I recently read the interview between Dele Momodu and Kola Abiola in Thisday Newspapers and was reminded about how the duo of Thomas Pickering and Susan Rice (American ambassador and state official) were interviewed on BBC and asked why they wanted to see Nigeria’s president-elect, MKO Abiola in 1998. They replied that they wanted to go and convince him to drop his ambition in prison.
General Sani Abacha had recently died, and Nigeria under General Abdulsalami Abubakar was in a quandary as to what next to do. The interviewer then prodded on, asking what if Abiola refuses to drop his ambition. The duo answered that he would have become a danger to Nigeria. The next thing we heard was that the man clutched his throat, fell on the floor, turned ashen in color and promptly joined his ancestors, after drinking tea served (admittedly) by no less than the then Undersecretary of State and now Director of the US Domestic Policy Council, the delectable, intelligent Ms. Susan Rice.
The same words (he would become a danger to Nigeria) were used about Yaradua especially when the sick man was returned to his country by his aides and family… to die. The Americans insisted that he should not be returned to Nigeria, not even to die. How can America say a president cannot come back to his country to die? But that is how they are (often totally emotionally unintelligent when they want their way). I remember vividly these events. And a few months back as Biden prepared to ascend the presidency of the United States, Susan Rice was in a position to be appointed Secretary of State. The black American spy (whom I think may be one of the shrewdest and most heartless they have), wrote a book in which she expressed surprise that Nigerians thought she killed their MKO. In truth, and with the benefit of every intelligence and shreds of evidence, many Nigerians still strongly believe so.
Fast forward to the year 2010 and I was also in the same room as Blair, Bush and Condoleeza Rice at Thisday Dome Abuja when in response to a question about China in Africa , Blair said and I quote “we have seen that each time African nations go to China for a road the next day the Chinese people show up with a digger. When they come to the west we give them huge sheaves of paperwork with conditionalities to sign”. Bush who was earlier distracted grabbed the mic from Blair and launched into some bunkum about China polluting our environment. It was a rare moment of honesty from Blair and I am more than surprised that none of the other 500 odd people in that hall seemed to be amplifying that incidence. I am the only one I know who seems to remember. Maybe they think it doesn’t matter.
Under Donald Trump, and increasingly under Biden, American secretaries of state have taken it as a cardinal objective, to go round trying to de-market China, and we are seeing them use more and more strident and indeed undiplomatic rhetoric that can only show that they are getting desperate. There is a clip online where the serving Minister of State for Labour, Festus Keyamo, lectured the Americans about why they oughtn’t to have lost Africa to China. Some Nigerians think Keyamo’s speech amounted to genuflecting to the Americans but I think it has a greater import on the question of western interference in and condescension to Africa. The finality of losing Africa to China because of past and present recklessness is the worst nightmare, especially of the USA.
It is important to consider the history. The Western nations sat and carved up Africa in the late 1880s, marking the beginnings of colonization. But before then, they had enslaved millions of people from this continent, on the back of whom they accelerated the development of their own countries and solidified their commerce. After granting independence to these countries, there was a tentative moment of mutual reverence and respect (like that famous visit of our Tafawa Balewa to the USA in 1961 where they really rolled out the drums). The respect towards African nations started waning almost immediately after then. Countries like Nigeria were grandstanding like they had arrived but the whites quickly saw through the braggadocio, that we were mostly incompetent, delusional, wasteful and naïve about how the world really works and the cold, brutal calculations around who gets what and how. They then started financing coups and destabilizing governments, removing some at will and supplanting their own ‘bastards’ as they called their puppets. It was the Cold War era (cold in Europe and the Americas, but hot in Africa). The USSR was on the opposite side of what should be rightly called a balance of terror.
And so, within seven years of attaining independence, Nigeria was in a bloody and costly (in terms of human lives) civil war. Almost every African nation has seen civil war since then and some are still in the throes of destabilisation, losing the time that they should have spent developing their human capital and infrastructure.
The West knows the game. They know they cannot help themselves from being so disruptive of our affairs. They poke here and probe there. They remove leaders and emplace new ones. Even Obama had to do an unprecedented 2.18 minutes clip moving against Goodluck Jonathan. They impose cultures that are alien to us and such. Our biggest challenge here is how to unshackle ourselves and I think the very next step is to learn from the likes of China and India. But we are still mentally and physically lazy and intellectually lazy anyway. Like Harriet Tubman could have said… “I freed a thousand slaves… I could have freed a thousand more … if only they knew they were slaves”. I strongly believe our interaction with the East is better than the toxicity we now have with a condescending West. But we are the ones who may turn the fairly new relationship toxic too … and probably in a worse way… with our pursuit of peanuts as bribes, our inability to think forward and plan for children unborn, our inability to learn real lessons and replicate how those nations are gradually but surely freeing themselves and standing on their own, and our consistent intellectual subservience. Pray, is the fault in our stars?
I think the best we can get is this Chinese interaction and whatever infrastructure they can help build. But when you go to the new Abuja International Airport, just 2 years on we cannot maintain it. Lifts have stopped working. Escalators have started coughing. Cobwebs and dust everywhere, especially in chandeliers or anything suspended. The air-conditioning in the main hall no longer works. I say we must look inwards. But we must keep moving. The problem is, do we KNOW HOW TO LEARN? When I started going to London around the year 2000, these Chinese people used to come to barbershops and restaurants selling pirated CDs. Today, they own half of London. We blame those in government, but I strongly suspect what we have is an intellectual, mental capture, so I say let us look at our academia. Most of our professors are bought already. They were mostly trained on a diet suffused with western ideology and they have to obtain grants anyway. Also runners of NGOs have to pander to the West for finance
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