Mr. Crispin Cole | May 1, 2008
Her Biography
Anne was born in Obuasi, Ghana on the 3rd day of August 1933 to Geoffrey William Eaton-Turner an Englishman, the General Manager of Ashanti Goldfields Ltd. and Sunkwa Abriwa Akua a Ghanaian mother. As her mother died early during her infancy, she was raised by Mrs. Mary Wilson, her step-mother, and grew up in a large family with her other brothers and sisters five of whom are with us today. She attended the St. Mary’s Convent in Cape Coast, in the Gold Coast as it then was and then went on to Achimota, the premier and prestigious Secondary School in Accra. Her days at St. Mary’s Convent were memorable. She was the object of much love and affection from the nuns, her teachers and strangers who doted on her.
On leaving Achimota she went to Nursing School at Korle Bu in Accra.
At an early age she had a deep sense of faith in God and this was reflected in her work. She had some wonderful experiences at Korle Bu where she found favour with Dr. Hawe and Sister Elfing. She devoted herself wholeheartedly to the interest of her patients. She would do jobs that the others frowned upon. For example, early in her nursing career, she looked after a woman whose bone had pierced her skin, which was deteriorating. She removed her from the general ward to a safe and exclusive place where she could get special attention and not be burden to other patients in the Ward. One of her significant recollections was looking after a patient who had a stroke. He was a very pleasant man who, fortunately had not lost his speech. While others considered him a difficult and demanding patient, Anne did her best to make him feel comfortable. He was an appreciative gentleman and very soon he and his wife became Uncle and Aunty to her. They virtually adopted her as their daughter and when they learnt that she was about to travel to the United Kingdom for further studies, they decided to pay her fare to England. She was given appropriate nicknames: Sister Elfing had been told her name was “Turner” but she preferred to call her “Daisy” while others simply called her “Angel”.
After a relatively short time at Korle Bu she travelled to the United Kingdom to continue her nursing career. Initially she was going to May Day Hospital in London with her friend Vicky Branson, but while in London she fell down the stairs at the home of her Aunty Emma at Golder’s Green and dislocated her right shoulder. The pain was excruciating but somehow, she managed to rotate it and put it back in place. That was a temporary expedient as it started coming out again and aging and she had to change her plans.
She worked at Hospitals in London, Manchester and Birmingham. In Manchester she became the first black nurse to be appointed a Sister. She travelled to Norway and Ireland and then met Marcus where their courtship developed in London, Birmingham. They went on to the United States and Anne worked at the Yale Medical Center in New Haven and the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn.
On the 12th January 1963, Anne and Marcus got married at the St. George’s Cathedral in Freetown. Thereafter, she worked at Hill Station Hospital and the Connaught Hospital in Freetown.
She travelled widely to Europe including Norway, Sweden, France, Holland, Spain, Germany and Italy, various countries in Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe where her school friend and classmate had married the current President Mugabe: South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, Korea, the United States, Central America
Her commitment to the Lord was epochal and unequivocal. . She had a deep and abiding faith in God and she knew the Bible inside out. She attended the Freetown Bible College and taught there as well. She spoke boldly on all issues and was commended for her “Holy Boldness” in spreading the word of God. She taught Sunday School, was instrumental in getting the Cathedral Church Bible Studies going under the late Rev. Evan Johnson: She went to Bonthe where the Methodist women had asked her to speak on the Holy Spirit. She organized a Life Application Bible Conference in Freetown and succeeded in bringing together nearly all the Christian denominations to the Conference. She was dubbed “A Bridge Builder”
After God had spoken to her in a dream, she organized a Praise March in Freetown and was instrumental in getting the Chairman of the NPRC to call a day of Fasting and Prayer for the Nation of Sierra Leone. As a member of the National Intercessory Prayer Committee she visited government offices in Freetown including State House and led prayers for our leaders and for the Nation.
Her home was a Centre for Christian Guests and she had many distinguished clerics including John Stott and Ian Barclay as her home guests. She was an excellent and willing hostess and brought together men and women of all racial backgrounds into her home.
During the visit of the Duchess of Kent to Sierra Leone for the 200th Anniversary of the City of Freetown, she chaired the Committee responsible for the restoration of the Cottage Hospital.
She travelled to Jerusalem on two occasions and was baptised in the River Jordan by Immersion.
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You are invited to take this opportunity of writing a tribute to Aunty Anne as she was affectionately known to many. Please post your tributes and comments below.
Thanks
Crispin
Mr. Crispin Cole | April 8, 2007
Amputees are the most visible victims of the descent into hell of this former British colony. The fighting has stopped but they see only misery with little hope of change
By Jonathan Clayton in Freetown
Courtesy The UK Times, April 6, 2007
A glint of light on steel and Abubakar Kargbo’s life changed forever. That was when the axe came crashing down and severed his arm from his body. Seconds later, the action was repeated. His left arm then also joined the pile of bloodied, lifeless limbs at the foot of the village mango tree.
That was eight years ago, at the height of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. He was 28 and has never worked since. “I go into town to beg, but it is hard. People have lost sympathy because of the time that has elapsed,” Abubakar, married with three children, explained sadly. “Some don’t want to be reminded of the war.”
His stumps often ache but he cannot afford medicine. Until recently the Health Ministry pocketed all the money given to buy drugs. “The Government tried in the early days but overall, since the end of the conflict, very little has been done to bring the victims back as close as is possible to what they were. They have forgotten totally about us now,” he told The Times.
Lamine Jusa Jarka, his former neighbour, was “amputated” on the same day by the same group of rebels, a motley gang of drugged child soldiers, led by Commanding Officer “Cut Hands”. They had been found hiding in their houses, defying instructions to come out and welcome the rebel Revolutionary United Front.
Amputations were a trade-mark of Sierra Leone’s civil war from 1991 to 2002, one of the fiercest witnessed in post-independence Africa. There are believed to be at least 6,000 such amputees across the country. With elections planned for July, they are now mobilising. Hundreds have registered to vote. By special decree, those without hands will be allowed to use their toes to stamp their mark. “Al-Haji” Jusa Jarka, chairman of the Amputees and War Wounded Association of Sierra Leone, declared: “We are going to vote for a president who recognises our plight.”
The amputees are the most visible victims of this former British colony’s descent into hell but they are far from being a lone voice. Their complaints over the Government’s failure to deliver promised peace dividends are echoed by others and have raised fresh concerns over the country’s future stability.
Mustapha, 20, who is unemployed, said: “They are crooks, all of them. They do nothing for us. I hate those greedy bastards.” Mustapha left the countryside to look for work in Freetown, the capital, and scrapes a living guiding foreigners around town.
Vivien, a scantily clad prostitute in one the many neon-lit discos lining the capital’s long, curving beach, cried softly into her beer. “There is nothing here, my mother is ill and I have to support her. There is nothing for young people here, just misery.”
It is easy to understand their frustration. For seven out of the past ten years, Sierra Leone has been ranked officially as the world’s poorest country, nudged out of bottom place only by Bangladesh. The UN’s Human Development Index reads like a roll call of horror. Life expectancy, at 37 and falling, is the worst in the world.
Deaths in childbirth are the highest in the world, made worse by widespread female genital mutilation. More than 300 children out of 1,000 do not make it beyond the age of five. Unemployment is put at more than 70 per cent. More than two-thirds of the population of five million live below the poverty line of 52p a day.
In the teeming slum of Kroo Bay in central Freetown, more than 5,000 people, crammed together in flimsy tin-roofed hovels, live in extreme poverty. Pigs wander knee-high in stagnant pools of water — human excrement floating on the surface — while women and children wash clothes and bathe a few yards away.
Sento Sesay, 12, great beads of sweat running down her face as she squeezes filthy water from washed clothes, says that each day she dreams of leaving. “When it rains, we are flooded, everything comes into our houses — human waste, litter, mosquitoes. It is horrible here.” In a quiet voice, she adds that sexual abuse is also rampant.
Tony Blair, whose father taught at Fourah Bay university in Freetown, West Africa’s first, is assured of a hero’s welcome when he visits the country next month, although it is unlikely that there will be a repeat of the euphoric scenes of his last visit in 2002 when he was met with banners saying: “We love and respect you, we support you.”
Within six months of British paratroopers leading an international intervention force in May 2000, a ceasefire was agreed and notorious gangs were disarmed. By 2002 a full UN-supervised peace agreement was in force. The ousted Government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, elected in 1996, was restored.
The rebels and their foreign backers bankrolled the war with diamonds — events depicted in the Hollywood blockbuster Blood Diamond. In little more than ten years 500,000 people — about one tenth of the population — were murdered, maimed or raped. A UN-supported tribunal was set up to bring the ringleaders to justice. Charles Taylor, the warlord who became President of Liberia, who channelled the gems through his country on to the world market, goes on trial in The Hague in June.
There has been undeniable progress since the end of the war. With Western support, the police and army, though notoriously corrupt and underpaid, have been restructured. The coups and counter-coups that marked the period after independence in 1961 are believed to be a thing of the past. The country is at peace.
Critics, however, say that what began as a model “nation-building exercise” has been knocked off course by high- level corruption and misrule by the same generation of politicians responsible for the initial crisis. They say progress has now slowed to a halt.
Valentine Collier, dismissed as head of a supposedly independent anti-corruption unit in November 2005, says Britain, the country’s biggest single bilateral donor at £40 million a year, takes a “softly, softly” approach because it does not want to spoil Sierra Leone’s image as a success before Mr Blair stands down this year.
“The greatest threat to peace and stability in Sierra Leone today is still corruption. In four years, I failed to bring one successful high-level indictment even though in some ministries’ capital flight per month is as high as $15,000,” he told The Times.
Mr Kabbah, 75, is due to step down but his chosen successor, Solomon Berewa, his current Vice-President, is not expected to make any changes. Two opposition leaders could push him closely but, even if they upset predictions and win, political analysts doubt that there would be any significant changes in policy.
Though few people, including the amputees, believe that war would return, many analysts fear that unmet expectations from the coming poll could destabilise the country once again.
Government supporters point to progress in many areas, notably education and food provision. “We had so many conflicting priorities. In the provinces, even a small thing like the creation of a market is a huge step forward,” said Kadie Sesay, a former academic who is now Minister of Trade and Industry.
“I think we will see new faces begin to emerge. Those who suffered most want a new type of leadership.”
Conflict toll
— The Civil War in Sierra Leone began in 1991. In July 1999 the warring parties signed the Lom� Peace Agreement, but despite UN presence fighting continued
— Conflict was between the Sierra Leone Government and the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), backed by Liberia
— Elections in May 2002 brought relative political stability. RUF incursions and flows of Liberian refugees continue to threaten peace
— Out of a population of 5 million, it is estimated that 2 million have been forced to leave their homes for refugee camps and 75,000 have died
— Diamond production in Sierra Leone was estimated at 300,000 carats by De Beers in 1998. Each carat is worth $100-$300. In 1998-99 official exports fell from 114,438 carats to 9,320, a drop attributed to RUF control of diamond-producing areas
Source: UN Global Policy Forum; www.american.edu
By Jonathan Clayton in Freetown
Courtesy The UK Times, April 6, 2007
A glint of light on steel and Abubakar Kargbo’s life changed forever. That was when the axe came crashing down and severed his arm from his body. Seconds later, the action was repeated. His left arm then also joined the pile of bloodied, lifeless limbs at the foot of the village mango tree.
That was eight years ago, at the height of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. He was 28 and has never worked since. “I go into town to beg, but it is hard. People have lost sympathy because of the time that has elapsed,” Abubakar, married with three children, explained sadly. “Some don’t want to be reminded of the war.”
His stumps often ache but he cannot afford medicine. Until recently the Health Ministry pocketed all the money given to buy drugs. “The Government tried in the early days but overall, since the end of the conflict, very little has been done to bring the victims back as close as is possible to what they were. They have forgotten totally about us now,” he told The Times.
Lamine Jusa Jarka, his former neighbour, was “amputated” on the same day by the same group of rebels, a motley gang of drugged child soldiers, led by Commanding Officer “Cut Hands”. They had been found hiding in their houses, defying instructions to come out and welcome the rebel Revolutionary United Front.
Amputations were a trade-mark of Sierra Leone’s civil war from 1991 to 2002, one of the fiercest witnessed in post-independence Africa. There are believed to be at least 6,000 such amputees across the country. With elections planned for July, they are now mobilising. Hundreds have registered to vote. By special decree, those without hands will be allowed to use their toes to stamp their mark. “Al-Haji” Jusa Jarka, chairman of the Amputees and War Wounded Association of Sierra Leone, declared: “We are going to vote for a president who recognises our plight.”
The amputees are the most visible victims of this former British colony’s descent into hell but they are far from being a lone voice. Their complaints over the Government’s failure to deliver promised peace dividends are echoed by others and have raised fresh concerns over the country’s future stability.
Mustapha, 20, who is unemployed, said: “They are crooks, all of them. They do nothing for us. I hate those greedy bastards.” Mustapha left the countryside to look for work in Freetown, the capital, and scrapes a living guiding foreigners around town.
Vivien, a scantily clad prostitute in one the many neon-lit discos lining the capital’s long, curving beach, cried softly into her beer. “There is nothing here, my mother is ill and I have to support her. There is nothing for young people here, just misery.”
It is easy to understand their frustration. For seven out of the past ten years, Sierra Leone has been ranked officially as the world’s poorest country, nudged out of bottom place only by Bangladesh. The UN’s Human Development Index reads like a roll call of horror. Life expectancy, at 37 and falling, is the worst in the world.
Deaths in childbirth are the highest in the world, made worse by widespread female genital mutilation. More than 300 children out of 1,000 do not make it beyond the age of five. Unemployment is put at more than 70 per cent. More than two-thirds of the population of five million live below the poverty line of 52p a day.
In the teeming slum of Kroo Bay in central Freetown, more than 5,000 people, crammed together in flimsy tin-roofed hovels, live in extreme poverty. Pigs wander knee-high in stagnant pools of water — human excrement floating on the surface — while women and children wash clothes and bathe a few yards away.
Sento Sesay, 12, great beads of sweat running down her face as she squeezes filthy water from washed clothes, says that each day she dreams of leaving. “When it rains, we are flooded, everything comes into our houses — human waste, litter, mosquitoes. It is horrible here.” In a quiet voice, she adds that sexual abuse is also rampant.
Tony Blair, whose father taught at Fourah Bay university in Freetown, West Africa’s first, is assured of a hero’s welcome when he visits the country next month, although it is unlikely that there will be a repeat of the euphoric scenes of his last visit in 2002 when he was met with banners saying: “We love and respect you, we support you.”
Within six months of British paratroopers leading an international intervention force in May 2000, a ceasefire was agreed and notorious gangs were disarmed. By 2002 a full UN-supervised peace agreement was in force. The ousted Government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, elected in 1996, was restored.
The rebels and their foreign backers bankrolled the war with diamonds — events depicted in the Hollywood blockbuster Blood Diamond. In little more than ten years 500,000 people — about one tenth of the population — were murdered, maimed or raped. A UN-supported tribunal was set up to bring the ringleaders to justice. Charles Taylor, the warlord who became President of Liberia, who channelled the gems through his country on to the world market, goes on trial in The Hague in June.
There has been undeniable progress since the end of the war. With Western support, the police and army, though notoriously corrupt and underpaid, have been restructured. The coups and counter-coups that marked the period after independence in 1961 are believed to be a thing of the past. The country is at peace.
Critics, however, say that what began as a model “nation-building exercise” has been knocked off course by high- level corruption and misrule by the same generation of politicians responsible for the initial crisis. They say progress has now slowed to a halt.
Valentine Collier, dismissed as head of a supposedly independent anti-corruption unit in November 2005, says Britain, the country’s biggest single bilateral donor at £40 million a year, takes a “softly, softly” approach because it does not want to spoil Sierra Leone’s image as a success before Mr Blair stands down this year.
“The greatest threat to peace and stability in Sierra Leone today is still corruption. In four years, I failed to bring one successful high-level indictment even though in some ministries’ capital flight per month is as high as $15,000,” he told The Times.
Mr Kabbah, 75, is due to step down but his chosen successor, Solomon Berewa, his current Vice-President, is not expected to make any changes. Two opposition leaders could push him closely but, even if they upset predictions and win, political analysts doubt that there would be any significant changes in policy.
Though few people, including the amputees, believe that war would return, many analysts fear that unmet expectations from the coming poll could destabilise the country once again.
Government supporters point to progress in many areas, notably education and food provision. “We had so many conflicting priorities. In the provinces, even a small thing like the creation of a market is a huge step forward,” said Kadie Sesay, a former academic who is now Minister of Trade and Industry.
“I think we will see new faces begin to emerge. Those who suffered most want a new type of leadership.”
Conflict toll
— The Civil War in Sierra Leone began in 1991. In July 1999 the warring parties signed the Lom� Peace Agreement, but despite UN presence fighting continued
— Conflict was between the Sierra Leone Government and the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), backed by Liberia
— Elections in May 2002 brought relative political stability. RUF incursions and flows of Liberian refugees continue to threaten peace
— Out of a population of 5 million, it is estimated that 2 million have been forced to leave their homes for refugee camps and 75,000 have died
— Diamond production in Sierra Leone was estimated at 300,000 carats by De Beers in 1998. Each carat is worth $100-$300. In 1998-99 official exports fell from 114,438 carats to 9,320, a drop attributed to RUF control of diamond-producing areas
Source: UN Global Policy Forum; www.american.edu
Mr. Crispin Cole | March 4, 2007
Blood Diamond
Review by Carolyn Arends | posted 12/08/06
Danny and Solomon are literally dodging bullets in war-torn Sierra Leone
Diamonds are a rebel army's best friend. Specifically "conflict diamonds"—stones smuggled out of countries of war and used to purchase weapons and to fuel violence. In the late 1990s, members of several concerned organizations coined the phrase "blood diamonds" in an effort to raise public consciousness about the problem. The term is a fitting title for Edward Zwick's new action drama, a story about the discovery of one very large diamond and the shedding of a whole lot of blood.
Blood Diamond is fiction, but its setting is recent (and tragic) history. The year is 1999, and civil war is raging in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Rebel forces (the Revolutionary United Front) are systematically raiding villages, killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians and making millions homeless. Many of the young boys whose lives are spared lose their souls, as R.U.F. leaders strip away the consciences and identities of children to turn them into ruthless soldiers. The conflict within the region is exacerbated by Western exploitation as diamonds flow out of the country (often just to be stock-piled in order to keep supply low and demand high) and arms flow in.
Djimon Hounsou and Kagiso Kuypers
Djimon Hounsou (Armistad, In America, Beauty Shop) plays Solomon Vandy, a Mende fisherman trying to live a peaceful life with his wife and children in a remote area of Sierra Leone. In the opening scenes of the film, Solomon's village is brutally attacked and he is ripped from his family and forced to work for rebel forces in the diamond fields. When Solomon finds an extremely rare and valuable 100-carat diamond, he risks almost certain discovery and death in order to hide it. He is motivated not by greed but by desperation—if he can somehow leverage the stone's value, he may be able to obtain the resources he needs to find and save his family. One of the cruelest of his captors, a glowering sadist who goes by the fitting name Captain Poison, discovers Solomon burying his find. Before he can dig up the diamond (and kill Solomon) a government military raid lands both men behind bars.
Languishing in the same Freetown prison is Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) a white South African mercenary who does the dirty work for Western diamond cartels by smuggling stones into the neighboring country of Liberia. Danny catches wind of Solomon's buried treasure and knows the diamond represents financial and person freedom. As soon as he is released from prison, he bails out Solomon as well. Danny promises to help Solomon find his family if he will lead him to the diamond and split the profits from its sale, and so the two men form an uneasy alliance.
In his efforts to locate Solomon's family, Danny is forced to enlist the help of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an idealistic (and adrenalin-addicted) American journalist who has been pressing him to provide information for her story on conflict diamonds. Eventually the trio finds Solomon's wife and daughters in a refugee camp, but the stricken father discovers with horror that his 12-year-old son has been forced to become a child soldier for the R.U.F. Although Solomon is decimated by grief, he agrees to return with Danny to rebel territory to search for his son and locate the diamond.
Danny and Solomon's journey back to the diamond fields is complicated by ever-escalating violence, and much of the film is consumed with numerous narrow escapes from military conflict. Director Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai, Courage Under Fire) and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (K-Pax) had every intention of making Blood Diamond a highly entertaining adventure movie, and the action is epic and relentless if sometimes rather implausible. (The film takes pains to explain how Danny's own military background makes him a gifted fighter and survivor, but there is no explaining how hundreds of bullets manage to just miss him.)
Still, amidst all the shooting and running and hiding, the film pursues numerous storylines. Maddy and Danny's mutual need and opposing philosophies keep them cycling through attraction and repulsion (and back to attraction); gradually their journey takes them (and the viewer) past their stereotypes of each other and into relationship. Solomon remains single-minded in his pursuit of his son, and although his character is rather one-dimensional, his purity is emblematic. We learn that it is Captain Poison who has captured Solomon's son, and we see—in some of the film's most devastatingly powerful images—how warlords use drugs, torture, humiliation and indoctrination to pervert young boys into killing machines.
Blood Diamond attempts not only to tell a number of stories but also to make a number of statements. The condemnation of the diamond industry for its complicity in smuggling and arms trading is obvious and expected; the film widens its target to include the exploitation of numerous African countries by pointing out that whenever something valuable is found, conditions get worse for the region. ("We better pray they never find oil here," says one old man as his village burns down around him. "Then we'll have real problems.") The West is under fire not only for its specific cases of corruption, but also for its general state of indifference. "This is what a million people looks like," says Maddy, as they approach a refugee camp teeming with humanity. "You might see 30 seconds of this on CNN, between the sports and the weather."
But the film does more than point fingers. It casts around for answers to the Big Questions—what makes people good, or bad, and if or how God is involved in the woes of the world. "I think people are just people," Danny shrugs, even while we watch the story carry his self-interested character to a discovery of some inner goodness. Later he confesses, "I used to wonder if God could ever forgive us for what we do to each other. But then I realized God left this place a long time ago." While Blood Diamond does not (and cannot) offer the definitive answers to these questions, it asks them in some compelling and legitimate ways.
What really makes Blood Diamond shine is the acting of its principles. Hounsou is a riveting presence; when he is overcome with longing for his son, his grief and desire are palpable. Connelly's Maddy is believable and magnetic. But this is ultimately DiCaprio's movie, and he makes his conflicted Danny a near iconic anti-hero. Naysayers doubted DiCaprio could handle the physicality of the role or the Afrikaans accent, but he inhabits the character beautifully and seemingly effortlessly. When the complexity of Blood Diamond's story and the breadth of its scope threaten to collapse the film, it is the force of the acting that keeps the viewer caught up in the momentum.
Blood Diamond is an ambitious movie that aspires to combine mainstream, swash-buckling Hollywood entertainment with insightful psychodrama and serious social statement. Some viewers will wonder whether heavy problems like genocide, Western exploitation and the tragedy of child soldiers should be explored in a film that also uses carnage and conflict as a source of entertainment. Blood Diamond is so relentlessly violent that it runs the risk of desensitizing its audience to the very atrocities it aims to decry. At the beginning of the film I flinched at every act of brutality, but by its end I had seen so much death depicted that the images no longer had the same impact.
Still, I left the film thinking about—and caring about—a country I had never seriously thought about before. And though it may be Blood Diamond's glossy, stunt-doubled violence that will put people into seats, the story it tells of some very real atrocities just might move some hearts.
Review by Carolyn Arends | posted 12/08/06
Danny and Solomon are literally dodging bullets in war-torn Sierra Leone
Diamonds are a rebel army's best friend. Specifically "conflict diamonds"—stones smuggled out of countries of war and used to purchase weapons and to fuel violence. In the late 1990s, members of several concerned organizations coined the phrase "blood diamonds" in an effort to raise public consciousness about the problem. The term is a fitting title for Edward Zwick's new action drama, a story about the discovery of one very large diamond and the shedding of a whole lot of blood.
Blood Diamond is fiction, but its setting is recent (and tragic) history. The year is 1999, and civil war is raging in the West African country of Sierra Leone. Rebel forces (the Revolutionary United Front) are systematically raiding villages, killing and maiming thousands of innocent civilians and making millions homeless. Many of the young boys whose lives are spared lose their souls, as R.U.F. leaders strip away the consciences and identities of children to turn them into ruthless soldiers. The conflict within the region is exacerbated by Western exploitation as diamonds flow out of the country (often just to be stock-piled in order to keep supply low and demand high) and arms flow in.
Djimon Hounsou and Kagiso Kuypers
Djimon Hounsou (Armistad, In America, Beauty Shop) plays Solomon Vandy, a Mende fisherman trying to live a peaceful life with his wife and children in a remote area of Sierra Leone. In the opening scenes of the film, Solomon's village is brutally attacked and he is ripped from his family and forced to work for rebel forces in the diamond fields. When Solomon finds an extremely rare and valuable 100-carat diamond, he risks almost certain discovery and death in order to hide it. He is motivated not by greed but by desperation—if he can somehow leverage the stone's value, he may be able to obtain the resources he needs to find and save his family. One of the cruelest of his captors, a glowering sadist who goes by the fitting name Captain Poison, discovers Solomon burying his find. Before he can dig up the diamond (and kill Solomon) a government military raid lands both men behind bars.
Languishing in the same Freetown prison is Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) a white South African mercenary who does the dirty work for Western diamond cartels by smuggling stones into the neighboring country of Liberia. Danny catches wind of Solomon's buried treasure and knows the diamond represents financial and person freedom. As soon as he is released from prison, he bails out Solomon as well. Danny promises to help Solomon find his family if he will lead him to the diamond and split the profits from its sale, and so the two men form an uneasy alliance.
In his efforts to locate Solomon's family, Danny is forced to enlist the help of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an idealistic (and adrenalin-addicted) American journalist who has been pressing him to provide information for her story on conflict diamonds. Eventually the trio finds Solomon's wife and daughters in a refugee camp, but the stricken father discovers with horror that his 12-year-old son has been forced to become a child soldier for the R.U.F. Although Solomon is decimated by grief, he agrees to return with Danny to rebel territory to search for his son and locate the diamond.
Danny and Solomon's journey back to the diamond fields is complicated by ever-escalating violence, and much of the film is consumed with numerous narrow escapes from military conflict. Director Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai, Courage Under Fire) and screenwriter Charles Leavitt (K-Pax) had every intention of making Blood Diamond a highly entertaining adventure movie, and the action is epic and relentless if sometimes rather implausible. (The film takes pains to explain how Danny's own military background makes him a gifted fighter and survivor, but there is no explaining how hundreds of bullets manage to just miss him.)
Still, amidst all the shooting and running and hiding, the film pursues numerous storylines. Maddy and Danny's mutual need and opposing philosophies keep them cycling through attraction and repulsion (and back to attraction); gradually their journey takes them (and the viewer) past their stereotypes of each other and into relationship. Solomon remains single-minded in his pursuit of his son, and although his character is rather one-dimensional, his purity is emblematic. We learn that it is Captain Poison who has captured Solomon's son, and we see—in some of the film's most devastatingly powerful images—how warlords use drugs, torture, humiliation and indoctrination to pervert young boys into killing machines.
Blood Diamond attempts not only to tell a number of stories but also to make a number of statements. The condemnation of the diamond industry for its complicity in smuggling and arms trading is obvious and expected; the film widens its target to include the exploitation of numerous African countries by pointing out that whenever something valuable is found, conditions get worse for the region. ("We better pray they never find oil here," says one old man as his village burns down around him. "Then we'll have real problems.") The West is under fire not only for its specific cases of corruption, but also for its general state of indifference. "This is what a million people looks like," says Maddy, as they approach a refugee camp teeming with humanity. "You might see 30 seconds of this on CNN, between the sports and the weather."
But the film does more than point fingers. It casts around for answers to the Big Questions—what makes people good, or bad, and if or how God is involved in the woes of the world. "I think people are just people," Danny shrugs, even while we watch the story carry his self-interested character to a discovery of some inner goodness. Later he confesses, "I used to wonder if God could ever forgive us for what we do to each other. But then I realized God left this place a long time ago." While Blood Diamond does not (and cannot) offer the definitive answers to these questions, it asks them in some compelling and legitimate ways.
What really makes Blood Diamond shine is the acting of its principles. Hounsou is a riveting presence; when he is overcome with longing for his son, his grief and desire are palpable. Connelly's Maddy is believable and magnetic. But this is ultimately DiCaprio's movie, and he makes his conflicted Danny a near iconic anti-hero. Naysayers doubted DiCaprio could handle the physicality of the role or the Afrikaans accent, but he inhabits the character beautifully and seemingly effortlessly. When the complexity of Blood Diamond's story and the breadth of its scope threaten to collapse the film, it is the force of the acting that keeps the viewer caught up in the momentum.
Blood Diamond is an ambitious movie that aspires to combine mainstream, swash-buckling Hollywood entertainment with insightful psychodrama and serious social statement. Some viewers will wonder whether heavy problems like genocide, Western exploitation and the tragedy of child soldiers should be explored in a film that also uses carnage and conflict as a source of entertainment. Blood Diamond is so relentlessly violent that it runs the risk of desensitizing its audience to the very atrocities it aims to decry. At the beginning of the film I flinched at every act of brutality, but by its end I had seen so much death depicted that the images no longer had the same impact.
Still, I left the film thinking about—and caring about—a country I had never seriously thought about before. And though it may be Blood Diamond's glossy, stunt-doubled violence that will put people into seats, the story it tells of some very real atrocities just might move some hearts.
Mr. Crispin Cole | February 25, 2007
February 25, 2007
Babes in Arms
By WILLIAM BOYD
What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today and recall Rwanda and Sierra Leone not long ago, or Biafra and Congo further back, we realize that these vicious, bitter African conflicts have left their trace on contemporary history, and on contemporary consciousness, in ways somehow different from the usual squalid reckoning that modern warfare encourages.
The great benefit of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, “A Long Way Gone,” is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah’s autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine — perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer.
Beah was 12 years old when the civil war in Sierra Leone entered his life, in 1993. Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa, sandwiched between Guinea and Liberia, suffered the usual post-independence rites of passage of corruption, unrest, military coups and gerrymandered elections. In the ’90s, civil strife in Liberia prompted the rise of the R.U.F. (the Revolutionary United Front), a ragtag liberation army headed by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, who took over the diamond mines in eastern Sierra Leone and whose brutal militia (with a horrible penchant for amputating hands) moved on toward the country’s capital, Freetown. There is a historical chronology at the back of the book, but you will gain little idea of the internecine political struggle from Beah’s account.
In a sense, however, this is beside the point. A 12-year-old is conscious only of immediate circumstances, and in Beah’s case the arrival of the rebels in his small town meant sudden separation from his parents and months of indeterminate flight from danger with a handful of other boys. These terrified youngsters wandered aimlessly along jungle tracks, starving and desperate, harassed and suspected as they scrounged for food and tried to make sense of what was going on. Finally they reached the Atlantic Ocean, but, once again, fearful villagers sent them packing, and they were eventually recruited into the Sierra Leone Army as boy soldiers.
Given rudimentary training, an AK-47 and as many drugs as he could consume (amphetamines, marijuana and a toxic mix of cocaine and gunpowder called “brown brown”), Beah seems then to have gone on a two-year mind-bending killing spree, until he was rescued by some Unicef fieldworkers and sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown. There, with counseling, care and attention, and the psychological ministrations of a kindly nurse named Esther, Beah’s slow return to normality began, further augmented when he was sent to the United Nations with the task of explaining the lot of the child soldier to a baffled and concerned international community. He came to live in the United States, graduating from high school and Oberlin College. “A Long Way Gone” is his first, remarkable book.
It is interesting to try to comprehend what act of remembering is going on here. Who of us in our 20s could accurately summon up our day-by-day lives as preteens? As you read “A Long Way Gone,” the details allow you to distinguish precise recall from autobiographical blur. Beah can remember the logo on the sneakers he is issued by the army. When he is captured by hostile villagers, he is released because he has a few rap cassettes on him (LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature, among others) and can mime the songs and dance to them. All this has the idiosyncratic ring of precisely remembered truth. But with lines like these, the effect is quite different: “We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts.” Or: “After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded.” The horror is duly registered, but its vagueness and generality don’t add up to moments of lived personal history. Indeed, Beah’s time in the army, and the accounts of the patrols and firefights he was caught up in, represent only a small portion of this book. And who can blame him? The blood-lust of a drug-crazed adolescent on the rampage with an assault rifle would challenge the descriptive powers of James Joyce. Beah confesses to slitting the throat of a trussed prisoner, and writes lines like: “I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved.” If these and similar passages are to be given credence, his personal body count must total many dozens. Such knowledge is shocking, but it’s the reader’s imagination that delivers the cold sanguinary shudder, not the author’s boilerplate prose. It is a vision of hell that Beah gives us, one worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, but as though depicted in primary colors by a naïve artist.
However, perhaps this gives us a clue to the nature and effect of these terrifying African conflicts. I have been close to only one, in Nigeria from 1968 to 1970, during that country’s civil war, known as the Biafran war. I was in my teens too, not much older than Beah, and far from the actual fighting. But at dusk one night with my father, our car was stopped at a roadblock on a back road in the bush by a unit of Nigerian soldiers. They were young, aggressive, drunk on beer, bored and ostensibly looking for currency smugglers. They waved their Kalashnikovs at us and angrily ordered us out of the car. We were roughly searched, the trunk was opened, and then my father cracked a joke and everybody laughed. But for a few moments I was profoundly aware that anything might have happened to us: there was no control, no “rules of engagement,” no chain of command. We were powerless; they had all the power. Night was falling, and there were no witnesses. It was a moment of pure potential anarchy that could have gone any way.
Beah’s book confirms this feeling. The unbelievable violence and dread, the blood and death, seem — if this does not appear too awful an oxymoron — somehow guileless and innocent, random, unpremeditated. Is that what fundamentally disturbs us about these African conflicts? Beah tells a story of a messenger sent by the rebels. All his fingers had been amputated except his thumbs. In more peaceful times, Sierra Leoneans used to give one another a thumbs-up sign that meant “one love” (a gestural echo of the reggae song), and that is what the R.U.F. called this mutilation. A joke is made: the cost is unimaginable.
Beah’s memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars. I think of “Sozaboy,” Ken Saro-Wiwa’s masterly novel about a young soldier during the Biafran war, or “Machete Season,” Jean Hatzfeld’s book of blood-chilling interviews with Rwandan killers. “A Long Way Gone” makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen.
William Boyd is the author of nine novels. His most recent is "Restless."
(Courtesy New York Times online)
Babes in Arms
By WILLIAM BOYD
What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilized West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today and recall Rwanda and Sierra Leone not long ago, or Biafra and Congo further back, we realize that these vicious, bitter African conflicts have left their trace on contemporary history, and on contemporary consciousness, in ways somehow different from the usual squalid reckoning that modern warfare encourages.
The great benefit of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, “A Long Way Gone,” is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah’s autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can determine — perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the pubescent (or even prepubescent) warrior-killer.
Beah was 12 years old when the civil war in Sierra Leone entered his life, in 1993. Sierra Leone, a former British colony in West Africa, sandwiched between Guinea and Liberia, suffered the usual post-independence rites of passage of corruption, unrest, military coups and gerrymandered elections. In the ’90s, civil strife in Liberia prompted the rise of the R.U.F. (the Revolutionary United Front), a ragtag liberation army headed by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, who took over the diamond mines in eastern Sierra Leone and whose brutal militia (with a horrible penchant for amputating hands) moved on toward the country’s capital, Freetown. There is a historical chronology at the back of the book, but you will gain little idea of the internecine political struggle from Beah’s account.
In a sense, however, this is beside the point. A 12-year-old is conscious only of immediate circumstances, and in Beah’s case the arrival of the rebels in his small town meant sudden separation from his parents and months of indeterminate flight from danger with a handful of other boys. These terrified youngsters wandered aimlessly along jungle tracks, starving and desperate, harassed and suspected as they scrounged for food and tried to make sense of what was going on. Finally they reached the Atlantic Ocean, but, once again, fearful villagers sent them packing, and they were eventually recruited into the Sierra Leone Army as boy soldiers.
Given rudimentary training, an AK-47 and as many drugs as he could consume (amphetamines, marijuana and a toxic mix of cocaine and gunpowder called “brown brown”), Beah seems then to have gone on a two-year mind-bending killing spree, until he was rescued by some Unicef fieldworkers and sent to a rehabilitation center in Freetown. There, with counseling, care and attention, and the psychological ministrations of a kindly nurse named Esther, Beah’s slow return to normality began, further augmented when he was sent to the United Nations with the task of explaining the lot of the child soldier to a baffled and concerned international community. He came to live in the United States, graduating from high school and Oberlin College. “A Long Way Gone” is his first, remarkable book.
It is interesting to try to comprehend what act of remembering is going on here. Who of us in our 20s could accurately summon up our day-by-day lives as preteens? As you read “A Long Way Gone,” the details allow you to distinguish precise recall from autobiographical blur. Beah can remember the logo on the sneakers he is issued by the army. When he is captured by hostile villagers, he is released because he has a few rap cassettes on him (LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature, among others) and can mime the songs and dance to them. All this has the idiosyncratic ring of precisely remembered truth. But with lines like these, the effect is quite different: “We walked around the village and killed everyone who came out of the houses and huts.” Or: “After every gunfight we would enter the rebel camp, killing those we had wounded.” The horror is duly registered, but its vagueness and generality don’t add up to moments of lived personal history. Indeed, Beah’s time in the army, and the accounts of the patrols and firefights he was caught up in, represent only a small portion of this book. And who can blame him? The blood-lust of a drug-crazed adolescent on the rampage with an assault rifle would challenge the descriptive powers of James Joyce. Beah confesses to slitting the throat of a trussed prisoner, and writes lines like: “I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved.” If these and similar passages are to be given credence, his personal body count must total many dozens. Such knowledge is shocking, but it’s the reader’s imagination that delivers the cold sanguinary shudder, not the author’s boilerplate prose. It is a vision of hell that Beah gives us, one worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, but as though depicted in primary colors by a naïve artist.
However, perhaps this gives us a clue to the nature and effect of these terrifying African conflicts. I have been close to only one, in Nigeria from 1968 to 1970, during that country’s civil war, known as the Biafran war. I was in my teens too, not much older than Beah, and far from the actual fighting. But at dusk one night with my father, our car was stopped at a roadblock on a back road in the bush by a unit of Nigerian soldiers. They were young, aggressive, drunk on beer, bored and ostensibly looking for currency smugglers. They waved their Kalashnikovs at us and angrily ordered us out of the car. We were roughly searched, the trunk was opened, and then my father cracked a joke and everybody laughed. But for a few moments I was profoundly aware that anything might have happened to us: there was no control, no “rules of engagement,” no chain of command. We were powerless; they had all the power. Night was falling, and there were no witnesses. It was a moment of pure potential anarchy that could have gone any way.
Beah’s book confirms this feeling. The unbelievable violence and dread, the blood and death, seem — if this does not appear too awful an oxymoron — somehow guileless and innocent, random, unpremeditated. Is that what fundamentally disturbs us about these African conflicts? Beah tells a story of a messenger sent by the rebels. All his fingers had been amputated except his thumbs. In more peaceful times, Sierra Leoneans used to give one another a thumbs-up sign that meant “one love” (a gestural echo of the reggae song), and that is what the R.U.F. called this mutilation. A joke is made: the cost is unimaginable.
Beah’s memoir joins an elite class of writing: Africans witnessing African wars. I think of “Sozaboy,” Ken Saro-Wiwa’s masterly novel about a young soldier during the Biafran war, or “Machete Season,” Jean Hatzfeld’s book of blood-chilling interviews with Rwandan killers. “A Long Way Gone” makes you wonder how anyone comes through such unrelenting ghastliness and horror with his humanity and sanity intact. Unusually, the smiling, open face of the author on the book jacket provides welcome and timely reassurance. Ishmael Beah seems to prove it can happen.
William Boyd is the author of nine novels. His most recent is "Restless."
(Courtesy New York Times online)
Mr. Crispin Cole | September 10, 2006
By Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, washington) --- We do not have to deny some of the inherent problems of confederal governments, but with good effort, confederations can be made to work, after all they work in Switzerland. At any rate, it seems the only alternative that would avert Africans penchant for mutual mayhem.
THE SOCIAL- PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFITS OF CONFEDERATION
Each ethnic group in Africa is very distinct. It evolved over the past thousands of years and developed a unique culture, a particularistic way of approaching phenomena. Obviously, culture, like everything else in this world, is adaptable and must evolve and adapt to changes in its environment for it to enable the people survive changes in their environment. Anthropologists tell us that when different cultures come into contact with each other, that they diffuse to one another and the result is borrowing from one another and changes in the manner each approaches reality. (Reality, itself, is unknown and is largely a product of individual and social constructs of it hence can be deconstructed and reconstructed on a different and, hopefully, better footing.)
African cultures were until recently isolated from each other and from the rest of the world. They have now come into close contact with each other and with the cultures of the rest of the world. They are now incorporating aspects of other cultures. In the long run, they will adapt, that is, change and become different from what they currently are.
Nevertheless, each culture tends to remain unique despite accepting influences from other cultures. This particularistic aspect of culture is not necessarily bad. Total cultural universalism when we do not know what is ultimately good for mankind may not be the answer. Until science comes up with a verifiable universal scientific culture for all mankind, we are best served encouraging each ethnic group to retain aspects of its culture.
Consider the peoples of Nigeria. The Igbo is very individualistic, democratic and republican. He is free enterprise oriented. Igbo culture is very much like the culture of Ancient Greek city states. If you have read of Athens during the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the classical age, you pretty much have read about Igbo culture.
In traditional Igbo societies, the entire town made up the ruling elements. All adult males over age 15 gathered to rule their town. They discussed matters arising and voted on them. They then delegated to a few the executory function of implementing their decisions.
The Freeborn of the town, Diala, gathered as Oha (also called Amala) and made decisions regarding their town’s governance. The Oha acted as legislature, executive and judiciary of the town. This way Igbo ruled itself like the Ancient Greeks did, without resorting to the auspices of kings, dukes, earls, counts, marquis, squires and the other Germanic governing elements which the English superimposed on the Igbos. (Unfortunately, like the ancient Greeks, Igbos did not permit women and slaves to participate in governance. Obviously, every person must now be permitted to make inputs in how society is governed.)
In the economic sphere, all Igbo strove to make a living independently. Each person is encouraged to do his best and procure a living for himself and his family. Farming and trading were encouraged. Dependency on other persons to support one was discouraged.
The cumulative effect of these social practices was that every Igbo child felt empowered and recognized that his life was in his own hands, not other people’s hands and that he must support himself. Every Igbo child was encouraged to be competitive and goes out there and competes for what he wanted out of life. He did not ask for handouts from other people, but asked for equal opportunity to compete. He knows that in every race some will win and others lose. He accepted unfettered competition and always strove to do his best, and when he lost, congratulated the winners and ground his teeth. In this life, there are always winners and losers. The best that we can do is tax winners and use that money to help losers. The Igbo are realistic and reconcile themselves to reality without undue emotionalism and sentimentalism. Cest la vie, such is life.
This magnificent Igbo culture only recently came into contact with Western civilization. In less than a century of contact, Igbo families routinely send their children to universities. This is an outstanding achievement and the culture that made this possible ought to be preserved. (The Igbos believe that there is no better culture in the world than theirs. Given what their belief makes them accomplish: be one of the most achievement oriented peoples in the world, we should permit them their belief, even if it is a myth.)
There is no doubt that if given the opportunity, if the Igbo is allowed to be Igbo, Alaigbo would compete with the best in the world. In the economic sphere, if the Igbos are let loose and unhampered by the burden of having to adapt to other Nigerians restrictive ways of lives, they would be at the apogee of world economic attainment.
If let loose, in fifty years, the Igbos would be second to none in the world. But, at present, they are shackled with the necessity of conforming to their neighbors’ cultures, some of whom eschew competition and expect handouts from life.
Every people are entitled to their culture. If some people like to sit around and ask God to send them food and or beg for food on the streets, that is their prerogative. The Igbo knows that God helps those who help themselves. If you want to eat, you go work for your food. The Igbo wants the opportunity to earn his living the old fashioned way: earn it legitimately. He must, therefore, be given the opportunity to be himself, rather than be handicapped by shiftless cultures that expect external others to fend for them.
The Igbo has internal locus of authority and knows that only him ought to do what he needs to do to survive. He and his Chi (personal God) are responsible for his fate in this world. He does not depend on other people to help him survive. Of course, where necessary, the Igbo cooperates with other people for their mutual survival, but he does not lose sight of the fact that his survival is in his own hands, not other people’s hands.
In Nigeria, we have a situation where the Moslem North wants to impose the Moslem legal system, Sharia, on the rest of the people. If we recall, Mohammed (570-622 AD) and his disciples evolved a certain legal system, the Sharia.
This legal system evolved in Arabia and is obviously rooted in Arab culture. This legal system is predicated on feudal Arabia of the seventh century. If so, one might ask: how reasonable is it to impose what evolved in Arabia fourteen hundred years ago on present African societies?
African societies ought to be governed by African legal systems. Of course, Africans must borrow from other lands. They currently borrow from the British Common law system (and aspects of continental European Napoleonic codes). In the long run, a uniquely African legal system that synthesizes European, African and other legal systems would come into being in Africa.
If the Moslems in Northern Nigeria want to embrace a seventh century Arab legal system, if they are so unaware of the evolving nature of social institutions, the fact that every thing adapts to changes in its environment, if the Northerners want to go back to practicing what was probably functional in seventh century Arabia, but not today, that is their prerogative. They are free to impose Sharia law on themselves.
One submits that the North does not have the right to impose Sharia on other Nigerians. And if they attempted to do so, they ought to be resisted. The Igbos ought to go to war rather than permit themselves to be hobbled by Arabia’s jurisprudence. It is better to die fighting than to live as a slave to other people’s archaic world views.
ANTIDOTE TO CORRUPTION IN AFRICA
Without beating around the bush, most African leaders are criminals. The real question is: why are African leaders criminal? One has given this problem quiet a bit of thinking. Is stealing in the genes of black men, as some white racists would like us to believe? If black men are born with criminal genes, what shall we make of white men, men who killed Indians, stole their lands and at present steal from all over the world and live off other people’s suffering?
If Africans are born with criminal genes, white folks are born as murderers and plunderers. Let us dispense with the nonsense that people are born with a predilection to criminal activity. Criminal activity is learned. It is circumstances that determine whether people steal or not.
Africans are corrupt because of circumstances, not because of their genes. One believes that whereas many factors contribute to Africans current tendency to stealing, that the issue of ethnic identification plays a critical role in it.
In so-called national politics, each ethnic group sees national wealth as a cake from which it takes and gives to its own people. The idea is to please the members of ones ethnic group, rather than serve national interests. Let us be specific rather than abstract.
Nigeria obtains most of its money from selling oil. Oil comes mostly from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria come together to get their own share of the money coming from the Ijaw area of Nigeria.
Here is what is happening in Nigeria. The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba and others steal the resources that come from Ijawland. These criminals gather at Abuja and devise means to steal Ijaw wealth and cart it to their home lands. They use Ijaw resources to go develop their own areas, while ignoring the needs of Ijawland.
Having accustomed themselves to stealing from Ijawland, they generalize their thieving habits to stealing from their own people, too. As it were, it seems that thieving is now in Nigerians’ blood.
Nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world. One gets nothing done in Nigeria without one bribing some one. Even to collect supposedly free forms from government offices requires one to bribe the dispensing clerk. If you do not bribe some one in Nigeria, you simply would not get any thing done.
Nigerians are so corrupt that they are beyond being angry at. One treats them as one treats children, that is, not expect them to behave like adults and do the right thing. They are to be taught the right way to live on planet earth, for they have forgotten it. They are in darkness and need some one to show them the light of love, mutual caring and service to one another.
Those who want to stop corruption in Nigeria cannot do so for as long as the various ethnic groups in Nigeria collude with one another to steal from Ijawland. The only way to stop corruption in Nigeria is to permit each ethnic group to have total control of the resources that come from its lands. Let the Ijaw have 100% control over their oil resources.
If each ethnic group runs its affairs, those without natural resources would work very hard to come up with the money to fund their governments. Igbos are good business men. They would find ways to come up with the money to fund their governments.
More importantly, if each ethnic group in Nigeria funded its governments by itself, it would pay attention to how its money is spent by its public officials. It would audit its accounting books and where a penny is missing punish culprits in the most draconian manner. Any public official who stole a penny and or took bribes ought to be sent to twenty years jail, with hard labor; he ought to work to feed him self; the public does not have to feed him, a detritus of mankind.
One believes that the only way to stop corruption in Africa is to permit each ethnic group to be a state, to rule itself and to have total control over its resources. The added advantage of this system is that it would force Nigerians to work harder. At present, the people do not have to work to get the money to fund their governments. They sit around doing nothing to get the money to fund the central government. All they do is figure out ways to optimize stealing the oil money that comes from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In the process, they develop stealing skills and are lazy. If we compel these lazy bums to go work and seek productive ways to fund their state governments and developmental activities, they would develop the habit of industry and, for a change, become admirable human beings, rather than the contemptible and despicable animals, they currently seem to be.
Nigeria has practically abandoned exploration of its other resources, such as Coal, Zinc, Bauxite, Palm oil, Palm kernel, Cocoa, Coffee, and Rubber. It did so in pursuit of oil money. Those other resources used to be explored, exported and generated sufficient income to feed most Nigerians. But now, most Nigerians have their eyes set on stealing Ijaw oil money and are unwilling to develop the resources that nature reposed in their neck of the wood. If we permit the Ijaw sole ownership of their oil money, other Nigerians, because of economic necessity, would return to developing the resources in their states hence making the economy more diversified and stable. When people’s backs are against the wall and their survival is at stake, they tend to work hardest. Let go of Ijaw oil money and let the threat of suffering compel other Nigerians to work hard. If they do, soon, they would have more wealth than oil ever promised them. Little Biafra had its back against the wall and invented incredible technologies that no African nation has replicated. Necessity is the mother of inventions. Let Ijaws have their oil; the rest of the people will survive.
Like every thing in this world, there are downsides to having each ethnic group control its resources. The ethnic groups that have lots of natural resources would become rich. We know what wealth does to people. One has observed what happened to Alaskans as a result of wealth. If you recall, Oil was discovered in Alaska in the late 1950s and 60s. In 1974/75 the Alaska Oil Pipe line was built from the North slopes to Valdez. Oil was piped from Prudhoe Bay to Prince Williams Sound and ships carried it to the lower forty eight states. Suddenly, Alaska was awash with money.
Alaskans did away with individual income taxes. They funded their government through oil revenue. Indeed, the government saved enough of that oil revenue (at the time of this writing, estimated at $28 billion) and each year shared the profits accruing to investments made with that fund. Generally, each year, every Alaskan receives anywhere from one to two thousand dollars in dividend. This is in addition to having just about everything done for him for free by his government: free education, free medical insurance (for persons under 21) and so on. The result of all this generosity is that Alaskans tend to be lackadaisical. As far as one knows, they are not noted for their industry and contribution to America’s science, technology and business.
The situation is even worse with Alaska Natives. Alaska has about 650, 000 people. Natives (Yupik, Inuit, Athabaska, Klinkit, Haida, Aleuts etc) are about 80, 000. African Americans and Asians are about the same in number as the natives. The rest of the population is Caucasians.
In the early 1970s, the United States Congress entered into what is now called Alaska Native Land Settlement with the various native tribes. Essentially, the natives were given about 10% of the land of Alaska, and the other 90% are left to the Federal and State governments.
If you recall, Russia came to Alaska in 1746 (under Captain Bering). Russia considered Alaska part of mother Russia. (Sitka was its capital). As a result of the impoverishment inflicted on Russia by the Crimean war, Russia needed money and approached the United States government to buy Alaska. Seward, the then secretary of State, bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. He paid ten million dollars for a piece of real estate almost twice the size of Nigeria. Many Americans were opposed to the Secretary buying what they called a “chunk of snow”; Seward’s folly, the purchase was called.
The United States government bought Alaska from Russia and owned it. All the land of Alaska, the great land, belonged to the United States government and was managed by the US department of Interior.
As a result of the Alaska Native Land Settlement Act, Alaska Natives were given parts of Alaska. This means that the resources coming from those lands are given to the natives.
The natives were untrained in capitalist ways. So, the federal government set up native corporations to run the affairs of the various natives for them. These corporations are run by white professional managers. They make profits for the natives, and each year, share these among the natives. During this observer’s last year at the University of Alaska, each Cook Inlet native (Anchorage area) got about fifty thousand dollars from this pot of money. The result is that the natives do not have to work. They have free money coming to them annually.
What do you think that they do with all that money? They waste it in riotous living, particularly on alcohol. Three months after receiving their cheeks in September, most of them are flat broke. Many of them die from alcohol induced diseases. Their life span is 42, in a society where whites routinely live to be 78 years.
What is the point? It is that if you give people free money that they might self destruct and or become lazy. The Ijaw might experience the fate of Alaska natives.
As they say, to be pre-warned is to be saved. The Ijaw can learn from Alaskans and invest their money for the raining day when oil runs out, as it must. They do not have to squander their oil resources in reckless living.
THE ABURI ACCORD
In 1966, as a result of the pogrom that they were experiencing in other parts of Nigeria, Igbos fled to their Igbo homeland. The military governor of Alaigbo, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, apparently, believed that Igbos were no longer safe in Nigeria. He sought a different political arrangement with the Nigerians. The Ghanaian head of state, General Ankrah, invited the head of the Nigerian government and all concerned in the dispute to a series of meetings at Aburi, Ghana.
Apparently, some sort of accord was reached by the parties in dispute. One has not read this accord and cannot attest to what it specified. However, the Igbo leader, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, seemed to have told his people that the accord specified a confederation form of government for Nigeria. He later said that the Federal authorities reneged on this agreement by creating twelve states (dividing the then Eastern region into three states) under the banner of federalism. For this and other reasons, Ojukwu went ahead and declared his region separated from Nigeria.
Today, the battle cry of many Igbos is “On Aburi we stand”. They seem to believe that confederation is the best form of government for Nigeria.
This observer is generally not swayed by mass sentiments. He goes with what seems self evidently true to him. In his observation, confederation seems the best type of political arrangement for Nigeria.
Nigeria has a choice to make, a choice of which of the three main forms of extant governments to choose from. The three forms of governments are unitary, federal and confederal. (Monarchy/Aristocracy is no longer a serious option.)
Of the alternatives, confederation seems the only realistic option. Why so? Unitary form of government tends to suit a homogeneous society. England and France seem to do well by this form of government. These people are, more or less, homogenous. However, as we have already pointed out, the unity of Britain may be skin deep. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish elements, Celts as opposed to German English, are agitating for some form of autonomy. We have not heard the last word on the political structure of Britain.
Nigeria has a heterogeneous population and unitary form of government is out of the question for her. Aguiyi Ironsi, apparently, toyed with that idea and it so enraged Northern Nigerians that they decided to eliminate him before he imposed that form of government on them.
At present, Nigeria toys with federalism, although what it has, in fact, is better called Centralism. The federal government controls all the resources of the country and doles out whatever it wants to the mini states it created.
Nigeria currently has 36 states, few of which can function independently. To function, these so-called states need handouts from the central government. The central government steals oil money from the Niger Delta and shares it with the thievish governors of the so-called states. The governors and the leaders at the central level are in cohorts with each other to steal and divide the loot they got from Ijawland.
For our present purposes, we do not have federalism in Nigeria, if by that we mean what obtains in the United States of America.
Federalism has not worked and will not work in Nigeria. Whoever governs the central government of Nigeria uses force to terrorize the periphery to go along with his wishes.
On paper, Nigeria emulates a badly misunderstood American form of government. It has a president, a legislature and an independent judiciary, all structured along the lines of the United States constitution. One wonders what idiots did this copying of America. America herself knew that she was different from her mother country, Britain, and constructed a government that suited her needs.
Nigeria is unique and cannot function properly with a political structure that works well in America. Nor does the American system work well for all Americans. The American political system was designed to work for white Americans. African Americans and Indians are marginalized persons in the American polity. When the latter are finally incorporated into the polity, as eventually they must, for there to be peace in the land, America must have another constitutional conference to work out a different political system, one that takes into consideration the interests of non-whites.
We are not at present focusing on America; we are talking about Nigeria and Africa. Why should Nigerian leaders copy something just because it works in America? What works in America is not guaranteed to work in Africa, for Africa is different from America.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE TO RESTRUCTURE AFRICAN COUNTRIES
If Africans were a rational people, they would have reconfigured the polities they inherited from their former colonial masters. They all know that the polities they inherited from their European masters are flawed and are the causes of their present problems. They all know that each country is a conglomeration of disparate people, some of whom do not want to be in the same country with others. They all know that it takes force to hold these restive people together; hence they have dictators all over Africa. They all know that for there to be democratic governments in Africa that they must restructure their present artificial polities.
But they have not done what they ought to have done, fifty years after obtaining independence from Europe. Instead of solving their problems, they kill each other in senseless wars to protect the territorial integrity of their artificial countries.
In as much as there is a failure of will and leadership in Africa to do what needs to be done to bring about stability in Africa, one is calling for an international conference, organized by the United Nations, at which African countries are restructured.
There are about four hundred legitimate ethnic groups/tribes in Africa (I named them all in a different paper). Each of these ethnic groups ought to be made a state, within confederations.
This international conference to restructure Africa must be held soon, if possible, tomorrow. It is the only way that the world would reduce Africans mismanagement of their continent and their tendency to killing each other. Failure to do this, Africans will continue making a mess of their continent and the world would continue seeing starving Africans.
Starving Africans means Africans who struggle to go live in the Western world. To avoid these people inundating other parts of the world, the world must help them do the right thing.
Failure to hold this conference and correct the mess that is Africa is tantamount to writing Africa off and permitting Africans to needlessly suffer and die. The death of Africans will be in our heads if we do not work to make sure that Africans restructure their countries and learn responsible self governance.
CONCLUION
African countries were hastily put together by European nations. With the exception of a few of them, most African countries are not natural countries. They are composed of many ethnic groups, many of whom do not get along with one another. In most cases, some ethnic groups grab power and use that power to subjugate members of other ethnic groups to their wishes. This is terrorism.
Countries like Nigeria, Congo and Sudan are terrorist states where a few armed persons use force to intimidate other ethnic groups into kowtowing to their undemocratic wishes. These terrorist leaders are not invested in managing their countries well but in being dictators who tell every body else what to do.
The world knows what is going in Africa and looks away. It is not right to look away as criminals who call themselves leaders in Nigeria, Congo or Sudan destroy the people’s spirit and mismanage their countries economy. The world ought to have reached a state of development where we all understand that we are all one and that what we permit to happen to our brothers we have permitted to happen to us. If we permit the continued hijacking and mismanagement of Africa by brutal criminals, we encourage criminal behavior in Africa. For example, by permitting criminal governments to exist in Nigeria, we encourage Nigerians to become criminals. In time, Nigerians bring their criminality to the Western world.
Nigerian criminals are currently swindling Americans and Europeans. These Nigerians are heartless and will take any one for a ride, without the slightest qualms of conscience, remorse and guilt feeling.
We permitted these groups of Africans to revert to animal status and escape from civilization. We did so by looking away as the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba clique appropriate power and use it to oppress and abuse other groups in Nigeria. As long as these thieves maintain enough order for us to obtain our oil from Nigeria, we look away and do not do something about their criminal activities. A poor Nigerian becomes a politician and within a year has multi million dollar mansions all over the world. He diverts the national treasury to his pockets, while Nigerians live like dogs in the various shanty towns that stand in place of cities.
One does not think that the world ought to look away as crime is committed in any part of the world. The suffering of any human being is our collective suffering. In a general system, what happens in any part of it affects all parts of it and all must adjust to it. The evil we have permitted in Africa is affecting decent people in all parts of the world.
We must, therefore, intervene in Africa and help to restructure it and for the first time help these people have realistic governments that are designed to address their issues, not ignore them.
The key problem of Africa is the fact that different ethnic groups were lumped together against their wishes. The solution to this problem is to fragmentalize African countries and permit each ethnic group to govern itself. This was done in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It could be done in Africa. If done, since Africa has about 400 legitimate ethnic groups (not the thousands we are told, the idiots who band around the number thousands count dialects as separate languages) we would have four hundred nations in Africa.
Clearly, 400 nations, some of whom are too small and are not politically and economically viable, are too many countries in one continent. The next best alternative is to make each ethnic group as autonomous as is possible and then group many of them into confederations where they willingly delegate the performance of certain functions to a central government. But under no circumstances is the central government to ride roughshod over the constituting states.
In this paper, one outlined how such a confederation could be structured. One suggested that, first: we transform current African countries into confederations and later work for regional confederations, such as West Africa Confederation, East Africa Confederation, South Africa Confederation, and Central Africa Confederation. By the middle of this century, Africa ought to have no more than four confederations and by the end of this century; she ought to have become one confederation.
In the future, it is possible for all of Africa to become one true federation. But in the present, what Africa needs are confederations.
This goal the world must help Africans achieve. Failure to do so amounts to abnegating our collective responsibilities to help each other be our best.
One believes that Africans are corrupt because the world permitted them to be so. Consider Nigeria. The world looks away as members of other ethnic groups steal the revenue from a certain part of the country, the Ijaw area, and share that wealth among themselves. In doing so, Nigerians learn that it is not worthwhile to work hard and manage their affairs well. They seek short cuts to becoming wealthy.
Today, most Nigerians have become lazy and have forgotten that people in a developing country ought to work, at least, twelve hour days, to pull themselves up. When the West was being developed, folks worked more than twelve hour days.
The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba must learn to fund their governments and develop their regions with resources from their regions and not be like locust and descend on the Niger Delta to rub it clean.
It is the function of the international community to help put Africa right, after all the international community of the nineteenth century created modern Africa at the 1884 Berlin conference. At that conference, a resurgent Germany and her iron chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck got the other powers to divide Africa among themselves. They arbitrarily fixed Africa’s current national boundaries.
We need a similar international conference to re-fix the boundaries of Africa, to correct the mess we made. This is a duty and obligation that the rest of the world owes Africans. Left alone, Africans have proven incapable of doing the right thing; they must be helped by the international community to do the right thing: restructure their countries and have each ethnic group constitute a state in confederated countries.
(Courtesy BNW Magazine)
THE SOCIAL- PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFITS OF CONFEDERATION
Each ethnic group in Africa is very distinct. It evolved over the past thousands of years and developed a unique culture, a particularistic way of approaching phenomena. Obviously, culture, like everything else in this world, is adaptable and must evolve and adapt to changes in its environment for it to enable the people survive changes in their environment. Anthropologists tell us that when different cultures come into contact with each other, that they diffuse to one another and the result is borrowing from one another and changes in the manner each approaches reality. (Reality, itself, is unknown and is largely a product of individual and social constructs of it hence can be deconstructed and reconstructed on a different and, hopefully, better footing.)
African cultures were until recently isolated from each other and from the rest of the world. They have now come into close contact with each other and with the cultures of the rest of the world. They are now incorporating aspects of other cultures. In the long run, they will adapt, that is, change and become different from what they currently are.
Nevertheless, each culture tends to remain unique despite accepting influences from other cultures. This particularistic aspect of culture is not necessarily bad. Total cultural universalism when we do not know what is ultimately good for mankind may not be the answer. Until science comes up with a verifiable universal scientific culture for all mankind, we are best served encouraging each ethnic group to retain aspects of its culture.
Consider the peoples of Nigeria. The Igbo is very individualistic, democratic and republican. He is free enterprise oriented. Igbo culture is very much like the culture of Ancient Greek city states. If you have read of Athens during the age of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the classical age, you pretty much have read about Igbo culture.
In traditional Igbo societies, the entire town made up the ruling elements. All adult males over age 15 gathered to rule their town. They discussed matters arising and voted on them. They then delegated to a few the executory function of implementing their decisions.
The Freeborn of the town, Diala, gathered as Oha (also called Amala) and made decisions regarding their town’s governance. The Oha acted as legislature, executive and judiciary of the town. This way Igbo ruled itself like the Ancient Greeks did, without resorting to the auspices of kings, dukes, earls, counts, marquis, squires and the other Germanic governing elements which the English superimposed on the Igbos. (Unfortunately, like the ancient Greeks, Igbos did not permit women and slaves to participate in governance. Obviously, every person must now be permitted to make inputs in how society is governed.)
In the economic sphere, all Igbo strove to make a living independently. Each person is encouraged to do his best and procure a living for himself and his family. Farming and trading were encouraged. Dependency on other persons to support one was discouraged.
The cumulative effect of these social practices was that every Igbo child felt empowered and recognized that his life was in his own hands, not other people’s hands and that he must support himself. Every Igbo child was encouraged to be competitive and goes out there and competes for what he wanted out of life. He did not ask for handouts from other people, but asked for equal opportunity to compete. He knows that in every race some will win and others lose. He accepted unfettered competition and always strove to do his best, and when he lost, congratulated the winners and ground his teeth. In this life, there are always winners and losers. The best that we can do is tax winners and use that money to help losers. The Igbo are realistic and reconcile themselves to reality without undue emotionalism and sentimentalism. Cest la vie, such is life.
This magnificent Igbo culture only recently came into contact with Western civilization. In less than a century of contact, Igbo families routinely send their children to universities. This is an outstanding achievement and the culture that made this possible ought to be preserved. (The Igbos believe that there is no better culture in the world than theirs. Given what their belief makes them accomplish: be one of the most achievement oriented peoples in the world, we should permit them their belief, even if it is a myth.)
There is no doubt that if given the opportunity, if the Igbo is allowed to be Igbo, Alaigbo would compete with the best in the world. In the economic sphere, if the Igbos are let loose and unhampered by the burden of having to adapt to other Nigerians restrictive ways of lives, they would be at the apogee of world economic attainment.
If let loose, in fifty years, the Igbos would be second to none in the world. But, at present, they are shackled with the necessity of conforming to their neighbors’ cultures, some of whom eschew competition and expect handouts from life.
Every people are entitled to their culture. If some people like to sit around and ask God to send them food and or beg for food on the streets, that is their prerogative. The Igbo knows that God helps those who help themselves. If you want to eat, you go work for your food. The Igbo wants the opportunity to earn his living the old fashioned way: earn it legitimately. He must, therefore, be given the opportunity to be himself, rather than be handicapped by shiftless cultures that expect external others to fend for them.
The Igbo has internal locus of authority and knows that only him ought to do what he needs to do to survive. He and his Chi (personal God) are responsible for his fate in this world. He does not depend on other people to help him survive. Of course, where necessary, the Igbo cooperates with other people for their mutual survival, but he does not lose sight of the fact that his survival is in his own hands, not other people’s hands.
In Nigeria, we have a situation where the Moslem North wants to impose the Moslem legal system, Sharia, on the rest of the people. If we recall, Mohammed (570-622 AD) and his disciples evolved a certain legal system, the Sharia.
This legal system evolved in Arabia and is obviously rooted in Arab culture. This legal system is predicated on feudal Arabia of the seventh century. If so, one might ask: how reasonable is it to impose what evolved in Arabia fourteen hundred years ago on present African societies?
African societies ought to be governed by African legal systems. Of course, Africans must borrow from other lands. They currently borrow from the British Common law system (and aspects of continental European Napoleonic codes). In the long run, a uniquely African legal system that synthesizes European, African and other legal systems would come into being in Africa.
If the Moslems in Northern Nigeria want to embrace a seventh century Arab legal system, if they are so unaware of the evolving nature of social institutions, the fact that every thing adapts to changes in its environment, if the Northerners want to go back to practicing what was probably functional in seventh century Arabia, but not today, that is their prerogative. They are free to impose Sharia law on themselves.
One submits that the North does not have the right to impose Sharia on other Nigerians. And if they attempted to do so, they ought to be resisted. The Igbos ought to go to war rather than permit themselves to be hobbled by Arabia’s jurisprudence. It is better to die fighting than to live as a slave to other people’s archaic world views.
ANTIDOTE TO CORRUPTION IN AFRICA
Without beating around the bush, most African leaders are criminals. The real question is: why are African leaders criminal? One has given this problem quiet a bit of thinking. Is stealing in the genes of black men, as some white racists would like us to believe? If black men are born with criminal genes, what shall we make of white men, men who killed Indians, stole their lands and at present steal from all over the world and live off other people’s suffering?
If Africans are born with criminal genes, white folks are born as murderers and plunderers. Let us dispense with the nonsense that people are born with a predilection to criminal activity. Criminal activity is learned. It is circumstances that determine whether people steal or not.
Africans are corrupt because of circumstances, not because of their genes. One believes that whereas many factors contribute to Africans current tendency to stealing, that the issue of ethnic identification plays a critical role in it.
In so-called national politics, each ethnic group sees national wealth as a cake from which it takes and gives to its own people. The idea is to please the members of ones ethnic group, rather than serve national interests. Let us be specific rather than abstract.
Nigeria obtains most of its money from selling oil. Oil comes mostly from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria come together to get their own share of the money coming from the Ijaw area of Nigeria.
Here is what is happening in Nigeria. The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba and others steal the resources that come from Ijawland. These criminals gather at Abuja and devise means to steal Ijaw wealth and cart it to their home lands. They use Ijaw resources to go develop their own areas, while ignoring the needs of Ijawland.
Having accustomed themselves to stealing from Ijawland, they generalize their thieving habits to stealing from their own people, too. As it were, it seems that thieving is now in Nigerians’ blood.
Nigeria is the most corrupt country in the world. One gets nothing done in Nigeria without one bribing some one. Even to collect supposedly free forms from government offices requires one to bribe the dispensing clerk. If you do not bribe some one in Nigeria, you simply would not get any thing done.
Nigerians are so corrupt that they are beyond being angry at. One treats them as one treats children, that is, not expect them to behave like adults and do the right thing. They are to be taught the right way to live on planet earth, for they have forgotten it. They are in darkness and need some one to show them the light of love, mutual caring and service to one another.
Those who want to stop corruption in Nigeria cannot do so for as long as the various ethnic groups in Nigeria collude with one another to steal from Ijawland. The only way to stop corruption in Nigeria is to permit each ethnic group to have total control of the resources that come from its lands. Let the Ijaw have 100% control over their oil resources.
If each ethnic group runs its affairs, those without natural resources would work very hard to come up with the money to fund their governments. Igbos are good business men. They would find ways to come up with the money to fund their governments.
More importantly, if each ethnic group in Nigeria funded its governments by itself, it would pay attention to how its money is spent by its public officials. It would audit its accounting books and where a penny is missing punish culprits in the most draconian manner. Any public official who stole a penny and or took bribes ought to be sent to twenty years jail, with hard labor; he ought to work to feed him self; the public does not have to feed him, a detritus of mankind.
One believes that the only way to stop corruption in Africa is to permit each ethnic group to be a state, to rule itself and to have total control over its resources. The added advantage of this system is that it would force Nigerians to work harder. At present, the people do not have to work to get the money to fund their governments. They sit around doing nothing to get the money to fund the central government. All they do is figure out ways to optimize stealing the oil money that comes from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In the process, they develop stealing skills and are lazy. If we compel these lazy bums to go work and seek productive ways to fund their state governments and developmental activities, they would develop the habit of industry and, for a change, become admirable human beings, rather than the contemptible and despicable animals, they currently seem to be.
Nigeria has practically abandoned exploration of its other resources, such as Coal, Zinc, Bauxite, Palm oil, Palm kernel, Cocoa, Coffee, and Rubber. It did so in pursuit of oil money. Those other resources used to be explored, exported and generated sufficient income to feed most Nigerians. But now, most Nigerians have their eyes set on stealing Ijaw oil money and are unwilling to develop the resources that nature reposed in their neck of the wood. If we permit the Ijaw sole ownership of their oil money, other Nigerians, because of economic necessity, would return to developing the resources in their states hence making the economy more diversified and stable. When people’s backs are against the wall and their survival is at stake, they tend to work hardest. Let go of Ijaw oil money and let the threat of suffering compel other Nigerians to work hard. If they do, soon, they would have more wealth than oil ever promised them. Little Biafra had its back against the wall and invented incredible technologies that no African nation has replicated. Necessity is the mother of inventions. Let Ijaws have their oil; the rest of the people will survive.
Like every thing in this world, there are downsides to having each ethnic group control its resources. The ethnic groups that have lots of natural resources would become rich. We know what wealth does to people. One has observed what happened to Alaskans as a result of wealth. If you recall, Oil was discovered in Alaska in the late 1950s and 60s. In 1974/75 the Alaska Oil Pipe line was built from the North slopes to Valdez. Oil was piped from Prudhoe Bay to Prince Williams Sound and ships carried it to the lower forty eight states. Suddenly, Alaska was awash with money.
Alaskans did away with individual income taxes. They funded their government through oil revenue. Indeed, the government saved enough of that oil revenue (at the time of this writing, estimated at $28 billion) and each year shared the profits accruing to investments made with that fund. Generally, each year, every Alaskan receives anywhere from one to two thousand dollars in dividend. This is in addition to having just about everything done for him for free by his government: free education, free medical insurance (for persons under 21) and so on. The result of all this generosity is that Alaskans tend to be lackadaisical. As far as one knows, they are not noted for their industry and contribution to America’s science, technology and business.
The situation is even worse with Alaska Natives. Alaska has about 650, 000 people. Natives (Yupik, Inuit, Athabaska, Klinkit, Haida, Aleuts etc) are about 80, 000. African Americans and Asians are about the same in number as the natives. The rest of the population is Caucasians.
In the early 1970s, the United States Congress entered into what is now called Alaska Native Land Settlement with the various native tribes. Essentially, the natives were given about 10% of the land of Alaska, and the other 90% are left to the Federal and State governments.
If you recall, Russia came to Alaska in 1746 (under Captain Bering). Russia considered Alaska part of mother Russia. (Sitka was its capital). As a result of the impoverishment inflicted on Russia by the Crimean war, Russia needed money and approached the United States government to buy Alaska. Seward, the then secretary of State, bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. He paid ten million dollars for a piece of real estate almost twice the size of Nigeria. Many Americans were opposed to the Secretary buying what they called a “chunk of snow”; Seward’s folly, the purchase was called.
The United States government bought Alaska from Russia and owned it. All the land of Alaska, the great land, belonged to the United States government and was managed by the US department of Interior.
As a result of the Alaska Native Land Settlement Act, Alaska Natives were given parts of Alaska. This means that the resources coming from those lands are given to the natives.
The natives were untrained in capitalist ways. So, the federal government set up native corporations to run the affairs of the various natives for them. These corporations are run by white professional managers. They make profits for the natives, and each year, share these among the natives. During this observer’s last year at the University of Alaska, each Cook Inlet native (Anchorage area) got about fifty thousand dollars from this pot of money. The result is that the natives do not have to work. They have free money coming to them annually.
What do you think that they do with all that money? They waste it in riotous living, particularly on alcohol. Three months after receiving their cheeks in September, most of them are flat broke. Many of them die from alcohol induced diseases. Their life span is 42, in a society where whites routinely live to be 78 years.
What is the point? It is that if you give people free money that they might self destruct and or become lazy. The Ijaw might experience the fate of Alaska natives.
As they say, to be pre-warned is to be saved. The Ijaw can learn from Alaskans and invest their money for the raining day when oil runs out, as it must. They do not have to squander their oil resources in reckless living.
THE ABURI ACCORD
In 1966, as a result of the pogrom that they were experiencing in other parts of Nigeria, Igbos fled to their Igbo homeland. The military governor of Alaigbo, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, apparently, believed that Igbos were no longer safe in Nigeria. He sought a different political arrangement with the Nigerians. The Ghanaian head of state, General Ankrah, invited the head of the Nigerian government and all concerned in the dispute to a series of meetings at Aburi, Ghana.
Apparently, some sort of accord was reached by the parties in dispute. One has not read this accord and cannot attest to what it specified. However, the Igbo leader, Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu, seemed to have told his people that the accord specified a confederation form of government for Nigeria. He later said that the Federal authorities reneged on this agreement by creating twelve states (dividing the then Eastern region into three states) under the banner of federalism. For this and other reasons, Ojukwu went ahead and declared his region separated from Nigeria.
Today, the battle cry of many Igbos is “On Aburi we stand”. They seem to believe that confederation is the best form of government for Nigeria.
This observer is generally not swayed by mass sentiments. He goes with what seems self evidently true to him. In his observation, confederation seems the best type of political arrangement for Nigeria.
Nigeria has a choice to make, a choice of which of the three main forms of extant governments to choose from. The three forms of governments are unitary, federal and confederal. (Monarchy/Aristocracy is no longer a serious option.)
Of the alternatives, confederation seems the only realistic option. Why so? Unitary form of government tends to suit a homogeneous society. England and France seem to do well by this form of government. These people are, more or less, homogenous. However, as we have already pointed out, the unity of Britain may be skin deep. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish elements, Celts as opposed to German English, are agitating for some form of autonomy. We have not heard the last word on the political structure of Britain.
Nigeria has a heterogeneous population and unitary form of government is out of the question for her. Aguiyi Ironsi, apparently, toyed with that idea and it so enraged Northern Nigerians that they decided to eliminate him before he imposed that form of government on them.
At present, Nigeria toys with federalism, although what it has, in fact, is better called Centralism. The federal government controls all the resources of the country and doles out whatever it wants to the mini states it created.
Nigeria currently has 36 states, few of which can function independently. To function, these so-called states need handouts from the central government. The central government steals oil money from the Niger Delta and shares it with the thievish governors of the so-called states. The governors and the leaders at the central level are in cohorts with each other to steal and divide the loot they got from Ijawland.
For our present purposes, we do not have federalism in Nigeria, if by that we mean what obtains in the United States of America.
Federalism has not worked and will not work in Nigeria. Whoever governs the central government of Nigeria uses force to terrorize the periphery to go along with his wishes.
On paper, Nigeria emulates a badly misunderstood American form of government. It has a president, a legislature and an independent judiciary, all structured along the lines of the United States constitution. One wonders what idiots did this copying of America. America herself knew that she was different from her mother country, Britain, and constructed a government that suited her needs.
Nigeria is unique and cannot function properly with a political structure that works well in America. Nor does the American system work well for all Americans. The American political system was designed to work for white Americans. African Americans and Indians are marginalized persons in the American polity. When the latter are finally incorporated into the polity, as eventually they must, for there to be peace in the land, America must have another constitutional conference to work out a different political system, one that takes into consideration the interests of non-whites.
We are not at present focusing on America; we are talking about Nigeria and Africa. Why should Nigerian leaders copy something just because it works in America? What works in America is not guaranteed to work in Africa, for Africa is different from America.
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE TO RESTRUCTURE AFRICAN COUNTRIES
If Africans were a rational people, they would have reconfigured the polities they inherited from their former colonial masters. They all know that the polities they inherited from their European masters are flawed and are the causes of their present problems. They all know that each country is a conglomeration of disparate people, some of whom do not want to be in the same country with others. They all know that it takes force to hold these restive people together; hence they have dictators all over Africa. They all know that for there to be democratic governments in Africa that they must restructure their present artificial polities.
But they have not done what they ought to have done, fifty years after obtaining independence from Europe. Instead of solving their problems, they kill each other in senseless wars to protect the territorial integrity of their artificial countries.
In as much as there is a failure of will and leadership in Africa to do what needs to be done to bring about stability in Africa, one is calling for an international conference, organized by the United Nations, at which African countries are restructured.
There are about four hundred legitimate ethnic groups/tribes in Africa (I named them all in a different paper). Each of these ethnic groups ought to be made a state, within confederations.
This international conference to restructure Africa must be held soon, if possible, tomorrow. It is the only way that the world would reduce Africans mismanagement of their continent and their tendency to killing each other. Failure to do this, Africans will continue making a mess of their continent and the world would continue seeing starving Africans.
Starving Africans means Africans who struggle to go live in the Western world. To avoid these people inundating other parts of the world, the world must help them do the right thing.
Failure to hold this conference and correct the mess that is Africa is tantamount to writing Africa off and permitting Africans to needlessly suffer and die. The death of Africans will be in our heads if we do not work to make sure that Africans restructure their countries and learn responsible self governance.
CONCLUION
African countries were hastily put together by European nations. With the exception of a few of them, most African countries are not natural countries. They are composed of many ethnic groups, many of whom do not get along with one another. In most cases, some ethnic groups grab power and use that power to subjugate members of other ethnic groups to their wishes. This is terrorism.
Countries like Nigeria, Congo and Sudan are terrorist states where a few armed persons use force to intimidate other ethnic groups into kowtowing to their undemocratic wishes. These terrorist leaders are not invested in managing their countries well but in being dictators who tell every body else what to do.
The world knows what is going in Africa and looks away. It is not right to look away as criminals who call themselves leaders in Nigeria, Congo or Sudan destroy the people’s spirit and mismanage their countries economy. The world ought to have reached a state of development where we all understand that we are all one and that what we permit to happen to our brothers we have permitted to happen to us. If we permit the continued hijacking and mismanagement of Africa by brutal criminals, we encourage criminal behavior in Africa. For example, by permitting criminal governments to exist in Nigeria, we encourage Nigerians to become criminals. In time, Nigerians bring their criminality to the Western world.
Nigerian criminals are currently swindling Americans and Europeans. These Nigerians are heartless and will take any one for a ride, without the slightest qualms of conscience, remorse and guilt feeling.
We permitted these groups of Africans to revert to animal status and escape from civilization. We did so by looking away as the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba clique appropriate power and use it to oppress and abuse other groups in Nigeria. As long as these thieves maintain enough order for us to obtain our oil from Nigeria, we look away and do not do something about their criminal activities. A poor Nigerian becomes a politician and within a year has multi million dollar mansions all over the world. He diverts the national treasury to his pockets, while Nigerians live like dogs in the various shanty towns that stand in place of cities.
One does not think that the world ought to look away as crime is committed in any part of the world. The suffering of any human being is our collective suffering. In a general system, what happens in any part of it affects all parts of it and all must adjust to it. The evil we have permitted in Africa is affecting decent people in all parts of the world.
We must, therefore, intervene in Africa and help to restructure it and for the first time help these people have realistic governments that are designed to address their issues, not ignore them.
The key problem of Africa is the fact that different ethnic groups were lumped together against their wishes. The solution to this problem is to fragmentalize African countries and permit each ethnic group to govern itself. This was done in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It could be done in Africa. If done, since Africa has about 400 legitimate ethnic groups (not the thousands we are told, the idiots who band around the number thousands count dialects as separate languages) we would have four hundred nations in Africa.
Clearly, 400 nations, some of whom are too small and are not politically and economically viable, are too many countries in one continent. The next best alternative is to make each ethnic group as autonomous as is possible and then group many of them into confederations where they willingly delegate the performance of certain functions to a central government. But under no circumstances is the central government to ride roughshod over the constituting states.
In this paper, one outlined how such a confederation could be structured. One suggested that, first: we transform current African countries into confederations and later work for regional confederations, such as West Africa Confederation, East Africa Confederation, South Africa Confederation, and Central Africa Confederation. By the middle of this century, Africa ought to have no more than four confederations and by the end of this century; she ought to have become one confederation.
In the future, it is possible for all of Africa to become one true federation. But in the present, what Africa needs are confederations.
This goal the world must help Africans achieve. Failure to do so amounts to abnegating our collective responsibilities to help each other be our best.
One believes that Africans are corrupt because the world permitted them to be so. Consider Nigeria. The world looks away as members of other ethnic groups steal the revenue from a certain part of the country, the Ijaw area, and share that wealth among themselves. In doing so, Nigerians learn that it is not worthwhile to work hard and manage their affairs well. They seek short cuts to becoming wealthy.
Today, most Nigerians have become lazy and have forgotten that people in a developing country ought to work, at least, twelve hour days, to pull themselves up. When the West was being developed, folks worked more than twelve hour days.
The Hausa, Fulani and Yoruba must learn to fund their governments and develop their regions with resources from their regions and not be like locust and descend on the Niger Delta to rub it clean.
It is the function of the international community to help put Africa right, after all the international community of the nineteenth century created modern Africa at the 1884 Berlin conference. At that conference, a resurgent Germany and her iron chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck got the other powers to divide Africa among themselves. They arbitrarily fixed Africa’s current national boundaries.
We need a similar international conference to re-fix the boundaries of Africa, to correct the mess we made. This is a duty and obligation that the rest of the world owes Africans. Left alone, Africans have proven incapable of doing the right thing; they must be helped by the international community to do the right thing: restructure their countries and have each ethnic group constitute a state in confederated countries.
(Courtesy BNW Magazine)
Mr. Crispin Cole | September 10, 2006
By Ozodi Thomas Osuji, Ph.D. (Seatle, washington) ---
HAMLET: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ~~~~ Hamlet, II, ii
Human beings are ratiocinative creatures. It, therefore, confounds one that they see problems and ignore them until they explode in their faces. This is a tragic flaw in the human character. They fail to take proactive and affirmative actions to address problems that are so palpable that one could literally touch them.
African countries are problematic countries. They are artificial social constructs. None of them is an organic community. They are all artificial entities put together by European colonial powers. Those powers constructed these countries for their own good. The motivations and behaviors of Europeans are understandable.
It is not for other persons to do what is good for one, but what is good for them. Europeans had a right to construct African countries that served their interests. It was in their interests for African countries to be weak. You make your enemy weak so as to better control him.
What is not understandable is why Africans have not reconstructed their countries so as to serve their African interests. Instead, they merely complain about what Europe did wrong in constructing the countries they inherited from Europe. Why not stop complaining and fix the problems you see? What are Africans, children or adults? Children see problems and complain about them. Adults accept the problems that existence gives them and solve them, or, at least, struggle to solve them.
Those who struggle to solve their problems develop a feeling of empowerment; those who refuse to address their issues feel depowered.
Instead of bellyaching about what Europeans did wrong, Africans ought to correct the mistakes they perceive in Africa. African countries are like powder kegs waiting for someone to light a fuse on them and they explode. When any of them explodes, people are killed and the international community wrings its hands in wonder, asking why Africans cannot seem to do anything right; why can’t they seem to govern themselves well?
There have been ethnic cleansings in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda and in other African countries. We shall continue having these problems until we decide to behave rationally and call for a conference, pretty much like the 1884 Berlin Conference that fixed Africa’s current boundaries, and reconfigure African countries, this time, on a realistic footing that would no longer generate future conflicts.
Extant African countries were put together by European countries. These Europeans did not consult Africans but arbitrarily congregated disparate people into political conglomerations that served their imperial goals.
Let us use Nigeria as an example in our effort to explicate the problems with contemporary African countries.
In 1460, Prince Henry the Navigator built a navigation school at Lagos, Portugal. He gathered sailors and had them explore the coast of Africa. By 1487, history tells us that the first Portuguese (hence Europeans) sailed to Nigerian ports. They visited the King, Oba, of Benin. They reported that the city of Benin was comparable to what they had in Europe at that time.
For our present purposes, the salient point is that it was in the late 1400s that Europeans came into sustained contact with Africans.
Christopher Columbus visited the Americas in 1492 and, thereafter, the Transatlantic Slave Trade began. The Portuguese established slaving ports on the Coast of West Africa and arranged for coastal Africans to sell them Africans, whom they took to the new world and used to work in their plantations.
It should be observed, however, that prior to the Trans Atlantic Slave trade that Africans were already selling themselves to Arabs. History books tell us that as early as the tenth century of our common era, Africans were already selling themselves into Arab slavery. In fact, the earliest West African empires, such as Ghana, Mali and Songhai, were little more than slaving syndicates for capturing and selling Africans to Moslem Arabs. We are told that the leaders of these so-called empires (such as Askia Mohammed and Sony Ali) took thousands of slaves with them when they visited Mecca for their hajj and sold them to Arabs.
(It is safe to assume that slavery had existed for at least five hundred years in Africa before the Europeans came to the scene. Africans sold each other into slavery for, at least, a thousand years: between 900 and 1900 AD. As such, Africans developed a slaving culture and a slaving mentality. This mentality contributes to their present anti social behaviors: they do not identify with their people and, instead, see them as slaves to be sold. Today, the international community prohibits slavery; otherwise, Africans would still be selling each other. Now, they sell each other in other ways. They exploit each other. For example, they pocket the monies that would have gone into helping their fellow Africans live decently. The contemporary African has as much a callous heart as his slave selling ancestors. He needs psychological surgery to teach him that the best lived life is one that devotes itself to serving fellow human beings. Africans have a sickness of the soul and until this sickness is accepted and healed, it is doubtful that they can effectively and decently govern themselves.)
The Portuguese established a slave port at Lagos (Nigeria) in 1529. In time, Portugal, as a seafaring power, declined and was replaced by other seafaring nations, first, by the Spanish. The Spanish, in turn, fell and was replaced by the Dutch, who, in turn, were replaced by the French and English. In the meantime, whichever European power was on ascendancy used the slaving ports established by the Portuguese on the coast of West Africa, to buy African slaves.
Slavery eventually elicited opposition to it. In England, William Wilberforce led the fight to outlaw slavery. In 1807, the British House of Commons outlawed slave trade. But, for all intents and purposes, the trade continued to flourish. The British Royal Navy was, therefore, mandated to patrol the Guinea Coast, West Africa, and board and search ships in those sea lanes and ascertain that they were not involved in slave trading. British war ships searched many ships and freed many slaves. Some of the freed slaves were settled at Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Ultimately, Britain recognized that it was not enough to intercede on the high seas and free slaves but that she had to go to the source of slaves and do something about selling Africans into slavery. Thus, in the mid 1800s British war ships began making calls on West African coastal cities, trying to work out arrangement with local African chiefs that would stop them from selling their people into slavery. In 1851, the British Navy landed at Lagos and tried to negotiate with the city’s king, Oba Kosoko, to stop buying and selling slaves. The Oba refused. The British, therefore, intervened militarily and removed the Oba from office and replaced him with another king who agreed to stop the horrible trading in human beings. This arrangement eventually required the British to maintain military presence at Lagos, to make sure that slavery was not going on under the cover of darkness.
The British did the same at other West African port cities. In Nigeria, they intervened at Calaba and Bonny, notorious slave ports. The cumulative effect of these interventions is the British decision to maintain permanent presence on the Coast of West Africa, to prevent slave trading. (It is interesting that many coastal African peoples fought tooth and nail to maintain slave trade. One would think that Africans would have taken the initiative to fight slavery, but, no, others did so and they resisted the effort to stop them from selling their own people. They are still selling their own people, albeit in different forms. These people’s characters were so distorted by slavery that to the present they hardly know the difference between right and wrong. Consider corruption. It is wrong to engage in corruption. But these people do so no matter what any one tells them about it. Watching Nigerian policemen taking bribes from motorists makes them seem like despicable animals.)
Britain attempted to replace trading in slaves with trading in other goods. British business men were encouraged to trade with Africans in goods other than slaves. The idea was to give hitherto African slave traders alternative sources of income.
In Britain, the Royal Niger Company (later called United African Company, UAC) was charted by the House of Commons and encouraged to trade along the River Niger and its delta tributaries, buying local produce like Palm oil and Palm kernel from Africans.
Coastal Africans learnt to go into the interior to buy palm oil and palm kernel, rather than buy slaves and traded these for European goods at the various factories that the Royal Niger Company set up along the Niger and its creeks.
The Royal Niger Company, more or less, became a government and ruled the communities where it traded. Professors Kenneth Dike and Ajayi have written splendid books on the activities of Sir George Goldie and his Royal Niger Company; we need not rehash what those outstanding African scholars said.
The activities of other European countries in West Africa, particularly the French, led the British to decide to intervene and directly govern the area that the Royal Niger Company governed. Thus, in 1906 the British government declared a protectorate over what it called Oil Rivers. An employee of the Royal Niger Company, Frederick Lugard, was hired to run the area. His girl friend came up with the name, Nigeria, and the oil rivers was changed to Southern Nigeria. The British made similar arrangements with the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (Sultan is Turkish for chief and Emir is Arabic for the German word, chief) of the Northern part of what is now called Nigeria and formed the protectorate of Northern Nigeria.
In 1914, Lugard united the Southern and Northern protectorates into what became Nigeria. Lugard became the first Governor General of Nigeria and appointed lieutenant Governors to help him govern the southern and northern parts of Nigeria.
Later, Nigeria was divided into three regions: North, East and West and lieutenant governors were appointed for each region. The deputy governors reported to the Governor General, who, in turn, reported to the colonial secretary at Whitehall, London. The colonial secretary, in turn, reported to the foreign secretary, who was part of the cabinet led by the British Prime Minister.
INDIRECT RULE SYSTEM
Lugard studied the pattern of governance in Northern Nigeria and was impressed by what he saw. He decided to rule Northern Nigeria through the already established rulers of Northern Nigeria. Thus, he told the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (each Hausa town had an emir, a chief, that helped the Fulanis rule their conquered Hausa states…the Fulani chieftain, Othman Dan Fodio, conquered Hausaland in 1804) what to do and they, in turn, got their people to do it. This system was called the indirect rule. Essentially, Lugard, assisted by a secretariat of colonial administrators stationed at the colonial capital, Lagos, told his lieutenant Governors, stationed at Kaduna, Enugu and Ibadan, what to do, and the lieutenant governors, in turn, told their district commissioners/officers what to do and these told emirs of their districts what to do, and the emirs got their people to do what their British overlords asked them to do. In effect, Lugard ruled Nigerians through Nigerian chiefs. The advantage of this system was that it saved cost and manpower for the colonial administration. With a handful of British colonial administrators, Britain governed Nigeria.
Lugard easily replicated the system he had established in the North in Western Nigeria. In Western Nigeria, there were already existing chiefs, Obas. Lugard, his lieutenant governor and district commissioners ruled the Yorubas through the obas.
In the East, particularly in Alaigbo, the going was a bit more difficult. There were no preexisting chiefs through whom Lugard and his assistants could rule the Igbos. Lugard proceeded to invent warrant chiefs for the Igbos. He appointed chiefs among people who, traditionally, were democratic and republican and had no chiefs. (Igbo ama eze; today, some phony Igbos disregard their history and run around calling themselves chiefs.)
Lugard attempted ruling Alaigbo through his artificially invented chiefs and had a difficult time of it.
Like every thing else in this world, there are always exceptions to a general rule. Some Igbos had chiefs. Those Igbos who bordered non-Igbo people, apparently, were influenced by their neighbors and had chiefs. Igbos in Onitsha, Asaba and Abo were close to Edo people. Edos had chiefs, the chief of whom was the Oba of Benin. Thus, these Igbo towns had Obis, such as the Obi of Onitsha.
Before we get carried away talking about the “great institution of kingship in Onitsha”, however, it should be remembered that until recently, Onitsha was just a town of no more than a few hundred people. We are talking about a minor chief. For all practical purposes, therefore, Igbos had no chiefs.
Lugard retired and his successors made minor changes to the system of governance that he established in Nigeria. Nigeria had many constitutional changes, such as Arthur Richards, McPherson and so on. Suffice it to say, however, that no major changes were made to the system of governance established by Lugard until Nigeria gained her independence from Britain in 1960.
The Littleton/Lancaster House constitution that gave Nigeria Independence retained the British form of government for Nigeria, a parliamentary system with the party winning the majority at elections forming the government and its leader becoming the prime minister and its sub leaders given cabinet positions. The first independent government of Nigeria was led by the Northern People’s Congress (political party) and the Prime Minister was Sir Abubaka Tafawa Balewa.
In 1966, the Balewa government was overthrown by a military coup. The coup leader was an Igbo, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu. Nzeogwu was quickly arrested and jailed and the most senior military officer took over governing Nigeria.
Major General Johnson Thomas Umunna Aguiyi Ironsi became the first military ruler of Nigeria. He was an Igbo. Aguiyi Ironsi toyed with the idea of giving Nigeria a unitary form of government.
In August of 1966, there was a counter coup and Ironsi was murdered and Major Yakubu Gowon, a Christian Northerner, became the head of government.
In the meantime, Igbos all over Nigeria were massacred. It is reported that over two million Igbos were killed. What was left of the Igbos in other parts of Nigeria ran to their Igbo homeland. The governor of the then Eastern region, Lt. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, in 1967 declared his region the Republic of Biafra.
The Federal authorities engaged in what they called a police action to quell Ojukwu’s secession. That police action lasted 30 months. In the process, it is reported that three million Igbo people were killed.
In January 1970, the Federal forces, under General Olusegun Obasano, Nigeria’s present President, received the unconditional surrender of the Biafran armed forces at Owerri. Ojukwu had fled the country and his second in command, General Efiong, had the onerous task of surrendering to the victorious Nigerian forces.
In 1975, while out of the country, Gowon was replaced by General Mutala Mohammed in a bloodless coup. Mutala ruled with Obasanjo as his second in command. An attempted military coup by Major Danjuma killed Mutala and Obasanjo became the head of government of Nigeria.
Obasanjo wrote a constitution for Nigeria and handed power over to an elected civilian government in 1979.
Alhaji Shehu Shagari became the first executive President of Nigeria in 1979. Four years later, Shagari won re-election. His government was allegedly characterized by corruption and graft, and General Buhari, on that account, overthrew it.
Buhari, by most accounts, was a man of probity. So far, no one has accused him of corruption. Nevertheless, he was replaced by General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.
Babangida, the maradona of Nigerian politics, handed power to a civilian, who was quickly dispatched by General Sani Abacha.
Abacha allegedly instituted the most corrupt government in Nigeria. He died while in office and his assistant, General Abdul Salami replaced him.
Abdul Salami wrote a constitution for Nigeria in 1999. That year, an election was held and Obasanjo and his People’s Democratic Party won the election. Obasanjo became the president of Nigeria. Obasanjo is still in office (September, 2005).
The purpose of this paper is not to provide the reader with a thorough history of Nigeria. The paper’s goal is to reflect on the type of government that suits Nigeria and other countries in Africa. If the reader is interested in a more detailed history of Nigeria, he or she should read books on Nigeria’s history.
THE MULTI ETHNIC REALITY OF NIGERIA
What is the reality of Nigeria? It is that it is an artificial country. Nigeria was put together by the British. The British did not consult the people living in Nigeria before they forcefully agglomerated them into one political entity.
Nigeria is composed of Hausas (Hausa is actually not a tribe; it is a Creole language, mix of Arab and African, spoken by those Northern tribes that had accepted Islam as their religion, and who were greatly influenced by Arab culture; they tend to have a unified, Moslem based worldview, and, for all practical purposes, may as well be considered an ethnic group), Yorubas, Igbos, Ijaws, Edos, Efiks, Urobos, Isikiris, Tivis, Kanuris, Fulanis, Bornu and many minor tribes.
These tribes, ethnic groups, call them what you like, are different from one another. They were forced to live with one another against their will. This, then, is the major problem of Nigeria. Different groups of human beings were forced against their will to live in the same country.
Generally, some of these tribes detest others. However, for some reasons, they are compelled to live together. As noted, in 1967 the Igbos seceded from Nigeria. The Gowon led Hausa-Fulani government at Lagos went to war with Biafra and successfully defeated it. Why did the Hausa-Fulani and their Yoruba ally go to war with the Igbos? Was it for their love of the Igbos?
Biafra encompassed the Niger Delta region, the region that produced most of the oil that provided the revenue with which Nigeria survived. Therefore, Biafra had to be defeated so that the Hausas, Fulanis and Yorubas (the triple alliance that fought the war with the Igbos) would have access to oil revenue.
The Nigerian civil war was, in effect, an economic war. The people from the North and West needed to get their hands on Niger Delta oil and had to defeat the Igbos so as to do so.
Today, revenue from oil supplies over 90% of the money that funds the Nigerian federal government, the Hausa and Yoruba governments and some other governments in Nigeria.
The men from the North and West essentially keep Nigeria together for economic reasons: they need to get their hands on the oil revenue that comes from the Niger Delta. They could care less for the Ijaw who live in the Delta. They, of course, in a Machiavellian vein manipulate the Ijaw and tell them that their neighbors, the Igbos, would like to take over their oil. Thus, the Ijaw, who are, in fact, a mix of Igbos and themselves, see the Igbos as their mortal enemies and then run to the Hausas to protect them. The Hausas protect them alright.
Money from Ijawland’s oil is used to develop Northern and other parts of Nigeria, while Ijawland is ignored. Ijawland is so devastated by oil drilling and burning of gas that it literally looks like denuded moonscape.
What we have in Nigeria is a collection of odd bedfellows who, for the sake of oil money, agree to tolerate each other. These people hate one another with passion but know enough to realize that they need the oil revenue from certain parts of Nigeria. Thus, like honorable thieves, they agree to get along with one another, provided that they share the loot from Ijawland.
There is no doubt whatsoever that what holds that strange country called Nigeria together is oil money. If there was no oil in Biafra, Northerners would have gladly seceded from Nigeria and not give a hoot for Igboland. It has been reported that the original intention of the August 1966 counter coup was to secede the North from the rest of Nigeria. Apparently, the coup plotters wised up to the fact that they needed revenue from the Niger Delta, changed their minds and decided to keep Nigeria one.
As long as these strange fellows have oil money to share, they would probably continue to agree to be in the same country. But when that oil runs dry, Nigeria probably would disintegrate. Nigeria probably will not last a second longer than oil lasts.
We have established that the political entity called Nigeria is the invention of Britain. We have further established that the British put together different people who did not want to live together and forced them to live together.
The various ethnic groups are radically different from each other, some as night is from day. The Hausas are Moslem. The Igbos are Christian. The Hausa had established a feudal political structure before the British came to their land. The Hausas seem to have adjusted to their feudal social structure. On the other hand, the Igbos are very individualistic, democratic and republican in orientation. Before the advent of the Europeans in Alaigbo, Igbos did not have kings ruling them. The Igbos do not like the Hausa feudal social- political structure.
How can these two very different people coexist in the same political arrangement? They cannot do so without conflict. The Igbo detests what he sees as the Hausa feudal system of governance and the Hausa does so regarding Igbo republicanism. The result is conflict between the two groups. So far, this conflict is masked by the preponderance of power that the Hausas have.
The Hausas control the Nigerian military (with second fiddle role performed by the Yoruba). For practical purposes, the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba military axis overwhelm the Igbo with their superior military power and, in effect, terrorize them into going along with the pseudo political entity called Nigeria.
The Igbos are a terrorized people. The men from the North and West use military power to intimidate the Igbos into going along with the government of Nigeria. Without force holding them down, the Igbos would break away from Nigeria, today.
(One may ask whether it is right to terrorize a group of people? Hasn’t human civilization gotten to a point where terrorism is no longer tolerated as instrument of governance? If terrorism is wrong, why does the rest of the world keep quiet while a group of human beings are intimidated with brutal force? Moslem terrorism in Europe and North America is fought by the West. Why does the West permit Moslem terrorism in Nigeria?)
One is searching for a political arrangement that gives all Nigerians freedom to be themselves and not intimidated persons.
In Ones view, it is necessary for the various ethnic groups that exist in Nigeria to come together in a national conference and renegotiate the parameters of their continued existence as a nation. In all likelihood, they would choose a confederation, not total divorce from each other.
Let us restate the obvious. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are different from one another. Each of them ought to be allowed to develop along its natural lines. No one ethnic group should impose its worldview on the others. Each group ought to have the opportunity to pursue its destiny, without others interfering in it.
At present, the various ethnic groups are forced to live together. The more powerful ones impose their values on others and these others silently resent being imposed on. A sort of Carthaginian peace prevails in Nigeria. But we all know that such peace does not last forever.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a mask for Russian empire, comprised of sixteen republics. In 1991, those sixteen groups separated from Russia. Within today’s Russia Federation are many ethnic groups, these suppressed by the Russian people. Some of these ethnic groups are agitating for freedom. Chechnya is fighting for independence. By and by, the various ethnic groups in Russia will obtain a measure of independence from Russia. Until Russia has the foresight to give some independence to these people, it must remain an unstable empire.
In Yugoslavia, President Tito used iron hand to hold six different nations together. These nations: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo-Albania etc are now running their own governments, but not before Yugoslavia had under went political and military convulsions.
Czechoslovakia saw the hand writing on the wall and peacefully separated into its two component parts, Czech and Slovakia republics.
The English used force to unify the disparate people that lived on Britain. The various Celtic groups were forced to accept the ruler ship of the English (Germans). But, today, the suppressed groups are agitating for a measure of Independence. The Welch, the Scotts and the Irish are asking for independence. Tony Blair, the astute British Prime Minister, has read the hand writing on the wall and realized that you cannot suppress a people forever and ever hence devolved the government and gave the Welch and Scotts a measure of independence.
After over a thousand years of being subjugated, the Celts of Britain are today resurrecting their “dead languages and cultures”. This goes to show that you simply cannot suppress a people forever.
In the United States of America, the Anglo Saxon elements employed superior force to displace the Indians and relegated them to reservations. In these ghettos, the Indians are given alcohol to drink themselves to untimely death. Genocide is being perpetrated against Native Americans, and the world keeps silent.
Nevertheless, if what we know of history remains constant, American Indians will some day come to their own. In the not too distant future, the various Indian tribes will probably rise up and become self governing entities.
THE MERITS OF CONFEDERATION
We have posited that Nigeria and most contemporary African countries are artificial social constructs. We have established that these countries essentially constitute forced marriages. Like in all such social arrangements, those in them itch to get out. In most cases, they are held together by brute force. In the case of Nigeria, military force is used to terrorize the Igbos into staying in a political arrangement that they detest.
What is the alternative to terrorist African states? Is total divorce called for in Nigeria?
The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are often too small and weak to go it alone. Independently, most of them are not viable political and or economic entities. Somehow, they need each other to survive.
The real question is not dissolving Nigeria but finding a better form of association for the current strange bed fellows called Nigerians. Since these people need each other and yet do not get along with each other, one believes that the best workable political arrangement for them is a confederation.
We need to retain the fiction called Nigeria but reorganize and make it realistic to its multi-ethnic composition.
Each of the twenty ethnic groups in Nigeria ought to become a state, a state in the real sense of that term; a state that rules itself. The various states then should cooperate with each other in a confederation of states called Nigeria.
The states should delegate certain functions to the central government, such as foreign affairs and military control. But beyond the specific areas given to the central government, each of the constituent states ought to govern itself in every other way, including having 100% control of its resources.
(The Ijaw ought to have 100% control of the oil revenue that comes from her area. Ijaw indigenes, like every one else, should pay income taxes to the confederal government. The confederal government ought to be able to impose no more than 25% tax on the individual’s annual income, and use such revenue to fund its activities.)
There should be the following states in the Confederation of Nigeria: Hausa State, Yoruba State, Igbo State, Edo State, Efik State, Ijaw State, Tivi State, Kanuri State, Bornu State. The minor tribes should be grouped into states. The total number of states in Nigeria should not exceed twenty.
The critical requirement is that each of the major ethnic groups constitutes a state and has the opportunity to govern its affairs, unimpeded by other ethnic groups.
Each state must include all those who speak a unique language, different dialects not withstanding. Alaigbo State, for example, must stretch from Ikwerre (Egwuocha/Port Harcourt) to Abo, from Arochukwu to Ida/Nsuka, with its capital at Owerri, the Igbo heartland.
One visualizes the state structure to be as follows: a unicameral legislature (not bicameral legislature, to reduce cost and avoid duplication of functions), not to exceed fifty elected legislators, who serve fiver year terms, not to exceed six terms, for a total of 30 years; a Premier selected from the dominant party in the state legislature, who is the chief executive officer of the state; a governor who is the nominal head of the state and signs bills passed by the legislature into law, an independent judiciary (High Court of seven judges, headed by the state chief judge, district courts, and town courts).
The state political structure is replicated at the district level: A district council of nine members, a district executive, elected for a five year term, two term limits, who heads the executive branch; a district court with district judge of first instance.
Finally, a town/city government: town/city council of seven members and a mayor heading the executive branch and a town magistrate court.
Each state is to have no more than fifty districts (and district governments).
The states would be responsible for delivering education and health services to their citizens. Each state must provide all its citizens with free six year primary education, free six year secondary education, free four year university education for at least one third of the graduating students from secondary schools and free four years of technical education for all the other graduates of secondary schools. Graduate education should be for the top ten percent of university graduates (a two year masters’ degree program and another three years for the doctor of science degree program for the top two percent of graduate students.)
Towns/cities are to be required to provide preschool education for children from age two to five…here working women drop off their children in the morning and pick them up after work, with such centers remaining open from six in the morning to seven in the evening. The town must find the resources, through property and sales taxes and licensing fees etc to fund this and other services.
Each state is to obtain its revenue independently from the confederal government. It is to tax its citizens and seek other revenue streams with which it funds its activities. Under no circumstances is a state to be financially dependent on the central government.
The confederal government is to be composed of a legislature (at least two delegates from each state, not to exceed overall 100 legislators for the country), legislators serve five year terms, not to exceed six terms, 30 years altogether; a prime minister elected by the legislators from among themselves; who serves a term of five years, but not to exceed two terms, ten years; an elected but nominal president who serves one term of ten years, the president must be of retirement age, a 70 year old national achiever, say, the best scientist in the country; an independent judiciary with the usual three tiers: Supreme Court of not more than thirteen justices, one of whom is the chief justice, appellate courts of three judges and district courts of single judges; each state having at least one district court, and a group of states constituting an appellate area.
What one visualizes for Nigeria is a situation where each of the ethnic groups in it is essentially governing itself while delegating certain powers to the national government. This arrangement would give each ethnic group sufficient sense of independence and leg room to be itself. This system will work for Nigeria.
In fact, it is the only system that will work for Nigeria. Not only will it work for Nigeria, it will work for other multiethnic countries in Africa. One advocates that multi ethnic countries in Africa adopt confederal systems of government. African countries, in fact, do not have any choice but to do this.
If in the future Africans freely choose to become federations with strong central governments, rather than confederations with weak central governments, that are welcome. In the present, confederating the present African countries seem the only way to avert some groups dominating others, and those dominated resenting it, with the result being intermittent civil wars in Africa.
DISADVANTAGES OF CONFEDERATIONS
Whereas confederal government seems the best government for extant African countries, this type of government tends to have inherent weaknesses. It is because of its weaknesses that the United States of America gave it up. It should be recalled that after its war of independence, America first adopted a confederal constitution (Articles of Confederation) and later found that system unworkable. Essentially, the Articles of Confederation made the central government too weak and the states too strong. The states did not have to accept direction from the center. There was no president or judiciary; congress was not even standing but met occasionally. This arrangement was particularly detrimental to the country’s military so that enemies easily walked all over America.
In light of the inherent problems in confederations, one made some changes in them by insisting on a standing national legislature, nominal president, executive prime minister, unified military command at the central level and the center’s control of foreign relations.
Each state must have control of its own police force (the central government must have its own police and additionally a secret police).
We do not have to deny some of the inherent problems of confederal governments, but with good effort, confederations can be made to work, after all they work in Switzerland. At any rate, it seems the only alternative that would avert Africans penchant for mutual mayhem.
(Courtesy BNW Magazine)
HAMLET: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ~~~~ Hamlet, II, ii
Human beings are ratiocinative creatures. It, therefore, confounds one that they see problems and ignore them until they explode in their faces. This is a tragic flaw in the human character. They fail to take proactive and affirmative actions to address problems that are so palpable that one could literally touch them.
African countries are problematic countries. They are artificial social constructs. None of them is an organic community. They are all artificial entities put together by European colonial powers. Those powers constructed these countries for their own good. The motivations and behaviors of Europeans are understandable.
It is not for other persons to do what is good for one, but what is good for them. Europeans had a right to construct African countries that served their interests. It was in their interests for African countries to be weak. You make your enemy weak so as to better control him.
What is not understandable is why Africans have not reconstructed their countries so as to serve their African interests. Instead, they merely complain about what Europe did wrong in constructing the countries they inherited from Europe. Why not stop complaining and fix the problems you see? What are Africans, children or adults? Children see problems and complain about them. Adults accept the problems that existence gives them and solve them, or, at least, struggle to solve them.
Those who struggle to solve their problems develop a feeling of empowerment; those who refuse to address their issues feel depowered.
Instead of bellyaching about what Europeans did wrong, Africans ought to correct the mistakes they perceive in Africa. African countries are like powder kegs waiting for someone to light a fuse on them and they explode. When any of them explodes, people are killed and the international community wrings its hands in wonder, asking why Africans cannot seem to do anything right; why can’t they seem to govern themselves well?
There have been ethnic cleansings in Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leon, Ivory Coast, Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda and in other African countries. We shall continue having these problems until we decide to behave rationally and call for a conference, pretty much like the 1884 Berlin Conference that fixed Africa’s current boundaries, and reconfigure African countries, this time, on a realistic footing that would no longer generate future conflicts.
Extant African countries were put together by European countries. These Europeans did not consult Africans but arbitrarily congregated disparate people into political conglomerations that served their imperial goals.
Let us use Nigeria as an example in our effort to explicate the problems with contemporary African countries.
In 1460, Prince Henry the Navigator built a navigation school at Lagos, Portugal. He gathered sailors and had them explore the coast of Africa. By 1487, history tells us that the first Portuguese (hence Europeans) sailed to Nigerian ports. They visited the King, Oba, of Benin. They reported that the city of Benin was comparable to what they had in Europe at that time.
For our present purposes, the salient point is that it was in the late 1400s that Europeans came into sustained contact with Africans.
Christopher Columbus visited the Americas in 1492 and, thereafter, the Transatlantic Slave Trade began. The Portuguese established slaving ports on the Coast of West Africa and arranged for coastal Africans to sell them Africans, whom they took to the new world and used to work in their plantations.
It should be observed, however, that prior to the Trans Atlantic Slave trade that Africans were already selling themselves to Arabs. History books tell us that as early as the tenth century of our common era, Africans were already selling themselves into Arab slavery. In fact, the earliest West African empires, such as Ghana, Mali and Songhai, were little more than slaving syndicates for capturing and selling Africans to Moslem Arabs. We are told that the leaders of these so-called empires (such as Askia Mohammed and Sony Ali) took thousands of slaves with them when they visited Mecca for their hajj and sold them to Arabs.
(It is safe to assume that slavery had existed for at least five hundred years in Africa before the Europeans came to the scene. Africans sold each other into slavery for, at least, a thousand years: between 900 and 1900 AD. As such, Africans developed a slaving culture and a slaving mentality. This mentality contributes to their present anti social behaviors: they do not identify with their people and, instead, see them as slaves to be sold. Today, the international community prohibits slavery; otherwise, Africans would still be selling each other. Now, they sell each other in other ways. They exploit each other. For example, they pocket the monies that would have gone into helping their fellow Africans live decently. The contemporary African has as much a callous heart as his slave selling ancestors. He needs psychological surgery to teach him that the best lived life is one that devotes itself to serving fellow human beings. Africans have a sickness of the soul and until this sickness is accepted and healed, it is doubtful that they can effectively and decently govern themselves.)
The Portuguese established a slave port at Lagos (Nigeria) in 1529. In time, Portugal, as a seafaring power, declined and was replaced by other seafaring nations, first, by the Spanish. The Spanish, in turn, fell and was replaced by the Dutch, who, in turn, were replaced by the French and English. In the meantime, whichever European power was on ascendancy used the slaving ports established by the Portuguese on the coast of West Africa, to buy African slaves.
Slavery eventually elicited opposition to it. In England, William Wilberforce led the fight to outlaw slavery. In 1807, the British House of Commons outlawed slave trade. But, for all intents and purposes, the trade continued to flourish. The British Royal Navy was, therefore, mandated to patrol the Guinea Coast, West Africa, and board and search ships in those sea lanes and ascertain that they were not involved in slave trading. British war ships searched many ships and freed many slaves. Some of the freed slaves were settled at Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Ultimately, Britain recognized that it was not enough to intercede on the high seas and free slaves but that she had to go to the source of slaves and do something about selling Africans into slavery. Thus, in the mid 1800s British war ships began making calls on West African coastal cities, trying to work out arrangement with local African chiefs that would stop them from selling their people into slavery. In 1851, the British Navy landed at Lagos and tried to negotiate with the city’s king, Oba Kosoko, to stop buying and selling slaves. The Oba refused. The British, therefore, intervened militarily and removed the Oba from office and replaced him with another king who agreed to stop the horrible trading in human beings. This arrangement eventually required the British to maintain military presence at Lagos, to make sure that slavery was not going on under the cover of darkness.
The British did the same at other West African port cities. In Nigeria, they intervened at Calaba and Bonny, notorious slave ports. The cumulative effect of these interventions is the British decision to maintain permanent presence on the Coast of West Africa, to prevent slave trading. (It is interesting that many coastal African peoples fought tooth and nail to maintain slave trade. One would think that Africans would have taken the initiative to fight slavery, but, no, others did so and they resisted the effort to stop them from selling their own people. They are still selling their own people, albeit in different forms. These people’s characters were so distorted by slavery that to the present they hardly know the difference between right and wrong. Consider corruption. It is wrong to engage in corruption. But these people do so no matter what any one tells them about it. Watching Nigerian policemen taking bribes from motorists makes them seem like despicable animals.)
Britain attempted to replace trading in slaves with trading in other goods. British business men were encouraged to trade with Africans in goods other than slaves. The idea was to give hitherto African slave traders alternative sources of income.
In Britain, the Royal Niger Company (later called United African Company, UAC) was charted by the House of Commons and encouraged to trade along the River Niger and its delta tributaries, buying local produce like Palm oil and Palm kernel from Africans.
Coastal Africans learnt to go into the interior to buy palm oil and palm kernel, rather than buy slaves and traded these for European goods at the various factories that the Royal Niger Company set up along the Niger and its creeks.
The Royal Niger Company, more or less, became a government and ruled the communities where it traded. Professors Kenneth Dike and Ajayi have written splendid books on the activities of Sir George Goldie and his Royal Niger Company; we need not rehash what those outstanding African scholars said.
The activities of other European countries in West Africa, particularly the French, led the British to decide to intervene and directly govern the area that the Royal Niger Company governed. Thus, in 1906 the British government declared a protectorate over what it called Oil Rivers. An employee of the Royal Niger Company, Frederick Lugard, was hired to run the area. His girl friend came up with the name, Nigeria, and the oil rivers was changed to Southern Nigeria. The British made similar arrangements with the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (Sultan is Turkish for chief and Emir is Arabic for the German word, chief) of the Northern part of what is now called Nigeria and formed the protectorate of Northern Nigeria.
In 1914, Lugard united the Southern and Northern protectorates into what became Nigeria. Lugard became the first Governor General of Nigeria and appointed lieutenant Governors to help him govern the southern and northern parts of Nigeria.
Later, Nigeria was divided into three regions: North, East and West and lieutenant governors were appointed for each region. The deputy governors reported to the Governor General, who, in turn, reported to the colonial secretary at Whitehall, London. The colonial secretary, in turn, reported to the foreign secretary, who was part of the cabinet led by the British Prime Minister.
INDIRECT RULE SYSTEM
Lugard studied the pattern of governance in Northern Nigeria and was impressed by what he saw. He decided to rule Northern Nigeria through the already established rulers of Northern Nigeria. Thus, he told the Sultan of Sokoto and his emirs (each Hausa town had an emir, a chief, that helped the Fulanis rule their conquered Hausa states…the Fulani chieftain, Othman Dan Fodio, conquered Hausaland in 1804) what to do and they, in turn, got their people to do it. This system was called the indirect rule. Essentially, Lugard, assisted by a secretariat of colonial administrators stationed at the colonial capital, Lagos, told his lieutenant Governors, stationed at Kaduna, Enugu and Ibadan, what to do, and the lieutenant governors, in turn, told their district commissioners/officers what to do and these told emirs of their districts what to do, and the emirs got their people to do what their British overlords asked them to do. In effect, Lugard ruled Nigerians through Nigerian chiefs. The advantage of this system was that it saved cost and manpower for the colonial administration. With a handful of British colonial administrators, Britain governed Nigeria.
Lugard easily replicated the system he had established in the North in Western Nigeria. In Western Nigeria, there were already existing chiefs, Obas. Lugard, his lieutenant governor and district commissioners ruled the Yorubas through the obas.
In the East, particularly in Alaigbo, the going was a bit more difficult. There were no preexisting chiefs through whom Lugard and his assistants could rule the Igbos. Lugard proceeded to invent warrant chiefs for the Igbos. He appointed chiefs among people who, traditionally, were democratic and republican and had no chiefs. (Igbo ama eze; today, some phony Igbos disregard their history and run around calling themselves chiefs.)
Lugard attempted ruling Alaigbo through his artificially invented chiefs and had a difficult time of it.
Like every thing else in this world, there are always exceptions to a general rule. Some Igbos had chiefs. Those Igbos who bordered non-Igbo people, apparently, were influenced by their neighbors and had chiefs. Igbos in Onitsha, Asaba and Abo were close to Edo people. Edos had chiefs, the chief of whom was the Oba of Benin. Thus, these Igbo towns had Obis, such as the Obi of Onitsha.
Before we get carried away talking about the “great institution of kingship in Onitsha”, however, it should be remembered that until recently, Onitsha was just a town of no more than a few hundred people. We are talking about a minor chief. For all practical purposes, therefore, Igbos had no chiefs.
Lugard retired and his successors made minor changes to the system of governance that he established in Nigeria. Nigeria had many constitutional changes, such as Arthur Richards, McPherson and so on. Suffice it to say, however, that no major changes were made to the system of governance established by Lugard until Nigeria gained her independence from Britain in 1960.
The Littleton/Lancaster House constitution that gave Nigeria Independence retained the British form of government for Nigeria, a parliamentary system with the party winning the majority at elections forming the government and its leader becoming the prime minister and its sub leaders given cabinet positions. The first independent government of Nigeria was led by the Northern People’s Congress (political party) and the Prime Minister was Sir Abubaka Tafawa Balewa.
In 1966, the Balewa government was overthrown by a military coup. The coup leader was an Igbo, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu. Nzeogwu was quickly arrested and jailed and the most senior military officer took over governing Nigeria.
Major General Johnson Thomas Umunna Aguiyi Ironsi became the first military ruler of Nigeria. He was an Igbo. Aguiyi Ironsi toyed with the idea of giving Nigeria a unitary form of government.
In August of 1966, there was a counter coup and Ironsi was murdered and Major Yakubu Gowon, a Christian Northerner, became the head of government.
In the meantime, Igbos all over Nigeria were massacred. It is reported that over two million Igbos were killed. What was left of the Igbos in other parts of Nigeria ran to their Igbo homeland. The governor of the then Eastern region, Lt. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, in 1967 declared his region the Republic of Biafra.
The Federal authorities engaged in what they called a police action to quell Ojukwu’s secession. That police action lasted 30 months. In the process, it is reported that three million Igbo people were killed.
In January 1970, the Federal forces, under General Olusegun Obasano, Nigeria’s present President, received the unconditional surrender of the Biafran armed forces at Owerri. Ojukwu had fled the country and his second in command, General Efiong, had the onerous task of surrendering to the victorious Nigerian forces.
In 1975, while out of the country, Gowon was replaced by General Mutala Mohammed in a bloodless coup. Mutala ruled with Obasanjo as his second in command. An attempted military coup by Major Danjuma killed Mutala and Obasanjo became the head of government of Nigeria.
Obasanjo wrote a constitution for Nigeria and handed power over to an elected civilian government in 1979.
Alhaji Shehu Shagari became the first executive President of Nigeria in 1979. Four years later, Shagari won re-election. His government was allegedly characterized by corruption and graft, and General Buhari, on that account, overthrew it.
Buhari, by most accounts, was a man of probity. So far, no one has accused him of corruption. Nevertheless, he was replaced by General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.
Babangida, the maradona of Nigerian politics, handed power to a civilian, who was quickly dispatched by General Sani Abacha.
Abacha allegedly instituted the most corrupt government in Nigeria. He died while in office and his assistant, General Abdul Salami replaced him.
Abdul Salami wrote a constitution for Nigeria in 1999. That year, an election was held and Obasanjo and his People’s Democratic Party won the election. Obasanjo became the president of Nigeria. Obasanjo is still in office (September, 2005).
The purpose of this paper is not to provide the reader with a thorough history of Nigeria. The paper’s goal is to reflect on the type of government that suits Nigeria and other countries in Africa. If the reader is interested in a more detailed history of Nigeria, he or she should read books on Nigeria’s history.
THE MULTI ETHNIC REALITY OF NIGERIA
What is the reality of Nigeria? It is that it is an artificial country. Nigeria was put together by the British. The British did not consult the people living in Nigeria before they forcefully agglomerated them into one political entity.
Nigeria is composed of Hausas (Hausa is actually not a tribe; it is a Creole language, mix of Arab and African, spoken by those Northern tribes that had accepted Islam as their religion, and who were greatly influenced by Arab culture; they tend to have a unified, Moslem based worldview, and, for all practical purposes, may as well be considered an ethnic group), Yorubas, Igbos, Ijaws, Edos, Efiks, Urobos, Isikiris, Tivis, Kanuris, Fulanis, Bornu and many minor tribes.
These tribes, ethnic groups, call them what you like, are different from one another. They were forced to live with one another against their will. This, then, is the major problem of Nigeria. Different groups of human beings were forced against their will to live in the same country.
Generally, some of these tribes detest others. However, for some reasons, they are compelled to live together. As noted, in 1967 the Igbos seceded from Nigeria. The Gowon led Hausa-Fulani government at Lagos went to war with Biafra and successfully defeated it. Why did the Hausa-Fulani and their Yoruba ally go to war with the Igbos? Was it for their love of the Igbos?
Biafra encompassed the Niger Delta region, the region that produced most of the oil that provided the revenue with which Nigeria survived. Therefore, Biafra had to be defeated so that the Hausas, Fulanis and Yorubas (the triple alliance that fought the war with the Igbos) would have access to oil revenue.
The Nigerian civil war was, in effect, an economic war. The people from the North and West needed to get their hands on Niger Delta oil and had to defeat the Igbos so as to do so.
Today, revenue from oil supplies over 90% of the money that funds the Nigerian federal government, the Hausa and Yoruba governments and some other governments in Nigeria.
The men from the North and West essentially keep Nigeria together for economic reasons: they need to get their hands on the oil revenue that comes from the Niger Delta. They could care less for the Ijaw who live in the Delta. They, of course, in a Machiavellian vein manipulate the Ijaw and tell them that their neighbors, the Igbos, would like to take over their oil. Thus, the Ijaw, who are, in fact, a mix of Igbos and themselves, see the Igbos as their mortal enemies and then run to the Hausas to protect them. The Hausas protect them alright.
Money from Ijawland’s oil is used to develop Northern and other parts of Nigeria, while Ijawland is ignored. Ijawland is so devastated by oil drilling and burning of gas that it literally looks like denuded moonscape.
What we have in Nigeria is a collection of odd bedfellows who, for the sake of oil money, agree to tolerate each other. These people hate one another with passion but know enough to realize that they need the oil revenue from certain parts of Nigeria. Thus, like honorable thieves, they agree to get along with one another, provided that they share the loot from Ijawland.
There is no doubt whatsoever that what holds that strange country called Nigeria together is oil money. If there was no oil in Biafra, Northerners would have gladly seceded from Nigeria and not give a hoot for Igboland. It has been reported that the original intention of the August 1966 counter coup was to secede the North from the rest of Nigeria. Apparently, the coup plotters wised up to the fact that they needed revenue from the Niger Delta, changed their minds and decided to keep Nigeria one.
As long as these strange fellows have oil money to share, they would probably continue to agree to be in the same country. But when that oil runs dry, Nigeria probably would disintegrate. Nigeria probably will not last a second longer than oil lasts.
We have established that the political entity called Nigeria is the invention of Britain. We have further established that the British put together different people who did not want to live together and forced them to live together.
The various ethnic groups are radically different from each other, some as night is from day. The Hausas are Moslem. The Igbos are Christian. The Hausa had established a feudal political structure before the British came to their land. The Hausas seem to have adjusted to their feudal social structure. On the other hand, the Igbos are very individualistic, democratic and republican in orientation. Before the advent of the Europeans in Alaigbo, Igbos did not have kings ruling them. The Igbos do not like the Hausa feudal social- political structure.
How can these two very different people coexist in the same political arrangement? They cannot do so without conflict. The Igbo detests what he sees as the Hausa feudal system of governance and the Hausa does so regarding Igbo republicanism. The result is conflict between the two groups. So far, this conflict is masked by the preponderance of power that the Hausas have.
The Hausas control the Nigerian military (with second fiddle role performed by the Yoruba). For practical purposes, the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba military axis overwhelm the Igbo with their superior military power and, in effect, terrorize them into going along with the pseudo political entity called Nigeria.
The Igbos are a terrorized people. The men from the North and West use military power to intimidate the Igbos into going along with the government of Nigeria. Without force holding them down, the Igbos would break away from Nigeria, today.
(One may ask whether it is right to terrorize a group of people? Hasn’t human civilization gotten to a point where terrorism is no longer tolerated as instrument of governance? If terrorism is wrong, why does the rest of the world keep quiet while a group of human beings are intimidated with brutal force? Moslem terrorism in Europe and North America is fought by the West. Why does the West permit Moslem terrorism in Nigeria?)
One is searching for a political arrangement that gives all Nigerians freedom to be themselves and not intimidated persons.
In Ones view, it is necessary for the various ethnic groups that exist in Nigeria to come together in a national conference and renegotiate the parameters of their continued existence as a nation. In all likelihood, they would choose a confederation, not total divorce from each other.
Let us restate the obvious. The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are different from one another. Each of them ought to be allowed to develop along its natural lines. No one ethnic group should impose its worldview on the others. Each group ought to have the opportunity to pursue its destiny, without others interfering in it.
At present, the various ethnic groups are forced to live together. The more powerful ones impose their values on others and these others silently resent being imposed on. A sort of Carthaginian peace prevails in Nigeria. But we all know that such peace does not last forever.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a mask for Russian empire, comprised of sixteen republics. In 1991, those sixteen groups separated from Russia. Within today’s Russia Federation are many ethnic groups, these suppressed by the Russian people. Some of these ethnic groups are agitating for freedom. Chechnya is fighting for independence. By and by, the various ethnic groups in Russia will obtain a measure of independence from Russia. Until Russia has the foresight to give some independence to these people, it must remain an unstable empire.
In Yugoslavia, President Tito used iron hand to hold six different nations together. These nations: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo-Albania etc are now running their own governments, but not before Yugoslavia had under went political and military convulsions.
Czechoslovakia saw the hand writing on the wall and peacefully separated into its two component parts, Czech and Slovakia republics.
The English used force to unify the disparate people that lived on Britain. The various Celtic groups were forced to accept the ruler ship of the English (Germans). But, today, the suppressed groups are agitating for a measure of Independence. The Welch, the Scotts and the Irish are asking for independence. Tony Blair, the astute British Prime Minister, has read the hand writing on the wall and realized that you cannot suppress a people forever and ever hence devolved the government and gave the Welch and Scotts a measure of independence.
After over a thousand years of being subjugated, the Celts of Britain are today resurrecting their “dead languages and cultures”. This goes to show that you simply cannot suppress a people forever.
In the United States of America, the Anglo Saxon elements employed superior force to displace the Indians and relegated them to reservations. In these ghettos, the Indians are given alcohol to drink themselves to untimely death. Genocide is being perpetrated against Native Americans, and the world keeps silent.
Nevertheless, if what we know of history remains constant, American Indians will some day come to their own. In the not too distant future, the various Indian tribes will probably rise up and become self governing entities.
THE MERITS OF CONFEDERATION
We have posited that Nigeria and most contemporary African countries are artificial social constructs. We have established that these countries essentially constitute forced marriages. Like in all such social arrangements, those in them itch to get out. In most cases, they are held together by brute force. In the case of Nigeria, military force is used to terrorize the Igbos into staying in a political arrangement that they detest.
What is the alternative to terrorist African states? Is total divorce called for in Nigeria?
The various ethnic groups in Nigeria are often too small and weak to go it alone. Independently, most of them are not viable political and or economic entities. Somehow, they need each other to survive.
The real question is not dissolving Nigeria but finding a better form of association for the current strange bed fellows called Nigerians. Since these people need each other and yet do not get along with each other, one believes that the best workable political arrangement for them is a confederation.
We need to retain the fiction called Nigeria but reorganize and make it realistic to its multi-ethnic composition.
Each of the twenty ethnic groups in Nigeria ought to become a state, a state in the real sense of that term; a state that rules itself. The various states then should cooperate with each other in a confederation of states called Nigeria.
The states should delegate certain functions to the central government, such as foreign affairs and military control. But beyond the specific areas given to the central government, each of the constituent states ought to govern itself in every other way, including having 100% control of its resources.
(The Ijaw ought to have 100% control of the oil revenue that comes from her area. Ijaw indigenes, like every one else, should pay income taxes to the confederal government. The confederal government ought to be able to impose no more than 25% tax on the individual’s annual income, and use such revenue to fund its activities.)
There should be the following states in the Confederation of Nigeria: Hausa State, Yoruba State, Igbo State, Edo State, Efik State, Ijaw State, Tivi State, Kanuri State, Bornu State. The minor tribes should be grouped into states. The total number of states in Nigeria should not exceed twenty.
The critical requirement is that each of the major ethnic groups constitutes a state and has the opportunity to govern its affairs, unimpeded by other ethnic groups.
Each state must include all those who speak a unique language, different dialects not withstanding. Alaigbo State, for example, must stretch from Ikwerre (Egwuocha/Port Harcourt) to Abo, from Arochukwu to Ida/Nsuka, with its capital at Owerri, the Igbo heartland.
One visualizes the state structure to be as follows: a unicameral legislature (not bicameral legislature, to reduce cost and avoid duplication of functions), not to exceed fifty elected legislators, who serve fiver year terms, not to exceed six terms, for a total of 30 years; a Premier selected from the dominant party in the state legislature, who is the chief executive officer of the state; a governor who is the nominal head of the state and signs bills passed by the legislature into law, an independent judiciary (High Court of seven judges, headed by the state chief judge, district courts, and town courts).
The state political structure is replicated at the district level: A district council of nine members, a district executive, elected for a five year term, two term limits, who heads the executive branch; a district court with district judge of first instance.
Finally, a town/city government: town/city council of seven members and a mayor heading the executive branch and a town magistrate court.
Each state is to have no more than fifty districts (and district governments).
The states would be responsible for delivering education and health services to their citizens. Each state must provide all its citizens with free six year primary education, free six year secondary education, free four year university education for at least one third of the graduating students from secondary schools and free four years of technical education for all the other graduates of secondary schools. Graduate education should be for the top ten percent of university graduates (a two year masters’ degree program and another three years for the doctor of science degree program for the top two percent of graduate students.)
Towns/cities are to be required to provide preschool education for children from age two to five…here working women drop off their children in the morning and pick them up after work, with such centers remaining open from six in the morning to seven in the evening. The town must find the resources, through property and sales taxes and licensing fees etc to fund this and other services.
Each state is to obtain its revenue independently from the confederal government. It is to tax its citizens and seek other revenue streams with which it funds its activities. Under no circumstances is a state to be financially dependent on the central government.
The confederal government is to be composed of a legislature (at least two delegates from each state, not to exceed overall 100 legislators for the country), legislators serve five year terms, not to exceed six terms, 30 years altogether; a prime minister elected by the legislators from among themselves; who serves a term of five years, but not to exceed two terms, ten years; an elected but nominal president who serves one term of ten years, the president must be of retirement age, a 70 year old national achiever, say, the best scientist in the country; an independent judiciary with the usual three tiers: Supreme Court of not more than thirteen justices, one of whom is the chief justice, appellate courts of three judges and district courts of single judges; each state having at least one district court, and a group of states constituting an appellate area.
What one visualizes for Nigeria is a situation where each of the ethnic groups in it is essentially governing itself while delegating certain powers to the national government. This arrangement would give each ethnic group sufficient sense of independence and leg room to be itself. This system will work for Nigeria.
In fact, it is the only system that will work for Nigeria. Not only will it work for Nigeria, it will work for other multiethnic countries in Africa. One advocates that multi ethnic countries in Africa adopt confederal systems of government. African countries, in fact, do not have any choice but to do this.
If in the future Africans freely choose to become federations with strong central governments, rather than confederations with weak central governments, that are welcome. In the present, confederating the present African countries seem the only way to avert some groups dominating others, and those dominated resenting it, with the result being intermittent civil wars in Africa.
DISADVANTAGES OF CONFEDERATIONS
Whereas confederal government seems the best government for extant African countries, this type of government tends to have inherent weaknesses. It is because of its weaknesses that the United States of America gave it up. It should be recalled that after its war of independence, America first adopted a confederal constitution (Articles of Confederation) and later found that system unworkable. Essentially, the Articles of Confederation made the central government too weak and the states too strong. The states did not have to accept direction from the center. There was no president or judiciary; congress was not even standing but met occasionally. This arrangement was particularly detrimental to the country’s military so that enemies easily walked all over America.
In light of the inherent problems in confederations, one made some changes in them by insisting on a standing national legislature, nominal president, executive prime minister, unified military command at the central level and the center’s control of foreign relations.
Each state must have control of its own police force (the central government must have its own police and additionally a secret police).
We do not have to deny some of the inherent problems of confederal governments, but with good effort, confederations can be made to work, after all they work in Switzerland. At any rate, it seems the only alternative that would avert Africans penchant for mutual mayhem.
(Courtesy BNW Magazine)
Mr. Crispin Cole | May 25, 2006
Student from Sierra Leone tells classmates why she only has one hand
Damba Koroma, who made a video about her life as a victim of rebels in Sierra Leone, and Kamika Jones, 14, right, recite the Pledge of Allegiance during their daily TV broadcast at Hammond Middle School, in Alexandria, Va.
By Tara Bahrampour
The Washington Post(With Courtesy)
Updated: 10:42 a.m. ET May 24, 2006
WASHINGTON - On Monday morning, the two young women anchoring Francis C. Hammond Middle School's daily televised news show chirpily announced an upcoming roller skating party, a talent show and a book club event.
Then one of the anchors, a bright-eyed Sierra Leonian immigrant named Damba Koroma, gave a nervous giggle and showed her fellow students, watching from classrooms throughout the Alexandria school, a video of herself that explained why she doesn't have a left hand.
"In August of 1998, war came to my village and ended my peaceful and normal life," said Damba, 13, who in the video was wearing a tank top that bared her arms. She explained that rebels set homes on fire and then attacked the villagers, killing those they accused of collaborating with the government and raping women and young girls.
They gathered the villagers under a tree and selected Damba, then 5, to make an example of. The rebel leader pushed her to the ground. "I could not hold the fear in me," she said. "I was cold and terrified. He landed his machete on my left arm. I felt a sharp pain running through my entire body. I was overwhelmed, and my whole body was shaking."
Dressed now as an anchor in a purple striped T-shirt, white skirt and pearls, Damba stared down as the video ran. At times her right hand, with its impeccably polished pink fingernails, reached unconsciously to cradle the stump of her left forearm.
"When my mother asked if she could pick me up and tie my bleeding arm, the same rebel who had cut off my arm ordered her to lay by me, and he cut off my mother's left arm." After several days, the two made it to a hospital. The video showed a photo of them, smiling on a bed together, left arms swathed in identical bandages.
After the broadcast, Damba's fellow anchor, Tamika Jones, 14, asked her schoolmates to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. Tamika was supposed to smile when she announced it. But she just couldn't.
Behind the cameras, in the darkened broadcasting room, students sniffled.
"I was about to cry," said Farishta Boura, 15, adding that she had never known why Damba was missing a hand. "I never asked her. It would be kind of mean, you know; it would be rude."
Tens of thousands killed, mutilated
Tens of thousands of people in Sierra Leone died or were mutilated during a decade-long war that began in 1990 as rebels fought to control the country's diamond mines. After living in refugee camps for several years, Damba was among a group of children brought to the United States to be fitted for prosthetics in 2002. She was taken in a few months later by a Sierra Leonian family in Alexandria that plans to adopt her.
Students at Hammond are used to seeing Damba -- a girl who sings alto in the choir, who acts in school plays, who aces her courses. Most of them are at an age where any blemish, any fashion mistake, can cause paroxysms of horror. But not many asked why Damba looked the way she did. Some thought she simply had been born that way.
Her peers have not always been so accepting. When she arrived in Alexandria at age 10 and enrolled at Ramsay Elementary School, some teased her. "They would call me a pirate or ask if I was one," she said. "Some of them would laugh at me and make me cry."
Her guardian, Amina Jah, contacted the school, and the teasers were made to apologize. Since then Damba has gotten good at sticking up for herself and answering questions with a disarming forthrightness.
"I'd like them to know . . . that what happened to me is not my fault; it's just something that I had nothing to do with," she explained, adding that showing the video felt good. "I'm kind of excited because it's kind of like a great feeling to let the whole world know what you've been through."
Damba said she hopes the video will go beyond the halls of Hammond Middle School -- she has drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey that she plans to send along with the video.
Her teachers say her personality overshadows her disability. "She has this gift of making you feel good," said Elaine Brand, a school librarian who helped her make the video. "I don't know if it's what she went through or it's genetic -- she's just a child with an intuitive spirit. . . . There are other children hiding all kinds of things in this school, and she is what she is, and she makes you want to be what you are."
Facing challenges
Still, she faces challenges. In a rock-climbing course in PE class she was reduced to tears because she thought she couldn't do it, until her teacher told her she could, and with the help of her friends she scaled the wall. "I was surprised that I could do it," she said.
She surprises her new family, too. When she insisted on buying a pair of shoes with a complicated set of ribbons, Jah was skeptical, but Damba quickly went into her room and tied them herself.
The nightmares Damba had when she first arrived have gone away. So has her fear of going outside the small brick and clapboard house she shares with her "auntie" and "uncle" and their two young daughters. When people would stare at her stump in public, Jah grabbed it and kissed it.
"She likes that," Jah said, "and people stop looking at us."
Damba still badly misses her mother, who is back in the village farming with her other three children and a niece. The two talk every couple of months, whenever her mother makes it into the town where there is a telephone. Damba wants to visit her in Guinea, which they can both travel to, but the high cost means it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, her guardians send money and clothes to her mother when they can.
After the broadcast, when she walked into her language arts class, several students gathered to ask questions.
"Why didn't you run?" said Priestly Williams, 14.
"I couldn't run," Damba said.
"Did you feel it?" he asked.
"Mm-hmm."
"How big was the knife?"
Damba reached her arms out wide. "It's really sharp, and it's like this long and curved."
In social studies, her classmates talked about her broadcast.
"I know when she said 'machete,' everybody shut up," said Hermes Hernandez, 13.
"Do you realize that your standing here, it's a miracle?" said Kyle Stevenson, 12. "Do you realize that?"
Yes, Damba said. She did.
Damba Koroma, who made a video about her life as a victim of rebels in Sierra Leone, and Kamika Jones, 14, right, recite the Pledge of Allegiance during their daily TV broadcast at Hammond Middle School, in Alexandria, Va.
By Tara Bahrampour
The Washington Post(With Courtesy)
Updated: 10:42 a.m. ET May 24, 2006
WASHINGTON - On Monday morning, the two young women anchoring Francis C. Hammond Middle School's daily televised news show chirpily announced an upcoming roller skating party, a talent show and a book club event.
Then one of the anchors, a bright-eyed Sierra Leonian immigrant named Damba Koroma, gave a nervous giggle and showed her fellow students, watching from classrooms throughout the Alexandria school, a video of herself that explained why she doesn't have a left hand.
"In August of 1998, war came to my village and ended my peaceful and normal life," said Damba, 13, who in the video was wearing a tank top that bared her arms. She explained that rebels set homes on fire and then attacked the villagers, killing those they accused of collaborating with the government and raping women and young girls.
They gathered the villagers under a tree and selected Damba, then 5, to make an example of. The rebel leader pushed her to the ground. "I could not hold the fear in me," she said. "I was cold and terrified. He landed his machete on my left arm. I felt a sharp pain running through my entire body. I was overwhelmed, and my whole body was shaking."
Dressed now as an anchor in a purple striped T-shirt, white skirt and pearls, Damba stared down as the video ran. At times her right hand, with its impeccably polished pink fingernails, reached unconsciously to cradle the stump of her left forearm.
"When my mother asked if she could pick me up and tie my bleeding arm, the same rebel who had cut off my arm ordered her to lay by me, and he cut off my mother's left arm." After several days, the two made it to a hospital. The video showed a photo of them, smiling on a bed together, left arms swathed in identical bandages.
After the broadcast, Damba's fellow anchor, Tamika Jones, 14, asked her schoolmates to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. Tamika was supposed to smile when she announced it. But she just couldn't.
Behind the cameras, in the darkened broadcasting room, students sniffled.
"I was about to cry," said Farishta Boura, 15, adding that she had never known why Damba was missing a hand. "I never asked her. It would be kind of mean, you know; it would be rude."
Tens of thousands killed, mutilated
Tens of thousands of people in Sierra Leone died or were mutilated during a decade-long war that began in 1990 as rebels fought to control the country's diamond mines. After living in refugee camps for several years, Damba was among a group of children brought to the United States to be fitted for prosthetics in 2002. She was taken in a few months later by a Sierra Leonian family in Alexandria that plans to adopt her.
Students at Hammond are used to seeing Damba -- a girl who sings alto in the choir, who acts in school plays, who aces her courses. Most of them are at an age where any blemish, any fashion mistake, can cause paroxysms of horror. But not many asked why Damba looked the way she did. Some thought she simply had been born that way.
Her peers have not always been so accepting. When she arrived in Alexandria at age 10 and enrolled at Ramsay Elementary School, some teased her. "They would call me a pirate or ask if I was one," she said. "Some of them would laugh at me and make me cry."
Her guardian, Amina Jah, contacted the school, and the teasers were made to apologize. Since then Damba has gotten good at sticking up for herself and answering questions with a disarming forthrightness.
"I'd like them to know . . . that what happened to me is not my fault; it's just something that I had nothing to do with," she explained, adding that showing the video felt good. "I'm kind of excited because it's kind of like a great feeling to let the whole world know what you've been through."
Damba said she hopes the video will go beyond the halls of Hammond Middle School -- she has drafted a letter to Oprah Winfrey that she plans to send along with the video.
Her teachers say her personality overshadows her disability. "She has this gift of making you feel good," said Elaine Brand, a school librarian who helped her make the video. "I don't know if it's what she went through or it's genetic -- she's just a child with an intuitive spirit. . . . There are other children hiding all kinds of things in this school, and she is what she is, and she makes you want to be what you are."
Facing challenges
Still, she faces challenges. In a rock-climbing course in PE class she was reduced to tears because she thought she couldn't do it, until her teacher told her she could, and with the help of her friends she scaled the wall. "I was surprised that I could do it," she said.
She surprises her new family, too. When she insisted on buying a pair of shoes with a complicated set of ribbons, Jah was skeptical, but Damba quickly went into her room and tied them herself.
The nightmares Damba had when she first arrived have gone away. So has her fear of going outside the small brick and clapboard house she shares with her "auntie" and "uncle" and their two young daughters. When people would stare at her stump in public, Jah grabbed it and kissed it.
"She likes that," Jah said, "and people stop looking at us."
Damba still badly misses her mother, who is back in the village farming with her other three children and a niece. The two talk every couple of months, whenever her mother makes it into the town where there is a telephone. Damba wants to visit her in Guinea, which they can both travel to, but the high cost means it won't happen for a while. In the meantime, her guardians send money and clothes to her mother when they can.
After the broadcast, when she walked into her language arts class, several students gathered to ask questions.
"Why didn't you run?" said Priestly Williams, 14.
"I couldn't run," Damba said.
"Did you feel it?" he asked.
"Mm-hmm."
"How big was the knife?"
Damba reached her arms out wide. "It's really sharp, and it's like this long and curved."
In social studies, her classmates talked about her broadcast.
"I know when she said 'machete,' everybody shut up," said Hermes Hernandez, 13.
"Do you realize that your standing here, it's a miracle?" said Kyle Stevenson, 12. "Do you realize that?"
Yes, Damba said. She did.
Mr. Crispin Cole | May 20, 2006
MIKE MALLOY
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
(Courtesy The Des Moines Register)
May 20, 2006
Like many soccer players, Morris Amara started playing when he was very young, honed his skills at a club and is now starring for his high school team.
His story, however, is anything but typical.
Amara, a Hoover senior, was born in Sierra Leone - a nation on Africa's western coast - and will step onto the pitch today for a substate match with Urbandale.
There's pressure, but nothing comparing to what Amara already has faced.
The long walk
Amara lived in Freetown - Sierra Leone's capital. Its sprawling cityscape and population of over 1,000,000 gave him ample chances to play his favorite sport.
"When he was little, five or six, he would be gone all the time. I would have to look for him; he was playing soccer," said Amara's mother, Kadiatu Massaquoi.
His speed, combined with ever-improving skills, made him a dazzling player.
"Street soccer is all about dribbling and quick legs. It really helped my game, then when I was nine or 10 I went to a soccer school, and that's the first time I played field soccer," Amara said.
The streets taught Amara much about soccer, and also brutality. A now-ended civil war that began in 1991 was fought largely in rural areas of the county, but Amara vividly remembers the day the conflict came home.
"The war never really hit me until Jan. 6, 1999," he said. "It was a cool morning . . . a Wednesday. They took over."
"They" is the Revolutionary United Front - a rebel force that was attempting to overthrow the government. Its methods were barbaric.
"I saw a lot of my friends killed. If they found out you were against them, they would use a car tire, put kerosene on it, light a match, and burn you on the street," Amara said.
It's been said that wars stop during the World Cup, and perhaps it is that sentiment that saved Amara.
"A lot of the RUF were friendly to me because I played soccer," he said.
Amara, Massaquoi, step-father, David, and sister, Isha - now also a Hoover student - left Freetown. They embarked on their own trail of tears as they walked hundreds of miles to Guinea, Sierra Leone's northern neighbor, where Massaquoi had family.
"No vehicle, no money, sometimes no food," Massaquoi said. "Sometimes all we had was water."
America, eventually
David moved to the United States in 1999, and Morris, Isha and Massaquoi followed - arriving in Des Moines on May 31, 2001.
Amara spoke some English, and said being an athlete "definitely made it easier."
His new town was radically different from his old, but even downsides had advantages.
"It's boring, I won't lie, but it is a good place to raise a family," Amara said. "(Freetown) was always packed. Over there, there would always be kids running around, markets in the street, a lot going on."
Amara found Americans to be friendly and accepting, though sometimes ignorant.
"People will be like, 'Oh, you're from Africa.' Well, Africa is a big continent with many countries," Amara said. "A lot of Americans only know what's around them. If you're on top of the world, you should know about the people below you."
Among friends
An athlete referring to teammates as "family" is common, but Amara shares even more than his sport with several members of the Hoover team.
Juniors Abu Darboh and Abdulai Kamara also hail from Sierra Leone, while several other players immigrated from neighboring Liberia, which also is recovering from civil war.
Bonding with teammates on the field took longer.
"When I was younger, I would never pass the ball," Amara said.
Amara - who leads Hoover with 10 goals and seven assists - credits coach Chris Faidley for making him a more complete player.
"Kobe Bryant has the ability to score 40 or 50 points a night, but just because you can doesn't make it right," Faidley said. "As a sophomore he took in upon himself to beat two or three guys. He's a better player now, but he's not as flashy."
But he is focused.
"Back in the day I was one of the best players, but I would get mad, get a red card and get kicked out. Now I keep my cool," he said.
Amara's college plans are uncertain. His outlook is not.
"I could have died during the war, so that's why you have to live life to the fullest," he said.
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
(Courtesy The Des Moines Register)
May 20, 2006
Like many soccer players, Morris Amara started playing when he was very young, honed his skills at a club and is now starring for his high school team.
His story, however, is anything but typical.
Amara, a Hoover senior, was born in Sierra Leone - a nation on Africa's western coast - and will step onto the pitch today for a substate match with Urbandale.
There's pressure, but nothing comparing to what Amara already has faced.
The long walk
Amara lived in Freetown - Sierra Leone's capital. Its sprawling cityscape and population of over 1,000,000 gave him ample chances to play his favorite sport.
"When he was little, five or six, he would be gone all the time. I would have to look for him; he was playing soccer," said Amara's mother, Kadiatu Massaquoi.
His speed, combined with ever-improving skills, made him a dazzling player.
"Street soccer is all about dribbling and quick legs. It really helped my game, then when I was nine or 10 I went to a soccer school, and that's the first time I played field soccer," Amara said.
The streets taught Amara much about soccer, and also brutality. A now-ended civil war that began in 1991 was fought largely in rural areas of the county, but Amara vividly remembers the day the conflict came home.
"The war never really hit me until Jan. 6, 1999," he said. "It was a cool morning . . . a Wednesday. They took over."
"They" is the Revolutionary United Front - a rebel force that was attempting to overthrow the government. Its methods were barbaric.
"I saw a lot of my friends killed. If they found out you were against them, they would use a car tire, put kerosene on it, light a match, and burn you on the street," Amara said.
It's been said that wars stop during the World Cup, and perhaps it is that sentiment that saved Amara.
"A lot of the RUF were friendly to me because I played soccer," he said.
Amara, Massaquoi, step-father, David, and sister, Isha - now also a Hoover student - left Freetown. They embarked on their own trail of tears as they walked hundreds of miles to Guinea, Sierra Leone's northern neighbor, where Massaquoi had family.
"No vehicle, no money, sometimes no food," Massaquoi said. "Sometimes all we had was water."
America, eventually
David moved to the United States in 1999, and Morris, Isha and Massaquoi followed - arriving in Des Moines on May 31, 2001.
Amara spoke some English, and said being an athlete "definitely made it easier."
His new town was radically different from his old, but even downsides had advantages.
"It's boring, I won't lie, but it is a good place to raise a family," Amara said. "(Freetown) was always packed. Over there, there would always be kids running around, markets in the street, a lot going on."
Amara found Americans to be friendly and accepting, though sometimes ignorant.
"People will be like, 'Oh, you're from Africa.' Well, Africa is a big continent with many countries," Amara said. "A lot of Americans only know what's around them. If you're on top of the world, you should know about the people below you."
Among friends
An athlete referring to teammates as "family" is common, but Amara shares even more than his sport with several members of the Hoover team.
Juniors Abu Darboh and Abdulai Kamara also hail from Sierra Leone, while several other players immigrated from neighboring Liberia, which also is recovering from civil war.
Bonding with teammates on the field took longer.
"When I was younger, I would never pass the ball," Amara said.
Amara - who leads Hoover with 10 goals and seven assists - credits coach Chris Faidley for making him a more complete player.
"Kobe Bryant has the ability to score 40 or 50 points a night, but just because you can doesn't make it right," Faidley said. "As a sophomore he took in upon himself to beat two or three guys. He's a better player now, but he's not as flashy."
But he is focused.
"Back in the day I was one of the best players, but I would get mad, get a red card and get kicked out. Now I keep my cool," he said.
Amara's college plans are uncertain. His outlook is not.
"I could have died during the war, so that's why you have to live life to the fullest," he said.
Mr. Crispin Cole | May 14, 2006
(KMOV) - It's a boy for new dad Jeff Boyce, and his happy wife Maria.
At this baby shower in their honor, you can't miss the many gifts, the colorful cakes or the fact that Maria has no hands.
Someday her son, Joseph will be old enough to ask his mother, 'What happened?'
The answer to that question goes back to the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the year 1999, where a bloody civil war had left thousands dead or mutilated by rebel soldiers.
Only 13 at the time, Maria was captured with other children, then lined up by rebel soldiers who systematically started hacking at their hands.
"I’m the only one who have my, both hands chopped off," said Maria.
Maria ran away, passed out and woke to find herself under a banana tree.
She prayed that God would keep her alive and protect her.
Maria said she, "was just sitting there and they was shooting the bullet over my head and I just felt, like someone right beside my shoulder, like you're going to be fine, everything's going to be okay."
A world away, a Missouri man named Lonnie Houk picked up a Time Magazine with an article on war atrocities, and saw a picture of a girl named Maria, holding up her stumps.
He says it just broke his heart. It was around this time that Lonnie launched a medical missionary group called 'Feed My Lambs,' and then took a fact-finding trip to the Ivory Coast.
But through a set of circumstances ended up in Freetown, Sierra Leone at only one of sixteen refugee camps for amputees.
Lonnie pulled out the picture of Maria which he'd saved.
"I said would anybody know this little girl, he said yeah, and within five minutes this little girl that I had been praying for was standing right next to me," said Lonnie.
Lonnie made no promises, but knew he had to do something.
“There was a pull on my heart at that time that I knew wouldn't go away," he said.
Maria was confident he was the beginning of the answer to her prayers.
Six months later Lonnie returned, with medical supplies and doctors, but Maria and a second girl named Sia needed surgery in the U.S.
Soon, two African girls who'd lived in mud huts with no electricity, were on their way to Missouri,
When Lonny and the girls walked off the plane, he realized how deeply he'd been touched by that girl in the photo.
"All of a sudden I just realized a big mission had been completed, but another mission was just starting," he said.
Maria would undergo three surgeries and be fitted with battery powered prosthetic hands.
Lonny said, "first time Maria got her artificial hands, we was at the Kansas City rehab center, she made it work, she made it hold a pencil, she wrote I love you dad on it, on a little piece of paper."
One day Maria knelt by her bed, put her handless arms together and prayed to forgive those who mutilated her.
Maria says, "I’m a Christian and I forgive them because Jesus forgive my sin."
After making the high school track team, Maria met another high school athlete, named Jeff, fell in love and got married.
Jeff and Maria’s son, Joseph is four months old and growing like a weed.
The couple lives with Jeff’s parents, where Maria chips in with the chores.
Maria still has the prosthetic hands she was fitted with when she first came to the United States.
She only wears them part of the time and it's pretty amazing to see how well she functions without them."
Maria calls Lonnie dad and they get together often.
He insists her story is not about his actions, but her faith.
At the age of 20, Maria graduates from high school in a few days. She calls her parents in Africa once a month and hopes to visit them someday soon.
Watch Russell Kinsaul’s report and Amazing video: CLICK HERE
http://www.kmov.com/sharedcontent/VideoPlayer/videoPlayer.php?vidId=62950
(Courtesy KMOV)
At this baby shower in their honor, you can't miss the many gifts, the colorful cakes or the fact that Maria has no hands.
Someday her son, Joseph will be old enough to ask his mother, 'What happened?'
The answer to that question goes back to the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the year 1999, where a bloody civil war had left thousands dead or mutilated by rebel soldiers.
Only 13 at the time, Maria was captured with other children, then lined up by rebel soldiers who systematically started hacking at their hands.
"I’m the only one who have my, both hands chopped off," said Maria.
Maria ran away, passed out and woke to find herself under a banana tree.
She prayed that God would keep her alive and protect her.
Maria said she, "was just sitting there and they was shooting the bullet over my head and I just felt, like someone right beside my shoulder, like you're going to be fine, everything's going to be okay."
A world away, a Missouri man named Lonnie Houk picked up a Time Magazine with an article on war atrocities, and saw a picture of a girl named Maria, holding up her stumps.
He says it just broke his heart. It was around this time that Lonnie launched a medical missionary group called 'Feed My Lambs,' and then took a fact-finding trip to the Ivory Coast.
But through a set of circumstances ended up in Freetown, Sierra Leone at only one of sixteen refugee camps for amputees.
Lonnie pulled out the picture of Maria which he'd saved.
"I said would anybody know this little girl, he said yeah, and within five minutes this little girl that I had been praying for was standing right next to me," said Lonnie.
Lonnie made no promises, but knew he had to do something.
“There was a pull on my heart at that time that I knew wouldn't go away," he said.
Maria was confident he was the beginning of the answer to her prayers.
Six months later Lonnie returned, with medical supplies and doctors, but Maria and a second girl named Sia needed surgery in the U.S.
Soon, two African girls who'd lived in mud huts with no electricity, were on their way to Missouri,
When Lonny and the girls walked off the plane, he realized how deeply he'd been touched by that girl in the photo.
"All of a sudden I just realized a big mission had been completed, but another mission was just starting," he said.
Maria would undergo three surgeries and be fitted with battery powered prosthetic hands.
Lonny said, "first time Maria got her artificial hands, we was at the Kansas City rehab center, she made it work, she made it hold a pencil, she wrote I love you dad on it, on a little piece of paper."
One day Maria knelt by her bed, put her handless arms together and prayed to forgive those who mutilated her.
Maria says, "I’m a Christian and I forgive them because Jesus forgive my sin."
After making the high school track team, Maria met another high school athlete, named Jeff, fell in love and got married.
Jeff and Maria’s son, Joseph is four months old and growing like a weed.
The couple lives with Jeff’s parents, where Maria chips in with the chores.
Maria still has the prosthetic hands she was fitted with when she first came to the United States.
She only wears them part of the time and it's pretty amazing to see how well she functions without them."
Maria calls Lonnie dad and they get together often.
He insists her story is not about his actions, but her faith.
At the age of 20, Maria graduates from high school in a few days. She calls her parents in Africa once a month and hopes to visit them someday soon.
Watch Russell Kinsaul’s report and Amazing video: CLICK HERE
http://www.kmov.com/sharedcontent/VideoPlayer/videoPlayer.php?vidId=62950
(Courtesy KMOV)
Mr. Crispin Cole | April 14, 2006
By Gumisai Mutume
Sometimes, for months on end, young African men and women risk everything, including their lives, to take on the perilous trip across dozens of borders and the treacherous waves of the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in the North. Some die along the way, some are turned back and some who finish the journey realize that life may not be easier across the frontier. But with few jobs and dim prospects at home, millions of youths and young adults in Africa still choose to migrate, often clandestinely.
Such movements of people pose difficult questions for many governments and for the international community. One of the most pressing concerns of governments and citizens in industrialized countries is irregular migration: illegal entry, bogus marriages, overstaying temporary admissions, abuse of asylum systems and the difficulty of removing unsuccessful applicants.
Migration is currently at the centre of disagreements between the mainly poor sending countries and the richer receiving nations. Today the world is more connected than ever. Information, commodities and money flow rapidly across national boundaries, a phenomenon often referred to as globalization. But while industrial countries are promoting easier flows of capital, goods and services (which they mainly supply), they are at the same time restricting the movement of labour, which comes mainly from developing countries. Developing countries view this as a double standard, especially since labour is an important factor in the production of goods and services.
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An aspiring African migrant on the road in Morocco, a common departure point for migrants seeking to reach Europe.
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Between 1960 and 2000, the share of merchandise exports and trade in services has roughly doubled, owing to new global trade policies negotiated at the World Trade Organization (WTO). But during the same period the share of international migrants in relation to the world’s population has increased only slightly, from 2.5 to 3 per cent. This is due to increasing restrictions on official migration, which are also partly to blame for the rise in illegal migration.
By 2000 there were an estimated 175 million migrants worldwide, most moving from low- to higher-income nations. About 9 per cent — 16.3 million — were African, down from 12 per cent in 1960. Between 5 and 12 per cent of the population of 30 industrialized nations are migrants, notes the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM).
Complex issues
Migration brings with it “many complex challenges,” says UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The issues include human rights, economic opportunity, labour shortages and unemployment, the brain drain, multiculturalism and integration, and flows of refugees and asylum seekers. Policy makers also must grapple with issues of law enforcement. Especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, many are focusing on human and national security.
“We cannot ignore the real policy difficulties posed by migration,” says Mr. Annan. “But neither should we lose sight of its immense potential to benefit migrants, the countries they leave and those to which they migrate.”
Owing in part to labour shortages in certain sectors, an expanding global economy and the long-term trend of ageing populations, many industrial countries need migrants. They face shortages in highly skilled areas such as information technology and health services, as well as in manual jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and construction. Many turn a blind eye to irregular migration to fill jobs locals do not want to take on.
But there are limits to the number of migrants they can take, for a number of reasons, including rising national unemployment. Some countries of the European Union, for example, have a growing number of “underutilized” workers, who are either unemployed or forced to work part-time. In France and Italy, the rate of underutilized labour reached 21 per cent in 2004, up from 17 per cent in 1994. As a result, more receiving countries are becoming more selective about the migrants they are willing to take in, opting mainly for those with skills or capital to invest.
In contrast, developing countries are demanding more open policies. They view migration as offering an opportunity to reduce the ranks of the unemployed, earn revenue through the remittance of workers’ earnings, and import skills, knowledge and technology via returning residents. Yet they are also concerned about losing skilled workers to richer countries, a process referred to as the brain drain. Aware of the detrimental effect of such migration, some have introduced measures to reduce the departure of people whose skills are needed, such as doctors and nurses.
How to develop comprehensive policies to manage all these issues is daunting. Migration is today at the point where international trade was 50 years ago, says Mr. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research in the US. For many at that time, the current governance system for international trade was unimaginable, he says.
“Those thinking about a new international framework for managing migration face remarkably similar challenges,” he says. “How to design a system that leads to freer and fairer flows of people, skills and remittances?”
Creating jobs
Most people who seek to migrate are pushed by circumstances in their home countries. War, poverty and persecution prompt people to become refugees, asylum seekers and labour migrants. In most emigrant-producing countries, jobs are scarce or salaries are too low, obliging people to seek opportunities elsewhere. Therefore, in times of peace, governments can stem the flow of citizens seeking to leave by creating jobs.
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“We cannot ignore the real policy difficulties posed by migration, but neither should we lose sight of its immense potential to benefit migrants, the countries they leave and those to which they migrate.”
— Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General
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“Globalization has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world,” says ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. So far, he says, “better jobs and income for the world’s workers has not been a priority in policy-making.”
Over the last few d
Sometimes, for months on end, young African men and women risk everything, including their lives, to take on the perilous trip across dozens of borders and the treacherous waves of the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in the North. Some die along the way, some are turned back and some who finish the journey realize that life may not be easier across the frontier. But with few jobs and dim prospects at home, millions of youths and young adults in Africa still choose to migrate, often clandestinely.
Such movements of people pose difficult questions for many governments and for the international community. One of the most pressing concerns of governments and citizens in industrialized countries is irregular migration: illegal entry, bogus marriages, overstaying temporary admissions, abuse of asylum systems and the difficulty of removing unsuccessful applicants.
Migration is currently at the centre of disagreements between the mainly poor sending countries and the richer receiving nations. Today the world is more connected than ever. Information, commodities and money flow rapidly across national boundaries, a phenomenon often referred to as globalization. But while industrial countries are promoting easier flows of capital, goods and services (which they mainly supply), they are at the same time restricting the movement of labour, which comes mainly from developing countries. Developing countries view this as a double standard, especially since labour is an important factor in the production of goods and services.
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An aspiring African migrant on the road in Morocco, a common departure point for migrants seeking to reach Europe.
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Between 1960 and 2000, the share of merchandise exports and trade in services has roughly doubled, owing to new global trade policies negotiated at the World Trade Organization (WTO). But during the same period the share of international migrants in relation to the world’s population has increased only slightly, from 2.5 to 3 per cent. This is due to increasing restrictions on official migration, which are also partly to blame for the rise in illegal migration.
By 2000 there were an estimated 175 million migrants worldwide, most moving from low- to higher-income nations. About 9 per cent — 16.3 million — were African, down from 12 per cent in 1960. Between 5 and 12 per cent of the population of 30 industrialized nations are migrants, notes the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM).
Complex issues
Migration brings with it “many complex challenges,” says UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The issues include human rights, economic opportunity, labour shortages and unemployment, the brain drain, multiculturalism and integration, and flows of refugees and asylum seekers. Policy makers also must grapple with issues of law enforcement. Especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, many are focusing on human and national security.
“We cannot ignore the real policy difficulties posed by migration,” says Mr. Annan. “But neither should we lose sight of its immense potential to benefit migrants, the countries they leave and those to which they migrate.”
Owing in part to labour shortages in certain sectors, an expanding global economy and the long-term trend of ageing populations, many industrial countries need migrants. They face shortages in highly skilled areas such as information technology and health services, as well as in manual jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and construction. Many turn a blind eye to irregular migration to fill jobs locals do not want to take on.
But there are limits to the number of migrants they can take, for a number of reasons, including rising national unemployment. Some countries of the European Union, for example, have a growing number of “underutilized” workers, who are either unemployed or forced to work part-time. In France and Italy, the rate of underutilized labour reached 21 per cent in 2004, up from 17 per cent in 1994. As a result, more receiving countries are becoming more selective about the migrants they are willing to take in, opting mainly for those with skills or capital to invest.
In contrast, developing countries are demanding more open policies. They view migration as offering an opportunity to reduce the ranks of the unemployed, earn revenue through the remittance of workers’ earnings, and import skills, knowledge and technology via returning residents. Yet they are also concerned about losing skilled workers to richer countries, a process referred to as the brain drain. Aware of the detrimental effect of such migration, some have introduced measures to reduce the departure of people whose skills are needed, such as doctors and nurses.
How to develop comprehensive policies to manage all these issues is daunting. Migration is today at the point where international trade was 50 years ago, says Mr. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research in the US. For many at that time, the current governance system for international trade was unimaginable, he says.
“Those thinking about a new international framework for managing migration face remarkably similar challenges,” he says. “How to design a system that leads to freer and fairer flows of people, skills and remittances?”
Creating jobs
Most people who seek to migrate are pushed by circumstances in their home countries. War, poverty and persecution prompt people to become refugees, asylum seekers and labour migrants. In most emigrant-producing countries, jobs are scarce or salaries are too low, obliging people to seek opportunities elsewhere. Therefore, in times of peace, governments can stem the flow of citizens seeking to leave by creating jobs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“We cannot ignore the real policy difficulties posed by migration, but neither should we lose sight of its immense potential to benefit migrants, the countries they leave and those to which they migrate.”
— Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Globalization has so far not led to the creation of sufficient and sustainable decent work opportunities around the world,” says ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. So far, he says, “better jobs and income for the world’s workers has not been a priority in policy-making.”
Over the last few d