The recent meeting in Nairobi between visiting US Vice-President Joe Biden and Salva Kiir Mayardit, president of the south Sudan semi-autonomous region, is surely one of the most important political developments of the first half of 2010 in Africa. The meeting focused on the ongoing preparations in the south Sudan to organise the historic January 2011 restoration-of-independence referendum for the people. Most observers are in no doubt that the region will register a decisive “yes” vote to free itself from decades of Arab/muslim occupation and subjugation. This outcome will signal the much expected beginning of the formal unravelling of the “Berlin-states” that have wreaked havoc in Africa since 1885.
The US’s very proactive support to the referendum process is highly commendable. Biden promised Kirr that the US would provide technical assistance to guarantee a successful outcome of the exercise. Additionally, and perhaps, more crucially, Biden called on the rest of the world to robustly support the referendum planning to “ensur[e] that all necessary measures are in place for a peaceful outcome that is internationally recognized.” Washington’s is indeed an unprecedented position to take on such a pivotal subject in Africa and its impact will have far reaching ramifications across the continent. African scholars, human rights, peace, freedom and other activists strenuously involved in the construction of post-“Berlin-states” in Africa couldn’t have had their work cut out more readily. They should now be booking their flights to south Sudan to monitor and be participants in history in the making… The south Sudan referendum will set the precedent that will chart the trajectory of the restoration of independence for all occupied and oppressed peoples in Africa subsequently.
The devastation wrought on the African humanity by the “Berlin-states” can never be exaggerated. These are states of conquest that European conqueror countries (Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Spain) imposed on Africa and currently maintained by a shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources. Everyone knows that these states cannot serve African interests. The African “overseeing” of the contraptions (beginning, pointedly, in the Sudan in January 1956), which should have been totally dismantled on the eve of the presumed “departure” of their creators back to Europe in the 1950s/60s, couldn’t be more illustrative of the destructiveness of these states’ ontological mission. The overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan itself depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970.
In 1990, I published The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath, one of my early books on the Igbo genocide. Such was my optimism of the possibilities of Africans to dismantle the “Berlin-states” in the future, despite the apparent bleakness of the times, that I noted the following in the concluding pages of the study. The unfolding, breathtaking events in the south Sudan are so reassuring that I am only too willing to share these thoughts of 20 years ago once again:
“Either in peace or war, the existence of the European post-colonial state is inimical to the interests of African peoples. It is a state that cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans … The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived post-colonial state in order to survive … African nations, [namely] Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Bambara, etc., etc … remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development … [and] the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity … What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the … issue of sovereignty … even if the outcome were to lead to 1000 states … For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more Africans have to die for the defence of, or for upholding the territorial frontier of any post-colonial state. No precious life should be wasted for its preservation.”
Saturday, 26 June 2010
Saturday, 29 May 2010
29 May 1966
Sunday 29 May 1966 is undoubtedly the most tragic day in Igbo history. It is the launch date of the Igbo genocide – the most gruesome, devastating and expansive genocide in 20th century Africa.
The genocide lasted for 44 gory months. 29 May 1966 was the day that Igbo people were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women. This atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state, the Nigeria state, which the Igbo had played a vanguard role to liberate from British conquest and occupation from the 1930s to October 1960. This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces in 1966, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens – provision of security. Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them, a quarter of their population then, between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970. The genocide was carried out with full complicity of the British government led by James Harold Wilson. The words in Hausa of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly on state-owned Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration and with editorial comments on the theme regularly published in both state-owned New Nigerian (daily) newspaper and weekly Gaskiya Ta fi Kwabo during the period, were unambiguously clear on the key objectives of this crime against humanity:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(English translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
Yet this 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation, Recovery and Liberation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe. This was the day the Igbo ceased to be Nigerians forever – right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and churches and schools and colleges and shops and markets and hospitals and rail stations and trains and coach stations and coaches and trucks and airports and planes and highways and village tracks and brooks and rivers and gorges and bridges and woods across north Nigeria and elsewhere in the country. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission. The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October 1960 (date of the presumed restoration of independence for peoples in Nigeria from the British occupation) shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship was the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples.
The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they decisively cast adrift. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with scarce prospects. Despite the four murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past four decades. Nigeria gburu ochu; Nigeria mere alu. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous crime, this crime against humanity.
Astonishingly, though, the world wonders what the Igbo are still doing in Nigeria, the burden of a strangulated occupation notwithstanding. In the past 44 years, the Igbo have written an extraordinary essay on human survival and resilience. These attributes have now been laudably demonstrated and the Igbo must now move on – to another dynamic threshold of their being. O zu gozie. No one should ever feel that they are trapped in the Nigeria quagmire. The Igbo must now actively begin to reconstruct their gravely battered homeland, transform the lives of their 50 million people, and contribute their ingenuity to working on the wider, inventive canvass of the African renaissance. To embark on these pressing tasks, the Igbo should, today, walk away from the Nigeria genocide state, this state of terror. The Igbo should go now. Go, Go, Go.
29 May is a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces. It is the new Igbo National Holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to achieve the expectant goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty. Now is the time.
The genocide lasted for 44 gory months. 29 May 1966 was the day that Igbo people were subjected to an overwhelming violence and unremitting brutality by supposedly fellow countrymen and women. This atrocity was clinically organised, supervised and implemented by the very state, the Nigeria state, which the Igbo had played a vanguard role to liberate from British conquest and occupation from the 1930s to October 1960. This state, now violently taken over by murderous anti-African sociopolitical forces in 1966, had pointedly violated its most sacred tenet of responsibility to its Igbo citizens – provision of security. Instead of providing security to these citizens, the Nigeria state murdered 3.1 million of them, a quarter of their population then, between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970. The genocide was carried out with full complicity of the British government led by James Harold Wilson. The words in Hausa of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly on state-owned Kaduna radio and television throughout its duration and with editorial comments on the theme regularly published in both state-owned New Nigerian (daily) newspaper and weekly Gaskiya Ta fi Kwabo during the period, were unambiguously clear on the key objectives of this crime against humanity:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(English translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
Yet this 29th day of May 1966 is also the Igbo Day of Affirmation, Recovery and Liberation. The Igbo people resolved on this day, the day that marked the beginning of the genocide, to survive the catastrophe. This was the day the Igbo ceased to be Nigerians forever – right there on the grounds of those death camps in the sabon gari residential districts and offices and churches and schools and colleges and shops and markets and hospitals and rail stations and trains and coach stations and coaches and trucks and airports and planes and highways and village tracks and brooks and rivers and gorges and bridges and woods across north Nigeria and elsewhere in the country. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria, a genocide state, from accomplishing its dreadful mission. The heuristic symbolism defined hitherto by 1 October 1960 (date of the presumed restoration of independence for peoples in Nigeria from the British occupation) shattered in the wake of this historic Igbo declaration. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship was the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples.
The Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they decisively cast adrift. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with scarce prospects. Despite the four murderous years of siege, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past four decades. Nigeria gburu ochu; Nigeria mere alu. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t recover from committing this heinous crime, this crime against humanity.
Astonishingly, though, the world wonders what the Igbo are still doing in Nigeria, the burden of a strangulated occupation notwithstanding. In the past 44 years, the Igbo have written an extraordinary essay on human survival and resilience. These attributes have now been laudably demonstrated and the Igbo must now move on – to another dynamic threshold of their being. O zu gozie. No one should ever feel that they are trapped in the Nigeria quagmire. The Igbo must now actively begin to reconstruct their gravely battered homeland, transform the lives of their 50 million people, and contribute their ingenuity to working on the wider, inventive canvass of the African renaissance. To embark on these pressing tasks, the Igbo should, today, walk away from the Nigeria genocide state, this state of terror. The Igbo should go now. Go, Go, Go.
29 May is a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unimaginably brutish forces. It is the new Igbo National Holiday. It is a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household anywhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to achieve the expectant goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty. Now is the time.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Salute to those who make a difference
Africa has uninterruptedly been a net-exporter of capital to the Western World since 1981. The thundering sum of US$400 billion is the total figure that Africa has transferred to the West in this manner to date. These are legitimate, accountable transfers, largely covering the ever-increasing interest payments for the “debts” the West claims African regimes owe it, beginning from the 1970s. A recent study by Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based research organisation, states that Africa may have also transferred the additional sum of US$854 billion since the 1970s (“this figure might be more than double, at [US]$1.8 trillion”, the study cautions), through illegitimate exports by the “leaderships” of corrupt African regimes, with Nigeria topping this league of felons at US$240.7 billion. In effect, the state, in Africa, no longer pretends that it exists to serve its peoples.
These capital exports, legitimate or/and illegitimate, are funds of gargantuan proportions produced by the same humanity that many a commentator would be quick to categorise as “poor” and “needy” for “foreign aid”. In the past 30 years, these funds could and should easily have provided a comprehensive health care programme across Africa, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the construction of an integrative communication network, the transformation of agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation, and, finally, it would have stemmed the emigration of 12 million Africans, including critical sectors of the continent’s middle classes and intellectuals to the West and elsewhere.
Yet, despite these grim times of pulverised economies and failed and collapsing states in Africa, we shouldn’t ever forget that those who still ensure that the situation on the ground is not much worse for the peoples than it is, and so profoundly retrievable, are Africans – individuals, working alone, conscientiously, or working in concert with a few others or within a larger group to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide healthcare and some leisure to immediate and extended families, communities, neighbourhoods, villages and the like: the surgeon who not only works tirelessly in a city hospital, with very limited resources, but uses his scarce savings to build a health centre and an access road in his village with subsidised treatment and prescription costs; the nurse who travels around her expansive health district, unfailingly, bringing care to the doorsteps of the people who neither can afford nor access it physically; the retired diplomat who has mobilised her community to set up a robust environmental care service that has involved the construction of public parks, regular refuse collection and some recycling, after-school free tuition for children with a planned community newspaper in the pipeline; the coach transport operator who laid out scores of his coaches to ferry survivors of a recently organised pogrom 350 miles away to safety; the civil rights activist and intellectual who rallied members of his internet discussion groups within the course of a month’s intense campaign to successfully apprehend a contractor who was about to abscond with millions of (US) dollars’ worth of public funds meant for a crucial upgrade of an international airport initially built by the community; a stretch of individuals’ programmes of scholarships for students at varying levels of school life, provision of staff salaries in schools and colleges, maintenance of libraries and laboratories in schools and colleges, construction and maintenance of vital infrastructure in villages and counties, etc., etc. These are the authors busily scripting the path of the renaissance Africa.
To cap these phenomenal strides of Africans, the 12 million African émigrés we mentioned earlier now dispatch more money to Africa than the much-parroted “Western aid” to the continent, year in, year out. In 2003, according to the World Bank, these overseas residents sent to Africa the impressive sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their 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. Thus, Africa’s pressing problem in the past 57 years of presumed restoration of independence has not been “poverty”, as it is often uncritically portrayed, but how to husband incredible range of abundance of human and non-human resources for the express benefits of the peoples.
A widespread revolution in the consciousness of Africans will hasten the realisation of a critical mass of the types of Africans described above – at all levels of society. Gradually, many fires are being lit. This shift in consciousness will feed into the strategic goal for change which still remains the dismantling of the architecture of alienation and subjugation posed to African existence and progress by the “Berlin states” emplaced.
These capital exports, legitimate or/and illegitimate, are funds of gargantuan proportions produced by the same humanity that many a commentator would be quick to categorise as “poor” and “needy” for “foreign aid”. In the past 30 years, these funds could and should easily have provided a comprehensive health care programme across Africa, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the construction of an integrative communication network, the transformation of agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation, and, finally, it would have stemmed the emigration of 12 million Africans, including critical sectors of the continent’s middle classes and intellectuals to the West and elsewhere.
Yet, despite these grim times of pulverised economies and failed and collapsing states in Africa, we shouldn’t ever forget that those who still ensure that the situation on the ground is not much worse for the peoples than it is, and so profoundly retrievable, are Africans – individuals, working alone, conscientiously, or working in concert with a few others or within a larger group to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide healthcare and some leisure to immediate and extended families, communities, neighbourhoods, villages and the like: the surgeon who not only works tirelessly in a city hospital, with very limited resources, but uses his scarce savings to build a health centre and an access road in his village with subsidised treatment and prescription costs; the nurse who travels around her expansive health district, unfailingly, bringing care to the doorsteps of the people who neither can afford nor access it physically; the retired diplomat who has mobilised her community to set up a robust environmental care service that has involved the construction of public parks, regular refuse collection and some recycling, after-school free tuition for children with a planned community newspaper in the pipeline; the coach transport operator who laid out scores of his coaches to ferry survivors of a recently organised pogrom 350 miles away to safety; the civil rights activist and intellectual who rallied members of his internet discussion groups within the course of a month’s intense campaign to successfully apprehend a contractor who was about to abscond with millions of (US) dollars’ worth of public funds meant for a crucial upgrade of an international airport initially built by the community; a stretch of individuals’ programmes of scholarships for students at varying levels of school life, provision of staff salaries in schools and colleges, maintenance of libraries and laboratories in schools and colleges, construction and maintenance of vital infrastructure in villages and counties, etc., etc. These are the authors busily scripting the path of the renaissance Africa.
To cap these phenomenal strides of Africans, the 12 million African émigrés we mentioned earlier now dispatch more money to Africa than the much-parroted “Western aid” to the continent, year in, year out. In 2003, according to the World Bank, these overseas residents sent to Africa the impressive sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their 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. Thus, Africa’s pressing problem in the past 57 years of presumed restoration of independence has not been “poverty”, as it is often uncritically portrayed, but how to husband incredible range of abundance of human and non-human resources for the express benefits of the peoples.
A widespread revolution in the consciousness of Africans will hasten the realisation of a critical mass of the types of Africans described above – at all levels of society. Gradually, many fires are being lit. This shift in consciousness will feed into the strategic goal for change which still remains the dismantling of the architecture of alienation and subjugation posed to African existence and progress by the “Berlin states” emplaced.
Friday, 16 April 2010
Sénégal recovers the bases
Fifty years after the apparent restoration of its independence from over a century of French conquest and occupation, Sénégal is about to take over a stretch of military bases in the country that France has, until now, continued to control and operate. Congratulations to Sénégal! It is never too late to secure one’s freedom – even if it is 50 years or more down the line... The quest for freedom is an ever-ongoing human endeavour. Provided people remain resolute and focused, no setbacks are enduring and no hurdles insurmountable.
France has used these bases, during the period, as essentially its eyes and ears to keep tabs on its vast and entrenched interests across Africa. The bases are France’s pivotal intelligence tracking station to oversee and coordinate its uninterrupted exercise of hegemony over the political and socioeconomic affairs of those 22 so-called francophone African countries that it (and Belgium, and Germany until 1918) had conquered and occupied hitherto. Immanent in the worldview of the French political establishment since Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, i.e. irrespective of ideological/political colouration, none of these states is considered really independent or sovereign by any breadth or shade of either of these definitions. Instead, according to this conception, they are “francophonie” backwoods, which, at best, have some measure of local administrative autonomy (hence, “francophone Africa”!), with ultimate sovereign power supposedly lodged at Paris.
Each of these states “hosts” a French military base of varying capabilities and configuration as part of this overarching network in which Dakar is at the epicentre, in turn linked to requisite interventionist brigades positioned back home in Corsica. Thanks to this network, the French military has invaded this continental “francophonie” enclave 50 times since 1960 – from Chad to Congo Democratic Republic (CDR), Côte d’Ivoire to the Comoros. Such invasions provide the French the opportunity to directly manipulate local political trends in line with their strategic objectives, install new client regimes, if need be, and expand the parameters of expropriation of critical resources even further. On this score, the CDR (or Zaïre or Congo-Kinshasa as it was variously called), the jewel in the crown of “francophonie”, is aptly illustrative. Between 1961 and 1996, France intervened militarily in the country 17 times to prop up the notorious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko which ravaged one of Africa’s richest economies. For France, therefore, its hegemonic control of “francophone Africa” in the past 50 years has been a lucrative and prestigious enterprise to maintain a stranglehold of influence in the Southern World. Jacques Godfrain, a one time French government official with special responsibility for “francophonie”, is perfectly right to observe: “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] ... relations... with 15 or 20 African countries.”
It is extraordinary that despite its lived status of “limited sovereignty” for one-half of a century, Sénégal has emerged as arguably Africa’s most successful “nation-state”. This has occurred as a result of the amicable relationship nurtured, shared and displayed by the country’s constituent nations and faiths – a far cry from the genocidal turbulence that maps the sociology of a polity located just a few hundreds of miles away in the region. The exception of course to Sénégal’s highly laudable tale is Casamance, its south region. This is clearly a restoration-of-independence subject that the Sénégalese peoples can and should resolve peacefully.
With the imminent return of the bases, Sénégal should strike off new vistas of “firsts” in its exemplary Africa journey. The excellent housing units in the bases should be converted to affordable social housing for the people rather than being “taken over” by the Sénégalese military. Sénégal should indeed think of disbanding its military. It does not need it. As I have argued severally for nearly a decade, there should be a mandatory global ban on all arms sales and transfers to Africa and the dismantling of the military on the continent. No African state needs the presence or the use of the military and arms on its soil except, as the world has witnessed in anguish since May 1966, to murder targeted peoples of its population. Sénégal, as usual, can show the way in this stride for the new Africa by cancelling all existing arms procurements and abolishing its military.
France has used these bases, during the period, as essentially its eyes and ears to keep tabs on its vast and entrenched interests across Africa. The bases are France’s pivotal intelligence tracking station to oversee and coordinate its uninterrupted exercise of hegemony over the political and socioeconomic affairs of those 22 so-called francophone African countries that it (and Belgium, and Germany until 1918) had conquered and occupied hitherto. Immanent in the worldview of the French political establishment since Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, i.e. irrespective of ideological/political colouration, none of these states is considered really independent or sovereign by any breadth or shade of either of these definitions. Instead, according to this conception, they are “francophonie” backwoods, which, at best, have some measure of local administrative autonomy (hence, “francophone Africa”!), with ultimate sovereign power supposedly lodged at Paris.
Each of these states “hosts” a French military base of varying capabilities and configuration as part of this overarching network in which Dakar is at the epicentre, in turn linked to requisite interventionist brigades positioned back home in Corsica. Thanks to this network, the French military has invaded this continental “francophonie” enclave 50 times since 1960 – from Chad to Congo Democratic Republic (CDR), Côte d’Ivoire to the Comoros. Such invasions provide the French the opportunity to directly manipulate local political trends in line with their strategic objectives, install new client regimes, if need be, and expand the parameters of expropriation of critical resources even further. On this score, the CDR (or Zaïre or Congo-Kinshasa as it was variously called), the jewel in the crown of “francophonie”, is aptly illustrative. Between 1961 and 1996, France intervened militarily in the country 17 times to prop up the notorious dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko which ravaged one of Africa’s richest economies. For France, therefore, its hegemonic control of “francophone Africa” in the past 50 years has been a lucrative and prestigious enterprise to maintain a stranglehold of influence in the Southern World. Jacques Godfrain, a one time French government official with special responsibility for “francophonie”, is perfectly right to observe: “A little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] ... relations... with 15 or 20 African countries.”
It is extraordinary that despite its lived status of “limited sovereignty” for one-half of a century, Sénégal has emerged as arguably Africa’s most successful “nation-state”. This has occurred as a result of the amicable relationship nurtured, shared and displayed by the country’s constituent nations and faiths – a far cry from the genocidal turbulence that maps the sociology of a polity located just a few hundreds of miles away in the region. The exception of course to Sénégal’s highly laudable tale is Casamance, its south region. This is clearly a restoration-of-independence subject that the Sénégalese peoples can and should resolve peacefully.
With the imminent return of the bases, Sénégal should strike off new vistas of “firsts” in its exemplary Africa journey. The excellent housing units in the bases should be converted to affordable social housing for the people rather than being “taken over” by the Sénégalese military. Sénégal should indeed think of disbanding its military. It does not need it. As I have argued severally for nearly a decade, there should be a mandatory global ban on all arms sales and transfers to Africa and the dismantling of the military on the continent. No African state needs the presence or the use of the military and arms on its soil except, as the world has witnessed in anguish since May 1966, to murder targeted peoples of its population. Sénégal, as usual, can show the way in this stride for the new Africa by cancelling all existing arms procurements and abolishing its military.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Breaking news on Kenya!
The International Criminal Court in The Hague is on the move again in Africa. Coming fast on the heels of its laudable decision last year to issue an arrest warrant to apprehend Omar al-Bashir (head of the Sudanese regime) to stand trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed in Darfur, the ICC has turned its attention to Kenya. The court has empowered Luis Moreno-Ocampo, its indefatigable chief prosecutor, to embark on the investigation into the December 2007 post-election widespread violence in Kenya when 1300 people were murdered. It declares that “information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that crimes against humanity [were] committed on Kenyan territory” during the polls. Moreno-Ocampo had asked the court’s authorisation to investigate these murders because he believed that Kenyan “political leaders organised and financed” some of the killings.
For 44 years, African peoples have waited patiently, sometimes in understandable despair, for this kind of news report. The report is indeed extraordinary. Little did these Kenyan “leaders” believe that as they plotted and unleashed unimaginable violence on their very own citizens over elections that the regime and its allies had fraudulently organised and consequently rigged, they might account to some tribunal for perpetrating this heinous crime. The tens of thousands who survived the massacres and are still displaced from their homes and communities have waited anxiously for justice. They will undoubtedly view the ICC intervention as the beginning of this overdue process of restitution. Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations on pursuing the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity.
Until now, African “leaderships” have felt that they could murder any one, people or peoples tagged as “opponents” within the country’s population as ruthlessly and horrifically as they wished because they envisaged no sanctions whatsoever from their colleagues elsewhere in Africa or from the rest of the world. The background to this impunity was of course laid in Nigeria on 29 May 1966. On this day, the north Nigeria political, religious, business and military establishment ordered a janjaweed attack on Igbo population centres across the entire stretch of north Nigeria – killing, raping, looting, wasting and heralding the first phase of the Igbo genocide which would claim 3.1 million lives by 12 January 1970. The world stood by as these murders were committed. Even some major powers and transnational institutions of the time were either complicit in the genocide or supported it outright. It is precisely because the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide appeared to have been let off the hook for their crimes by the world that Africa did not wait very long before the politics of the Nigeria genocide state morphed violently beyond the country’s frontiers. Leaders elsewhere on the continent including Rwanda, the Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya particularly waged their own vile versions of liquidations of peoples, à la Nigeria, because they expected no sanctions as a result. The tragic consequence for Africa for not stopping these regimes, since 1970, has been the additional state murders of 12 million children, women and men.
The ICC’s next port of call in its Africa journey cannot but be Nigeria. This was where this infectious malady was incubated. As should be expected, Moreno-Ocampo is assured a very busy workload here. Many of those responsible for the genocide, pogroms and other acts of murder against the Igbo are still alive. Many are in their 60s-70s while some are in their 80s and 90s. A number of them are ex-heads of regime, ex-military and ex-police personnel, ex-civil servants, legislators, retired professors, businesspeople, even “diplomats”. Prior to the genocide, Igbo people were murdered in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953) for what were effectively “dress rehearsals” for the slaughtering of 1966-1970. Subsequently, the Igbo have been subjected to 16 planned pogroms/other acts of murder in Nigeria during the following years: 1980, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Lately, in the wake of a catastrophic strain in state hegemonic coalition, the Berom of the plateau central region have been targeted as well as the earlier destruction of the village of Odi.
With this historic ICC intervention, members of Africa’s “leaderships” (at whatever tiers of their regimes) who have murdered people/peoples in their country or are currently murdering people/peoples in their country or are in the process of planning to murder people/peoples in their country now know that they can no longer hide under the bogus rubric of “immunity from prosecution” or seek the protective “diplomatic cover” offered by a London or Moscow or whoever else as often occurred in the past. The world, even if belatedly, now demands and expects justice for the slain and the survivor from Africa’s states of death.
For 44 years, African peoples have waited patiently, sometimes in understandable despair, for this kind of news report. The report is indeed extraordinary. Little did these Kenyan “leaders” believe that as they plotted and unleashed unimaginable violence on their very own citizens over elections that the regime and its allies had fraudulently organised and consequently rigged, they might account to some tribunal for perpetrating this heinous crime. The tens of thousands who survived the massacres and are still displaced from their homes and communities have waited anxiously for justice. They will undoubtedly view the ICC intervention as the beginning of this overdue process of restitution. Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations on pursuing the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity.
Until now, African “leaderships” have felt that they could murder any one, people or peoples tagged as “opponents” within the country’s population as ruthlessly and horrifically as they wished because they envisaged no sanctions whatsoever from their colleagues elsewhere in Africa or from the rest of the world. The background to this impunity was of course laid in Nigeria on 29 May 1966. On this day, the north Nigeria political, religious, business and military establishment ordered a janjaweed attack on Igbo population centres across the entire stretch of north Nigeria – killing, raping, looting, wasting and heralding the first phase of the Igbo genocide which would claim 3.1 million lives by 12 January 1970. The world stood by as these murders were committed. Even some major powers and transnational institutions of the time were either complicit in the genocide or supported it outright. It is precisely because the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide appeared to have been let off the hook for their crimes by the world that Africa did not wait very long before the politics of the Nigeria genocide state morphed violently beyond the country’s frontiers. Leaders elsewhere on the continent including Rwanda, the Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya particularly waged their own vile versions of liquidations of peoples, à la Nigeria, because they expected no sanctions as a result. The tragic consequence for Africa for not stopping these regimes, since 1970, has been the additional state murders of 12 million children, women and men.
The ICC’s next port of call in its Africa journey cannot but be Nigeria. This was where this infectious malady was incubated. As should be expected, Moreno-Ocampo is assured a very busy workload here. Many of those responsible for the genocide, pogroms and other acts of murder against the Igbo are still alive. Many are in their 60s-70s while some are in their 80s and 90s. A number of them are ex-heads of regime, ex-military and ex-police personnel, ex-civil servants, legislators, retired professors, businesspeople, even “diplomats”. Prior to the genocide, Igbo people were murdered in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953) for what were effectively “dress rehearsals” for the slaughtering of 1966-1970. Subsequently, the Igbo have been subjected to 16 planned pogroms/other acts of murder in Nigeria during the following years: 1980, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Lately, in the wake of a catastrophic strain in state hegemonic coalition, the Berom of the plateau central region have been targeted as well as the earlier destruction of the village of Odi.
With this historic ICC intervention, members of Africa’s “leaderships” (at whatever tiers of their regimes) who have murdered people/peoples in their country or are currently murdering people/peoples in their country or are in the process of planning to murder people/peoples in their country now know that they can no longer hide under the bogus rubric of “immunity from prosecution” or seek the protective “diplomatic cover” offered by a London or Moscow or whoever else as often occurred in the past. The world, even if belatedly, now demands and expects justice for the slain and the survivor from Africa’s states of death.
Saturday, 27 March 2010
What exactly does "sub-Sahara Africa" mean?*
It appears increasingly fashionable in the West for a number of broadcasters, websites, news agencies, newspapers and magazines, the United Nations/allied agencies and some governments, writers and academics to use the term “sub-Sahara Africa” to refer to all of Africa (53 countries) except the 5 predominantly Arab states of north Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) and the Sudan, a northcentral African country. Even though its territory is mostly located south of the Sahara Desert, the Sudan is excluded from the “sub-Sahara Africa” tagging by those who promote the use of the epithet because the regime in power in Khartoum describes the country as “Arab” despite its majority African population.
As we now demonstrate, 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 the “sub-Sahara Africa” labelling. Is it “under” the Sahara Desert or “part of”/“partly” the Sahara Desert? Or, presumably, “partially”/“nearly” the Sahara Desert or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of “in the style of, but inferior to” the Sahara Desert, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan?
The example of South Africa is appropriate here. Crucially, this is a reference underlined in the relevant literature of the era especially those emanating from the West, the United Nations (principally UNDP, FAO, WHO, UNCTAD), the World Bank and IMF, the so-called NGOs/“aid” groups, and some in academia who all are variously responsible for initiating and sustaining the operationalisation of this “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma. The point is that 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, which were also often referred to at the time as the “frontline states”. South Africa then was either termed “white South Africa” or the “South Africa sub-continent” (as in the “India sub-continent” usage, for instance), meaning “almost”/“partially” a continent – quite clearly a usage of “admiration” or “compliment” employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geostrategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile European minority occupation regime-led country.
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 happened suddenly 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? Interestingly, 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 the 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 countries, 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 led predominantly 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 countries as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes since January 1956 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 5 north Africa Arab states are said to be located “above” the Sahara, then 48 are positioned “under”. The latter would therefore include all the 5 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 the “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 liberation 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 geostrategic global “irrelevance”.
“Sub-Sahara Africa” is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical 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 1 billion 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 steadily 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.
*This essay is an updated version of a paper entitled "What is 'sub-Sahara Africa'"?, read at the IDeoGRAMS Conference: Contemporary Media, University of Leicester, 14 September 2007.
As we now demonstrate, 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 the “sub-Sahara Africa” labelling. Is it “under” the Sahara Desert or “part of”/“partly” the Sahara Desert? Or, presumably, “partially”/“nearly” the Sahara Desert or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of “in the style of, but inferior to” the Sahara Desert, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan?
The example of South Africa is appropriate here. Crucially, this is a reference underlined in the relevant literature of the era especially those emanating from the West, the United Nations (principally UNDP, FAO, WHO, UNCTAD), the World Bank and IMF, the so-called NGOs/“aid” groups, and some in academia who all are variously responsible for initiating and sustaining the operationalisation of this “sub-Sahara Africa” dogma. The point is that 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, which were also often referred to at the time as the “frontline states”. South Africa then was either termed “white South Africa” or the “South Africa sub-continent” (as in the “India sub-continent” usage, for instance), meaning “almost”/“partially” a continent – quite clearly a usage of “admiration” or “compliment” employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geostrategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile European minority occupation regime-led country.
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 happened suddenly 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? Interestingly, 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 the 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 countries, 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 led predominantly 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 countries as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes since January 1956 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 5 north Africa Arab states are said to be located “above” the Sahara, then 48 are positioned “under”. The latter would therefore include all the 5 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 the “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 liberation 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 geostrategic global “irrelevance”.
“Sub-Sahara Africa” is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical 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 1 billion 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 steadily 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.
*This essay is an updated version of a paper entitled "What is 'sub-Sahara Africa'"?, read at the IDeoGRAMS Conference: Contemporary Media, University of Leicester, 14 September 2007.
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Jos - foregrounding a failed state
The concept “failed-state” carries an understandable melodramatic import! It refers to the inability or failure of a state to fulfil some of its key roles and responsibilities to its people(s) and others domiciled within its territory and consequently to its neighbours and the wider global community of states. According to the Funds for Peace think-tank, state failure materialises at three broad spheres of the lives of the people(s): social, political and economic. The following would feature among the key empirical determinants of this failure:
1. The state’s inability to provide security to its population. This situation may have arisen because the state no longer exercises control across part/parts or all of its territory. Factors such as catastrophic breakdowns in vital internal sociopolitical and economic relations, intra-regime fractionalism and rivalries, external invasion and occupation of territory, and unmanageable natural disasters would contribute to the failure. It could also be due to the state’s violation of the human rights of the people(s) including a deliberate state policy to embark on the destruction of one or more of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups, etc., etc.
2. The state’s inability to provide essential social services
(communication infrastructure, health care, education, housing and recreation, development of culture) to its people(s) or the state’s deliberate policy to deny or partially offer such services to some of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups… This failure could be the consequence of a state’s dwindling fiscal/material resources or just sheer incompetence in its management capacity. Alternatively, this inability points to the staggering nature of corruption and largely institutionalised norm of non-accountability in the access and control of public-owned finances by state officials and their agents.
There remains a lack of consensus among scholars studying the failed states of contemporary Africa on the terms of the evaluative parameters of this enterprise including the crucial constitutive timeframes of assessing and therefore concluding when this or that African state “began to fail” or/and when indeed it “failed”. There is a tendency by some experts to arbitrarily circumscribe the limit of the focus of interrogation to the so-called African post-conquest epoch (i.e., post-January 1956) with the underlying presumption that the state, as formulated and constituted on the eve of the “restoration of independence”, has a definitive and enduring internal logic to its being. In its annual 2009 “Failed States Index” publication, the Fund for Peace identifies the “worst 20 states”, 11 of which are in Africa. It is to one of these, Nigeria, that we should now turn.
For Nigeria, it was Jos, a city in its northcentral region, that the trajectory to its “failed state” status began. The year was 1945, 11 years before 1956 and 15 years before 1960 – the year of the presumed termination of the British occupation of the country. On 22 June 1945, Nigerian workers declared a countrywide strike to back their demands for a pay rise in response to their deteriorating social conditions, aggravated by the effects of the Second World War. Since the earlier strike in 1941, the cost of living in Nigeria had increased by 200 per cent. While European staff in the country had been paid a couple of “allowances” to cope with these skyrocketing costs, the occupation regime refused bluntly to make similar payments to Africans. The strike virtually paralysed Nigeria’s economic life. It went on for 44 days in the Lagos capital district, but even longer elsewhere in the country – up to 52 days in some places in the regions. The National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the vanguard political party for Nigeria liberation and its press (particularly West African Pilot and Daily Comet newspapers) supported the strike, highlighting the increasingly evident cooperation between the trade unions and the emerging political leadership in the struggle to achieve the country’s restoration of independence. The British however had successfully persuaded the predominantly Hausa-Fulani muslim north region, which was opposed to termination of its occupation of the country, to boycott the strike.
Nonetheless, the strike was an outstanding success. It was the most far-reaching mobilisation of labour in 60 years of occupied Nigeria and its political implications were not lost on the British. They banned the Pilot and Comet and openly blamed prominent Igbo leaders (including Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pre-eminent leader of the freedom movement who also owned and edited these papers), their political and cultural organisations for leading the strike. Such was the vitriolic nature of the occupation regime’s anti-Igbo propaganda on the strike that by October 1945 it became the instigator prop to Hausa-Fulani leaders’ organised massacres of Igbo immigrants in Jos and the surrounding tin mining towns and villages. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the pogrom and tens of thousands of pounds’ sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. No perpetrators of these murders were apprehended or punished by the regime. As a result, emboldened Hausa-Fulani leaders organised yet another pogrom of Igbo immigrants in the north, this time in Kano, in May 1953, which coincided with the heightened debates among Nigeria politicians on the possible date for the formal termination of British occupation and the restoration of independence. In contrast to the Igbo and other nations in the south who favoured the year 1956 for both historic events, the north, as was expected, was vehemently opposed to any such dates. Essentially, the north unleashed the Igbo pogrom in Kano to scuttle these debates – which it succeeded in doing, with evident British relief and satisfaction. As in Jos, the occupation regime did not apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and destruction.
In the meantime, the regime would spend 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) working assiduously to ensure that Igbo people, who spearheaded the liberation movement to terminate its occupation of Nigeria, did not assume a leadership position in a post-conquest/occupation Nigeria. Britain also spent 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) fashioning the institutions and processes that, in effect, choked off the possibilities of the emergence of a coherently organic state that would serve the interests of most of the African constituent nations in a future independently-restored Nigeria state. In 1951, Britain helped to found the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), an exclusive north-based retrograde feudal political party that opposed the restoration of African independence but supported indefinite British occupation. As a reward to north Nigeria’s steadfast support for Britain, the occupation rigged both the 1952 census results and the defining 1959 elections to the central legislature in favour of its Hausa-Fulani north clients.
It was therefore to the NPC that the British handed over supreme political power in October 1960 with the expectation that this anti-African freedom party would safeguard their vast economic and strategic interests in this southwestcentral region of Africa in perpetuity. Six years later, beginning on 29 May 1966, the north region, true to type, and other key sectors of the Nigeria political establishment (military, police, emirs, intellectuals, muslim cleric, feudal overlords, businesspeople, civil servants, varied regional/constituent nations’ leaderships, other public officials and patrons) with full complicity of the Harold Wilson government in London, launched the Igbo genocide. Throughout the slaughter, the genocidists had the following gruesome anthem in Hausa, broadcast over the authoritative Kaduna radio and television stations (variations on this anthem have since been adapted and re-broadcast elsewhere in Africa by genocidist journalists supporting the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur) with spot advertisements and editorial comments on the theme regularly reproduced in the mass-circulating New Nigerian and Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspapers:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
The Igbo genocide is the foundational and worst genocide in Africa of the 20th century. In response, the Igbo renounced their Nigerian citizenship forever. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria from accomplishing its dreadful mission. Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of its population at the time, were murdered. The genocidists also sequestrated and pillaged the multibillion dollar-Igbo economy. Yet despite earning the gargantuan sum of US$700 billion in oil sales in the subsequent 40 years, a significant proportion of this from occupied Igboland in the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions, Nigeria has cascaded into a degenerative slump politically, economically, intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually. For all intents and purposes, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects in the wake of the Igbo genocide.
Just as in the antecedents established in the 1945 and 1953 Igbo pogroms, no person or institution in Nigeria or elsewhere has been apprehended or prosecuted for their role in the Igbo genocide. On the contrary, many operatives who worked as advisors, at varying layers of the genocidist command and control infrastructure, went to, or returned to universities and colleges as professors and researchers, some became university administrators, bureaucrats, media editors and executives, company chief executives and directors, ministers of state, ministers of religion, businesspeople; many of the commanders and commandants became generals and admirals and marshals, and state legislators, administrators and the like; some even sought the highest office of state – head of regime (Awolowo – genocide chief “theorist” and head of finance ministry – variously, without success; Gowon – chief commander – once, successful; Obasanjo – commander – three times, successful; Babangida – commander – once, successful; Buhari – commander – once, successful; Abubakar – commander – once, successful). Not surprisingly, the Nigeria state’s incessant murder of the Igbo has continued unabated despite the “formal” end of the genocide in 1970. The following years of additional murderous outrages illustrate the extent of this continuing tragedy: 1980…1982…1985…1991…1992…1993…1994…1999…2000…2002…2004…2005…2006…2007…2008…2009…2010…
Sixty years on, with the 2010 murders in Jos whose gory images have shocked the world, the wheel has indeed come full circle. Few now doubt that Nigeria is historically a cataclysmic failure. Presently, Nigeria is a grave danger to itself. It is a grave danger to its constituent peoples and nations, to its neighbours, to the west Africa region, to Africa and the wider world. The recent murders have exposed particularly the lethal fissures in a hitherto seemingly compact genocidist monolith. This fractionalisation cannot be contained.
The future for the nations and peoples of this region couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which was once genocidist Nigeria. Biafra and the other successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out that which was Nigeria here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us humans and part of humanity. The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups, however defined. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. Finally, the long drawn out nightmare is over and truly we do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.
1. The state’s inability to provide security to its population. This situation may have arisen because the state no longer exercises control across part/parts or all of its territory. Factors such as catastrophic breakdowns in vital internal sociopolitical and economic relations, intra-regime fractionalism and rivalries, external invasion and occupation of territory, and unmanageable natural disasters would contribute to the failure. It could also be due to the state’s violation of the human rights of the people(s) including a deliberate state policy to embark on the destruction of one or more of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups, etc., etc.
2. The state’s inability to provide essential social services
(communication infrastructure, health care, education, housing and recreation, development of culture) to its people(s) or the state’s deliberate policy to deny or partially offer such services to some of its constituent nations/peoples/religious groups… This failure could be the consequence of a state’s dwindling fiscal/material resources or just sheer incompetence in its management capacity. Alternatively, this inability points to the staggering nature of corruption and largely institutionalised norm of non-accountability in the access and control of public-owned finances by state officials and their agents.
There remains a lack of consensus among scholars studying the failed states of contemporary Africa on the terms of the evaluative parameters of this enterprise including the crucial constitutive timeframes of assessing and therefore concluding when this or that African state “began to fail” or/and when indeed it “failed”. There is a tendency by some experts to arbitrarily circumscribe the limit of the focus of interrogation to the so-called African post-conquest epoch (i.e., post-January 1956) with the underlying presumption that the state, as formulated and constituted on the eve of the “restoration of independence”, has a definitive and enduring internal logic to its being. In its annual 2009 “Failed States Index” publication, the Fund for Peace identifies the “worst 20 states”, 11 of which are in Africa. It is to one of these, Nigeria, that we should now turn.
For Nigeria, it was Jos, a city in its northcentral region, that the trajectory to its “failed state” status began. The year was 1945, 11 years before 1956 and 15 years before 1960 – the year of the presumed termination of the British occupation of the country. On 22 June 1945, Nigerian workers declared a countrywide strike to back their demands for a pay rise in response to their deteriorating social conditions, aggravated by the effects of the Second World War. Since the earlier strike in 1941, the cost of living in Nigeria had increased by 200 per cent. While European staff in the country had been paid a couple of “allowances” to cope with these skyrocketing costs, the occupation regime refused bluntly to make similar payments to Africans. The strike virtually paralysed Nigeria’s economic life. It went on for 44 days in the Lagos capital district, but even longer elsewhere in the country – up to 52 days in some places in the regions. The National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the vanguard political party for Nigeria liberation and its press (particularly West African Pilot and Daily Comet newspapers) supported the strike, highlighting the increasingly evident cooperation between the trade unions and the emerging political leadership in the struggle to achieve the country’s restoration of independence. The British however had successfully persuaded the predominantly Hausa-Fulani muslim north region, which was opposed to termination of its occupation of the country, to boycott the strike.
Nonetheless, the strike was an outstanding success. It was the most far-reaching mobilisation of labour in 60 years of occupied Nigeria and its political implications were not lost on the British. They banned the Pilot and Comet and openly blamed prominent Igbo leaders (including Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pre-eminent leader of the freedom movement who also owned and edited these papers), their political and cultural organisations for leading the strike. Such was the vitriolic nature of the occupation regime’s anti-Igbo propaganda on the strike that by October 1945 it became the instigator prop to Hausa-Fulani leaders’ organised massacres of Igbo immigrants in Jos and the surrounding tin mining towns and villages. Hundreds of Igbo were murdered during the pogrom and tens of thousands of pounds’ sterling worth of their property looted or destroyed. No perpetrators of these murders were apprehended or punished by the regime. As a result, emboldened Hausa-Fulani leaders organised yet another pogrom of Igbo immigrants in the north, this time in Kano, in May 1953, which coincided with the heightened debates among Nigeria politicians on the possible date for the formal termination of British occupation and the restoration of independence. In contrast to the Igbo and other nations in the south who favoured the year 1956 for both historic events, the north, as was expected, was vehemently opposed to any such dates. Essentially, the north unleashed the Igbo pogrom in Kano to scuttle these debates – which it succeeded in doing, with evident British relief and satisfaction. As in Jos, the occupation regime did not apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and destruction.
In the meantime, the regime would spend 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) working assiduously to ensure that Igbo people, who spearheaded the liberation movement to terminate its occupation of Nigeria, did not assume a leadership position in a post-conquest/occupation Nigeria. Britain also spent 15 and one-half long years (March 1945-September 1960) fashioning the institutions and processes that, in effect, choked off the possibilities of the emergence of a coherently organic state that would serve the interests of most of the African constituent nations in a future independently-restored Nigeria state. In 1951, Britain helped to found the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), an exclusive north-based retrograde feudal political party that opposed the restoration of African independence but supported indefinite British occupation. As a reward to north Nigeria’s steadfast support for Britain, the occupation rigged both the 1952 census results and the defining 1959 elections to the central legislature in favour of its Hausa-Fulani north clients.
It was therefore to the NPC that the British handed over supreme political power in October 1960 with the expectation that this anti-African freedom party would safeguard their vast economic and strategic interests in this southwestcentral region of Africa in perpetuity. Six years later, beginning on 29 May 1966, the north region, true to type, and other key sectors of the Nigeria political establishment (military, police, emirs, intellectuals, muslim cleric, feudal overlords, businesspeople, civil servants, varied regional/constituent nations’ leaderships, other public officials and patrons) with full complicity of the Harold Wilson government in London, launched the Igbo genocide. Throughout the slaughter, the genocidists had the following gruesome anthem in Hausa, broadcast over the authoritative Kaduna radio and television stations (variations on this anthem have since been adapted and re-broadcast elsewhere in Africa by genocidist journalists supporting the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur) with spot advertisements and editorial comments on the theme regularly reproduced in the mass-circulating New Nigerian and Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo newspapers:
Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su
(translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)
The Igbo genocide is the foundational and worst genocide in Africa of the 20th century. In response, the Igbo renounced their Nigerian citizenship forever. They created the state of Biafra in its place and tasked it to provide security to the Igbo and prevent Nigeria from accomplishing its dreadful mission. Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, 3.1 million Igbo people, a quarter of its population at the time, were murdered. The genocidists also sequestrated and pillaged the multibillion dollar-Igbo economy. Yet despite earning the gargantuan sum of US$700 billion in oil sales in the subsequent 40 years, a significant proportion of this from occupied Igboland in the Abia, Delta, Imo and Rivers administrative regions, Nigeria has cascaded into a degenerative slump politically, economically, intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually. For all intents and purposes, Nigeria collapsed as a state with any serious prospects in the wake of the Igbo genocide.
Just as in the antecedents established in the 1945 and 1953 Igbo pogroms, no person or institution in Nigeria or elsewhere has been apprehended or prosecuted for their role in the Igbo genocide. On the contrary, many operatives who worked as advisors, at varying layers of the genocidist command and control infrastructure, went to, or returned to universities and colleges as professors and researchers, some became university administrators, bureaucrats, media editors and executives, company chief executives and directors, ministers of state, ministers of religion, businesspeople; many of the commanders and commandants became generals and admirals and marshals, and state legislators, administrators and the like; some even sought the highest office of state – head of regime (Awolowo – genocide chief “theorist” and head of finance ministry – variously, without success; Gowon – chief commander – once, successful; Obasanjo – commander – three times, successful; Babangida – commander – once, successful; Buhari – commander – once, successful; Abubakar – commander – once, successful). Not surprisingly, the Nigeria state’s incessant murder of the Igbo has continued unabated despite the “formal” end of the genocide in 1970. The following years of additional murderous outrages illustrate the extent of this continuing tragedy: 1980…1982…1985…1991…1992…1993…1994…1999…2000…2002…2004…2005…2006…2007…2008…2009…2010…
Sixty years on, with the 2010 murders in Jos whose gory images have shocked the world, the wheel has indeed come full circle. Few now doubt that Nigeria is historically a cataclysmic failure. Presently, Nigeria is a grave danger to itself. It is a grave danger to its constituent peoples and nations, to its neighbours, to the west Africa region, to Africa and the wider world. The recent murders have exposed particularly the lethal fissures in a hitherto seemingly compact genocidist monolith. This fractionalisation cannot be contained.
The future for the nations and peoples of this region couldn’t be more reassuring on the morrow of that which was once genocidist Nigeria. Biafra and the other successor states, organically constituted, really have their work cut out. Their mission is not to begin to construct states that are merely post-genocide or post post-conquest/post post-“colonial” states (cancelling out that which was Nigeria here and there!) but a realisation, a reclamation of that which makes us humans and part of humanity. The new states have an opportunity to begin to build a new civilisation where human life, fundamentally, is sacrosanct. This is an inclusive state where women and men live as co-operators and co-creators in fundamentally transforming their society. This is a state that accepts and accords full rights to all minority groups, however defined. This is a state where people enjoy the rights to differ and to dream dreams and dream different sets of dreams as they choose. This is a state dedicated to furthering and nurturing the resilience of its people and to enabling them pursue their highest creative endeavours. This state continuously strives to remove all limitations in the paths of its people and committed to making life better and better and better. This is a state that primes its people to flourish. Finally, the long drawn out nightmare is over and truly we do stand poised on the eve of a new beginning.
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