The struggle for reparation which drove some important ideological and intellectual debates in the closing phase of military rule now has to be revisited in the light of post-military developments in Nigeria as well as emergent realities of the post-Covid-19 world. But since no one can step into the same river twice, we can only return to the issue in a conceptually modified form.
The case for economic reparation from our former colonial masters for the subsisting damage done to the African psyche, the disruption of its spiritual and political order and the devastation of its economy, is so clear and cogent that only fringe right-wing White Supremacist organizations can remain in denial.
That being the case, the crucial objection of many even on the continent remains. While they do not object to the idea of compensation in its broadest outlines, they chafe at the idea of Africa’s profligate and debauched political elites being the recipients and beneficiaries of such manna from heaven, if earlier experiences are anything to go by. The propensity of the African ruling class, particularly its Nigerian franchise, for mindboggling thievery is legendary.
But this does not obviate the need for some form of compensation. Ever since the advent of International Slavery and colonization, Africa, and Latin America to a lesser extent, have been at the receiving end of an unjust and unfair global economic order with the North of the globe cornering about four-fifth of the resources while the South could only make do with whatever remains.
The advent of Covid-19 and its aftermath have shown the immense capacity of leading western nations to overcome economic adversity. Despite the fact that most western nations took a pounding from the malign virus, their recovery has been a tad short of the miraculous. The stockpiling of arms and fearsome nuclear arsenal also proved ineffective as a mere virus upended the entire world.
It is argued that if only an infinitesimal fraction of the money expended on an unproductive arms race and economic hostilities against weaker nations is freed up for humanitarian purpose, the world would be a more equitable and hospitable place. This is where reparation for the slavery and colonization which enabled the economic and political ascendancy of the west over Africa and the Black person takes the front burner once again.
The case for reparation is an old one in Nigeria. It erupted famously at the turn of the nineties of the last century when MKO Abiola mounted a fierce, well-oiled lobby for it. Yours sincerely was one of the naysayers. In a riposte, titled Reparation or Repatriation, we argued that the campaign for reparation was a red herring designed to cover or obscure the massive state larceny going on at that point in time under Abiola’s friends in uniform.
While the argument for reparation was not untenable, it was already overtaken by more pressing matters as a result of military venality. If only a fraction of the national patrimony being salted away abroad in the vaults of western nations could be repatriated, Nigeria would be on the way to becoming an African El Dorado.
This argument drew the ire of the intellectual lobby that Abiola had pressed into service. At an International Conference on Reparation held in Abuja to which yours sincerely had been invited and with Abiola himself as the presiding deity, one could swear that from a distance Abiola eyed yours sincerely with a hostile glare to which one responded appropriately with a baleful stare in his direction. The reparation lobby unravelled with Abiola’s incarceration and subsequent death in captivity.
If that was the grim reality of state looting in Nigeria about thirty years ago under draconian military rule, a more gruesome actuality of official malfeasance now subsists twenty three years into post-military civilian rule. The scale and scope of the current fiscal heists will make the much derided soldiers look like secular saints. If misapplication of funds was the euphemism for misappropriation of resources then, one is at a loss to find a word to capture what is going on at the moment.
This past week alone, the Accountant General of the federation and the Director General of the Niger Delta Development Commission were both apprehended for misappropriating funds totalling a humongous 127 billion Naira. An exasperated reader on a forum observed that if the outlandish figures continue to turn in in this manner, the nation may soon play host to a bloody revolution.
A social reality this besieged and violated can be forgiven for clinging to any straw. Under the influence of political hallucination, many can even think they can glimpse a messiah in the horizon. Yet compounding the contradictions and the welter of ironies is the fact that in the intervening period, there have also been more incontrovertible exposures of colonial atrocities in Africa and elsewhere which make the case for some form of reparation even more compelling.
There are already some pointers to future developments in this regard. In an attempt to sidestep unwieldy and protracted legal entanglement over its documented genocide against the people of Namibia and particularly the Herero nationality, the German government has agreed to give substantial aid over a period of time to the Namibians. Although both sides avoid using culturally charged expressions, there can be no doubt that what is going on approximates the concept of historical restitution.
The same combination of moral suasion and legal entanglement should now be extended to other nations guilty of unspeakable colonial crimes in Africa, particularly in the old Congo, Cameroons, East Africa and along the West Africa corridor. This is not to exempt Brazil and an Argentina where the local Black populace is known to have been systematically eliminated by deliberate state policy.
It can be argued that the history of humanity is replete with the brutal decimation and elimination of weaker people by stronger societies that have developed cutting edge technologies of warfare. But nowhere in human history has the ascendancy of a world order, in this case the triumph of western modernism and the nation-state paradigm, occasioned a deliberate and systematic intellectual, economic, political and spiritual decimation of other people and their way of life.
Having suffered this fundamental disruption to their psyche and the normal pattern of evolution, most Africans have forcibly reverted to the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence in their psychological formation. Hence, and except in the most fortuitous cases of exceptional circumstances combined with human resilience and fortitude, they are no longer capable of building durable and enduring societies or institutions of nation-growing for that matter.
This is why their elites behave with predatory malice and economic malediction, ruining and wrecking anything across their path, acquiring what they do not need for survival and cornering resources that ought to be freed up for the betterment and qualitative improvement of their environment.
This is why the imposition of the nation-state paradigm on a psychically battered and psychologically deflated people is perhaps the most brutal assault on a people’s humanity ever witnessed in the history of humankind and the evolution of the higher species. It has left in its trail in Africa, a history of millennial misery and unspeakable carnage.
The deplorable and miserable state and appalling history of murder and mayhem of most postcolonial African nations speak to this horror of history. They were not altruistically designed in the first instance as sisterly nations to help humanity reach its telos and self-actualization but as overseas outlets for metropolitan merchandise, dumping sites for expired goods and veritable testing grounds for the latest munitions from the western military industrial complex.
Whenever a distraught African country manages to throw up talented and promising leaders in such distressing and deeply and unpromising circumstances, they were either incarcerated, thrown out of office, murdered or thwarted at the finishing line as a result of international conspiracy. The list is endless and bone-chilling: Patrice Lumumba, Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, Muammar Ghadaffy, Obafemi Awolowo etc.
When Obafemi Awolowo was asked on a campaign trail whether he would nationalize Nigeria’s oil industry upon coming to power, the wily titan from Ikenne had enough lucidity and acute presence of mind to respond that he did not want to become Nigeria’s Mosaddegh. Mohammad Mosaddegh was the Iranian prime minister who tried that and was promptly dethroned in a military putsch. Awolowo was reading the tea leaves correctly. But this classic instance of political pragmatism was not enough to appease his metropolitan tormentors.
On the other hand, the west has always been willing to promote a long line of African marauders who were willing to devastate their land for as long as they allowed them to remain in power. At a point, Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko, aka the cock that leaps from hen to hen in the open barn, was richer than his own country.
Blaise Compaore after murdering Sankara did his stuff for almost twenty eight years until he ran out of luck leaving his country in an anarchic roil which has culminated in a military coup. So did Gnassingbe Eyadema after murdering Sylvanus Olympio in 1963. A western official was known to have famously declared that Mobutu might be a thug, but he was their thug.
All that mattered was keeping the African emporium safe for brutal expropriation. Similar shenanigans were to cost the French the life of their ambassador to Kinshasa as the Mobutu misadventure finally reached the last bend of the Congo River. This deliberate derailment of progressive forces in postcolonial Africa is worse in terms of opportunity cost than the centuries-long economic depredation of the continent.
But common sense ought to suggest that even a cash cow should be kept in a fairly decent condition for it to able to continue to supply milk. And an overseas market must not be left in a condition where it is overwhelmed by weeds and poisonous creep. The open festering sore of Nigeria has reached a point where its suppurating pus is about to infect the entire environment.
The covid-19 tragedy ought to be a learning curve and a teachable moment for the west and our metropolitan overlords. The new wave of globalization consequent upon the radical restructuring of the modus operandi of global capitalism has demonstrated emphatically that what infects even the most remote corner of the world is bound to find its way to its most advanced part. The plight of Africa can no longer be ignored as it will be fatal to do so.
Enlightened self-interest is the most rational motivation for a new western doctrine in Africa. It must be a comprehensive package which includes massive aid, a modified form of debt forgiveness, the prompt repatriation of stolen funds originating from the continent, the promotion of transparency and good governance and above all the identification and solidarity with our talented eleven who will work to restructure and reconfigure the obviously misaligned and malign nation-state paradigm that has been imposed on many African countries particularly in Nigeria by western capitalism in its malignant phase.
This is why the west cannot afford to turn a blind eye on events unfolding in Nigeria. If Nigeria were to go under as the current auguries suggest, it will be a sorry and apocalyptic mess which will afflict the entire continent and the globe. After almost six hundred years of malignant capitalism which has decimated and dehumanized an entire continent, it is time for the west to turn a new leaf in Africa.
