor does it enable the growth and _expression of society’s transformative capacities. It is virtually at war with its peoples, having murdered 15 million since 1966 as we have highlighted. The typical African state, 53 years after the so-called “restoration of independence”, is essentially a genocide-state.
Child Soldiers
Currently, Africa has the world's largest number of refugees displaced by wars – a total of 15 million or just short of one-half of the world's total of 38 million that includes the Middle East, South-West Asia and South-East Asia. As can be imagined, the effect of these wars on the African family and the community at large has been profoundly tragic – bereavement, separation, disorganisation, displacement. Life in a refugee camp that could be miles away from one's village, town, province, district or region in another part of the country (or even in a foreign land) with a missing mother or father or daughter or son, has taken a heavy toll on Africa's legendary family cohesiveness. The effect on children is particularly grave and the ever contentious questions increasingly posed in several intellectual circles on the survivability of the African family life in its present form can no longer be shrugged off. As casualties on the war front mount inexorably, the recruitment of children from refugee camps and elsewhere into the military intensifies. Africa has the highest concentration of child-soldiers (boys and girls) presently. Of the 120,000 children fighting in the world’s wars, 80,000 or two-thirds of the total are Africans – actively involved in the continent's major conflicts in the east, central and west regions.
Economies and Indebtedness
The economics of Africa's arms, arming and armed conflicts, as should be expected, have had a strangulating effect on the continent's resources. The variegated features of African militarisation and wars have been very costly, creating crippling indebtedness. These constitute US$170 billion or about a 40 per cent share of Africa's total so-called “external debt” that currently stands at US$350 billion. Africa's annual servicing of these “debts”, with ever spiralling interest rates on them, has ensured that the continent has been a net exporter of capital to overseas, mostly to the Western World, since 1981. During the period, Africa transferred the gargantuan amount of US$400 billion to the West – a sum which is in fact four times the size of the original US$100 billion principal of the continent's “debt” as it stood in 1980, and in excess of the present value of US$350 billion. The militarisation component of African “indebtedness” will surely continue to rise as more resources than ever before are allocated to this across the continent. In the era of the virtual collapse of the so-called African “nation-state”, it is not as ironical as it may seem that the only sector of the state's economic activity with the rest of the world that has retained an unrivalled dynamism is its arms, arming, genocide, conflict and war capability. Africa as a whole now spends 25 per cent of its GNP (Gross National Product) on militarisation and wars while it allocates a paltry 2.4 per cent of its GNP to education – despite the general collapse of the continent's educational infrastructure at all tiers – and 2.1 per cent of its GNP to health, despite the HIV/AIDs pandemic that afflicts millions of its people and other equally debilitating maladies. It should be stressed that this stated expenditure on militarisation is highly conservative as it does not account for the usual “military/security-oriented” funds that many a regime in Africa surreptitiously lodges in the budget of the Office of the President or those of the Ministry of Public Works or Ministry of Reconstruction and Planning or some other quaint-sounding government department of dubious tasks. Neither does this expenditure fully account for those that emanate from quasi-state operatives (for instance, the notorious Sudanese janjaweed) the non-state/anti-state insurgent organisations and their constituencies that sprout up here and there as this emergency deteriorates. In countries and regions with multi-sectoral sites of ongoing wars (Côte d'Ivoire/central West Africa, Chad, the Congos/Great Lakes, the Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria), quasi-state and non-state/anti-state insurgent groups now compete actively in Africa's arms build-up and proliferation. In effect, Africa's expenditure on militarisation and wars is closer to one-third of its GNP than the 20 per cent stated above. What is therefore certain is that until there is a dramatic de-escalation of this grim crisis, the ratio of both Africa's annual militarisation budgetary provision vis-à-vis the rest of the economy, and the share of this provision to the continent's overall “debt” budget, will continue to expand.
Fuelling Killing Fields
Besides South Africa and Egypt and the very limited arms production base in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Morocco, Africa does not, in the main, produce the array of weaponry that fuels the killing fields that stretch across the continent. The United States and Britain are Africa's principal suppliers of weapons and the impact of their roles here need highlighting. Both countries make up 70 per cent of Africa's total imports while Russia, France, China, Germany and Belgium account for 20 per cent. The remaining 10 per cent are made up of the so-called “illegal weapons”, most of which are imported from east and central Europe. If US arms sales and transfers to Egypt and Morocco could be ignored for now (transactions that are more related to the US's Middle-East strategic considerations than Africa itself), Britain is in fact the leading arms exporter to Africa. In 1999 alone, Britain sold US$80 million worth of arms to Africa which represented about one-third of all US sales to the continent (Egypt and Morocco excluded) in the entire 1990s decade. In this first decade of the new millennium, British military sales to Africa have leapt to an average of US$180 million per annum or about 80 per cent of US's total military exports to the region (Egypt and Morocco again excluded) in the previous decade.
British arms exporters were the leading beneficiaries of the billions of dollars that Nigeria, to use the example of the country in Africa that inaugurated the genocide state in 1966, spent on arms and other “state security-related” imports during the 16 years of the appalling military dictatorships of Generals Buhari, Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar. At the time, budgetary allocations to the Nigerian military and other paraphernalia of the juntas' repressive apparatus averaged US$2 billion per annum with Britain enjoying 60-70 per cent of all imports. The dictatorships were therefore fully equipped to pursue their notorious state of siege on the populations with such devastating consequences: a run-down economy, the murder of scores of political opponents, the detention of several others, the catastrophic military interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone which cost the country US$13 billion and thousands of casualties (never acknowledged officially by any of the latter three military regimes that were involved in the intervention nor indeed the so-called two “civilian” successor regimes), and the flight of tens of thousands of intellectuals and professionals into exile. Contrary to popular expectations across the country in 1999, the formal end of military rule did not reverse the underlying anti-democratic policy and manifestation of militarisation. The situation had not least been helped by the leadership of the new regime, headed by none other than Olusegun Obasanjo, an ex-military dictator himself who led a junta for three years in the 1970s and a genocidist commander during the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970. In an era when the rest of the world appeared completely exasperated in watching Africa forced to its knees by a cyclical retinue of colonels and generals wielding the cudgel of their brute usurpation of state power, Obasanjo had essentially followed in the footsteps of former military dictators in west and central Africa (Togolese General Eyadema, Ghanaian Flt-Lt Rawlings, Burkinabe Captain Campore and Central African Republic General Bokassa, for instance) to “civilianise” himself into state president. The outcome, his eight years in office, was a disaster in the country. Rather than slash the budget on militarisation, “Civilian” President Obasanjo increased it! When Obasanjo took over from the formal military regime in 1999, the junta's stated budgetary allocation to militarisation was US$2.2 billion. In Obasanjo's own first budget in 2000, he earmarked US$2.4 billion for militarisation/state brutalisation, an increase of almost 10 per cent from the previous year. In contrast, US$500 million was assigned to education while health care received US$150 million. The widespread human rights abuse and personal insecurity that were the hallmark of life in the country during formal military rule did not abate. Instead, the situation worsened markedly with the increased levels of state and quasi-state violence on principally Igbo people and the further strangulation of the economy of occupied Igboland.
In the eight years that Obasanjo was in power, 20,000 people in Nigeria were murdered by the state, quasi-state agencies and others. Eighty per cent of those murdered were Igbo. In all, Obasanjo had overseen one of the most corrupt and incompetent governments in Nigeria. Transparency International branded Nigeria the “second most corrupt country” in the world. But the Obasanjo regime's more detailed and graphic indictment came from a January 2003 damning report on its financial life published by its own auditor general, noting gross irregularities: “over-invoicing, non-retirement of cash advances, lack of audit inspection, payments for jobs not done, double debiting, contract inflation, lack of receipts of back pay, flagrant violation of financial regulations, release of money without approving authority…” Thousands of employees, especially in public services, were owed salaries ranging from 12-18 months. Industrial enterprises operated at about 30 per cent capacity and acute shortages of petrol and petroleum products were the norm for a country that is the world's sixth largest exporter of petroleum oil! Several universities and other educational institutions of higher learning were strike-bound for long stretches during the academic year due to both staff and students' protests over lack of adequate state funding for education. Hospitals were also frequent sites of strike action by doctors, nurses and other medical staff protesting over the government's poor funding of healthcare. What Obasanjo has shown demonstrably in Nigeria is that rather than ease an already desperate situation, the “civilianisation” of ex-military dictators in the politics of their countries deepens the crisis of militarisation and brutalisation, with the predictable consequences on the welfare and aspirations of the people. The haemorrhage on the economy as the regime ploughs even more resources into the procurement of armaments to suppress recalcitrant/targeted population(s) intensifies. More armament requirement for these regimes is of course welcome news to Britain, Africa's chief weapon exporter, and the others contending for a slice of this scrumptious pie…
Britain's pervasive entrenchment in the very lucrative business of African militarisation and wars is equally evident in central and southern Africa. Despite its rhetoric of an “ethical foreign policy”, the British Labour party government that took office in 1997 was heavily involved in the Congo/Great Lakes war. Similar to the United States's intervention in this conflict, Britain had sold arms to both sides of the principal protagonists – Congo Democratic Republic itself, Rwanda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Uganda. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation at the height of the conflict in 2000, Charles Onyango-Obbo, the editor of the respected Ugandan independent newspaper, The Monitor, did not fail to stress the significance of the British role in the region:
Britain is supporting both sides – it just robs [it] of any moral authority and a lot of people rightly do despise the British government in this affair.
Despite this “ethical foreign policy”, British Prime Minister Blair at the time personally visited South Africa in 1999 to lobby successfully on behalf of the British arms industry for a substantial share in the massive US$6 billion arms build up planned then by the South African military. For South Africa, such an outlandish expenditure on militarisation was a shock to many observers concerned about the country's priorities. None of South Africa's neighbours posed (or poses) any threat to the country's security and no such threats were envisaged from elsewhere in the world in the foreseeable future. The post-conquest years of urgently required reconstruction of institutions, and the provision of services to ensure equitable inclusion and participation by all races and peoples in South African society, would surely have benefited immensely from the injection of US$6 billion rather than the government’s allocation of such a huge sum to the armaments of certain death.
For yet more thoughts on Britain’s “ethical foreign policy”, it is worth noting that this “orientation” was equally unsustainable in the light of the convoluted phases of the controversial British military intervention in the Sierra Leone wars during the 1990s, including the highly embarrassing “arms-to-Africa” affair. In this affair, well-placed British government officials connived with Sandline International, a British-based mercenary force, which was in combat operations in Sierra Leone to install a pro-British regime. British arms were also sent to contending combatant groups in the country, often in clear violations to stipulated United Nations arms embargo on Sierra Leone and the region. Finally, an “ethical foreign policy” did not in any way sway Britain's decision in its most scandalous participation in African militarisation to date when, in 2002, it sold a military air traffic control system to Tanzania (a country without a credible air force) for the price tag of US$42 million. Not even the usually reticent World Bank and the IMF restrained themselves from publicly criticising a deal that had been struck by London only after putting “unbearable” pressure on the Tanzanian government. As for the latter, it was an ignoble occasion at the time to watch senior state officials struggle pitiably to explain or rather rationalise how a country that had no obvious need for the expensive machinery that they had just purchased would hence slide into certain debt as a result.
Onyango-Obbo's observations on Britain could equally have been made, with the obvious substitutions, to also capture the nature of US foreign policy towards the scourge of African militarisation and wars as we show shortly, and indeed those of other countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, one of Africa’s few but most costly inter-state conflicts, Russia and Bulgaria, for instance, sold expensive weapons’ systems (especially fighter aircraft, bombers, helicopter gun ships, tanks) to both African neighbours throughout their devastating confrontation. Thousands of Ethiopians and Eritreans were killed in the war and it is estimated that both sides spent about US$1 million per day throughout the duration of the arms build up and hostilities. Less than three years after the end of fighting, the two countries made a startling appeal to an outside world still bewildered over the sheer idiocy of their conflict: they urgently needed international support to feed 11 million of their citizens facing hunger and starvation. Nothing in this appeal indicated that the political leadership in either Addis Ababa or Asmara really cared for the welfare of its citizens when it drove thousands of them into war to face untimely deaths just a few years earlier. In so doing, these leaderships laid the very foundations of the deaths that presently stalk their lands through starvation.
As for the United States, it sold weapons totalling about US$230 million to Africa during the years 1990-1999. Significantly, about 50 per cent of these sales went directly to the countries steeped in the very fractured contours of the epicentre of the raging wars of the Congo/Great Lakes arc: Congo Democratic Republic, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, Burundi, Namibia and Zimbabwe. The fact that some of these countries and their varying non-state insurgent forces' allies were in opposing military alliances during the conflict (necessitating using US weaponry against enemies similarly armed by the same supplier!), was of little consideration in Washington's arms transfer policy. Furthermore, Rwanda, which consistently maintained an intransigent position towards innumerable peace settlements at the time, received an additional US$75 million worth of “emergency aid” during the period, that hardly disguised the incorporated military/quasi-military components in it. Similarly, US arms sales and transfers to war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia (and to contiguous states with interest in the wars such as Guinea and Mali) during the era did not in any way enhance the goals of conflict resolution. On the contrary, more arms were just being poured into a region already bursting at the seams with an unimaginable array of destructive arsenal…
“Legal” vs “Illegal”?
We should now focus briefly on Africa's so-called “illegal arms”. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine and Bulgaria make up the bulk of exporters of weapons to the continent's ever-expanding non-state insurgents, some of whose missions are anti-state (as the innumerable clusters in Somalia, for example, are) or are indeed pro-state (as the janjaweed, in the Sudan, for instance). These armaments, often made up of small and light arms (pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades), are usually categorised as “illegal weapons” to highlight the juridical status of their destinations or recipients, but not their sources. There are about 500 million of such weapons circulating in the world and one-fifth of these or 100 million are used in Africa's wars, armed banditry and other escapades. To underscore the seriousness of the situation at stake, the deadly AK-47 assault rifle, for example, can be purchased as cheaply as six US dollars in a number of African countries. This is equivalent to the cost of a chicken or a bag of corn in many parts of the continent! Yet, thanks to the fragility of the African state with its underlying unpredictable upheavals, millions of items of weaponry that ultimately make up this “illegal” pool of categorisation do have their origins from the sources of the (African) “sovereign states”’ armouries initially supplied by the principal arms exporter powers cited earlier. In other words, an item of AK-47 rifle or a rocket launcher on the African scene that may have started its original classificatory placement as a “legal weapon” in some state armoury could, in a few weeks, or even much less time, transmogrify into an “illegal arm” label because it is now in the hands of some dissident or insurgent organisation opposed to the state or a pro-state militia murdering targeted individuals, groups or, especially, targeted constituent nations. The converse of this transmutable process is also the case.
It should therefore be stressed that whilst the dichotomy often placed between “legal arms” and “illegal arms” by some observers (in the African militarisation, genocide and war debate) has some analytical credit, its outcome on the ground, particularly in enabling us evaluate the comparative impact that the two categories ultimately pose on African social co-existence and security always comes as a shock! Contrary to the initial value judgement that most people would make between the “legality” of a particular commodity (in this case, arms) and its “illegality”, it is definitely no comfort at all when it is shown at the end of the exercise that the overwhelming majority of the 15 million killed in Africa's genocides and wars in the past 45 years were in fact slaughtered with the use of “legal” armaments, operated seemingly legally by the armed forces of the state and their allies. The examples of the Nigeria state in 1966-1970, the Rwandan central government in the 1990s and the current Arab regime in Khartoum are acutely illustrative of this cataclysmic sequence. In effect, whether “legal” or “illegal”, armaments in Africa, controlled overwhelmingly by the African state and its allies, are used to murder targeted African nations and populations domiciled within these states; the African states, since the Igbo genocide, have deployed armaments in their armouries to murder their peoples most brutally, massively and extensively. These states, starting from Nigeria, have murdered a ghastly total of 15 million Africans in a generation. They are still murdering without let up… They have devastated communities. They have disfigured and traumatised peoples’ lives and aspirations. In the hands of the typical African state, since the Igbo genocide, these armaments, even though classified “conventional”, are indeed weapons of mass destruction. Nothing else, but weapons of mass destruction… In Africa, the pistol, the rifle, the grenade, the rocket, the bazooka, the landmine, the helicopter gunship, the naval gunship, the fighter aircraft, the bomber, the tank – each and every one of these items, imported by and large from abroad, is a killer used primarily by the state to murder targeted peoples within its border. The African state should and must be stopped from murdering peoples within its frontiers. The rest of the world, especially from where weapons to these African states originate, day in, and day out, can no longer remain bystanders as this orgy of death is brazenly played out in Africa. Since the Igbo genocide, the African state has been destroying African lives; they are presently destroying African lives; they will continue to destroy African lives until stopped. The African state must surely be stopped from its pursuit of this pulverising mission of death.
“Failed States”? “Sub-Sahara Africa”?
It is perhaps difficult not to conclude from our portrait of the contemporary African state that its being is symptomatic or even indicative of that term that several scholars and political commentators increasingly employ in characterising most of Africa – the “failed state”. The concept “failed state” of course has a melodramatic import! It designates the outcome, penned in a professorial manner, of a project supposedly observed and assessed over time and space. In that case, the recipient or audience to which this outcome is conveyed is assumed to be well in tune with the progress or otherwise of the subject matter. The problem though is that the evaluative parameter of this enterprise of assessing and therefore concluding that this or that African state has “failed” is often not clear or certain. Or is it? Was Nigeria, for instance, a “failed state” during the course of May to September 1966 (that is just six years after its so-called “restoration” of independence after the British occupation) when it murdered 100,000 of its Igbo citizens in the first phase of the genocide that would over the subsequent three years cost the death of an additional 3 million Igbo people? Before Somalia became a state without a central government, which has now lasted for well over a decade, was it a failed state? Successive central governments in Kinshasa, Congo Democratic Republic, have for over 20 years hardly exercised effective authority over a quarter of the country’s territory which is twice the size of western Europe; is Congo Democratic Republic a “failed state”? A devastating war raged in south Sudan for about 20 years and a genocidal one is being waged on the people of Darfur (northwest of the country) by the Arab government in Khartoum currently; is the Sudan a “failed state”? All of Africa, since 1981, has been a net exporter of capital to the West – 85 per cent which accounts for the servicing of its so-called “debts”. In 1981, Africa recorded a net export capital export of US$5.3 billion to the West. In 1985, this figure increased to US$21.5 billion. Three years later, this net capital transfer was US$36 billion or US$100 million per day. In 1995, this figure jumped to US$100 billion and on the eve of the new millennium in 2000, Africa’s net capital transfer to the West hit the US$150 billion mark. As we indicated earlier, Africa has exported a total of US$400 billion in the past 30 years in this way – these are funds that should easily have provided a comprehensive health programme across the continent, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the construction of an integrative communication network, and finally, the transformation of agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Would this outlandish export of critical resources merit designating all of Africa as “failed states”?
It should be stressed that none of the figures referred to above includes the national accounting of the Arab states in north Africa – namely, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt – but the rest of the 48 countries on the continent which some commentators, especially the CNN, BBC, International Herald Tribune, Reuters, Associated Press, Fox News, Yahoo! News, the UN/allied agencies and some governments and academics in the West, increasingly categorise as “sub-Sahara Africa”, a term that requires some examination forthwith. Its users routinely invoke the reference to the Sahara Desert when writing, speaking about or broadcasting on Africa, especially when they wish to refer to Africa that excludes the five predominantly Arab states of north Africa just mentioned. Pointedly, they also exclude the Sudan, a north-central African state whose overwhelming territory is south of the Sahara from the “sub-Sahara” tagging because the regime in power describes the country as “Arab” despite its majority African population.
As we show now, the concept “sub-Sahara Africa” is absurd, misleading, if not a meaningless classificatory schema. Its use defies the science of the fundamentals of geography but prioritises hackneyed, stereotypical, racist labelling. It is not obvious, on the face of it, which of the four possible meanings of the prefix, “sub”, its users attach to its “sub-Sahara Africa” labelling. Is it “under” or “part of”/“partly”? Or, presumably, “partially”/“nearly” or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of “in the style of, but inferior to”, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan?
The example of South Africa is apt here. Crucially, this is a reference underlined in the relevant literature of the era especially those emanating from West states, the United Nations (principally UNDP, FAO, UNCTAD, ILO), the World Bank and IMF, the so-called NGOs/“aid” groups, and some in academia who are variously responsible for initiating and sustaining the operationalisation of this dogma. Prior to the formal restoration of African majority government in 1994, South Africa was never designated “sub-Sahara Africa” by anyone in this portrait unlike the rest of the 13 African-led states in southern Africa. South Africa then was either termed “white South Africa” or the “South Africa sub-continent” (as in the “India sub-continent” usage, for instance) i.e. “almost”/“partially” a continent – quite clearly a usage of “admiration” or “compliment” employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geo-strategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile European-minority occupying regime. But soon after the triumph of the African freedom movement there, South Africa became “sub-Sahara Africa” in the quickly adjusted schema of this representation! What suddenly happened to South Africa’s “geography” to be so differently classified?! Is it African liberation/rule that renders an African state “sub-Sahara”? Does this post-1994 West-inflected South Africa-changed classification make “sub-Sahara Africa” any more intelligible? Just as in the South Africa “sub-continent” example, the application of the “almost”/“partially” or indeed “part of”/“partly” meaning of prefix “sub-” to “Sahara Africa” focuses unambiguously on the following countries of Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, each of which has 25-75 per cent of its territory (especially to the south) covered by the Sahara Desert. It also focuses on Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, which variously have 25-75 per cent of their territories (to the north) covered by the same desert. In effect, these 10 states would make up sub-Sahara Africa.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the five Arab north Africa states do not, correctly, describe themselves as Africans even though they unquestionably habituate African geography, the African continent, since the Arab conquest and occupation of this north one-third of African territory in the 7th century CE. The West governments, press and the transnational bodies we referred to earlier (which are predominantly led by West personnel and interests) have consistently “conceded” to this Arab cultural insistence on racial identity. Presumably, this accounts for the West’s non-designation of its “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma to these states as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes in the past 53 years have claimed, but incorrectly, that the Sudan “belongs” to the Arab World. On this subject, the West does no doubt know that what it has been engaged in, all along, is blatant sophistry and not science. This, however, conveniently suits its current propaganda packaging on Africa, which we shall be elaborating on shortly.
It would appear that we still don’t seem to be any closer at establishing, conclusively, what its users mean by “sub-Sahara Africa”. Could it, perhaps, just be a benign reference to all the countries “under” the Sahara, whatever their distances from this desert, to interrogate our final, fourth probability? Presently, there are 53 so-called “sovereign” states in Africa. If the five north Africa Arab states are said to be located “above” the Sahara, then 48 are positioned “under”. The latter would therefore include all the five countries mentioned above whose north frontiers incorporate the southern stretches of the desert (namely, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan), countries in central Africa (the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, etc., etc), for instance, despite being 2000-2500 miles away, and even the southern African states situated 3000-3500 miles away! In fact, all these 48 countries, except the Sudan (alas, not included for the plausible reason already cited!), which is clearly “under” the Sahara and situated within the same latitudes as Mali, Niger and Chad (i.e., Between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator), are all categorised by “sub-Sahara Africa” users as “sub-Sahara Africa”. To replicate this obvious farce of a classification elsewhere in the world, the following random exercise is not such an indistinct scenario for universal, everyday, referencing:
1. Australia hence becomes “sub-Great Sandy Australia” after the hot deserts that cover much of west and central Australia
2. East Russia, east of the Urals, becomes “sub-Siberia Asia”
3. China, Japan and Indonesia are reclassified “sub-Gobi Asia”
4. Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam become “sub-Himalaya Asia”
5. All of Europe is “sub-Arctic Europe”
6. Most of England, central and southern counties, is renamed “sub-Pennines Europe”
7. East/southeast France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia are “sub-Alps Europe”
8. The Americas become “sub-Arctic Americas”
9. All of South America south of the Amazon is proclaimed “sub-Amazon South America”; Chile could be “sub-Atacama South America”
10. Most of New Zealand’s South Island is renamed “sub-Southern Alps New Zealand”
11. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama become “sub-Rocky North America”
12. The entire Caribbean becomes “sub-Appalachian Americas”
So, rather than some benign construct, “sub-Sahara Africa” is, in the end, an outlandish nomenclatural code that its users employ to depict an African-led “sovereign” state – anywhere in Africa, as distinct from an Arab-led one. It is the users’ non-inclusion of the Sudan in this grouping (despite its majority African population and geographical location) but its inclusion of South Africa only after the latter’s 1994 restoration of independence that gives the game away! More seriously to the point, “sub-Sahara Africa” is employed to create the stunning effect of a supposedly shrinking African geographical landmass in the popular imagination, coupled with the continent’s supposedly attendant geo-strategic global “irrelevance”. “Sub-Sahara Africa” is undoubtedly a racist geo-political signature in which its users aim repeatedly to present the imagery of the desolation, aridity, and hopelessness of a desert environment. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of 800 million Africans do not live anywhere close to the Sahara, nor are their lives so affected by the implied impact of the very loaded meaning that this dogma intends to convey. Except this increasingly pervasive use of “sub-Sahara Africa” is robustly challenged by rigorous African-centred scholarship and publicity work, its proponents will succeed eventually in substituting the name of the continent “Africa” with “sub-Sahara Africa” and the name of its peoples, “Africans”, with “sub-Sahara Africans” or worse still “sub-Saharans” in the realm of public memory and reckoning.
We should return and conclude on our reflections on the so-called “failed state” in Africa – scientifically understood and unambiguously expressed! Christopher Clapham has argued that the concept “failed state” is “one of those categories that is named after what it isn’t, rather than what it is”. He obviously has a point for a state that routinely wages wars on its population(s), does not provide basic services for its people, and immanently churns out successive leaderships that fleece the collective wealth can hardly merit such a description as the concept connotes in social science discourses. All we need to do is to reflect on the fact that crucial state functions such as the provision of security, rule of law, a rationalising but flexible structure of management, accountability and open and unfettered competition especially with respect to regime change have never existed in the African “nation state” in order to highlight the obvious flaw within this concept. Ultimately, the major limitation of the use of the “failed state” concept to assess the crisis in contemporary Africa is that it confers an unjustifiable rationality on an enterprise in which a spectrum of outcomes ranging from perhaps “very successful” to “failure” or “outright failure” is typecast; it is assumed that those who run the Africa state (Museveni, Obasanjo, Gnassingbé, Buhari, Yar’Adua, Idi Amin, Mengistu, Abacha, Mugabe, Mohammed, Abubakar, Eyadema, Banda, al-Bashier, Numeiri, Bokassa, Toure, Biya, Moi, Gowon, Taylor, Habre, Ahidjo, Babangida, Obote, Rawlings, Doe …) are aware of this test and its evaluative scruples and, like any rational participant, would want to succeed… If they do not do so well, at some instance, so goes the logic, they would try to improve on their previous score and, hopefully, do better… Success is always a possibility! On the contrary, there is limited indication on the ground that African state operatives in the past 40-50 years have approached statecraft as a challenge to succeed in transforming the lives of their peoples. “Success” is never a goal set along the trajectory of their mission. For the Obasanjos and Gowons, for instance, “statecraft” is a fiendish opportunity to murder as many millions of Igbo people as they can possibly achieve … Furthermore, it should be noted that given the evidently limited concerns on just “measuring” the scoreboard of performance, “failed states”’ discourses tend to overlook the much more expansive turbulence of underlying history.
So, rather than organisations that bring benefits to many of its people, the state in Africa has “evidently been a source of suffering”, to quote Christopher Clapham, again, an imagery consistent with Basil Davidson’s description of the impact of this state on the African humanity as a “curse”. Richard Dowden also uses a health metaphor in capturing the legacy of the African state when he notes, alluding to its genesis – a feature that we shall confront soon – “[this European]-scissors and paste job [has indeed caused Africa] much blood and tears”. For her own observation, Lyn Innes is in no doubt that the African state has created what she describes as a “deeply diseased [outcome]” on the continent. William Reno’s categorisation of Sierra Leone as a “shadow state” may appear more of an aesthetic judgement than pathological, but the psychosocial outcome of vivid alienation evident in the country in the 1990s as state and disparate insurgent military forces battled up and down the country as the state was in free fall was palpable.
Chester Crocker has observed, succinctly, that the fundamental problem with the nature of the African state that we have been discussing has been its lack of “legitimacy and authority to manage [its] affairs… As such, [this state has] always derived a major, if not dominant, share of [its] legitimacy from the international system rather than from domestic society”. It is this question of alienability that is at the crux of this grave crisis. T o live in the typical African “nation state” presently is to live in the most oppressively centralised state in the world that denies most peoples in constituent nations their fundamental human rights. This has been a debilitating legacy for most Africans since Europeans created this state during their occupation of the continent. It was, and still remains a conqueror’s and a conquest state, having clobbered together peoples of varying political, cultural, religious and ideational heritage with no identifiably-embracing organic transnational sensibility, save an ensemble or organisation to rationalise the exploitation of critical human and non-human resources for transfers to the West World and elsewhere.
It is precisely in this context that what P. Chabal and J-P. Daloz have ironically called the “political economy of disorder” actually works in Africa: it offers immense opportunities to those who control the instrument of the state but who clearly lack or do not subscribe to the domestic or internal legitimacy to work the system. This state was a boon to the European occupation project as was expected. It was the instrument to harness and enforce the African occupation in its entirety and maximise the expropriation of the spoils of conquest. The African take-over of this state in the 1950s/1960s, without any efforts to transform it into an African-centred ethos and enterprise, witnessed a new era of even greater disregard for domestic legitimacy with cataclysmic consequences – creating that “deeply diseased [outcome]” Innes has referred to: the slaughter of 15 million, colossal decapitalisation of the economy, degenerative poverty. It should never escape the attention of the observer that the flip side of the coin that tells the tale of Africa’s staggering capital transfers to the Western World, day in, day out, as we have just highlighted, is the emaciated, starving and dying African child, woman or man that has for long been the abiding image on television screens across the world. In effect, Franz Schurmann is right to note in his illuminating study on the subject that African leaderships who oversee the non-deconstructed state of the European conquest “are not traditional but rather a phenomenon of modernity. They are fighting for power in a Western-type state with its armies, police, bureaucracies [and] control over economic institutions”.
Pertinently, these leaderships have failed to incorporate into the state structures “inherited” in the aftermath of the European occupation pre-conquest African institutions of politics and governance aimed at maintaining a democratic, fully participatory process and government to respond to the needs and aspirations of individuals and constituent nations. The resulting imbalance in power relations so widely witnessed in Africa today between the state and its people, among constituent peoples, and between men and women have their roots in this systematic marginalisation of Africa’s traditional democratic legacy. Thus, structural alienation from the political process typifies the overall disposition of peoples in the African state. The overwhelming majority of the people are not involved in the process of their own governance and of course one obvious and serious consequence of this is the ease with which political differences and disagreements often deteriorate into major conflicts and wars. This is dictated largely by the unresolved nature and character of the state vis-à-vis the constituent nations. Evidently, the underlying structural basis of independence, or, more correctly, the restoration of independence in Africa has never really been defined. There is no rigorously worked-out agreement on the fundamental character and role of the “post-conquest state” by the constituent nations that make up the state. The broad sectors of African peoples are yet to be placed and involved centrally in the entire process of societal reconstruction and transformation. Not surprisingly, the nature of the state that emerged after the European conquest and occupation had, and still has limited organically shared values linking its peoples. Most African conflicts have therefore centred on the continuously thunderous demands made by desperately deprived and exploited nations and peoples in these states for the construction of decentralised and decentring alternative political structures and institutions which empower people at their locale. It is as a result of this unresolved historical factor of conquest that Africa remains a tinderbox, exploding uncontrollably from time to time, with the devastating consequences that the world has come to know in the past half of a century. Until there is a far-reaching restructuring of political and economic relations within the state to ensure inclusive participation by all nations and peoples, conflicts in Africa will remain endemic. Decentralisation and democratisation are essential in creating a sense of inclusiveness amongst African peoples, a crucial ingredient in overcoming the present causes of disempowerment, instability and underdevelopment. Only within these parameters of justice, equality, freedom, the cessation of violence and alienation can true peace occur.
Disarming Africa: Brazil, Africa Arms-Free Zone, Obama Legacy
Inevitably, Africa must resolve the contentious issues that fuel the current conflictual existence of most of its peoples before achieving urgently needed socio-economic transformation. This is a political question. The widespread feeling of alienation by most constituent peoples in a typical African “nation-state” is palpable enough. This state, in which African peoples were cobbled together in the past by the triumph of external conquest to serve the spoils of occupation, has been a monumental failure in the past 40-50 years of mismanagement by African leaderships. Africans urgently need a principled, unfettered, and unsentimental debate on the “inherited” state, with its ultra-centralising and utterly unviable ethos. It cannot lead to that transformation of a very rich continent that has been the expectation of millions of Africans across the world. The way out is for an extensive political and economic decentralisation which is essential in creating a sense of inclusiveness amongst peoples, a crucial ingredient in overcoming the present causes of disempowerment, instability and underdevelopment. It cannot be over-stressed that if people are not actively involved in the affairs of their society, issues of human and civil rights as well as civic responsibilities will be subverted, creating societies that are clearly not at peace with themselves.
Militarisation, including arms confrontation, is obviously not a viable option to resolve Africa's outstanding problems – especially those that affect constituent peoples in the current state. Arms should henceforth be removed from the African scene as the vehicle for the settlement of disputes. All Africa's problems, however complex and intractable they may appear presently, can and should be resolved through painstaking negotiation even if this seems or becomes protracted. As it was generally in pre-European/pre-Arab conquest times in most of Africa, there should be no limits or ultimatums placed on negotiations and conflict resolutions in Africa: the talking went on and on until some resolution was achieved… The mutual bombardment of ideas, not bullets and shells, was the driving impetus for the avoidance and overcoming of conflicts. Thus the genocide killing field or the battlefield or indeed the riot-field, whether it is Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, the Sudan or Kenya should no longer be an option for the settlement of Africa's extant problems.
On this score, the ethos that governs the African journey of recovery is the commitment of all Africans and the demand that they need to make to the rest of the world to place a mandatory embargo on all arms sales and transfers to all of Africa, as well as a complete demilitarisation of the continent. Africa needs justice and peace for, and with itself, to enable it embark on the much-vaunted era of reconstruction. Britain, the world’s leading arms-delivery-state to Africa must now mothball its arms-delivery behemoth destined for Africa. The British public opinion and British-based human rights and charities such as the British Red Cross, Amnesty International, Oxfam and Christian Aid can no longer live comfortably with the seeming anomaly whereby the British ministry of defence approves to send weapons of death to Africa (whose sales enjoy cast-iron official guarantees for the British arms manufacturer readily provided by the British ministry of trade) and then respond to the inevitable devastating aftermath of the use of these weapons on the African scene by initiating radio and television campaigns to raise and send “relief aid” to the targeted African population(s). It is really no longer sufficient for the Amnesty Internationals and Oxfams of Britain to issue periodic condemnations of the misdemeanours and transgressions of the African state when they are silent over the crucial role that the very heart of the British political establishment at Whitehall (London), located just a few miles away from these organisations, plays in propping up the African genocide state. The Amnesty Internationals and Oxfams must be in the forefront of the campaign calling for a total, unconditional arms ban on Africa and the demilitarisation of the continent. This focus on British charity/human rights institutions’ relationship with their state and the latter’s arms shipment to Africa also applies to the US, France, Belgium, Canada and other countries in the West that export arms to Africa.
Thanks to Brazil’s current impressive scientific and technological advancement, which has, understandably, impacted on its arms manufacturing industry, this country is rapidly expanding its arms export capacity. As a result, Brazil is steadily climbing up the Africa arms-delivery-states’ ladder. But Brazil shouldn’t be on any of the rungs of this notorious ladder in the first place. Yet, on this very important subject of our times, Brazil can act as a beacon to the rest of the world by being the first country to descend from this ladder and walk away. If the indolent African regime is ever interested in Brazil’s exciting technological innovations, it should instead be presented with a catalogue of Brazilian-made tractors, harvesters, irrigation machinery … Brazil should immediately place a blanket arms embargo on all of Africa. Even arms being negotiated presently with any African state and those in the pipeline of delivery to the continent should be abandoned, withdrawn or blocked. Brazil has the enviable status as the country in the world outside Africa with the highest number of peoples of African descent in its population. It should not at the same time be sending weapons of death to Africa’s genocide states to murder Africans who live east of the Atlantic. Brazilian intellectuals and students have their work very much cut out on this in their dialogue with their state. Finally, US President Obama, his country’s first African-descent head of state, can be assured of a lasting legacy of his presidency by imposing a comprehensive US arms embargo on this continent of his fathers at the cusp of constructing new states of organic sensibilities – away from the terror of the genocide state. Obama should expand this initiative to involve other arms-exporters-to-Africa especially on such forums as the UN Security Council and the G-8. Arms ban to Africa should be internationally mandatory and enforceable.
On this, Africa’s challenge to the rest of the world couldn’t be clearer: those who live outside Africa but “care so much for Africa” should now scale down their multitudinous “aid-ventures for Africa” and turn their incredible talents to lobbying their respective states and other institutions in their countries and elsewhere to ban arms sales/transfers to Africa. This new focus for the world’s leading charities, away from the band-aid syndrome, will surely be more exciting, even less taxing, but definitely more rewarding for the ultimate outcome for Africa and the rest of the world alike. Africa seeks no resources from anyone, not even for one US dollar, to accomplish its current transformative mission to dismantle the genocide state. It is simply asking the world to completely seal off its vast armouries to deny access to the deadly claws of the Africa genocide state. For once, no one is asking anyone to raise money for Africa! Given the devastating impact of arms, arming, armies, genocide and other armed conflicts on Africa’s tragic history and the present, Africa, in 2009, projects an unwavering signpost for the world’s attention that proclaims: Africa Is An Arms-Free Zone. A demilitarised continent. No More Arms Sales Or Transfers To Africa.
Renaissance
The African genocide state has now run the course of its bloody trail in history. The greatest challenge facing Africans in the new millennium is to dismantle this state and create new state forms based on Africa’s critical re-engagement with its rich cultural heritage. This is to enable them to safeguard the lives of their people and embark on the vast topography of reconstruction of society after a depressing and devastating history. This task is a cardinal facet of the African renaissance or renewal. Africa’s alternative path of survival and reconstruction is clearly a path that emerges from the people re-connecting to the continent’s enduring cultural precepts and institutions emplaced in its ancient nations or in “real Africa”, as some scholars have aptly categorised them. It attaches a high priority to the resuscitation of the treasured position of the family in African community affairs and the full operation of the ethos and institutions of the dual-sex complementarity that has for centuries defined the central tenets of African social existence. These spheres of African life have come under sustained assaults and, in some fronts, have had considerable fractures during the course of the European occupation of the continent and the last 40-50 years of disastrous African overseeing-management. One such emergency zone of fracture has been the outrageous marginalisation of African women from participating actively in the key institutions of the state and society. This has been an historical setback for women who in the past controlled and exercised extensive rights and authority over their own affairs as well as those of the rest of society as has been demonstrated extensively in the writings and studies of novelists such as Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and scholars such as Kemene Okonjo, Adiele Afigbo, Ifi Amadiume, Nkiru Nzegwu and Okwuonicha Femi Nzegwu. The re-positioning of women in the shared complementary spaces of responsibility, power and authority must be at the epicentre of the reconfiguration of African fortunes in these new state forms of decentralisation.
Already, this alternative Africa, this reconstituted land of renewal, translated into decentralised, organically articulated new states, is being built amidst the chaos and brutality of a tragic epoch. As should be already obvious, this future of Africa discussed here is antithetical to Muammar Gaddafi’s current “Africa Unity” theatrical digressions, which, more seriously as I demonstrate in a 2007 essay, are indeed a cover for an ominous proto-islamic, neofeudal Africa-wide continental dynastic fiefdom modelled on Gaddafi’s own family firm and patronage formulations in Libya since 1969. This contraption will only reinforce and expand the stranglehold of the genocide state in Africa. Whilst the death machine that is the African state is undoubtedly ruthless, as we have shown, it has an immanent weakness which the people are presently exploiting across different regions of the continent to recast a new social existence. Thanks to the sheer size of the territorial space that it has to contend with in its existentialist quest to enforce its legendary brute power, and given its notorious inefficiency and stunted technological development, this pulverising state of death has not been able to exercise an all-embracing, omni-present Gestapo-like or Ba’athist party-like control of society. It does not have tentacles embedded all over the place. The ever-bubbling currents of enhanced globalisation with attendant flashes of instant communication, 24 hours a day, have further exposed the tenuousness of the foundation of its existence. The peoples have therefore exploited this weakness with aplomb. Africa is currently saturated with communities actively experimenting and exercising control of their immediate, surrounding societies by setting up a people-oriented security and a working justice system, developing infrastructure, building schools and hospitals and negotiating operating terms of relations with transnational companies or corporations or even the odd government or quasi-government organisation from overseas. The operationalising slogan that appears to underpin this exercise is the “Survival of Our Nation”. From Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Benin and genocidist Nigeria in the west, through Cameroon and Gabon in the centre, to Uganda, Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia to the east and to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa in the south, a new Africa of constituent nations-based reconstruction is emerging to pursue the tasks of reconstruction as the genocidist/so-called “nation-state” collapses or retreats into insignificance. The well over 100,000 African intellectuals and professionals who have left Africa for overseas (particularly in the West) are playing a crucial role in this renewal. They are part of the 12 million-strong Africans who left the continent since 1980. These émigrés are now the most active source of Africa-directed investment presently. It is people-targeted and the results are astonishing. These African émigrés now dispatch billions of dollars per annum as well as lend their skill and time to Africa’s growth – investing directly in the development of the people as they literally take care of the feeding, clothing, housing, education, health care and other social needs of relatives and indeed the wider community, amongst a re-emerging/revivalist ethos of local initiative, local control, transparency and accountability. In 2003, according to the World Bank, African émigrés sent to Africa the impressive sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their home communities. This is 40 times the sum of “Western aid” in real terms in the same year – i.e. when the pervasive “overheads” attendant to the latter are accounted for. It is interesting that the source of the information of the instrumental role of African émigrés in current external capital transfers to Africa comes from the World Bank. It is this same World Bank, which, in alliance with the International Monetary Fund and the string of kakistocratic African regimes in the past 30 years, contributed to the virtual destruction of the African economy in its so-called “structural adjustment programme” of the era. Contrary to the very partial, stunted imagery of the African situation of this period propagated with relish by predictable, stunningly uncritical pastiche of international media reporting on the continent, Africans, themselves, have, on the whole, taken central care of coping with the punishing aftermath of the socioeconomics of state collapse and terror, and in charting new pathways to construct organically-responsive states to subvert and replace the extant genocide state.
We cannot overstate the immeasurably favourable resource base that would support this goal of African renaissance. An overview is necessary to underscore the immense possibilities that exist. Africa has developed and continues to develop an advanced humanpower capability that will drive the transformation of the post-genocide state. Eighty per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remain uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production by just 50 per cent, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty (the countries in question are Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan and the Congo Democratic Republic). The overall statistics of the African situation is even more revealing as with regards to the continent’s long-term endowment. Just a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to the so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, peanut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports mainly to the West World at a time when there has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in the West’s commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price of these African products in the West has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the 1960s-70s period which was soon after the restoration of independence. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential. The world is aware of the array of strategic minerals such as cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, petroleum oil found in the Sudan, Congo Democratic Republic, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the continent. These countries are among Africa’s most wealthy and potentially some of the world’s wealthiest. However, what is not always or simultaneously associated with the wealth profiles of these countries is that they have vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, west Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc., all highlight the potential Africa has for fully providing for all its food needs.
In effect, what the current African socioeconomic situation shows is extraordinarily reassuring, provided the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs. Land used directed at agriculture for food output, as opposed to the calamitous waste of “cash crop” production for export, must become the focus of agricultural policy in the new Africa. It is an inexplicable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources on this continent. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future. There is only one condition, though, for the realisation of this goal: Africa must utilise these immense resources for the benefit of its own peoples within newly negotiated, radically decentralised political dispensations which must shed any resemblance to the genocide state. Thus, Africa’s pressing problem in the past 53 years has not been “poverty”, as it is often uncritically portrayed, but how to husband phenomenal resources, human and non-human, for the express benefit of the peoples at a time when the strategic goal for change is to dismantle the architecture of annihilation posed to African existence by its genocide states.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is a leading scholar of the Igbo genocide, 1966-1970. His books include Conflict and Intervention (Macmillan, 1990), Issues in Nigerian Politics Since the Fall of the Second Republic, 1984-1990 (Mellen, 1991), Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and the People (IIAR, 1994), African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe (African Renaissance, 2001), Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2006) and Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (forthcoming, 2009).
Text of 10 lectures on Africa delivered between 13 June and 10 July 2009 at the following universities in Brazil: Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Aracaju, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, São Paulo. I wish to thank Alyxandra Gomes Nunes of the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, for her excellent planning and coordination of the lecture tour and to Professors Paula Barreto, Eliane Veras Soares, Claudio Pereira, Antonio Mota, Walteir Silva, Hypolite Brice, Luiz Eduardo Oliveira, Marie Teresa Salgado, César Nunes, Fábio Akcelrud Durão, Jose Augusto Alburquerque and Jamie Ginzburg for their stimulating contributions and exchanges during the lively post-lecture question & discussion sessions and for creating the enabling environment in their various universities which made the tour such a resounding intellectual success. To you all, I say, “Obrigado. Tchau!” All notes and references are in the original – HE-E]
Arms, arming, armies and armed conflicts as well as a deleterious political economy characterise the tragedy of contemporary Africa. With 10 major ongoing-armed conflicts, including the genocide in Darfur being perpetrated by the Arab-led state in the Sudan, Africa has more wars raging on its territory than any other continent in the world. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945, more than 120 wars have been fought in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America/the Caribbean resulting in the death of 40 million people. This figure represents about 80 per cent of the total number of those killed during the Second World War. Of these 40 million fatalities, well over one-third or 15 million are Africans, killed in the genocidal murders and other so-called “internal-based” wars that have been fought across Africa since the 1960s – notably the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide executed by the Nigeria state and its allies, the foundational and most gruesome genocide in Africa to date where 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered, the 1996 Rwanda genocide, the ongoing Darfur genocide, and the wars in the Congos (Congo Democratic Republic, Republic of Congo), Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Senegal (southern Casamance province), Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Guinea Bissau, southern Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire. Elsewhere, the war theatre fatalities of the period that complete the grisly tally of 15 million occurred in the following countries where Africans waged wars against occupying European conquest regimes: South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Kenya and Angola. Presently, Côte d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, Nigeria, Angola, Central Africa Republic, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Eritrea are still ravaged by simmering conflict or the aftermath of one, and the spill-over consequences on contiguous states and regions have been devastating. The displacement of millions of people and the prevailing extensive food shortages and desperate famine conditions in west, central, east and southern Africa that affect 38 million people have indeed been exacerbated by these varied war and post-war situations.
In essence, the state in Africa that emerged on the morrow of the late 1950s/early 1960s’ “termination” of direct European conquest occupation of the continent demonstrates a glaring inability to fulfil its basic role. This state does not provide security and welfare nor does it enable the growth and _expression of society’s transformative capacities. It is virtually at war with its peoples, having murdered 15 million since 1966 as we have highlighted. The typical African state, 53 years after the so-called “restoration of independence”, is essentially a genocide-state.
Child Soldiers
Currently, Africa has the world's largest number of refugees displaced by wars – a total of 15 million or just short of one-half of the world's total of 38 million that includes the Middle East, South-West Asia and South-East Asia. As can be imagined, the effect of these wars on the African family and the community at large has been profoundly tragic – bereavement, separation, disorganisation, displacement. Life in a refugee camp that could be miles away from one's village, town, province, district or region in another part of the country (or even in a foreign land) with a missing mother or father or daughter or son, has taken a heavy toll on Africa's legendary family cohesiveness. The effect on children is particularly grave and the ever contentious questions increasingly posed in several intellectual circles on the survivability of the African family life in its present form can no longer be shrugged off. As casualties on the war front mount inexorably, the recruitment of children from refugee camps and elsewhere into the military intensifies. Africa has the highest concentration of child-soldiers (boys and girls) presently. Of the 120,000 children fighting in the world’s wars, 80,000 or two-thirds of the total are Africans – actively involved in the continent's major conflicts in the east, central and west regions.
Economies and Indebtedness
The economics of Africa's arms, arming and armed conflicts, as should be expected, have had a strangulating effect on the continent's resources. The variegated features of African militarisation and wars have been very costly, creating crippling indebtedness. These constitute US$170 billion or about a 40 per cent share of Africa's total so-called “external debt” that currently stands at US$350 billion. Africa's annual servicing of these “debts”, with ever spiralling interest rates on them, has ensured that the continent has been a net exporter of capital to overseas, mostly to the Western World, since 1981. During the period, Africa transferred the gargantuan amount of US$400 billion to the West – a sum which is in fact four times the size of the original US$100 billion principal of the continent's “debt” as it stood in 1980, and in excess of the present value of US$350 billion. The militarisation component of African “indebtedness” will surely continue to rise as more resources than ever before are allocated to this across the continent. In the era of the virtual collapse of the so-called African “nation-state”, it is not as ironical as it may seem that the only sector of the state's economic activity with the rest of the world that has retained an unrivalled dynamism is its arms, arming, genocide, conflict and war capability. Africa as a whole now spends 25 per cent of its GNP (Gross National Product) on militarisation and wars while it allocates a paltry 2.4 per cent of its GNP to education – despite the general collapse of the continent's educational infrastructure at all tiers – and 2.1 per cent of its GNP to health, despite the HIV/AIDs pandemic that afflicts millions of its people and other equally debilitating maladies. It should be stressed that this stated expenditure on militarisation is highly conservative as it does not account for the usual “military/security-oriented” funds that many a regime in Africa surreptitiously lodges in the budget of the Office of the President or those of the Ministry of Public Works or Ministry of Reconstruction and Planning or some other quaint-sounding government department of dubious tasks. Neither does this expenditure fully account for those that emanate from quasi-state operatives (for instance, the notorious Sudanese janjaweed) the non-state/anti-state insurgent organisations and their constituencies that sprout up here and there as this emergency deteriorates. In countries and regions with multi-sectoral sites of ongoing wars (Côte d'Ivoire/central West Africa, Chad, the Congos/Great Lakes, the Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria), quasi-state and non-state/anti-state insurgent groups now compete actively in Africa's arms build-up and proliferation. In effect, Africa's expenditure on militarisation and wars is closer to one-third of its GNP than the 20 per cent stated above. What is therefore certain is that until there is a dramatic de-escalation of this grim crisis, the ratio of both Africa's annual militarisation budgetary provision vis-à-vis the rest of the economy, and the share of this provision to the continent's overall “debt” budget, will continue to expand.
Fuelling Killing Fields
Besides South Africa and Egypt and the very limited arms production base in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Morocco, Africa does not, in the main, produce the array of weaponry that fuels the killing fields that stretch across the continent. The United States and Britain are Africa's principal suppliers of weapons and the impact of their roles here need highlighting. Both countries make up 70 per cent of Africa's total imports while Russia, France, China, Germany and Belgium account for 20 per cent. The remaining 10 per cent are made up of the so-called “illegal weapons”, most of which are imported from east and central Europe. If US arms sales and transfers to Egypt and Morocco could be ignored for now (transactions that are more related to the US's Middle-East strategic considerations than Africa itself), Britain is in fact the leading arms exporter to Africa. In 1999 alone, Britain sold US$80 million worth of arms to Africa which represented about one-third of all US sales to the continent (Egypt and Morocco excluded) in the entire 1990s decade. In this first decade of the new millennium, British military sales to Africa have leapt to an average of US$180 million per annum or about 80 per cent of US's total military exports to the region (Egypt and Morocco again excluded) in the previous decade.
British arms exporters were the leading beneficiaries of the billions of dollars that Nigeria, to use the example of the country in Africa that inaugurated the genocide state in 1966, spent on arms and other “state security-related” imports during the 16 years of the appalling military dictatorships of Generals Buhari, Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar. At the time, budgetary allocations to the Nigerian military and other paraphernalia of the juntas' repressive apparatus averaged US$2 billion per annum with Britain enjoying 60-70 per cent of all imports. The dictatorships were therefore fully equipped to pursue their notorious state of siege on the populations with such devastating consequences: a run-down economy, the murder of scores of political opponents, the detention of several others, the catastrophic military interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone which cost the country US$13 billion and thousands of casualties (never acknowledged officially by any of the latter three military regimes that were involved in the intervention nor indeed the so-called two “civilian” successor regimes), and the flight of tens of thousands of intellectuals and professionals into exile. Contrary to popular expectations across the country in 1999, the formal end of military rule did not reverse the underlying anti-democratic policy and manifestation of militarisation. The situation had not least been helped by the leadership of the new regime, headed by none other than Olusegun Obasanjo, an ex-military dictator himself who led a junta for three years in the 1970s and a genocidist commander during the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970. In an era when the rest of the world appeared completely exasperated in watching Africa forced to its knees by a cyclical retinue of colonels and generals wielding the cudgel of their brute usurpation of state power, Obasanjo had essentially followed in the footsteps of former military dictators in west and central Africa (Togolese General Eyadema, Ghanaian Flt-Lt Rawlings, Burkinabe Captain Campore and Central African Republic General Bokassa, for instance) to “civilianise” himself into state president. The outcome, his eight years in office, was a disaster in the country. Rather than slash the budget on militarisation, “Civilian” President Obasanjo increased it! When Obasanjo took over from the formal military regime in 1999, the junta's stated budgetary allocation to militarisation was US$2.2 billion. In Obasanjo's own first budget in 2000, he earmarked US$2.4 billion for militarisation/state brutalisation, an increase of almost 10 per cent from the previous year. In contrast, US$500 million was assigned to education while health care received US$150 million. The widespread human rights abuse and personal insecurity that were the hallmark of life in the country during formal military rule did not abate. Instead, the situation worsened markedly with the increased levels of state and quasi-state violence on principally Igbo people and the further strangulation of the economy of occupied Igboland.
In the eight years that Obasanjo was in power, 20,000 people in Nigeria were murdered by the state, quasi-state agencies and others. Eighty per cent of those murdered were Igbo. In all, Obasanjo had overseen one of the most corrupt and incompetent governments in Nigeria. Transparency International branded Nigeria the “second most corrupt country” in the world. But the Obasanjo regime's more detailed and graphic indictment came from a January 2003 damning report on its financial life published by its own auditor general, noting gross irregularities: “over-invoicing, non-retirement of cash advances, lack of audit inspection, payments for jobs not done, double debiting, contract inflation, lack of receipts of back pay, flagrant violation of financial regulations, release of money without approving authority…” Thousands of employees, especially in public services, were owed salaries ranging from 12-18 months. Industrial enterprises operated at about 30 per cent capacity and acute shortages of petrol and petroleum products were the norm for a country that is the world's sixth largest exporter of petroleum oil! Several universities and other educational institutions of higher learning were strike-bound for long stretches during the academic year due to both staff and students' protests over lack of adequate state funding for education. Hospitals were also frequent sites of strike action by doctors, nurses and other medical staff protesting over the government's poor funding of healthcare. What Obasanjo has shown demonstrably in Nigeria is that rather than ease an already desperate situation, the “civilianisation” of ex-military dictators in the politics of their countries deepens the crisis of militarisation and brutalisation, with the predictable consequences on the welfare and aspirations of the people. The haemorrhage on the economy as the regime ploughs even more resources into the procurement of armaments to suppress recalcitrant/targeted population(s) intensifies. More armament requirement for these regimes is of course welcome news to Britain, Africa's chief weapon exporter, and the others contending for a slice of this scrumptious pie…
Britain's pervasive entrenchment in the very lucrative business of African militarisation and wars is equally evident in central and southern Africa. Despite its rhetoric of an “ethical foreign policy”, the British Labour party government that took office in 1997 was heavily involved in the Congo/Great Lakes war. Similar to the United States's intervention in this conflict, Britain had sold arms to both sides of the principal protagonists – Congo Democratic Republic itself, Rwanda, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Uganda. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation at the height of the conflict in 2000, Charles Onyango-Obbo, the editor of the respected Ugandan independent newspaper, The Monitor, did not fail to stress the significance of the British role in the region:
Britain is supporting both sides – it just robs [it] of any moral authority and a lot of people rightly do despise the British government in this affair.
Despite this “ethical foreign policy”, British Prime Minister Blair at the time personally visited South Africa in 1999 to lobby successfully on behalf of the British arms industry for a substantial share in the massive US$6 billion arms build up planned then by the South African military. For South Africa, such an outlandish expenditure on militarisation was a shock to many observers concerned about the country's priorities. None of South Africa's neighbours posed (or poses) any threat to the country's security and no such threats were envisaged from elsewhere in the world in the foreseeable future. The post-conquest years of urgently required reconstruction of institutions, and the provision of services to ensure equitable inclusion and participation by all races and peoples in South African society, would surely have benefited immensely from the injection of US$6 billion rather than the government’s allocation of such a huge sum to the armaments of certain death.
For yet more thoughts on Britain’s “ethical foreign policy”, it is worth noting that this “orientation” was equally unsustainable in the light of the convoluted phases of the controversial British military intervention in the Sierra Leone wars during the 1990s, including the highly embarrassing “arms-to-Africa” affair. In this affair, well-placed British government officials connived with Sandline International, a British-based mercenary force, which was in combat operations in Sierra Leone to install a pro-British regime. British arms were also sent to contending combatant groups in the country, often in clear violations to stipulated United Nations arms embargo on Sierra Leone and the region. Finally, an “ethical foreign policy” did not in any way sway Britain's decision in its most scandalous participation in African militarisation to date when, in 2002, it sold a military air traffic control system to Tanzania (a country without a credible air force) for the price tag of US$42 million. Not even the usually reticent World Bank and the IMF restrained themselves from publicly criticising a deal that had been struck by London only after putting “unbearable” pressure on the Tanzanian government. As for the latter, it was an ignoble occasion at the time to watch senior state officials struggle pitiably to explain or rather rationalise how a country that had no obvious need for the expensive machinery that they had just purchased would hence slide into certain debt as a result.
Onyango-Obbo's observations on Britain could equally have been made, with the obvious substitutions, to also capture the nature of US foreign policy towards the scourge of African militarisation and wars as we show shortly, and indeed those of other countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the 1998-2000 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, one of Africa’s few but most costly inter-state conflicts, Russia and Bulgaria, for instance, sold expensive weapons’ systems (especially fighter aircraft, bombers, helicopter gun ships, tanks) to both African neighbours throughout their devastating confrontation. Thousands of Ethiopians and Eritreans were killed in the war and it is estimated that both sides spent about US$1 million per day throughout the duration of the arms build up and hostilities. Less than three years after the end of fighting, the two countries made a startling appeal to an outside world still bewildered over the sheer idiocy of their conflict: they urgently needed international support to feed 11 million of their citizens facing hunger and starvation. Nothing in this appeal indicated that the political leadership in either Addis Ababa or Asmara really cared for the welfare of its citizens when it drove thousands of them into war to face untimely deaths just a few years earlier. In so doing, these leaderships laid the very foundations of the deaths that presently stalk their lands through starvation.
As for the United States, it sold weapons totalling about US$230 million to Africa during the years 1990-1999. Significantly, about 50 per cent of these sales went directly to the countries steeped in the very fractured contours of the epicentre of the raging wars of the Congo/Great Lakes arc: Congo Democratic Republic, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, Burundi, Namibia and Zimbabwe. The fact that some of these countries and their varying non-state insurgent forces' allies were in opposing military alliances during the conflict (necessitating using US weaponry against enemies similarly armed by the same supplier!), was of little consideration in Washington's arms transfer policy. Furthermore, Rwanda, which consistently maintained an intransigent position towards innumerable peace settlements at the time, received an additional US$75 million worth of “emergency aid” during the period, that hardly disguised the incorporated military/quasi-military components in it. Similarly, US arms sales and transfers to war-torn Sierra Leone and Liberia (and to contiguous states with interest in the wars such as Guinea and Mali) during the era did not in any way enhance the goals of conflict resolution. On the contrary, more arms were just being poured into a region already bursting at the seams with an unimaginable array of destructive arsenal…
“Legal” vs “Illegal”?
We should now focus briefly on Africa's so-called “illegal arms”. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Ukraine and Bulgaria make up the bulk of exporters of weapons to the continent's ever-expanding non-state insurgents, some of whose missions are anti-state (as the innumerable clusters in Somalia, for example, are) or are indeed pro-state (as the janjaweed, in the Sudan, for instance). These armaments, often made up of small and light arms (pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades), are usually categorised as “illegal weapons” to highlight the juridical status of their destinations or recipients, but not their sources. There are about 500 million of such weapons circulating in the world and one-fifth of these or 100 million are used in Africa's wars, armed banditry and other escapades. To underscore the seriousness of the situation at stake, the deadly AK-47 assault rifle, for example, can be purchased as cheaply as six US dollars in a number of African countries. This is equivalent to the cost of a chicken or a bag of corn in many parts of the continent! Yet, thanks to the fragility of the African state with its underlying unpredictable upheavals, millions of items of weaponry that ultimately make up this “illegal” pool of categorisation do have their origins from the sources of the (African) “sovereign states”’ armouries initially supplied by the principal arms exporter powers cited earlier. In other words, an item of AK-47 rifle or a rocket launcher on the African scene that may have started its original classificatory placement as a “legal weapon” in some state armoury could, in a few weeks, or even much less time, transmogrify into an “illegal arm” label because it is now in the hands of some dissident or insurgent organisation opposed to the state or a pro-state militia murdering targeted individuals, groups or, especially, targeted constituent nations. The converse of this transmutable process is also the case.
It should therefore be stressed that whilst the dichotomy often placed between “legal arms” and “illegal arms” by some observers (in the African militarisation, genocide and war debate) has some analytical credit, its outcome on the ground, particularly in enabling us evaluate the comparative impact that the two categories ultimately pose on African social co-existence and security always comes as a shock! Contrary to the initial value judgement that most people would make between the “legality” of a particular commodity (in this case, arms) and its “illegality”, it is definitely no comfort at all when it is shown at the end of the exercise that the overwhelming majority of the 15 million killed in Africa's genocides and wars in the past 45 years were in fact slaughtered with the use of “legal” armaments, operated seemingly legally by the armed forces of the state and their allies. The examples of the Nigeria state in 1966-1970, the Rwandan central government in the 1990s and the current Arab regime in Khartoum are acutely illustrative of this cataclysmic sequence. In effect, whether “legal” or “illegal”, armaments in Africa, controlled overwhelmingly by the African state and its allies, are used to murder targeted African nations and populations domiciled within these states; the African states, since the Igbo genocide, have deployed armaments in their armouries to murder their peoples most brutally, massively and extensively. These states, starting from Nigeria, have murdered a ghastly total of 15 million Africans in a generation. They are still murdering without let up… They have devastated communities. They have disfigured and traumatised peoples’ lives and aspirations. In the hands of the typical African state, since the Igbo genocide, these armaments, even though classified “conventional”, are indeed weapons of mass destruction. Nothing else, but weapons of mass destruction… In Africa, the pistol, the rifle, the grenade, the rocket, the bazooka, the landmine, the helicopter gunship, the naval gunship, the fighter aircraft, the bomber, the tank – each and every one of these items, imported by and large from abroad, is a killer used primarily by the state to murder targeted peoples within its border. The African state should and must be stopped from murdering peoples within its frontiers. The rest of the world, especially from where weapons to these African states originate, day in, and day out, can no longer remain bystanders as this orgy of death is brazenly played out in Africa. Since the Igbo genocide, the African state has been destroying African lives; they are presently destroying African lives; they will continue to destroy African lives until stopped. The African state must surely be stopped from its pursuit of this pulverising mission of death.
“Failed States”? “Sub-Sahara Africa”?
It is perhaps difficult not to conclude from our portrait of the contemporary African state that its being is symptomatic or even indicative of that term that several scholars and political commentators increasingly employ in characterising most of Africa – the “failed state”. The concept “failed state” of course has a melodramatic import! It designates the outcome, penned in a professorial manner, of a project supposedly observed and assessed over time and space. In that case, the recipient or audience to which this outcome is conveyed is assumed to be well in tune with the progress or otherwise of the subject matter. The problem though is that the evaluative parameter of this enterprise of assessing and therefore concluding that this or that African state has “failed” is often not clear or certain. Or is it? Was Nigeria, for instance, a “failed state” during the course of May to September 1966 (that is just six years after its so-called “restoration” of independence after the British occupation) when it murdered 100,000 of its Igbo citizens in the first phase of the genocide that would over the subsequent three years cost the death of an additional 3 million Igbo people? Before Somalia became a state without a central government, which has now lasted for well over a decade, was it a failed state? Successive central governments in Kinshasa, Congo Democratic Republic, have for over 20 years hardly exercised effective authority over a quarter of the country’s territory which is twice the size of western Europe; is Congo Democratic Republic a “failed state”? A devastating war raged in south Sudan for about 20 years and a genocidal one is being waged on the people of Darfur (northwest of the country) by the Arab government in Khartoum currently; is the Sudan a “failed state”? All of Africa, since 1981, has been a net exporter of capital to the West – 85 per cent which accounts for the servicing of its so-called “debts”. In 1981, Africa recorded a net export capital export of US$5.3 billion to the West. In 1985, this figure increased to US$21.5 billion. Three years later, this net capital transfer was US$36 billion or US$100 million per day. In 1995, this figure jumped to US$100 billion and on the eve of the new millennium in 2000, Africa’s net capital transfer to the West hit the US$150 billion mark. As we indicated earlier, Africa has exported a total of US$400 billion in the past 30 years in this way – these are funds that should easily have provided a comprehensive health programme across the continent, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the construction of an integrative communication network, and finally, the transformation of agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Would this outlandish export of critical resources merit designating all of Africa as “failed states”?
It should be stressed that none of the figures referred to above includes the national accounting of the Arab states in north Africa – namely, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt – but the rest of the 48 countries on the continent which some commentators, especially the CNN, BBC, International Herald Tribune, Reuters, Associated Press, Fox News, Yahoo! News, the UN/allied agencies and some governments and academics in the West, increasingly categorise as “sub-Sahara Africa”, a term that requires some examination forthwith. Its users routinely invoke the reference to the Sahara Desert when writing, speaking about or broadcasting on Africa, especially when they wish to refer to Africa that excludes the five predominantly Arab states of north Africa just mentioned. Pointedly, they also exclude the Sudan, a north-central African state whose overwhelming territory is south of the Sahara from the “sub-Sahara” tagging because the regime in power describes the country as “Arab” despite its majority African population.
As we show now, the concept “sub-Sahara Africa” is absurd, misleading, if not a meaningless classificatory schema. Its use defies the science of the fundamentals of geography but prioritises hackneyed, stereotypical, racist labelling. It is not obvious, on the face of it, which of the four possible meanings of the prefix, “sub”, its users attach to its “sub-Sahara Africa” labelling. Is it “under” or “part of”/“partly”? Or, presumably, “partially”/“nearly” or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of “in the style of, but inferior to”, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan?
The example of South Africa is apt here. Crucially, this is a reference underlined in the relevant literature of the era especially those emanating from West states, the United Nations (principally UNDP, FAO, UNCTAD, ILO), the World Bank and IMF, the so-called NGOs/“aid” groups, and some in academia who are variously responsible for initiating and sustaining the operationalisation of this dogma. Prior to the formal restoration of African majority government in 1994, South Africa was never designated “sub-Sahara Africa” by anyone in this portrait unlike the rest of the 13 African-led states in southern Africa. South Africa then was either termed “white South Africa” or the “South Africa sub-continent” (as in the “India sub-continent” usage, for instance) i.e. “almost”/“partially” a continent – quite clearly a usage of “admiration” or “compliment” employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geo-strategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile European-minority occupying regime. But soon after the triumph of the African freedom movement there, South Africa became “sub-Sahara Africa” in the quickly adjusted schema of this representation! What suddenly happened to South Africa’s “geography” to be so differently classified?! Is it African liberation/rule that renders an African state “sub-Sahara”? Does this post-1994 West-inflected South Africa-changed classification make “sub-Sahara Africa” any more intelligible? Just as in the South Africa “sub-continent” example, the application of the “almost”/“partially” or indeed “part of”/“partly” meaning of prefix “sub-” to “Sahara Africa” focuses unambiguously on the following countries of Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, each of which has 25-75 per cent of its territory (especially to the south) covered by the Sahara Desert. It also focuses on Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, which variously have 25-75 per cent of their territories (to the north) covered by the same desert. In effect, these 10 states would make up sub-Sahara Africa.
Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the five Arab north Africa states do not, correctly, describe themselves as Africans even though they unquestionably habituate African geography, the African continent, since the Arab conquest and occupation of this north one-third of African territory in the 7th century CE. The West governments, press and the transnational bodies we referred to earlier (which are predominantly led by West personnel and interests) have consistently “conceded” to this Arab cultural insistence on racial identity. Presumably, this accounts for the West’s non-designation of its “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma to these states as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes in the past 53 years have claimed, but incorrectly, that the Sudan “belongs” to the Arab World. On this subject, the West does no doubt know that what it has been engaged in, all along, is blatant sophistry and not science. This, however, conveniently suits its current propaganda packaging on Africa, which we shall be elaborating on shortly.
It would appear that we still don’t seem to be any closer at establishing, conclusively, what its users mean by “sub-Sahara Africa”. Could it, perhaps, just be a benign reference to all the countries “under” the Sahara, whatever their distances from this desert, to interrogate our final, fourth probability? Presently, there are 53 so-called “sovereign” states in Africa. If the five north Africa Arab states are said to be located “above” the Sahara, then 48 are positioned “under”. The latter would therefore include all the five countries mentioned above whose north frontiers incorporate the southern stretches of the desert (namely, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan), countries in central Africa (the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, etc., etc), for instance, despite being 2000-2500 miles away, and even the southern African states situated 3000-3500 miles away! In fact, all these 48 countries, except the Sudan (alas, not included for the plausible reason already cited!), which is clearly “under” the Sahara and situated within the same latitudes as Mali, Niger and Chad (i.e., Between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator), are all categorised by “sub-Sahara Africa” users as “sub-Sahara Africa”. To replicate this obvious farce of a classification elsewhere in the world, the following random exercise is not such an indistinct scenario for universal, everyday, referencing:
1. Australia hence becomes “sub-Great Sandy Australia” after the hot deserts that cover much of west and central Australia
2. East Russia, east of the Urals, becomes “sub-Siberia Asia”
3. China, Japan and Indonesia are reclassified “sub-Gobi Asia”
4. Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam become “sub-Himalaya Asia”
5. All of Europe is “sub-Arctic Europe”
6. Most of England, central and southern counties, is renamed “sub-Pennines Europe”
7. East/southeast France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia are “sub-Alps Europe”
8. The Americas become “sub-Arctic Americas”
9. All of South America south of the Amazon is proclaimed “sub-Amazon South America”; Chile could be “sub-Atacama South America”
10. Most of New Zealand’s South Island is renamed “sub-Southern Alps New Zealand”
11. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama become “sub-Rocky North America”
12. The entire Caribbean becomes “sub-Appalachian Americas”
So, rather than some benign construct, “sub-Sahara Africa” is, in the end, an outlandish nomenclatural code that its users employ to depict an African-led “sovereign” state – anywhere in Africa, as distinct from an Arab-led one. It is the users’ non-inclusion of the Sudan in this grouping (despite its majority African population and geographical location) but its inclusion of South Africa only after the latter’s 1994 restoration of independence that gives the game away! More seriously to the point, “sub-Sahara Africa” is employed to create the stunning effect of a supposedly shrinking African geographical landmass in the popular imagination, coupled with the continent’s supposedly attendant geo-strategic global “irrelevance”. “Sub-Sahara Africa” is undoubtedly a racist geo-political signature in which its users aim repeatedly to present the imagery of the desolation, aridity, and hopelessness of a desert environment. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of 800 million Africans do not live anywhere close to the Sahara, nor are their lives so affected by the implied impact of the very loaded meaning that this dogma intends to convey. Except this increasingly pervasive use of “sub-Sahara Africa” is robustly challenged by rigorous African-centred scholarship and publicity work, its proponents will succeed eventually in substituting the name of the continent “Africa” with “sub-Sahara Africa” and the name of its peoples, “Africans”, with “sub-Sahara Africans” or worse still “sub-Saharans” in the realm of public memory and reckoning.
We should return and conclude on our reflections on the so-called “failed state” in Africa – scientifically understood and unambiguously expressed! Christopher Clapham has argued that the concept “failed state” is “one of those categories that is named after what it isn’t, rather than what it is”. He obviously has a point for a state that routinely wages wars on its population(s), does not provide basic services for its people, and immanently churns out successive leaderships that fleece the collective wealth can hardly merit such a description as the concept connotes in social science discourses. All we need to do is to reflect on the fact that crucial state functions such as the provision of security, rule of law, a rationalising but flexible structure of management, accountability and open and unfettered competition especially with respect to regime change have never existed in the African “nation state” in order to highlight the obvious flaw within this concept. Ultimately, the major limitation of the use of the “failed state” concept to assess the crisis in contemporary Africa is that it confers an unjustifiable rationality on an enterprise in which a spectrum of outcomes ranging from perhaps “very successful” to “failure” or “outright failure” is typecast; it is assumed that those who run the Africa state (Museveni, Obasanjo, Gnassingbé, Buhari, Yar’Adua, Idi Amin, Mengistu, Abacha, Mugabe, Mohammed, Abubakar, Eyadema, Banda, al-Bashier, Numeiri, Bokassa, Toure, Biya, Moi, Gowon, Taylor, Habre, Ahidjo, Babangida, Obote, Rawlings, Doe …) are aware of this test and its evaluative scruples and, like any rational participant, would want to succeed… If they do not do so well, at some instance, so goes the logic, they would try to improve on their previous score and, hopefully, do better… Success is always a possibility! On the contrary, there is limited indication on the ground that African state operatives in the past 40-50 years have approached statecraft as a challenge to succeed in transforming the lives of their peoples. “Success” is never a goal set along the trajectory of their mission. For the Obasanjos and Gowons, for instance, “statecraft” is a fiendish opportunity to murder as many millions of Igbo people as they can possibly achieve … Furthermore, it should be noted that given the evidently limited concerns on just “measuring” the scoreboard of performance, “failed states”’ discourses tend to overlook the much more expansive turbulence of underlying history.
So, rather than organisations that bring benefits to many of its people, the state in Africa has “evidently been a source of suffering”, to quote Christopher Clapham, again, an imagery consistent with Basil Davidson’s description of the impact of this state on the African humanity as a “curse”. Richard Dowden also uses a health metaphor in capturing the legacy of the African state when he notes, alluding to its genesis – a feature that we shall confront soon – “[this European]-scissors and paste job [has indeed caused Africa] much blood and tears”. For her own observation, Lyn Innes is in no doubt that the African state has created what she describes as a “deeply diseased [outcome]” on the continent. William Reno’s categorisation of Sierra Leone as a “shadow state” may appear more of an aesthetic judgement than pathological, but the psychosocial outcome of vivid alienation evident in the country in the 1990s as state and disparate insurgent military forces battled up and down the country as the state was in free fall was palpable.
Chester Crocker has observed, succinctly, that the fundamental problem with the nature of the African state that we have been discussing has been its lack of “legitimacy and authority to manage [its] affairs… As such, [this state has] always derived a major, if not dominant, share of [its] legitimacy from the international system rather than from domestic society”. It is this question of alienability that is at the crux of this grave crisis. T o live in the typical African “nation state” presently is to live in the most oppressively centralised state in the world that denies most peoples in constituent nations their fundamental human rights. This has been a debilitating legacy for most Africans since Europeans created this state during their occupation of the continent. It was, and still remains a conqueror’s and a conquest state, having clobbered together peoples of varying political, cultural, religious and ideational heritage with no identifiably-embracing organic transnational sensibility, save an ensemble or organisation to rationalise the exploitation of critical human and non-human resources for transfers to the West World and elsewhere.
It is precisely in this context that what P. Chabal and J-P. Daloz have ironically called the “political economy of disorder” actually works in Africa: it offers immense opportunities to those who control the instrument of the state but who clearly lack or do not subscribe to the domestic or internal legitimacy to work the system. This state was a boon to the European occupation project as was expected. It was the instrument to harness and enforce the African occupation in its entirety and maximise the expropriation of the spoils of conquest. The African take-over of this state in the 1950s/1960s, without any efforts to transform it into an African-centred ethos and enterprise, witnessed a new era of even greater disregard for domestic legitimacy with cataclysmic consequences – creating that “deeply diseased [outcome]” Innes has referred to: the slaughter of 15 million, colossal decapitalisation of the economy, degenerative poverty. It should never escape the attention of the observer that the flip side of the coin that tells the tale of Africa’s staggering capital transfers to the Western World, day in, day out, as we have just highlighted, is the emaciated, starving and dying African child, woman or man that has for long been the abiding image on television screens across the world. In effect, Franz Schurmann is right to note in his illuminating study on the subject that African leaderships who oversee the non-deconstructed state of the European conquest “are not traditional but rather a phenomenon of modernity. They are fighting for power in a Western-type state with its armies, police, bureaucracies [and] control over economic institutions”.
Pertinently, these leaderships have failed to incorporate into the state structures “inherited” in the aftermath of the European occupation pre-conquest African institutions of politics and governance aimed at maintaining a democratic, fully participatory process and government to respond to the needs and aspirations of individuals and constituent nations. The resulting imbalance in power relations so widely witnessed in Africa today between the state and its people, among constituent peoples, and between men and women have their roots in this systematic marginalisation of Africa’s traditional democratic legacy. Thus, structural alienation from the political process typifies the overall disposition of peoples in the African state. The overwhelming majority of the people are not involved in the process of their own governance and of course one obvious and serious consequence of this is the ease with which political differences and disagreements often deteriorate into major conflicts and wars. This is dictated largely by the unresolved nature and character of the state vis-à-vis the constituent nations. Evidently, the underlying structural basis of independence, or, more correctly, the restoration of independence in Africa has never really been defined. There is no rigorously worked-out agreement on the fundamental character and role of the “post-conquest state” by the constituent nations that make up the state. The broad sectors of African peoples are yet to be placed and involved centrally in the entire process of societal reconstruction and transformation. Not surprisingly, the nature of the state that emerged after the European conquest and occupation had, and still has limited organically shared values linking its peoples. Most African conflicts have therefore centred on the continuously thunderous demands made by desperately deprived and exploited nations and peoples in these states for the construction of decentralised and decentring alternative political structures and institutions which empower people at their locale. It is as a result of this unresolved historical factor of conquest that Africa remains a tinderbox, exploding uncontrollably from time to time, with the devastating consequences that the world has come to know in the past half of a century. Until there is a far-reaching restructuring of political and economic relations within the state to ensure inclusive participation by all nations and peoples, conflicts in Africa will remain endemic. Decentralisation and democratisation are essential in creating a sense of inclusiveness amongst African peoples, a crucial ingredient in overcoming the present causes of disempowerment, instability and underdevelopment. Only within these parameters of justice, equality, freedom, the cessation of violence and alienation can true peace occur.
Disarming Africa: Brazil, Africa Arms-Free Zone, Obama Legacy
Inevitably, Africa must resolve the contentious issues that fuel the current conflictual existence of most of its peoples before achieving urgently needed socio-economic transformation. This is a political question. The widespread feeling of alienation by most constituent peoples in a typical African “nation-state” is palpable enough. This state, in which African peoples were cobbled together in the past by the triumph of external conquest to serve the spoils of occupation, has been a monumental failure in the past 40-50 years of mismanagement by African leaderships. Africans urgently need a principled, unfettered, and unsentimental debate on the “inherited” state, with its ultra-centralising and utterly unviable ethos. It cannot lead to that transformation of a very rich continent that has been the expectation of millions of Africans across the world. The way out is for an extensive political and economic decentralisation which is essential in creating a sense of inclusiveness amongst peoples, a crucial ingredient in overcoming the present causes of disempowerment, instability and underdevelopment. It cannot be over-stressed that if people are not actively involved in the affairs of their society, issues of human and civil rights as well as civic responsibilities will be subverted, creating societies that are clearly not at peace with themselves.
Militarisation, including arms confrontation, is obviously not a viable option to resolve Africa's outstanding problems – especially those that affect constituent peoples in the current state. Arms should henceforth be removed from the African scene as the vehicle for the settlement of disputes. All Africa's problems, however complex and intractable they may appear presently, can and should be resolved through painstaking negotiation even if this seems or becomes protracted. As it was generally in pre-European/pre-Arab conquest times in most of Africa, there should be no limits or ultimatums placed on negotiations and conflict resolutions in Africa: the talking went on and on until some resolution was achieved… The mutual bombardment of ideas, not bullets and shells, was the driving impetus for the avoidance and overcoming of conflicts. Thus the genocide killing field or the battlefield or indeed the riot-field, whether it is Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, the Sudan or Kenya should no longer be an option for the settlement of Africa's extant problems.
On this score, the ethos that governs the African journey of recovery is the commitment of all Africans and the demand that they need to make to the rest of the world to place a mandatory embargo on all arms sales and transfers to all of Africa, as well as a complete demilitarisation of the continent. Africa needs justice and peace for, and with itself, to enable it embark on the much-vaunted era of reconstruction. Britain, the world’s leading arms-delivery-state to Africa must now mothball its arms-delivery behemoth destined for Africa. The British public opinion and British-based human rights and charities such as the British Red Cross, Amnesty International, Oxfam and Christian Aid can no longer live comfortably with the seeming anomaly whereby the British ministry of defence approves to send weapons of death to Africa (whose sales enjoy cast-iron official guarantees for the British arms manufacturer readily provided by the British ministry of trade) and then respond to the inevitable devastating aftermath of the use of these weapons on the African scene by initiating radio and television campaigns to raise and send “relief aid” to the targeted African population(s). It is really no longer sufficient for the Amnesty Internationals and Oxfams of Britain to issue periodic condemnations of the misdemeanours and transgressions of the African state when they are silent over the crucial role that the very heart of the British political establishment at Whitehall (London), located just a few miles away from these organisations, plays in propping up the African genocide state. The Amnesty Internationals and Oxfams must be in the forefront of the campaign calling for a total, unconditional arms ban on Africa and the demilitarisation of the continent. This focus on British charity/human rights institutions’ relationship with their state and the latter’s arms shipment to Africa also applies to the US, France, Belgium, Canada and other countries in the West that export arms to Africa.
Thanks to Brazil’s current impressive scientific and technological advancement, which has, understandably, impacted on its arms manufacturing industry, this country is rapidly expanding its arms export capacity. As a result, Brazil is steadily climbing up the Africa arms-delivery-states’ ladder. But Brazil shouldn’t be on any of the rungs of this notorious ladder in the first place. Yet, on this very important subject of our times, Brazil can act as a beacon to the rest of the world by being the first country to descend from this ladder and walk away. If the indolent African regime is ever interested in Brazil’s exciting technological innovations, it should instead be presented with a catalogue of Brazilian-made tractors, harvesters, irrigation machinery … Brazil should immediately place a blanket arms embargo on all of Africa. Even arms being negotiated presently with any African state and those in the pipeline of delivery to the continent should be abandoned, withdrawn or blocked. Brazil has the enviable status as the country in the world outside Africa with the highest number of peoples of African descent in its population. It should not at the same time be sending weapons of death to Africa’s genocide states to murder Africans who live east of the Atlantic. Brazilian intellectuals and students have their work very much cut out on this in their dialogue with their state. Finally, US President Obama, his country’s first African-descent head of state, can be assured of a lasting legacy of his presidency by imposing a comprehensive US arms embargo on this continent of his fathers at the cusp of constructing new states of organic sensibilities – away from the terror of the genocide state. Obama should expand this initiative to involve other arms-exporters-to-Africa especially on such forums as the UN Security Council and the G-8. Arms ban to Africa should be internationally mandatory and enforceable.
On this, Africa’s challenge to the rest of the world couldn’t be clearer: those who live outside Africa but “care so much for Africa” should now scale down their multitudinous “aid-ventures for Africa” and turn their incredible talents to lobbying their respective states and other institutions in their countries and elsewhere to ban arms sales/transfers to Africa. This new focus for the world’s leading charities, away from the band-aid syndrome, will surely be more exciting, even less taxing, but definitely more rewarding for the ultimate outcome for Africa and the rest of the world alike. Africa seeks no resources from anyone, not even for one US dollar, to accomplish its current transformative mission to dismantle the genocide state. It is simply asking the world to completely seal off its vast armouries to deny access to the deadly claws of the Africa genocide state. For once, no one is asking anyone to raise money for Africa! Given the devastating impact of arms, arming, armies, genocide and other armed conflicts on Africa’s tragic history and the present, Africa, in 2009, projects an unwavering signpost for the world’s attention that proclaims: Africa Is An Arms-Free Zone. A demilitarised continent. No More Arms Sales Or Transfers To Africa.
Renaissance
The African genocide state has now run the course of its bloody trail in history. The greatest challenge facing Africans in the new millennium is to dismantle this state and create new state forms based on Africa’s critical re-engagement with its rich cultural heritage. This is to enable them to safeguard the lives of their people and embark on the vast topography of reconstruction of society after a depressing and devastating history. This task is a cardinal facet of the African renaissance or renewal. Africa’s alternative path of survival and reconstruction is clearly a path that emerges from the people re-connecting to the continent’s enduring cultural precepts and institutions emplaced in its ancient nations or in “real Africa”, as some scholars have aptly categorised them. It attaches a high priority to the resuscitation of the treasured position of the family in African community affairs and the full operation of the ethos and institutions of the dual-sex complementarity that has for centuries defined the central tenets of African social existence. These spheres of African life have come under sustained assaults and, in some fronts, have had considerable fractures during the course of the European occupation of the continent and the last 40-50 years of disastrous African overseeing-management. One such emergency zone of fracture has been the outrageous marginalisation of African women from participating actively in the key institutions of the state and society. This has been an historical setback for women who in the past controlled and exercised extensive rights and authority over their own affairs as well as those of the rest of society as has been demonstrated extensively in the writings and studies of novelists such as Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and scholars such as Kemene Okonjo, Adiele Afigbo, Ifi Amadiume, Nkiru Nzegwu and Okwuonicha Femi Nzegwu. The re-positioning of women in the shared complementary spaces of responsibility, power and authority must be at the epicentre of the reconfiguration of African fortunes in these new state forms of decentralisation.
Already, this alternative Africa, this reconstituted land of renewal, translated into decentralised, organically articulated new states, is being built amidst the chaos and brutality of a tragic epoch. As should be already obvious, this future of Africa discussed here is antithetical to Muammar Gaddafi’s current “Africa Unity” theatrical digressions, which, more seriously as I demonstrate in a 2007 essay, are indeed a cover for an ominous proto-islamic, neofeudal Africa-wide continental dynastic fiefdom modelled on Gaddafi’s own family firm and patronage formulations in Libya since 1969. This contraption will only reinforce and expand the stranglehold of the genocide state in Africa. Whilst the death machine that is the African state is undoubtedly ruthless, as we have shown, it has an immanent weakness which the people are presently exploiting across different regions of the continent to recast a new social existence. Thanks to the sheer size of the territorial space that it has to contend with in its existentialist quest to enforce its legendary brute power, and given its notorious inefficiency and stunted technological development, this pulverising state of death has not been able to exercise an all-embracing, omni-present Gestapo-like or Ba’athist party-like control of society. It does not have tentacles embedded all over the place. The ever-bubbling currents of enhanced globalisation with attendant flashes of instant communication, 24 hours a day, have further exposed the tenuousness of the foundation of its existence. The peoples have therefore exploited this weakness with aplomb. Africa is currently saturated with communities actively experimenting and exercising control of their immediate, surrounding societies by setting up a people-oriented security and a working justice system, developing infrastructure, building schools and hospitals and negotiating operating terms of relations with transnational companies or corporations or even the odd government or quasi-government organisation from overseas. The operationalising slogan that appears to underpin this exercise is the “Survival of Our Nation”. From Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Benin and genocidist Nigeria in the west, through Cameroon and Gabon in the centre, to Uganda, Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia to the east and to Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho and South Africa in the south, a new Africa of constituent nations-based reconstruction is emerging to pursue the tasks of reconstruction as the genocidist/so-called “nation-state” collapses or retreats into insignificance. The well over 100,000 African intellectuals and professionals who have left Africa for overseas (particularly in the West) are playing a crucial role in this renewal. They are part of the 12 million-strong Africans who left the continent since 1980. These émigrés are now the most active source of Africa-directed investment presently. It is people-targeted and the results are astonishing. These African émigrés now dispatch billions of dollars per annum as well as lend their skill and time to Africa’s growth – investing directly in the development of the people as they literally take care of the feeding, clothing, housing, education, health care and other social needs of relatives and indeed the wider community, amongst a re-emerging/revivalist ethos of local initiative, local control, transparency and accountability. In 2003, according to the World Bank, African émigrés sent to Africa the impressive sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their home communities. This is 40 times the sum of “Western aid” in real terms in the same year – i.e. when the pervasive “overheads” attendant to the latter are accounted for. It is interesting that the source of the information of the instrumental role of African émigrés in current external capital transfers to Africa comes from the World Bank. It is this same World Bank, which, in alliance with the International Monetary Fund and the string of kakistocratic African regimes in the past 30 years, contributed to the virtual destruction of the African economy in its so-called “structural adjustment programme” of the era. Contrary to the very partial, stunted imagery of the African situation of this period propagated with relish by predictable, stunningly uncritical pastiche of international media reporting on the continent, Africans, themselves, have, on the whole, taken central care of coping with the punishing aftermath of the socioeconomics of state collapse and terror, and in charting new pathways to construct organically-responsive states to subvert and replace the extant genocide state.
We cannot overstate the immeasurably favourable resource base that would support this goal of African renaissance. An overview is necessary to underscore the immense possibilities that exist. Africa has developed and continues to develop an advanced humanpower capability that will drive the transformation of the post-genocide state. Eighty per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remain uncultivated. Were Uganda to expand its current food production by just 50 per cent, not only would it be completely self-sufficient, but it would be able to feed all the countries contiguous to its territory without difficulty (the countries in question are Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan and the Congo Democratic Republic). The overall statistics of the African situation is even more revealing as with regards to the continent’s long-term endowment. Just a quarter of the potential arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to the so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, peanut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports mainly to the West World at a time when there has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in the West’s commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price of these African products in the West has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the 1960s-70s period which was soon after the restoration of independence. As for the remaining 75 per cent of Africa’s uncultivated land, this represents 66 per cent of the entire world’s potential. The world is aware of the array of strategic minerals such as cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, petroleum oil found in the Sudan, Congo Democratic Republic, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and elsewhere on the continent. These countries are among Africa’s most wealthy and potentially some of the world’s wealthiest. However, what is not always or simultaneously associated with the wealth profiles of these countries is that they have vast acreage of rich farmlands with capacity to optimally support the food needs of generations of African peoples. In addition, the famous fish industry in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana for instance, Botswana’s rich cattle farms, west Africa’s yam and plantain belts extending from southern Cameroon to the Casamance province of Senegal, the continent’s rich rice production fields, etc., all highlight the potential Africa has for fully providing for all its food needs.
In effect, what the current African socioeconomic situation shows is extraordinarily reassuring, provided the acreage devoted to cultivation is expanded and expressly targeted to address Africa’s own internal consumption needs. Land used directed at agriculture for food output, as opposed to the calamitous waste of “cash crop” production for export, must become the focus of agricultural policy in the new Africa. It is an inexplicable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources on this continent. Africa constitutes a spacious, rich and arable landmass that can support its population, which is still one of the world’s least densely populated and distributed, into the indefinite future. There is only one condition, though, for the realisation of this goal: Africa must utilise these immense resources for the benefit of its own peoples within newly negotiated, radically decentralised political dispensations which must shed any resemblance to the genocide state. Thus, Africa’s pressing problem in the past 53 years has not been “poverty”, as it is often uncritically portrayed, but how to husband phenomenal resources, human and non-human, for the express benefit of the peoples at a time when the strategic goal for change is to dismantle the architecture of annihilation posed to African existence by its genocide states.
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is a leading scholar of the Igbo genocide, 1966-1970. His books include Conflict and Intervention (Macmillan, 1990), Issues in Nigerian Politics Since the Fall of the Second Republic, 1984-1990 (Mellen, 1991), Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and the People (IIAR, 1994), African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe (African Renaissance, 2001), Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2006) and Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (forthcoming, 2009).
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Genocide by any other name
Federal Nigerian troops walk along a road near Ikot Expene, Nigeria, with Biafran forces in this 1968 file photograph. On the roadside are two emaciated Nigerian boys. (Photograph: AP) By Percy ZvomuyaThe first half-century of black Africa's independence was especially notorious for three reasons: coups, corrupt dictatorships and genocides.
Just seven years after Nigeria's independence in 1960, more than a million Igbos died of starvation or were slaughtered in the Biafran war in Nigeria; in the 1980s a million people died of starvation in Ethiopia as the government was busy buying weapons, and more than 20 000 Ndebele were slaughtered by the Zimbabwean army's Fifth Brigade.
In 1994, in just three months, a million Tutsis died in Rwanda at the hands of their Hutu compatriots and, more recently, up to four million Congolese people have died as an indirect result of 10 years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And in the Sudanese provinces of Darfur, massacres have claimed up to 300 000 people, a conflict for which the country's president Omar al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
So many millions gone, deaths that could easily fill an encyclopedia, which is precisely the project that Abebe Zegeye, professor and chair of genocide and holocaust studies at Unisa, and Maurice Vambe, a professor at Unisa's English studies department, have undertaken. The two academics are writing the first African encyclopedia of genocide, a 600-page tome that is due to come out next year.
The pair's working definition of genocide is not the one the UN arrived at in 1948, which defines genocide as what happens when one ethnic group seeks to destroy another in part or in whole.
"While this definition provides a broad framework within which to understand mass murder, it has to be expanded to accommodate the peculiarities of present-day crimes related to mass murder in Africa." They argue that "genocide must be explained first in terms of the number of bodies that lie dead, but also most importantly, in terms of the conditions that result directly or indirectly [in] the death of masses of people".
Vambe said rogue governments now know that killing 100 people, for example, will ignite the interest of the international community, so what governments do instead is create conditions that make it impossible for people to live or learn.
"These conditions could be hunger, choleraor failure to go school. We shouldn't focus on the outcome, but on the process of consciously denying people their rights."
Using this definition, the two scholars argue that the lives lost in Operation Murambatsvina, the Zimbabwean government'sbrutal 2005 crackdown on inhabitants of informal settlements, and the electoral violence oflast year could be defined as genocide.
When communities are killed it's not only individual lives that are lost, language too is distorted as governments resort to obfuscation and Orwellian double-speak.
"The use of selective vocabulary to insulate acts of aggression and violence in 'officialese or diplomatic speak' can indeed encourage and escalate the violence," they say.
This explains why there has been confusion about what happened in the conflict in Biafra, routinely referred to as the Biafran War. "To describe it this way might imply that the people fighting one another were equals and all were armed. History tells us that this was not the case."
Vambe and Zegeye say that hundreds of thousands of Biafrans were massacred during the conflict, which was sparked by the region's desire to break away from the rest of Nigeria.
Their project is motivated by the realisation that, in mainstream history, what happened in Biafra is not defined as genocide. "Instead it was described [by the Nigerian government] as a preservation of national sovereignty -- a euphemism that every dictator in Africa is now using."
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