Showing posts with label restoration of independence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restoration of independence. Show all posts
Monday, 7 February 2011
Referendum result: South Sudan votes decisively for restoration of independence
The “Berlin-state” is now in freefall. Africa is back – Indeed! Which peoples, which nations, are next positioned in this celebrative, illuminated pathway to join the historic freedom journey of our age? Igbo? Darfuri? Constituent nations, Democratic Republic of the Congo? Constituent nations, Kenya? Constituent nations, the Cameroon? Constituent nations, Uganda? Constituent nations, Nigeria? … Who? … Which? … Africa and the rest of the world await ecstatically! O di egwu!
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.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
No one should ever be scared of freedom
Jean Ping, the chair of the Addis Ababa-based Commission of the Africa Union, recently criticised the likely outcome of next year’s referendum by the people of south Sudan on the restoration of their independence. Ping told a French radio station interviewer that he feared that the Sudan was “sitting on a powder keg” and that a “yes” vote for south Sudanese freedom could have “catastrophic” consequences: “Will the independence of Southern Sudan not lead other players in Darfur and in other places, which are currently not asking for independence, to seek independence as Southern Sudan will have done?”
These are shocking and sad comments made by such a highly placed African public official. It is not certain how much of the Sudan’s recent history, especially the 1956 post-British conquest epoch, that Ping is familiar with. The 2011 referendum that he refers to is in fact a crucial feature of the terms of the 2005 cessation of the north-south Sudanese war that had been waged for 22 years. 1.5-2million Sudanese, overwhelming majority of them southerners, were killed during this war. South Sudan has long resisted its totally subject sociopolitical status, occasioned by the British hand-over of supreme political power to the minority Arab north Sudanese population on the eve of the formal termination of its occupation of the Sudan in January 1956. We mustn’t fail to recall that James Robertson, the outgoing British occupation governor in Khartoum who sealed the infamous Sudan deal, flew southwest to Nigeria, another conglomeration of British-occupied African peoples and states, and crafted and sealed yet another “post-conquest” albatross in Africa in October 1960.
The 2011 referendum is therefore an historic opportunity for Africans in south Sudan to regain their freedom. Africans, elsewhere in the Sudan and indeed anywhere else on the continent, who similarly wish to exercise their freedom to be free from the burden of subjugation, cannot be stopped by any interests and calculations. Freedom is inalienable. No one should fear freedom – and its consequences.
These are shocking and sad comments made by such a highly placed African public official. It is not certain how much of the Sudan’s recent history, especially the 1956 post-British conquest epoch, that Ping is familiar with. The 2011 referendum that he refers to is in fact a crucial feature of the terms of the 2005 cessation of the north-south Sudanese war that had been waged for 22 years. 1.5-2million Sudanese, overwhelming majority of them southerners, were killed during this war. South Sudan has long resisted its totally subject sociopolitical status, occasioned by the British hand-over of supreme political power to the minority Arab north Sudanese population on the eve of the formal termination of its occupation of the Sudan in January 1956. We mustn’t fail to recall that James Robertson, the outgoing British occupation governor in Khartoum who sealed the infamous Sudan deal, flew southwest to Nigeria, another conglomeration of British-occupied African peoples and states, and crafted and sealed yet another “post-conquest” albatross in Africa in October 1960.
The 2011 referendum is therefore an historic opportunity for Africans in south Sudan to regain their freedom. Africans, elsewhere in the Sudan and indeed anywhere else on the continent, who similarly wish to exercise their freedom to be free from the burden of subjugation, cannot be stopped by any interests and calculations. Freedom is inalienable. No one should fear freedom – and its consequences.
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