Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
AS FAMILIES and friends and peoples heartily exchange the customary best wishes for the new
year, west Africa’s most notorious Murdering Inc., genocidist Nigeria, is
already putting final touches to the launch of its new year’s early bloodbath
episode. But this time round, the target isn’t across the predictable borders
of the contiguous state of Biafra to the south but further to its west – the
Gambia, 1500 miles away.
“Elections”
for head of regime were held in the Gambia last month (December 2016) in which
Yahya Jammeh, the incumbent, apparently lost and conceded to opponent Adama
Barrow initially but soon changed his mind because he had “since [found] irregularities
in the polling” exercise. Jammeh has instead “appealed” to the country’s high
court, which he invariably controls, to “rule” on the dispute.
Bellicosity
In the
meantime, a 4-person representative body of ECOWAS, west Africa region’s
economic organisation, of which the Gambia is a member, travelled to Banjul, the
Gambia, to begin some mediation in the crisis. The delegation met both Jammeh
and Barrow, separately, but was unsuccessful in resolving the contentious
issues at stake. An ECOWAS summit in Abuja, Nigeria, later followed on the
subject but its resulting communiqué, prompted largely by Nigeria and the
organisation’s secretariat, was outlandishly bellicose.
Instead of
continuing and even expanding the parameters of its representative’s mediation
visit to Banjul, just begun with the very brief, mostly formal procedural sessions
with the Gambian protagonists, the communiqué was surprisingly emphatic that it
would “take all necessary actions to enforce the
results of 1st December 2016 elections”. To underscore the gravity of this
increasing bellicosity, some media organisations in the region have in the last
few days been publishing images of “battle ready Nigeria” troops “awaiting
orders” for “possibly invading” the Gambia to “topple”/“force” Jammeh out of
office. Marcel de Souza of the ECOWAS secretariat indeed confirmed in a separate
press briefing (Premier Times, Lagos,
23 December 2016) that the Abuja summit had “authorised” an ECOWAS “standby
force” to invade the Gambia from staging bases in Sénégal (not explicitly
stated in the communiqué) if Jammeh did not “step down” by 19 January 2017, the
presumed end of “his mandate”. (Sénégal almost envelopes the Gambia land space completely,
as the map above indicates, thanks to those incredulously bizarre conquest
frontier lines darted out by the dual European occupying states France and
Britain in the region in the 19th century.)
Scant credible election
As most people know, what passes for election across
Africa is largely a farce. The murderous (European)conqueror “Berlin-state”
entrenched on the continent does not require an election to function and uphold
its definitive mission and as I have shown more expansively elsewhere (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa: the elector, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas,
APART FROM perhaps Sénégal and to a limited extent
Ghana, none other of the 16 countries of ECOWAS has had a credible election as
a “Berlin-state” of Africa. A credible election in a “Berlin-state” is intrinsically
a contradiction in terms. Just Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa,
paradoxically, given its very familiar history, would join Sénégal and Ghana in that league of rare exceptions
in Africa on this score (“Elections in Africa”).
It should be stressed, therefore, that the overwhelming
majority of the heads of regime gathered in the Abuja summit on the Gambia came
to power originally as military putschists or in rigged elections, often aided
by judiciaries they control (“Elections in Africa”). Nigeria regime’s Muhammadu Buhari, a trooper
actively involved in 50 years of the Igbo genocide, was imposed as chief of
state operations in March 2015 by the then British Prime Minister Cameron, born
five months after Buhari first got
involved in his murder of the Igbo in phase-I of the genocide, and US President
Obama, notably the first African-descent president in 233 years of the US republic.
Given particularly the monstrosity of the dehumanisation of African peoples in the United States throughout the course of this epoch, Barack
Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide in Africa, the land of his fathers, is an
incalculable tragedy, a catastrophic legacy. Since Buhari was installed in power, 2000 Igbo have been
murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko
Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist
organisations. Neither Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his
embassy in Nigeria has ever condemned any of these murders.
Hands off the Gambia!
Nigeria and ECOWAS must now abandon all plans
to invade the Gambia. They have demonstrated woefully that they are no worthy
arbiters in this dispute. The peoples in the Gambia must be allowed by essentially hostile neighbours,
and the rest of the world, to sort out the problems on the “elections” and
whatever else without threats and intimidations. There isn’t anything
sacrosanct about the 19 January 2017 “end of mandate” date in the Gambia for protagonists to
sit down and negotiate a way out of their differences. These negotiations
shouldn’t have deadlines. The Gambian parties must be encouraged to discuss and
discuss and discuss to resolve this crisis – however long it takes them.
Surely, the world can facilitate these
intra-Gambian talks. The lead arms supplying countries to Africa, especially Britain, the US, Russia, China, the Ukraine and Pakistan should immediately ban all arms
supplies to the Gambia and Nigeria as
well as to the rest of the 14 ECOWAS member states. These regimes and states,
with the obviously negligible manufacturing base of their own, rely heavily on
the world outside for the lethal range of armaments to murder peoples and
devastate communities within and without their frontiers.
West Africa is arguably the continent’s most troubled region and another front of confrontation, this time in the Gambia, must be stopped.
West Africa is arguably the continent’s most troubled region and another front of confrontation, this time in the Gambia, must be stopped.
(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965])
Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
