Tatalo Alamu
Our heart is warmed by the news that about a hundred freshly trained Nigerian medical doctors are returning to the country courtesy of Cuba.
This, no doubt, is going to be a great boost to the failing national health programme and a windfall for our drying pool of human capital.
Snooper salutes Fidel Castro and the good people of Cuba for this act of generosity and munificence, particularly at a time when their own economy is not in the best of shape. Just as there are noble people, there are also noble nations.
Readers who are familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ wonderful epic, Love in the Time of Cholera will agree that raging epidemics do not prevent human beings from falling in love.
If anything, the stress of affliction often predisposes certain people to premature romance. But the world changes and so does humanity.
In our own age, the idea of love among nations may seem like a gospel from a quaint and distant era, erased forever from human memory.
Despite the pretences of globalisation at turning the world into a global village, what it has actually turned the world into is a global cage with a polar cat set among frightened pigeons.
There is nothing strange or unusual about this. Only those who read their history wrongly are wrong-footed by historical developments.
When the early Europeans, in the first wave of globalisation, set out from their city-states to explore the rest of the world, it was not to bring peace or mutual cooperation.
It was a mission of unequal exchange, conquest and colonisation. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be at the end.
It is noteworthy, then, that at a time when the forces of globalisation have unleashed a brutal competitiveness among nations and an unhealthy polarisation of the world into an affluent and politically stable west and the rest of us, we find glimpses of the old paradigm of cooperation among nations irrespective of dominant ideologies.
Like the two aging former lovers in Marquez’s classic who renewed their vow after half a century of separation, the path of Nigeria and Cuba has crossed before in happier circumstances and a fruitful liason, too.
When the tempestuous General Murtala Mohammed famously erupted at the 1976 OAU conference against western meddling in Angola, it was Cuba that provided the military teeth.
There is a consensus that this was probably Nigeria’s golden moment as a nation. With the help of Cuba and under Nigeria’s vociferous watch, the MPLA triumphed.
Holden Roberto was sent scampering across the border to his Zairian in law while Jonas Savimbi retreated southwards to his Ovimbudu tribal enclave.
Thereafter before the biblical cock could crow thrice, Nigeria had betrayed its former ally serially. As the nation fell under the iron grips of a string of right-wing IMF-compliant dictators, the idea of radical and revolutionary fraternity also receded into the shadow.
As the rhetoric of African liberation faltered, it was replaced by the rhetoric of market forces and the end of ideology.
As the ogre of dictatorship matured, Nigeria also came under the spell of the intellectual clones of the neo-con, a strange African hybrid evolved from the American militarisation of the entire globe, the militarisation of post-colonial Nigeria and a corresponding militarisation of the thinking faculty.
These are hard men and women mouthing empty platitudes like military recruits drilled into senseless obeisance. If ever one can have the daring oxymoron of intellectual zombies, here they were.
As apostles of mindless economic and political violence, they were to receive their official canonisation as the Obasanjo regime drifted farther and farther to the right in a fruitless and futile search for relevance and western endorsement.
This is not Castro or Cuba’s turf, and both have given us a wide berth. Despite the declining national revenues, despite the economic blockade, despite the massive propaganda and the seeming unpopularity of rigid centralization, Cuba has refused to go under.
Bloodied, battered and brutalised, this heroic nation, in fifty years of revolutionary turbulence, has achieved full literacy and comprehensive medical service for all, a feat still in the realm of an impossible dream for many western nations.
Whatever may come after him, Castro has changed Cuba forever for the better. He has laid the foundation of a great nation from the marsh bog of corruption and sleaze.
His gift to Nigeria at this time could not have been more symbolic and damning. A nation can continue to ape western ideologies until the kingdom comes, as long as the political elite do not get their act together, the country will be marooned in the limbo of underdevelopment.
After fifty years of oil revenues, Nigeria has to rely on a small island off the American coast to boost its supply of doctors, no thanks to a string of maniacally corrupt rulers.
Being a gifted ironist, Fidel Castro would understand that there are leaders and there are leaders.
Here is thanking the old man of Havana once more for his thoughtful medical assistance to a diseased nation.
( First published in June, 2007)
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