Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

There seems to be a correlation between advanced civilizations in the past with the founding and flourishing of universities. This accounts for the location of such universities like Bologna, founded in 1088 and currently has a students’ population of 87,760, Padua, established in 1222 with a students’ population of 62,500, Sienna, established in 1240 and currently has a students’ population of 20,000 and Naples Federico ii, established in 1224 currently has a students’ population of 80,000 all located in Italy which was arguably the most civilized country in medieval times. Eight of the 10 oldest universities in the world along with Oxford University, established in 1096 with a students’ population of 24,300, Salamanca (Spain), established in 1134 with current students’ population of 26,746, University of Paris ( La Sorbonne), established in 1160   with a students’ population of 50,000,  Cambridge, established in 1209  with a students’ population of 23,247, Coimbra (Portugal),  established in 1290 and currently holds a students’ population of  24,000  are located in countries with old and world renowned civilizations.

The two African universities of Al-Azhar (Egypt), established in 970 AD with students population in excess of 60,000  and the oldest of them all, Qarawinyyin founded in 859 in Fez Morocco currently has about 20;000 students belong to countries of ancient civilizations and traditions of learning .

It can easily be assumed that all these institutions started as centres of clerical training before morphing into the universality of academic institutions now known as universities. Universities in Asia and the Americas came much later but were established by inheritors of ancient civilizations. In the case of Africa, we had centres of Islamic learning in places like Djenne, Sannkore (Timbuktu), Kano and Katsina in precolonial times but these were not comparable with universities in Europe, Egypt and Morocco as indicated above. The university tradition in Africa as a whole is less than 200 years old. Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, (1827) and Cape Town University 1829 were founded in the 19th century as clerical institutions on the pattern of the old institutions in Europe while the University of Ibadan was only established in 1948.

The upshot of this is that university tradition has not sunk into the African mentality and this accounts for what we can call the aberrant behavior of universities’ administrations and governance in Nigeria in particular and possibly in tropical Africa as a whole.

The colonial universities established in Africa initially offered external degrees of well-established universities in the European metropolitan cities like London and Paris. These colonial universities eventually evolved into well-established African centres of learning while still maintaining the traditions of their European foster institutions. But this was not going to be for long. In the emergent African countries after independence, the idea of university autonomy was anathema. The powers that were in authority could not conceive of, or tolerate a situation where government funded institutions could be totally independent of government. Thus, governments constituted governing councils and chose vice chancellors of the universities.

In the beginning, those who were chosen as vice chancellors were absolutely deserving of their positions in the eyes of the public and the university communities and their academic colleagues. There was not much meddling by politicians in the running of universities for a short time in Nigeria. The universities were however not insulated from the vagaries of politics and political alignment and realignment in Nigeria in the 1960s. In Nigeria, what was subtle and clandestine meddling in the First Republic became flagrant and open intervention in the long years of military rule in Nigeria. The military intervention in Nigerian politics also coincided with the expansion of higher tertiary institutions in Nigeria. As new universities were established, their vice chancellors were appointed either on the principle of federal character or on the basis of patronage to friends or those connected to the seats of power at federal and state levels. Even the National Universities Commission, established on the pattern of British universities Grants Commission went out of its remit to influence the choice of vice chancellors because the military rulers knew very little about who was who in the universities. Not only did the NUC meddle in the internal affairs of universities, it also used the power of the purse to favour some universities over others. The 1960s remain the golden age of Nigerian universities.  Things were not too bad by the 70s but since the 80s, the situation has changed for the worst.

The exponential increase in the number of universities without adequate planning about funding and staffing has made the status of universities ridiculous. Politicians now after heavy state dinners and consumption of drinks as part of their after-dinner speeches routinely announce the establishment of new universities as part of “democratic dividends”. President Goodluck Jonathan, a man who ought to know more about universities than his predecessors who never went to universities, announced in one fell swoop the establishment of 12 federal universities to satisfy federal character and as “dividends of democracy”, he immediately sited one in his own village!

Since his time, more than 100 universities, both federal , state , military, naval duplicating the Military Academy in Kaduna which is a degree-awarding military institution and hordes of private universities have been established. Most of these new universities share the same available local academic staff with the result that they are all poorly staffed and young academics who should be lecturers are prematurely elevated to professors and in some cases as vice chancellors. Recently the press carried the pictures of a young lady who was appointed vice chancellor of a federal university in Owerri who went back to her village to hire a band and she and her supporters danced vigorously round the campus. I found it funny and pathetic and I asked myself if the likes of professors Kenneth Dike, J F Ade Ajayi, Adeoye Lambo, Oritsejolomi Thomas, Eni Njoku , Kodlinye, Ishaya Audu, Iya Abubakar, TN Tamuno, Emanuel Ayandele, Dipo Akinkugbe and  Ayo Banjo would have been dancing to drums from their towns and villages when they were appointed vice chancellors. This is the level of ridicule the position of vice chancellors in our universities have been reduced to. Even after so-called autonomy to choose their vice chancellors, the universities communities have not demonstrated maturity and wisdom neither have the communities where they are located shown any understanding and appreciation of the meaning of universities as universal institutions.  Community leaders routinely issue threats against the universities if they refuse to select “sons and daughters of the soil “as principal officers of institutions in their areas.  The universities have moved down from bending to pressure from ethnic groups to those of clans and villages. Even in large urban centres like Ibadan and Lagos, threats are usually issued against the institutions who fail to be grateful by appointing “outsiders “as vice chancellors. With bad leaders the universities are now riddled with politics and attendant and consequential corruption and lowering of standards.

This has led to a corrosion of the university idea and the value of the academic certificates given to students. One insidious effect of the homogenization of academic programs as demanded by the NUC is that all universities offer the same courses without them being permitted to offer courses that are unique to their missions and visions. This is not good in a federation of diverse needs and characteristics.

Some of the private universities offer some hope for the future. Some are very good especially the ones founded on religious ethics and philanthropy. But like most things Nigerian, some businessmen delude themselves of thinking that there is money to be made by establishing private universities. Such people will be disappointed. But unfortunately some of them are not giving up and their institutions are churning out graduates to increase the frustrated crowds of unemployed and unemployable young people roaming the streets of the urban conurbations of Nigeria and thereby constituting themselves into ready army of kidnappers and bandits and highway robbers who have to survive by all and every means since self-preservation is the first law of nature. There are also universities set up in neighboring countries by rich Nigerians catering to the mad urge for certification without knowledge by young Nigerians.  Many of these universities in Nigeria and those in our neighborhood are merely universities in name and have overtime not produced the highly skilled and innovative manpower needed for our industrialization. Of course, water would eventually find its own level and the taste of the pudding is in the eating and employers of labor would invariably find out who is a graduate and who is not. This is the result of our total lack of manpower planning and penchant of muddling through and expecting all will be well. Of course, all is not well.

We need to overhaul our educational system and lay emphasis on training skilled middle level manpower and artisans. It is a shame that while our young men are riding “Okadas” taxi motorcycles, the building sector of our economy is dominated by carpenters, electricians, welders and bricklayers from our sister ECOWAS countries. The same is true of the hospitality sector of our economy. These are the areas of future growth of our economy which for security and economic reasons must not be left in the hands of foreigners.

The upshot of what I am saying is that we need to revise our colonial system of education and learn from how training of technical and skilled people have transformed economies of countries like Japan, Germany, China and South Korea. While university education is important, we need people who can transform theories into practice. We have a country to build. The weakness in the existing universities in Nigeria which are totally dependent on government funding has been exposed by their lack of preparedness in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Asking students to receive lectures online when the lecturers themselves are not trained to do so and in the face of poor electricity supply to charge students electronic devices has created serious problems of pedagogy. The lack of realism on the part of government which forbids universities charging economic fees for university education is killing the institutions whose infrastructures are becoming antediluvian and unsustainable and unsuitable to train students for the 21st century. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a need for a revolution in our education system.

By Jide Osuntokun

Anybody who has been watching the thousands of deaths caused by the coronavirus pandemic in India and other countries in South Asia and South Eastern Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia and even Thailand cannot but be worried about what will happen in Africa and particularly in our country if we were to experience the same phenomenon. With our situation of total unpreparedness, we can only hope and pray that we will be spared the consequences of our lack of adequate preparation.

What is happening in India, the centre of vaccines manufacturing in the world has ramifications for the developing countries that receive vaccines pro bono from the World Health Organization (WHO) because of our impecunious situation caused by stealing of national resources and mismanagement and poor governance in most of African countries where state capture by a few well-connected local and or external forces is the order of the day. This has invariably benefited the ruling and colluding elite. If Nigeria were well governed, we should not be waiting for handouts from the WHO or any external bodies. But alas, this is the situation in Africa with the exception of South Africa which has the infrastructure to manufacture on license, vaccines against coronavirus. I suppose when we witness the oncoming catastrophe in our country, we will probably run to China for the vaccines of Sinopharm which has proved totally ineffective in Brazil. While on the issue of Chinese vaccines, I am totally confused about how the Chinese have managed to control the spread of the coronavirus pandemic which started in Wuhan China. Apart from the initial closure of areas affected by the virus in China, there has been no other extraordinary measures taken by the Chinese. Some have suggested that the draconian measure taken by the Chinese could only have been adopted by a Communist country with its centralized planning, policing and control of all levers of power. Whatever the Chinese have done, one must admire them. The Chinese economy in the last year has grown by 12% which is incredible when compared with the negative nose-diving growth of western economies. This is why some cynics are saying the coronavirus pandemic was unleashed on the world as part of Chinese strategy to be the numero uno among the world powers. Whatever the case may be, the Indian situation probably indicates the fault lines in democracy in a large and highly populated country where perhaps strong governments are needed rather than parliamentary debates which are the hall mark of democratic governance. In our case in Nigeria, we suffer from the double jeopardy of weak governance and autocracy and state capture by a small ethnic and religious cohort.

When we got the first batch of Covax vaccines from the WHO, states were given their shares according apparently on the basis of incidence of the disease and ready infrastructure to administer the vaccines. Lagos, the entry point of the coronavirus to Nigeria got half a million doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccines for its close to 20 million inhabitants. Other states got measly amount from the two million doses of the vaccines.

Special allocations were made to members of the armed forces, of course these were for officers only while the rank and file would have to wait until the next batch. I don’t know if the police got any allocations. The allocations to the states were given to the higher members of the bureaucracy, state and federal, who got the jabs in their arms and allocations were made to the judiciary and the federal and state legislatures.

To my surprise, nothing was given to teachers, at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Now the schools including universities have been asked to open. What will happen to teachers and professors and the students in their cramped dormitories, halls of residence and classrooms? What about the old professors who should have been part of those to receive priority consideration ab initio? It is of course true that the number of vaccines given to us as a country was too small. This two million total allocation to Nigeria’s 200 million amounts to one hundredth of our need.

No one should blame the WHO for not giving us more. It can only give us out what it had. In fact, the WHO had to blackmail the rich world which was hoarding the vaccines with the USA and Canada having more vaccines than they would ever need. The rich country did what was in the interest of their people. It is natural to protect yourself before thinking of others. Even the Holy scriptures say love your neighbors as yourselves not more than yourselves. It was when the rich countries realized that no one would be safe until all are safe before they climbed down from their high horses of vaccines nationalism and began to accede to WHO request to help the poor people of the world. It is of course a pity that Nigeria and the rest of Africa wear the badge of poverty as an honor.  But in reality, Nigeria should not belong to the category of poor nations if we had managed our resources well. Countries that are members of OPEC are generally not considered poor. It was a herculean task persuading the rest of the world that Nigeria was a poor country when we were campaigning for debt forgiveness while suffering from the debt overhang. Unfortunately, this present government has taken us back to debt peonage where our children and grandchildren will be domiciled even when we are gone.

Another problem we have in Nigeria is vaccines hesitancy. Some of our clerics, Muslim and Christian are even telling their flock that coronavirus only affect sinners and unbelievers and frown at wearing masks. Some illiterates are also saying it is a disease of the rich and affluent and the preaching about physical distancing, masking and avoiding of large congregations are falling on deaf ears in a country where poverty has driven our people to churches and mosques of charlatans who are exploiting and deceiving the gullible people.

I of course know that the African Union is rumored to have placed orders for 400 million of the Johnson and Johnson vaccines even though South Africa has previously rejected them on the grounds of their ineffectiveness to combat the coronavirus variant in their country. This variant has spread to the Southern, Central and Eastern African regions. It is only a matter of time before it spreads to West Africa including Nigeria if it has not done that already. Even if the 400 million of Johnson and Johnson vaccines which require only one jab rather than the two jabs of Astra Zeneca jabs are delivered hopefully by next year, one wonders if they will work since they did not work against the South African variant. The date of delivery means we will probably all be dead by that time as predicted by the Anglican Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa.

There is the issue of those who have already received the first jab of Astra Zeneca vaccines and waiting for the second jab which India has now embargoed because of the surging coronavirus in their country. It’s a case of charity beginning at home. There is no scientific backing for mixing vaccines. One just hopes that the Nigerian government would plead with the United States and the British governments to release some of the stockpiles of the Astra Seneca vaccines in their possession.

The science of vaccines production is not totally alien to our country. In the 1970s vaccines of one type or the other against small pox, trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness and other diseases were produced in Vom on the Plateau. The current coronavirus vaccines may be different but certainly we could move from our previous knowledge of vaccines production to the new sophisticated computer driven ones if the resources were made available for researchers and if the infrastructure were kept up to date. But like everything we do in our import-dependent country, we have abandoned even our previous knowledge for imports in every aspect of our lives. We are now importing New Jersey cows to produce milk when in fact in the 1950s and 1960s, we were drinking fresh cow milk in Ibadan!

Our problems are legion. On one hand we are begging foreign countries to come and help us with our self-inflicted wounds of banditry, herders war against farmers, jihadist terrorism, secessionist agitation and demands for wholesale restructuring and now we are going to have to plead for vaccines! Unfortunately, we have no choice. This is the cross road in which we now find ourselves and we don’t know where to turn to and remaining at this crossroads may be terminal for our existence. I shudder to imagine what will happen to us unless we make haste while the sun shines.

By Jide Osuntokun

There is nothing wrong in requesting for external assistance to beef up our military’s firepower in the face of aggression by foreign sponsored local terrorists. From 1957 to 1960, Malaysia requested not only the British forces but forces from several Commonwealth countries to support it against local communists-aided and supported by global communism. It is now clear that Nigeria is not only fighting internal dissidents but terrorists assisted by the forces of defeated Al Qaeda and ISIS and those of foreign mercenaries previously in the service of Muamar al Qaddafi. This is why they appear hardened and better armed than our poorly-equipped troops whose commanders have allegedly made away with their budget for equipment and weapons to build or buy fancy houses in Abuja and Dubai.

Our foes are better motivated than our own forces. They are also made to feel they are fighting a jihad with promise of eternal enjoyment and paradise in the hereafter if they die as al-mujahideen. There also seems to be a grand plan by terrorists fighting under the flag of international terrorism mouthing the Islamic slogans to destabilize the whole of Africa as can be seen in what is going on in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, the Cameroons, Mali, Kenya, Tanzania, Central African Republic, Somalia and now Mozambique. The death of Field Marshal Idris Deby Itno perhaps the linchpin in the fight against Boko Haram and al Qaeda in West Africa has added more urgency in our struggle against terror. Unfortunately the present political leadership in Nigeria has sleep walked into the hands of the terrorists by fanning the embers of so-called herders and foreign Fulani terrorism rather than stamping it out the moment herders started killing farmers all over northern Nigeria beginning in Zamfara and Benue states and now all over Nigeria. This cancer has almost metastasized into a terminal disease which unless radically and surgically excised, would kill Nigeria.

This is where we are and it is this desperation that has led our government to be giving up the fight and openly exposing its soft underbelly on the electronic media in the discussion between Anthony Blinken, the American Secretary of State with President Buhari and his foreign minister, Geoffrey Onyeama openly pleading with the United States to move AFRICOM from its headquarters in Stuttgart Germany to Africa.

There has been some anxiety on the part of some experts about the propriety of Nigeria linking what is a bilateral request with movement of the African Command (AFRICOM) of United States military to Africa presumably to Nigeria although this was not so stated.

I remember this issue of the location of AFRICOM came before the five-man Presidential  Advisory Council on International Affairs(PAC) then headed  by Chief Emeka Anyaoku of which I was a member in 2008  for advice. I remember the unanimous advice to the then President Umar Yar’Adua was that Nigeria should not welcome its location in Nigeria and Africa as a whole. If it is appropriate to say this, I was not then against the location of AFRICOM even in Sokoto which I was aware was what the Americans wanted. My support even though I felt pained about its implication on our hard fought independence from the British was based on realism that no country was totally independent in an interdependent world.  My position was based on our ability to properly negotiate the basis of the American base on our soil.

I was aware of American huge presence in Germany particularly in Bonn where they have a whole “city” and in Britain, France, Italy, Okinawa in Japan, South Korea, and nearer home in Saudi Arabia. These American bases bring enormous benefits to those countries in terms of employment and resources and security. My point was that we were not near any theatre of possible superpower military confrontation and would not be involved directly in any American conflict with another power. I also felt American presence in the above listed countries has not derogated from their sovereignty. My position was based on realism of the fragile nature of our country which has now been exposed.

Of course I agreed with those who felt and still feel that whoever wants to sup with the American devil must do so with a long spoon. The Americans may have had an agenda completely different from ours. But the point is that life is a gamble; you only win or lose and there is no point in not playing the game of life. I write all this for historical records.

But to come to the present, General Buhari should be told that in a game of Chess, you have to make a move before your opponent responds. To strengthen the hands of Nigeria in this insecurity conundrum, we can solve half of the problem politically by devolving power and security to the six informal zones the country seems to agree exists with the present unwieldy 36 states reduced to local governments while we do away with the useless 774 local governments administration which merely consumes resources without any demonstrable profit in terms of security and development.

So instead of the myriads of states and local governments, we would have a weakened centre, six powerful zonal administrations and 36 local or provincial administrations each with its own  mobile and motorized  powerfully armed and equipped police force like the French gendarmes  answerable to their zones and local/provincial authorities and coordinated by a federal police  like the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The army and other security forces would then be available as supporting forces if the powerful police forces cannot handle any security problem. This new structure would go hand in hand with fiscal and cooperative federalism. Buhari should, like General Charles de Gaulle during the Algerian war who took a decisive, costly and personally risky decision to cut the Gordian knot of the problem by granting independence to Algeria and ending a costly war in men and materiel. Buhari should risk everything and solve Nigeria’s problem and thereby saving the republic and writing his name in gold in Nigeria’s history.

Since the Nigerian parliament is calling on the president to declare a state of emergency and siege, Buhari should pick up the gauntlet and bring an executive bill incorporating the suggested new administrative and police architecture which the parliament should quickly ratify. Once this is done, then we have the architectural structure to which we can call our trading partners to react to. Negotiations with external bodies should not be done in the public. These kinds of things should be handled by senior military and police officers advising a powerful diplomatic team to handle the intricate and delicate issues involved. It’s not the kind of thing you do through Zoom or other electronic devices. You need what the Yoruba calls “oju loro wa” meaning the “eye carries more importance when talking than mere words”. That is what diplomats call “body language”.

No foreign power can do more than what ordinarily we should be able to do for ourselves. We have since 2019 been playing with fire of not arresting terrorists of whatever hue or colour and of whatever ethnic group or the other and trying them and imposing on them appropriate punishment including hanging or public executions for those who commit murder. Punishment ought to have been swift and sure but we prevaricated and let people go because of whatever emotional reasons of common ethnicity the political leaders may have had. Chicken has now come home to roost; the whole thing has gotten out of hands and people have now taken to self-help and the whole country is now on fire and great Nigeria, the giant of Africa, has become the butt of jokes by other Africans.

We who in the 1960s sent troops to stabilize Tanzania; who formed the majority of the military component of, and financed ECOMOG during the Babangida years; Nigeria a frontline states in confrontation with apartheid South Africa and its western powers; Nigeria which made possible the independence of Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and the eventual non-racial majority rule in South Africa possible. Nigeria which was third after India and Bangladesh in providing troops for United Nations peace keeping and peace enforcement operations is now reduced to mockery by Chadians saying our soldiers cannot fight.

Whatever is responsible for this loss of glory is directly related to the absence of will and direction by our political leadership and dedication of the followership, some of who, are fifth columnists feeling no sympathy for the national cause because of their alienation as a result of marginalization and ethnic and religious discrimination. Our insecurity problem arises from our not understanding the fact that war is politics by other means. There can be no development without peace and without development the devil will find work for idle hands. We are caught in a self-inflicted wound of pandering to the forces of ethnicity and religious discrimination while losing our focus on national direction. Yet it is obvious that like the rest of the world, we are bound together by economic interdependence in which the mineral resources in one part of the country service the whole country while food security is guaranteed by the hard work of farmers in another part of the country.

To come out of this coming and looming disaster of dismemberment and dissolution, we must reverse our treacherous and headlong celebration of ethnic exceptionalism and embrace the credo of universal humanity.

By Jide Osuntokun

One of the noticeable phenomena in contemporary times is the rise of nationalism not only in Russia with its policy of protecting “Russia abroad” but also in the United States under the former president of the USA, Donald J. Trump and his policy of “America first”.  This was a policy of isolationism and building fortress America in which the former president wanted to so arm America that any war it engages in will be a walkover. As part of his scheme, he wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark a deal whose suggestion at all was deemed rather odd, old fashioned kind of territorial bargaining and unusual in contemporary times.

President Trump was ready to befriend Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Kim Jong un of North Korea, Xi Jinping of China at least initially before they fell out and the Arab monarchical dictators and any other “strong leader” irrespective of his democratic credentials as long as such people were friendly to the USA. “America first” policy was based on brutal diplomatic language of abuse and bullying of opponents something unseen in diplomacy since the Europe of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In this scenario, Trump said he was not bound to defend any foreign country’s democratic rights as long as America’s interests were not involved.  He was not even interested in NATO whose members he claimed had cheated the US by under-contributing to its budget and as for the European Union, he did not see the usefulness of the Union and supported Britain’s exit from it.

He was not interested in the UN and any of its specialized agencies.  He threatened to cut the US contributions to the budget of the UN and actually withdrew from UNESCO and the WHO at a critical time of the coronavirus pandemic on the grounds that the World Health Organization did not back his theory that the coronavirus pandemic was unleashed on the world by China. Trump was ready to dismantle the peace architecture of the world set 1945. It did not matter to him whether it was NATO or the UN and its specialized agencies such as UNESCO, WTO, UNICEF, World Bank, The World Court and the United Nations convention on climate change (UNFCC) and its mitigation, adaptation and finance signed in 2016.

Trump claimed there was no climate emergency and that the whole thing was cyclical and that the science of it was not universally accepted. He said the economic demands on America to save the environment were so onerous as to constitute an economic burden on America. Even though all the major countries stayed in the Paris Accord and continued to implement policies agreed upon by the world to mitigate climate abuse, the accord was almost dealt a death blow by the United States’ withdrawal. Staying in the Paris Agreement by America was critical; America being one of the countries whose industrial and anthropogenic emissions and other forms of pollution brought the whole world to the present climate emergency. Happily, the Joe Biden administration has returned America to the Paris protocol on climate change.

China, the other major power virtually operating outside the “talking shop” of the UN has staked out its dominance in the South China Sea by building fortified artificial Islands which it has militarized as forward positions for the Chinese military in its defence of what it considers its national interest. China has become more aggressive in Hong Kong, flying the flag of nationalism of “one country one people “in spite of its former commitment to maintain “one country two systems” which involves the protection of Hong Kong’s democratic and capitalist system of government, which it covenanted with Britain to protect.  China has made it clear that Taiwan is part of China and would not welcome United States’ interference. The US is challenging China in the South China sea under the guise of protecting International law of freedom of navigation. The US has recently cobbled together a so-called alliance of four democratic states namely India, Japan, Australia and South Korea as a counterpoise to China in South Asia and South East Asia. It is also helping its former enemy, Vietnam and the Philippines to strengthen their claims in the South China sea. There is no doubt that this is the beginning of fierce competition for global economic supremacy between the United States and China that is bound to increase as China tries to catch up with the US as the premier economic power in the world. This is what is at the root of the increasing diplomatic spat between China and the United Sates. While all this challenge and counter moves are going on, the UN can only watch from a distance and hope that the situation does not get out of hands.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the UN is not in a position to secure world peace.

This is why the UN in the past embraced the strategy of regionalism and world order. The UN actively supports regional organizations as building blocks for global peace. Representatives of such organizations as the EU, The AU, OAS and others have observer status in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). This is actually a wise step as could be seen in the ECOMOG operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the late 1980s and 1990s with UN support only in the latter part of that operation whose burden was largely borne by ECOWAS, a regional organization. The UN nevertheless  is still able to arbitrate between warring countries in Africa, in South America, the Middle East, East Timor and to help build peace where there is none in collapsed or collapsing  states like Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Libya, Somalia, Central African Republic and to mediate between Morocco and Algeria over their rival claims on Former Spanish Sahara (Rio de Oro) and to help build in the 1990s peace in former Yugoslavian successor states some of which were in military confrontation with others.

In spite of its limitations, some people even think the UN can help unlock the knot of rival nationalisms within existing member states. This unrealistic expectation is prevalent in Africa and in a place like Nigeria where some groups would like to secede from the present country because of the fear of ethnic chauvinism and discrimination based on language and religion. This is not an area in which the UN would like to be involved but of course, if law and order were to break down in any member country it will be the duty of the UN to help the suffering people in such situations such as is currently the case in Tigray in Ethiopia. Even when it cannot shape the course of events, the voice of its current Secretary-General, Antonio  Guterres carries moral weight.

The relevance of the UN during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has amplified the usefulness of the international organization. If the WHO had not existed, substantial members of humanity in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but particularly in Africa would not have had access to Covid- 19 vaccines because of their poverty. It is the WHO, appealing to the conscience of the rich world, that has been able to mobilize resources for supply of vaccines to the poor part of humanity. But for this, Africa would have been forgotten in an era of vaccines nationalism when most countries in the world are naturally taking care of their own citizens first before dawning on them that in a global pandemic, no one is safe until everyone is safe. Apart from the WHO, the financial institutions of the UN, the so-called Breton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and its regional affiliates, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are helping many poor countries.

The future of the UN will lie in its ability to coordinate global efforts to save the environment because it is the only body that can coax the various countries driven by their national interests to see the world as a common patrimony of mankind. Even though the job of economic equity and fairness cannot be guaranteed by the UN or through fair trade as is being dreamt of by the WTO supporters mostly in the Third world, it is also clear that a world where the yawning gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen will not be secure for either those who are at an advantage or the disadvantaged. In the future, the futility of armed peace, balance of terror or Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which we have become used to may compel us to commit ourselves to a policy of general disarmament that was mooted after the Second World War.

By Jide Osuntokun

Developing crises in the international community particularly the ongoing deployment of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine which has drawn sharp criticism from the United States and her NATO allies presage possible big powers conflict if care is not taken. Hopefully this will not lead to a shooting war between Russia and NATO and its leading power the United States but we could see a proxy war between Ukraine aided by NATO and Russian troops backing Russian ethnic Ukrainians who have effectively set up their own country adjacent to Russia. It is unlikely President Joe Biden would allow Russia to annex eastern Ukraine as it did to Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014.  Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems to pursue policies of brinkmanship paying little regard to international opinion. The Czech Republic has now had to expel scores of Russian diplomats from its country after being accused of subversion and some kind of terrorism involving blowing up of munitions factories in the Czech Republic. The absence of the United Nations as a mediator in all these crises is symptomatic of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the UN in today’s global politics.

ÿþIt is 76 years ago since the United Nations was founded after the most destructive war mankind has ever faced and which included the use of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiping out close to a million souls instantly. The ferocity and the destructive nature of the new weapons convinced world leaders that if serious and collective efforts were not made to rein in man’s violent behavior, mankind itself would be doomed to self-immolation and annihilation. Since the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the ability of the Soviet Union  in 1949 to balance the one-sided equation of the USA being the only nuclear power in the world, peace has been maintained by the fear of mutual terror of possible  exchange of nuclear weapons by the two nuclear weapons states of  the USA and the USSR especially when inter-continental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear war heads became operational by the late 1950s. These weapons system have been further perfected depending on intended theatre of operation and targets to the point that each of the then super powers of the USA and USSR allegedly had enough nuclear weapons to bury the world five times over. One cynic added what would be the point of burying the world five times over once it is buried once? The second-strike capability possessed by each of the super powers eliminated the advantage of a surprise attack. The futility of the arms race eventually led to some reduction in nuclear weapons by the USA and Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union. More reductions are planned for the future presumably by all the nuclear weapons states.

The danger now facing the world is the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is not only the five permanent members ( P5) of the United Nations’ Security Council ( UNSC) namely the US, Russia, Great Britain, France and China  that have the bomb, other countries such as India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are now nuclear weapons states. Iran has ambition, against international opposition and international treaty of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), to join the nuclear club, presumably for defensive purposes. There are other countries that have the technical knowledge and the money that can quickly become nuclear weapons states if determined to do so because the UN ‘s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) based in Vienna Austria, does not really have the energy and force to prevent a determined country from producing nuclear weapons as was the case of North Korea, Pakistan, Israel and India. Countries like Japan and Germany, the two countries that lost the second world war can easily become nuclear weapons states but for their constitutional self-restraint and possibly international disapproval.

What was until recently a bipolar world up till the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 suddenly became a unipolar world of the United States as the global hegemon. This has now metamorphosed into a tri- polar world of the United States, Russia and China, when the question of war and peace are taken into consideration. But in actual fact, it is really still a bipolar world of China and the United States when all indices of power including the economy are considered. For example, the following comparative GDP figures graphically illustrate the strength of each major power today. The USA has a GDP of $21.43 trillion, China has a GDP of $15.42 trillion and Russia has a GDP of $1.7 trillion USD (2017). The relative poor strength of Russia is what made President Barack Obama of the United States to call Russia a medium power to the annoyance of President Vladimir Putin who found the description humiliating for a proud and powerful country and a nuclear power for that matter.

This is the power context within which the modern United Nations operates. The truth is that the UN is as effective as the major powers want it to be because each of these major powers that sit permanently on the UNSC can wield their veto power in the UNSC to prevent collective action of the UN even when world peace is threatened. The UN seems most effective when the major powers are behind it and are ready to provide logistical support if military or humanitarian operations are needed. The big powers rarely provide troops for peace keeping or peace enforcement operations. The only aberrant example was during the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 when a largely American military operation supported by her western allies fought under the UN flag.

The upshot of all these preambular statements is to suggest that the issues of global peace are largely dealt with bilaterally between the super powers rather than under UN multilateral diplomatic channels. Of course, when there is a crisis in such places like Syria or Myanmar, the UN Security Council would convene to condemn, offer platitudes and call for arms embargo and nothing more. When action is taken it is usually unilateral action with the UN merely as an onlooker. Each of the global powers recognizes red lines which they may not cross to avoid super power confrontation. When Russia in 2014 illegally annexed the Crimea peninsula part of Ukraine, it was a gamble that the United States would not risk a global conflict to save Ukraine. The USA of course imposed sanctions and summoned the meeting of the UNSC to condemn Russia. Russian policies in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus are based on what it calls protection of “Russia abroad “that is to say, showing the Russian nationalist flag to assure the millions of Russian leftovers in the 15 successor states of the former Soviet Union. The USA and the west without open acquiescence with this policy seem to see that Russia has genuine interests in those states. This is why military operations by Russian supported dissidents and even Russian volunteers in Eastern Ukraine, in Georgia, and Moldova are largely tolerated as sops to Russian nationalism. This should also be taken in the context of the USA and her NATO allies intervening in the Balkan wars (1994-1995) to stop the genocide of Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia in spite of Russian opposition of western military action against a Slavic people like the Serbs. But Russian opposition was brushed aside especially when it was obvious genocide was being committed. In any case Russia in 1994 was not in a position to challenge the West. The UN later came into the scene when UN International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague to try Serb and Croat political and military leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity. This same court has tried some African leaders from Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, the Ivory Coast and Chad for crimes against humanity. The number of former African rulers that have been dragged before the court has raised eyebrows in Africa where intellectuals are wondering why it seems the International Criminal Court was set up specifically to try former African rulers. It should however be borne in mind that countries like the USA and Russia are not parties to the protocol setting up the International Criminal court and consequently the court has no jurisdiction over their nationals. It is obvious that the UN is only active in stopping the virulent nationalism leading to genocide when relatively powerless countries are involved but not countries such as Russia’s championing ethnic Russian nationalism in former countries of the Soviet Union. However, no matter the push by Russian nationalists, Russia has restrained itself in all forms of intervention apart from secret efforts of subversion in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania despite the presence of large ethnic Russian population in the three Baltic states. This restraint by Russia is because of the danger of confrontation with NATO to which these countries now belong to maintain and guarantee their freedom from Russia.

By Jide Osuntokun

It has become a habit of mine to take the privilege I have as a columnist, to celebrate those who have made great impacts ether in terms of public or international recognition or appointments or sadly people who have finished their race of life and are sure to get the crowns of glory from God Almighty for the impact they have made on our country and Ipso facto on other Nigerians. It is however better to celebrate a person when he or she is alive, well and kicking than to celebrate them posthumously. This is why I write about good citizens who happen to be my friends.

I knew of ‘Biola Omolewa before I ever met him. I went to Ibadan Grammar school for the Higher School Certificate course for two years between January 1961 and December 1962 and stories about the rascally boys in previous years were told to us country bumpkins from Ekiti where my previous school, Christ’s School Ado- Ekiti is located. The exploits and appropriate punishment on the two rascally friends of Abiola Omolewa and Isaac Oluwole were told us like broken records.

Luckily I met Oluwole in the school in the science section of the upper sixth form as the British called the second year of the two-year program preparing students for the Advanced Level certificate that was to see us enter any university in Nigeria or any part of the Commonwealth and the United States. Oluwole’s physique and stature were not intimidating! I therefore dismissed the stories of the duo’s rascality as exaggerated. So when I met Biola, I was again surprised because Biola’s centre of gravity was even lower than that of Oluwole’s, if you know what I mean.

Biola after some time in Lagos went to Christ’s School, my old school for his Higher School Certificate thus switching school with me. It was in Christ’s School in 1962 that I first met Biola. I don’t know if there were stories about me Biola heard when he got to Christ’s School because my set (1956 to 1960) did not lie down and allowed ourselves to be run over by the bullies who were our seniors. Some of us only luckily escaped being rusticated by the   then principal, Canon Leslie Donald Mason, who always backed the prefects no matter how unjustly they treated us. His credo was that discipline must be maintained at all costs! I remember how some of us in 1959 narrowly escaped being sent down but given the last chance not by an “act of merit  but grace “ perhaps divine grace, as Archdeacon L.D Mason , our English principal tearfully put it.

My friendship with Biola really developed from 1964 to this day. Biola entered the University of Ibadan in 1964. I was already there since 1963. We both were in the History department. Biola excelled in his first session that he became a university college scholar. He did so well in the subsidiary French course that he and others like Ladipo Adamolekun were sent to Dakar, Senegal for advanced French course for three months. He did so well that the History department nearly lost him to the French department.

When he returned to Ibadan, we were both involved in running the Historical Society of the university. I remember with fondness our trip in 1965 to Ghana and Benin and my struggle with the French language during the soirée amicale the students of L’Ecole Behanzin organized for us.  After the Soirée amicale, female students who felt I was courageous to have danced with the wife of their principal, something none of them would have dared to do, flocked to us boys actually asking us to take them to Nigeria. That was the good image of Nigeria then in West Africa even before the oil boom/curse. What these young people did not understand was that we were undergraduates not high schoolers. We however like all boys enjoyed the adulation and we bragged to our female members how foreigners appreciated us and that it was a case of too much familiarity breeding contempt. I enjoyed my time in the limelight of being called “Monsieur le president “by adoring Beninois girls!

When I left the following year on a one year Exchange Program with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, Biola took over from me as president. The following year, he followed the same trajectory of being chosen as one of the two students exchanged with SOAS and Saint Mary’s College of the University of London. When I left for graduate studies after graduating in 1966, I knew Biola would follow my footsteps like my “running mate”. He did. The late Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi wanted to have Nigerians specialize in European Studies so that when the white professors handling those courses departed for their countries, there would be Nigerians prepared and ready to take their positions. He wanted Biola and myself to be prepared to do this. He also had the same plan for Nigerians to be able to specialize in American Studies for which he chose the late Okon Uya and another person, an Igbo chap whose name has escaped my old brain. It was not an easy thing for me and Biola and particularly for Biola whose effort was sabotaged in Ibadan by the same people he was trying to replace. Eventually Biola switched to Education which was the plan of God for him and he has excelled and distinguished himself there as the foremost Nigerian professor of Adult Education.

He has achieved so much in the field of education that his advice and expertise and experience are highly sought after by the federal government, UNESCO and other international organizations like the Commonwealth that pay close attention to and interest in education. To crown his efforts, the federal government appointed him as ambassador and permanent delegate to UNESCO in Paris in 1999 and he held that position for almost a decade and this he did with distinction. I am not writing a reference for Biola . He doesn’t need one from anybody but God at this stage of his life. He invited me to collaborate with him in editing two huge biographies of Professor J. F. Ade Ajayi our mentor and the other was on Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, our spiritual father. I hope we did a reasonably acceptable job.

Biola is a wonderful person. He as an energetic person who seems not to get tired even at his age. He recently went to Abakaliki for a meeting of council of the Federal university located in the place. I believe he hired a taxi for part of the trip. When he contacted me from there, I felt sorry for him and I asked him what the hell he was doing there in these days of general insecurity? He disarmed me by saying God was with him there.  I told him off rather irreverently even though I am an elder in my church. I am of the credo that God helps those who help themselves.  Abiola is blessed with two brilliant daughters and a son who are doing well abroad. One of the girls has inherited the gift of mastering foreign languages particularly French and German and of course English like her dad. Unfortunately Biola lost his Gambian wife, Yamin almost a decade ago and like me in our adversity, he soldiers on. Biola has this wonderful gift of never being unhappy or perhaps he has a way of masking his unhappiness because with Biola it’s jokes all the time, at least when we are together. He is a prodigious researcher and a workaholic. He knows all the research libraries in London and Paris and also the art galleries where whenever he sees a painting of divine personages Biola would stop and offer a prayer! He once took me to the London Gallery of the Arts and while others were snapping photos, Biola led me in prayer every section we went to my embarrassment and amusement of onlookers! Later he took me to Saint Stephen in the Field, an Anglican church, built right on a cemetery in Trafalgar Square London. I would ordinarily not go to a church in cemetery and later have breakfast in the same cemetery! This probably came naturally to Biola!

Biola is a genuine Christian who contributes to Christian institutions financially like he did throughout his sojourn in Paris. He also builds up people and I have been a recipient of his generosity when my daughter was getting married in Dublin when he sent his wife Yamin to represent him all the way from Paris with a heavy present to lift my hand up just as he did to me when I visited him in Paris. Biola and I have come a long way experiencing the usual ups and downs in our journey of life. I wish I could have the inner joy that Biola seems to have. Unlike me Biola never drank despite his sojourn in Paris where red wine is cheaper than Evian water! This separates him from us “les hommes sous develope”. I am sure Biola knows the joke of this comment. I throw it in because how can I write this short congratulatory tribute without making Biola laugh?

Biola deserves whatever accolades that may be heaped upon him. In his inimitable way, Biola never mentioned his coming celebration to me. I always tell him he is a magician who disappears and appears at will. I love you with all your eccentricities perhaps the hallmark of a true academic!

Wherever you are, Biola have a blast because you are worth it!

By Jide Osuntokun

A fool would soon part with his money especially if the fool has no advisers, says an African adage. It came to most of us in the reading public as a rude shock to learn that once again our government is going on a wild goose chase over the rehabilitations of our money-guzzling refineries. This time around the annual $100 million is not enough, it is now going to be $1.5 billion. From the international media we learn this money is going to be sourced from the international capital market.

We don’t know what the collateral is going to be. I ask whether this is a trick or something else. But a trick that is so easily decipherable is no longer a trick but a sick joke. The project would not be completed until the Buhari regime expires. This means the succeeding regime would have to carry the debt albatross. For God’s sake how much debt will Buhari pile up for the succeeding generations to come?

We are back to debt peonage from which Obasanjo got us out of and Jonathan and particularly Buhari have gotten us enmeshed in debt slavery where we thought we and our children have escaped from. Did this new debt undergo parliamentary scrutiny? What is the purpose of having a well-paid, in fact the highest paid parliament in the world if it cannot perform parliamentary oversight duties? What we get in return is free flowing heavily embroidered gowns and shining Japanese Jeeps to show for it. No one knows how much this government based on other people’s money has accumulated in the last six years and we have two more years of generalized insecurity, uncertainty and additional foreign loans to go.

This particular loan is taking Nigeria and Nigerians for a ride. Any informed Nigerian knows that for almost two decades rehabilitations of the four moribund refineries have become coded words for looting and grand larceny. Realizing this, on the eve of Obasanjo’s departure, he sold these useless refineries to some Nigerians willing to take a leap in the dark. But when Umaru Yar’Adua came, his “socialist crowd” from Ahmadu Bello University prevailed on him to abrogate the sale whose negotiations were apparently inchoate. Since then, we went back to the annual ritual of awarding the rehabilitations of these refineries to what Americans will call “favorite sons” or companies fronting for them. This whole scenario began when Abacha, the byword for national looting gave the rehabilitations of the Kaduna refineries to a so-called French company for $100 million. Of course nothing seemed to have been done and the Kaduna Refineries continue to run a deficit of hundreds of billions of Naira without producing any refined petroleum while its staff are routinely promoted after attending annual jamborees and refresher courses abroad.

The current minister in a moment of candor said he could not understand how a company not refining oil annually runs a deficit and promotes its staff without being closed down or sold to whoever may want to buy the dead dodo off the hands of a clueless and confused state. One of the last things the late Professor Tam David West, a knowledgeable person in these things said is that the refineries should all be sold to private entrepreneurs. David West was an avid supporter of the incumbent president and a man who served Nigeria well and for most of his life was a lone voice in the wilderness crying for Nigeria’s Risorgimento.

Many of us in the academia had consistently supported Buhari, I believe since 2003 because of what we perceived was his sense of purpose, discipline and integrity. Some of us felt that having been an oil minister without dirtying his hands in what is now a curse on our country, he will be able to block the leaking basket of the national treasury.  It is either we did not think thoroughly or we were deceived or that because of Buhari‘s advanced age, people are doing things in his name of which he is unconscious of. If a huge loan was needed, should it not be for infrastructural development and electricity? Even in the case of infrastructural development, there is need for monitoring and scrutiny of what is going on so that nobody is deceived.

The much-ballyhooed Lagos -Ibadan railway that has been officially opened is still work in progress. Out of curiosity I went to see the station at Moniya in Ibadan and I was shocked by what I found. The station is still under construction and the roads to the station are virtually impassable. It took me more hours to drive from the station to downtown Ibadan than it took me from Lagos to Ibadan. Yet Rotimi Amaechi is signing railway loans all over the place. A government that does not believe in cabinet reshuffle is by global parliamentary standards an inactive or carefree government or a government of free for all or a government in a free fall.  This is what the Buhari government of sit-tight ministers is.

If a huge loan was needed to upgrade the universities or some of them into centres of learning and ground-breaking research in a sustainable fashion, one would understand. If people are short of ideas, shouldn’t the coronavirus pandemic bring our national shame before us that we who used to produce vaccines in places like Vom are now waiting for handouts from WHO in Geneva before we can save our country from going under the coronavirus scourge. South Africa is manufacturing the Johnson and Johnson one shot vaccines on license from the company’s owners in the United States. Yet we are told we are the biggest economy in Africa. We have the humiliation of two million vaccines being sent to us by the WHO to vaccinate a population of 200 million if we can trust our census. Why can’t we on our own take $5 billion from our foreign reserves and begin to set up a vaccine infrastructure in Nigeria to manufacture under license vaccines against coronavirus and not only supply all our needs and sell vaccines to other parts of the world including Africa but also prepare for future pandemics. Rather than this imaginative way, we go around borrowing money to put into the sink-hole of refineries’ rehabilitations when even before we begin, we know the project will not end well.

If money is to be borrowed why sink it into petrol refineries when we know in a few years to come, perhaps 20 years when petroleum would no longer be energy of choice because of the environment, we would not have recovered our investment. If there is a need for investment in this sector, a government driven by national interest would invest such money in the high yielding NNLG which has been returning huge dividends to the national purse.

While still on petroleum refinery, why not wait for the Dangote Refinery that would produce refined petroleum products for home consumption and for export to come on board rather than waking up moribund national refineries that should just be scrapped and save us the heart burn of annual budgetary allocation into corrupt pockets of armchair petroleum engineers hopping around in the corridors of power for their share of national cake? If there is any hurdle in the way of the Dangote refineries, government should assist the company to overcome them. If the Dangote refineries do not come on stream this year, it may be too difficult for the company to recover the almost $20 billion invested in the huge multi-purpose industrial complex because the world is moving away from hydrocarbons dependency.

Parliament should enquire about the loan being sourced for the rehabilitations of the Port Harcourt refineries and any other refineries for that matter. Without parliamentary budgetary approval, the process of awarding contracts and or funding the rehabilitations should be stopped and if the rehabilitations contract has been awarded without parliamentary approval, then the whole process should be regarded as dead and buried. There should be no funding for any such projects from the annual budget. There are more pressing issues of infrastructure and security that should take government’s one hundred percent attention. Security should even take precedence over infrastructure because it has come to a point when travelling between two cities in Nigeria has become a perilous journey undertaken only by those who have military or police escorts or by intrepid travellers secured by the Holy Ghost or by African juju.

Indeed, there was a country! How much my heart pants for a return to a Nigeria of yore when we slept with our two eyes closed.

By Jide Osuntokun

President Joe Biden has been in power for less than three months and the time is too short to have a full picture of the direction of regime’s policies but morning shows the day as childhood shows manhood. His policy at home will of course be subject to robust Republican challenge and even filibustering in the senate. He will have to moderate his policies in order to have national consensus in an ideologically and culturally fractured society. The areas of contention at home are immigration, health, civil rights, racism, housing, culture, infrastructure, energy, the environment, education and police reforms. These are subjects which American administrations since Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s have battled with sometimes with a national consensus but in most cases with sharp divisions between the Democrats on the Left and the Republicans on the Right.

While foreign policy cannot be completely divorced from domestic policies but in some cases the linkage between the two may not be obvious. The foreign policy of a country like that of the USA remains fixed on the protection of its national interest. What appears to be different between the Democratic and Republican parties is at best tenuous and a difference in emphasis and in the dramatis personae. American foreign policy in the Middle East tries to protect American Oil Majors which had invested heavily in the development of the Middle East oil. Protecting them was couched in the defence of democracy and free navigation of international waters. This policy has been defended by Republican Administrations from David Dwight Eisenhower to Democratic administration of Joe Biden. While oil may no longer be important as a factor in American Middle East policy, America’s investment in the area and the strategic importance of the Middle East in global shipping and aviation will always make control and influence in the Middle East important to policy makers in Washington DC and now of course in Beijing and Moscow.

America wants to reduce the power and nuclear ambitions of Iran while tolerating Israel’s excesses and those of Arab monarchies favorable to American interest. Surprisingly Biden has moved strongly against the Saudi Crown prince which a quieter policy could well have achieved. But America is not the only player there.

The Russian federation needs neutrality if not acquiescence of the Muslim world in the way it tackles the serious Islamic fundamentalist problems of the Russian Caucasus and its relation with the now sovereign Muslim majority republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan where fundamentalism has remained a worrying political problem.

China also needs friendship with the keepers of the holiest places of Islam to mollify its restive Muslim population in Northwest China particularly in Xinjiang, Gansu and Ningxia and significant Muslim population in Yunnan province in the South West and Henan province in Central China. In the past, Western policy makers used to feel that China and Russia did not have abiding interest in the Middle East but the situation has changed. The Soviet Union maintained presence in the Middle East ideologically and militarily in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt after Colonel Abdel Nasser came to power in 1956. China, until recently, did not count for much in global politics but since the Korean War of 1953, China has demonstrated muscle in protecting its interest in the Pacific and I remember a statement credited to Zhou En Lai, China’s prime minister in 1956 that in the event of war with the USA, China would be prepared to sacrifice 100 million Chinese and it would still have over a billion Chinese left. This came as a sobering moment to people in the Pentagon who were used to threatening China with nuclear weapons following Chinese troops pouring into North Korea to defend it against western allies fighting under the flag of the United Nations.

What used to be a bipolar world of the United States and the USSR has now metamorphosed into a Tripolar world of a dominant USA, a much weaker Russia which President Obama dismissed as a medium power and resurgent China with a GDP of USD14.34 trillion (2019) compared with the USA USD20.9 trillion (2020) and Russia’s GDP of USD1.7 trillion (2019) which is about half of Germany’s.

World peace is guaranteed by the fear of universal nuclear holocaust which John F Kennedy captured in his remarks during the Cuban crisis of 1963 by saying if war broke out between America and the Soviet Union, the “living will envy the dead” meaning those who survive will wither away through the painful death caused by radioactive fallout. Robert Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb was said to have regretted letting the genie out of the bottle and one of the earliest nuclear scientists, Albert Einstein was sad at the coming of the bomb and said if a Third World War was fought, the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones because civilization will not survive a thermonuclear exchange by the then two super powers. The situation is now more complex because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of Britain, France, India, Pakistan and now Israel, North Korea and in spite of the nuclear weapons’ non-proliferation treaty, some countries like Iran are determined to have atomic weapons ostensibly for defensive purposes. If this pandora box is not closed tightly, the technology and the money is available in countries like Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea even Brazil.

The antagonism of the Biden administration to Russia and China is therefore wrong-headed. Calling the Russian President a “killer” is totally undiplomatic. Putin in return, says he wishes the American president good health meaning he thinks the old man is unhinged. Trying to reset American-Russian relations to pre- Trump level doesn’t mean President Biden calling another president a killer even if there is incontrovertible and public evidence. What does America gain from it?

American-Russian relation is too serious to be based on some nebulous civil rights consideration no matter how popular it is with the Democratic Left. Saying Putin will be punished and every American would see it is a “misspeak” because apart from economic pressures, what can America that has been wearied and weakened by two decades of wars in Asia and the Middle East do to Russia? Does Biden want to liberate the Crimean Peninsula annexed by Russia since 2014? Of course, Biden can make Russia pay in places like Syria and block the gas pipeline bringing gas from Russia to Germany. Before this brouhaha died down, Biden’s foreign minister  Anthony J. Blinken publicity lashed out at China in a public meeting in Alaska telling the Chinese, America would  no longer tolerate China’s stealing of American technology by violating copyright of American companies  as well as violation of democratic rights of people in Hong Kong and the rights of Muslims in Zinjiang and that America would resist China’s meddling in Taiwan affairs and obstruction of international waterways in South China Sea. The whole world knows this is standard American policy but what benefit did America derive from this public spat which elicited appropriate insulting response from China.

Biden in this careless way of undoing Trump’s policy has unwittingly driven his two potential enemies into each other’s warm embrace. Yet, he needs China’s help in dealing with the recalcitrant Kim Jong-un of North Korea on denuclearization.

Western Europe must be worrying about Biden’s wobbly foreign policy because if war were to break out and fought with conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, it will probably be fought first in the European theatre before it spreads to the whole world. Of course, if any disastrous policies emanate from lack of professionalism in the USA, they should not expect their European and Canadian allies to follow them sheepishly.

One area of domestic policy that will explode in the face of Biden is the impression he has given to people in South and Central America that the American southern border is open to welcome gate-crashing immigrants into America where anti-immigrant racism and white supremacist tendencies are getting out of hands. The Biden administration is now soliciting for Mexico’s assistance by offering it two million Astra-Seneca vaccines which America doesn’t need.

Lest I am misunderstood on the issue of immigration, I believe that the success of the Biden Democratic administration is so important to the welfare of the rest of the world that everything should be done to prevent the return of Trumpian  racist white supremacist republicanism.