In a curious failure of judgment that almost ruined the epochal event, former British prime minister Tony Blair — Phony Tony or Tony Bliar (rhymes with Liar) to most of his countrymen — was invited as keynote speaker at ceremonies to herald the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s 15th president.
On the eve of his scheduled outing, he scurried out of Nigeria, and his one-time secretary of state and ideological soulmate, Peter Mandelson, was ferried in to take his place.
Last May, he hustled his way into Abuja, wangled an audience and a photo opportunity with President-elect (as he then was) Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and offered gratuitously to help the in-coming Administration launch Nigeria on the path of democratic governance and development at home and as a respectable international actor.
Granting Blair an audience was a misstep in an otherwise calibrated countdown to the Inauguration that culminated in yesterday’s inspiring rite of renewal.
He has no core convictions. He has no political or moral capital that he can deploy for Nigeria’s benefit. President Bola Tinubu and his Administration must not allow him to indulge in that pretence again. But there he was in Abuja again last week in an audience with Tinubu, unctuous as ever, as Tinubu marked the anniversary of his administration.
Abuja is one of the few capitals where Tony Blair can still count on a polite welcome. His 2015 visit was the third in just a little over four years. Since then, by my count, he has visited Nigeria twice. What about Blair guarantees him a hospitable official reception in Nigeria, whereas he is much despised in his own country and elsewhere in the world?
I was reminded the other day that it was my column for May 19, 2015, “An unwelcome visitor,” that scuttled Blair’s scheduled presentation before Buhari’s inauguration. I would like to take the liberty to draw substantially on it for this.
In February 2010, his hands still wet with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis he liberated from this world and from their relations in a military invasion that he helped gin up with a raft of lies, he was invited – along with fellow war criminals former U.S. president George W. Bush and his former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – by one Nigerian newspaper proprietor basking in the illusion of influence and affluence to speak at a ceremony in Abuja purportedly honouring distinguished Nigerians past and present.
On a different occasion, Blair even got to meet a star-struck acting President Goodluck Jonathan, as he then was, to discuss “matters of mutual interest” between Nigeria and Britain, and his desire to keep that relationship strong.
Nine months later, declaiming with the unctuousness that becomes him so well, he claimed that the “international community” was nursing a great deal of interest and excitement in Nigeria’s elections scheduled for 2011.
More to the point of his new career as a money-grubbing influence peddler, he declared, with JP Morgan chief executive officer Jamie Damon in tow, that the global financial giant’s decision to upgrade its Nigerian office to a full branch was a demonstration of confidence in Nigeria and in President Jonathan’s effort to transform the economy.
Shortly after that visit, JPMorgan bagged a huge chunk of Nigeria’s controversial Sovereign Wealth Fund, even as it recorded huge losses resulting from reckless transactions.
Blair’s 2015 visit was no accident. It was designed to secure future access in the Buhari dispensation for the major players in international high finance, for which he is a well-paid lobbyist
It was entirely in character that Blair should have presumed at every stop to speak for the “international community,” though he held no public office and was in fact a hugely discredited politician who, in a just world, should be in prison serving time for war crimes.
So resented and discredited had he become at the end of his record tenure as prime minister that he could not embark on a farewell tour of Britain, where he was sure to be greeted with shouts of “Liar, Liar” and pelted with tomatoes and eggs. They even re-christened him BLIAR, And so, he went instead to bid farewell to British troops in Basra, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.
Blair’s quest to become president of the European Council ended in humiliation. The British Government withdrew its backing when it became clear that member-states wanted nothing to do with him. The Middle East for which Blair was designated international mediator has rarely witnessed greater turmoil.
When Blair went to testify before the Chilcot Inquiry into how the UK entered the unholy alliance that invaded, occupied, and destroyed Iraq, he had to be smuggled into the Committee Room through a back door, to save him from the wrath of protesters.
More recently, I should add, more than one million Britons signed a petition against his being conferred with a knighthood by King Charles the Third.
This was not the way the script was supposed to end for the youngest prime minister of the UK since 1812, the skilled politician who rescued Britain from the exhausted Tories, redefined its place in world politics, and led his Labour Party to three back-to-back election victories.
He seemed destined for greatness.
But hubris and delusion soon set in, and glory turned to ashes.
Blair seized the September 1, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a lifetime opportunity to project himself as a statesman of global reckoning. The United States would not fight alone, he assured Americans. Britain would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with America as it confronted the terrorist threat.
-From then on Blair made it his business to confect a casus belli, just in case the United States could not come up with a compelling one. First, he published a dossier on what he said was Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-production programme. It was a “dodgy” document, copied in part from a sophomoric doctoral dissertation that an American university had rejected.
Next, he put it out that Iraq had sought to buy uranium cake from Niger Republic. The document detailing the alleged transaction was a transparent forgery. The minister who purportedly signed on behalf of the Niger Government had left office at least eight years earlier. It is as if Federal Government documents dated May 2014 were to surface today bearing the signature of Olu Adeniji as Nigeria’s foreign minister.
Blair also claimed, again falsely, that Iraq had developed nuclear weapons that could be assembled and deployed for combat within 45 minutes — the same Iraq that could not shoot down a single plane from the armada that had been patrolling its air space and since the end of the Gulf war and bombing military and non-military assets at will.
The United States quickly latched on to the document as proof that its homeland was imperiled and that it could not afford to have its skies darkened by a mushroom cloud before striking.
For his domestic audience, Blair declared that Iraq had developed missiles capable of hitting British forces in Cyprus. Why Iraq would want to attack British troops that had been garrisoned in Cyprus since the 1970s.
So determined was Blair to take Britain to war that even when Bush offered him a chance to change course, fearing that the British parliament might not share America’s enthusiasm for war, Blair deployed his forensic skills to stay the course, with no consideration for the massive anti-war demonstrations in London and around the world.
Whenever he prefaces a statement with “to be perfectly honest” or “to be absolutely candid,” which he does very often, you could be sure that he was going to zap you with a falsehood, a barefaced lie.
He did just that when he claimed in a debate in the House of Commons that “weapons of mass destruction” would be found in Iraq within two weeks.
Contrived earnestness, evangelical fervour, and the ability to tell a blatant lie with a straight face: That is the quintessence of Tony Blair.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. But by the time British forces pulled out, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. Hundreds of thousands more had been displaced, and Iraq lay in ruins. Hundreds of British soldiers had also been killed – all for a lie.
Blair says he is not sorry for that lie because other countries – Australia is the example he and George W Bush frequently cited — also believed it. True, Britannia no longer rules the waves. But when did Britain become just another country?
Germany did not believe it. France did not believe it China did not believe it. Russia did not believe it.
Blair compounds his war crimes each time he asserts that removing Saddam from power was “the right thing to do.” But at what cost?
The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whom Blair’s warmongering removed from this world, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis it turned into refugees or otherwise brought to ruin have no place in Blair’s consciousness.
He condoned or turned a blind eye to torture. To head off trials that would have embarrassed the authorities, the British Government in 2011 paid out millions of pounds to persons tortured by officials in parts of Iraq occupied by British forces.
No wonder, then, that when Blair offered to donate the earnings from his memoir to the families of British troops killed or wounded in Iraq, they rejected it angrily, calling it “blood money.”
In a just world, Tony Blair would be serving a long jail term — my aversion to capital punishment is total and unconditional, unlike his — for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In the meantime, the Federal Government and other institutions must stop inflicting this hustler on the Nigerian public. He needs them more much more than they need him. They must realize that he comes here for one purpose and one purpose only: To obtain.
