The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Buhari at the United Nations plenary

    I have been travelling through Europe and North America for the past few weeks so it was with pleasure that I watched our president deliver his speech at this year’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). I have some sentimental memories of my being a member of Nigeria’s delegation to UNGA beginning from 1988 to 1993 and again in 2005 before finally bowing out.

    I remember those years we spent under our foreign minister, General Ike Nwachukwu (retired) crafting our statements at the United Nations. When the late General Joseph Garba was our our ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations, we used to debate every word in the president’s speech before a final text was given to the president, vice president or foreign minister for delivery at the podium of the UN. It was usually a lively scene of arguments sometimes deteriorating into rude retorts before we settled down to a clean text. Even after that, someone close to the leader of the delegation may sneak in a sentence or two even after the advance copy had gone to the UN secretariat. This was why every UN speech had at the back – “check against delivery”.

    By the time I stopped going to the UN, it was no longer customary for speeches to be printed since this was made available on UN website. It was also customary for the president to host a reception for other delegates on the day of the national statement at the UN. The Nigerian delegation was always bloated. No amount of effort made by the ministry of foreign affairs to control the size of the delegation worked.  People came from every ministry tangentially related to UN affairs wanting to be delegates. The people in the ministry of finance who had to provide the money for the operations and their colleagues in the Central Bank would insist on attending. The various line ministries, cabinet office or the presidency as it is now called would have its own list. The ministry of foreign affairs always had a long list. The media also had to be invited so that one would have adequate coverage.

    During civilian administrations of Shehu Shagari and since 1999 post-military civilian regime, members of parliament and even state governors showed up as delegates in what had by then become a charade. The effect of this was that Nigeria’s delegation was usually embarrassingly large. But the work was done by only a few who were the best brains available or shall I say, who were invited. I hope Nigeria under Buhari will ensure that the size of its delegation is not too large and that people will not continue to show up until Christmas carrying letters from home to the permanent mission wanting to be registered as delegates.

    One also hopes that the Nigeria House in New York will continue to be maintained so that several of its floors can be rented out to service our diplomatic operations in North America and elsewhere. That was the purpose of building the imposing edifice in the first place. I say so because I was involved.

    President Muhammadu Buhari acquitted himself well in his performance at the UN. He was confident and had poise in his carriage and delivered a well crafted speech clearly. He covered all areas of the world where there are problems such as the Middle East particularly Palestine and Israel. He called for a just settlement of the Palestinian problem on the basis of a two states solution and according to the innumerable UN resolutions going back decades. Any one waiting for condemnation of the USA’s movement of its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv would be disappointed. Nigeria cannot be expected to face an approaching train of Trump’s America. The president spoke sympathetically on Syria calling for peaceful solution to the civil war while praising Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Germany for taking in Syrian refugees. He also called for peace in Yemen without getting involved in the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. He then spent an unnecessarily long time on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar praising Bangladesh for its humanitarian assistance to the refugees.  One wonders whether the time spent on the perennial problems of the Middle East could not have been better spent on African and Nigerian problems while just mentioning the Middle East in one or two sentences.

    The president paid adequate and encouraging tribute to Eritrea and Ethiopia for signing a peace treaty between the two countries and ending the state of belligerency which had unhappily existed between the two countries for decades. He said South Sudan and Djibouti had also resolved their internal problems that have led to the loss of lives and displacement of their people. He said no problem was too deep-rooted that it cannot be solved. He mentioned the situation in the Sahel and the threat posed by terrorists to West Africa following the collapse of Libya. He linked the proliferation of weapons and light arms in our sub region with the collapse of Libya but said nothing about those who killed Ghadafi to contribute to the solution.

    His call on the international community to help us restore the waters of Lake Chad and thereby the livelihood to 45 million people is likely to fall on deaf ears. His acknowledgement of the help of France, Germany, the USA and Norway in this regard is spot on. Boko Haram and the rehabilitation of our people in the northeast of Nigeria can only be resolved within bilateral relations with friendly nations. I will like discrete moves made to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the states in the Gulf where our rich people carry our money to for assistance in our situation of desperation. The president also linked the desiccation of Lake Chad to climate change and its deleterious effect in the bitter and deadly struggle for land between farmers and herders in Nigeria indirectly calling for all countries including the United States to take the issue of climate change seriously. He did not say this but it is implied. He finally called for international effort to stamp out corruption and illegal transfer of billions of dollars by nationals of under developed countries to the developed countries. He added that without repatriation of such funds, resources available to government will be considerably reduced. He said we will not have the resources to provide employment for our youths at home instead of their dying miserably in the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea.

    The president should have mentioned what his government was doing to tackle all these problems.

    On the whole it was a good speech which also was well delivered. Unfortunately it was delivered to a virtually empty chamber. Nigeria has no control who listens to its president’s speech at the UN. Thank God, we were not laughed at. But the lack of audience is a manifestation of how far down Africa and Nigeria has sunk in international reckoning. Our continent has become a synonym for disease, poverty underdevelopment and civil strife and there is no glimmer of hope that our continent will soon join the rest of humanity in the march for development. This is the challenge before all of us and particularly before Nigeria’s leaders ruling over a country that the UN says by 2050 will harbour 40% of the poorest people in the world.

  • President Trump at UN General Assembly plenary

    Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his annual report before the plenary session of the General Assembly on September 25, painted a sombre and dangerous picture of the world in which unilateralism is being preferred over the post-Second World War multilateral diplomacy and multinational institutions which have secured the world after a bitterly fought world war and an unstable post war peace. The Secretary General said the idea of each country building a fortress around itself was what led to the Second World War. He identified climate change and the danger of wrong application of robotics and artificial intelligence as posing challenge to mankind’s survival. The melting of arctic ice in places like Greenland and other areas, in the polar regions of the world, if evidence are still needed, is a clear indication of the challenge of a deluge to the world apart from the unseasonable heavy rains and high temperatures.

    On the technology front, he felt the use of machines to wage war and to kill people may get out of hands where machines take independent and automatic actions in killing human beings. He called on all humanity to come together and save the world from destruction.  He emphasized that security cannot be secured individually but by the collective effort of the world. He may have had an advance copy of President Donald Trump’s speech and felt he needed to respond to it in advance.

    President Trump’s speech called on individual states to embrace “patriotism, pride and prosperity”  over globalism which before the First World War was in consonant with traditional American isolationism rooted in the Monroe Doctrine which the president made an allusion to. He began by saying no administration in the history of the United States has achieved as much as his administration. This attracted the laughter of the assembled delegates from all over the world which felt the American president mistook the audience for an American campaign rally. The president was visibly shaken but he brushed off the embarrassment by jokingly saying he was surprised by the reaction of the audience.

    Then he continued by saying all the “wonderful” things he had achieved since he last spoke at the United Nations. He said he has built an American economy in which unemployment has virtually disappeared. He emphasized the fact that millions of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinos have never had it so good in terms of employment. He mentioned how America was economically strong and had gotten a budget over $700 billion for its military in 2017 and a further increase on this budget for the current year. He then called on every member state of the United Nations to be prepared to defend itself and clearly said any country that wants America to defend it must be prepared to bear the cost.

    He also mentioned how last year, he had been preoccupied with the danger posed to the USA and the world by nuclear weapons-armed North Korea but which through his effort following meeting with Kim Jon Un its leader, he has gotten a commitment towards denuclearization.  This time, the “little rocket man “has become his dear friend chairman Kim Jon Un. The president said his Secretary of State was following up efforts at further talks with the authorities in North Korea to ensure meeting the target of complete denuclearization. He said he had just signed a bilateral trade agreement in a win-win relation with South Korea. He said he had also done the same with Mexico but was quiet about Canada its northern neighbour which forms the third leg of the triangular trade relations called NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area). Surprisingly he went after China whose leader Xi Jinping he describes as his friend. He claimed that over the years China had ripped off the United States up to trillions of dollars in unfair trade and intellectual property theft. He said he was determined to reverse the situation and had imposed series of tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States and would continue until there was equilibrium in China- American trade relations.

    He singled out some countries for praise and approbation. He then mentioned a country like Saudi Arabia which was witnessing an era of reforms under its young crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman Al Saud .He also singled out Poland as a country determined to consolidate not only its political but more importantly its economic freedom by building a gas pipeline from the Baltic Sea apparently bye-passing previous Russian gas supply. He used the opportunity to lambast Germany, which these days has become his whipping boy, for its total dependence on Russia for energy supply. He praised India for seeing millions of people out of the poverty trap. He said nothing negative about Russia not even when he was talking about Syria except indirectly when he said America would not stand idly by if Syria uses chemical weapons in its civil war which had led to displacement of millions of Syrians and the death of more than half a million Syrians.

    President Trump had the harshest and undiplomatic words for Iran whose leader, Hassan Rouhani, described him as suffering from intellectual deficit. Trump said the Iranian regime was robbing its own people and that all the billions of dollars that it had earned under the 2015 nuclear agreement it signed with the P5+1 i.e. the USA, Great Britain, France, Russia and China (five permanent members of the UN Security Council) and. Germany had either been embezzled or wasted on destabilizing its neighbours and sponsoring terrorism. He said America was determined to stop Iran from harming American allies in the region. He said he was a realist and to this end he has moved American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the interest of peace. He said he was elected to defend American interest and was not ashamed to do this and he called on other nations to defend their own interest. He did not say or perhaps does not care about what may happen when there is a clash of interest. He carried on with his jingoism and attacked President Maduro of Venezuela for economically destroying his country and said those who are still deluded about the efficacy of socialism should see what it had done to one of the richest countries in the world which has now been reduced to absolute poverty.

    He said nothing about climate change rather boasted about how the USA is now the largest producer of energy including “clean coal” which it was ready to export to willing buyers. On the whole, this was a rather distressing speech which brought bad taste to the mouths of all who believe in the United Nations which Trump had dismissed during his campaign for the presidency as a useless and hostile body working against American interest. He said the USA will reduce to 25% its contribution to UN peace keeping operations and that this will be on voluntary basis and not as an assessed contribution. He said America had withdrawn from UN human rights commission, UNESCO and had no good words for the WTO and that America will not participate in UN sponsored international conference on migration saying control of any country’s borders is not the business of the UN. He made it clear America will determine who comes to the country and would not welcome large numbers of refugees as it used to do and that everyone was on its own .It will not surprise any one if next year, America withdraws from the UN especially after the delegates had laughed at Trump who does not take personal attack lying down.

    Needless to say virtually every head of state or leader of a country’s delegation including President Muhammadu Buhari spoke diametrically against Trump’s position.

     

  • Too much politics and little governance

    THIS season of elections has brought to my mind the issue of our preoccupation with politics and politicking while governance takes a second place in our priority in the affairs of our nation. The point I am raising is universal but the consequences may not be universal. It is assumed in some countries that the campaign for the next election begins the moment a new government is sworn in. In other words, campaign for elections is an unending occurrence and therefore there is no dichotomy between politics and governance.

    In the advanced western democracies, the bureaucracies or what is now negatively referred as the “deep state” are so well established as to put governance on auto-pilot. If there is no party, government the society will not collapse. In fact people would rather be saved from the politically corrosive and divisive nature of party government. When people call for political stability or continuity of policies, they are indirectly saying they do not want political disruption arising from party politics. In the remarkable and phenomenal economic development in China and Southeast Asia, one sees politics being kept in the rear while governance occasioning economic development gathers pace. Development in these countries can be divorced from politics. Singapore and Malaysia under Lee Kuan Yew, and Mahathir bin Muhammad respectively, present us example of continuous governance without the possibility of change of government following a regular election. The authoritarian governments in those countries present us a new paradigm of government different from the western democracies where party government change is constant and when it is not it is assumed that things are not right.

    In China the government has come out publicly to state that the current president of the country, Xi Jinping will remain in office indefinitely. Even in a country like Germany, the long stay in power of the Conservative coalition of the CDU/CSU since the time of Konrad Adenauer through Helmut Kohl and now Angela Merkel with occasional intervention of the SPD / FDP has provided political stability for Germany which has allowed it to face the task of governance that has made the post economic wonder (Wirtschaftswunder) in the country possible. In other words, governance and development can only be achieved in a stable polity and even in the case of Italy, governance based on strong and well established bureaucracy can go on irrespective of political instability. This would not have been possible without solid national institutions which continue to provide sinews to knit the state together even though imperceptibly. It is not every state that can be as lucky as some of the states in Europe.

    In developing countries where there is no deep state and well established state institutions and strong bureaucracy, political stability is necessary for economic development. Where too much time and resources are spent on politics, development is put in abeyance.

    In Nigeria the pre-independence governments at the regions and at the federal level in spite of the party politics of the time benefited from the stable colonial civil service in place then. But after independence when politics crept into the civil service, we began our slippery slope to instability. When the military took over particularly under President Ibrahim Babangida, the post of permanent secretaries was abolished and replaced with director generals who were political appointees and could come from either the civil service, the universities, business or the media. Thus began the road to permanent instability arising from the entanglement of governance and politics. Since 1999, there has been an attempt to go back to a regime where politics is separated from governance as much as possible.

    Lagos presents a unique laboratory for this study in politics and governance especially since 2007 when Bola Ahmed Tinubu ended his second term in office and was succeeded by Raji Fashola whom he chose to succeed him. During the eight years of Fashola, Tinubu provided political backing to the Fashola government while Fashola concentrated on governance for the good of the state. The exceptional performance of Fashola in Lagos has been ascribed to the fact that he did not have to worry about politics and politicking in the politically combustible environment of Lagos. The same scenario that existed in the case of Fashola apparently played itself out during the Akinwunmi Ambode’s gubernatorial tenure with Tinubu and the party leadership providing political backing for Ambode while he buried his head in the problem of governance.

    Whatever may have been achieved by separating running the government from day to day politicking, this separation of politics from governance has not been without its problems as has been found out after Fashola’s and Ambode’s first terms and the trouble the two of them have experienced in securing a second term in office. This probably means it is not a perfect system and that perhaps the man in the government house should be well grounded politically. It seems our people prefer that a politician should combine the attribute of a good governor with that of a good politician. In Kayode Fayemi’s first administration in Ekiti, everybody said he did very well and too well that he forgot about politics and politicking. Nobody could have said this about Awolowo who had tight control of both party and government. In Awolowo‘s time, politics was an elite preoccupation not like now when every Dick and Harry are in politics. We have to be careful in Nigeria that thugs and militants do not take over rulership of states as was the case in some parts of the Niger Delta during President Jonathan’s regime.

    I once asked a young cousin of mine in Ekiti what he was doing for a living and he did not think before he said “I am in politics”. I was shocked because I did not know politics has become a profession. When I got talking to this young man, he told me so many lies against the leader of the opposing party to his that I had to upbraid him that as an educated person, he should not be telling lies that don’t make sense. He retorted that lies naturally came to him and that the tactics was to lie against an opponent and then allow the opponent to struggle with explaining to the public and that the bigger the lie the more effective it is politically. This is what the politics of Nigeria has been reduced to. All that matters is being elected. There are no abiding party manifestos or ideology. There is no party discipline, loyalty or commitment. Politics is the politics of the belly or what Governor Fayose calls “stomach infrastructure” which apparently worked for him very well in the governance of Ekiti for eight years.

    Before our country can settle down, we will need to have strong institutions and not “big men” or robber barons manipulating the politics of the nation and the states. We must get to a point where the states can be on auto-pilot and politics will become routine and not a matter of life and death and not the easiest avenue to wealth and prosperity and that one can make contribution to national life and be recognized without being involved in politics.

     

  • Democracy and pro-poor development in Nigeria

    The idea of universal basic income has gathered traction in some circles particularly in Europe and Canada. The idea is that most countries in the world can afford to get their citizens paid living stipends rather than continuing with maintenance of the current gulf presently existing between the rich and the poor whose salaries are not living wages. This, it is argued, is not some kind of communism but that it will require redistribution and equity in the way national wealth is shared. It is also suggested that if everybody is paid basic income it will lead to more national wealth because it will increase the demand for goods and consequent increased production. Other spinoffs will be reduction in crime and consequent reduction in state apparatus for maintenance of peace, law and order and that the manpower tied up in internal maintenance of peace can be redeployed to more useful and positive enterprises such as farming and industrial production and other productive enterprises. I must say the idea of universal basic income still needs better articulation and rigorous examination. But whatever its shortcomings may be, the present payment of the dole and welfare Cheques in the western world has only succeeded in permanently banishing a large proportion of the people to living below the poverty line. The present system can only alleviate poverty and not eradicate it as basic income would do. Of course people in the poor countries of the world who are left to fend for themselves without state support will be too glad to receive welfare payment like people in the western world.  There is of course the need for an attainment of a certain level of mobilization and production before one can talk of basic income payment. But in places such as Nigeria where we are told 64% of our people are living in absolute and abject poverty we need to do something to tackle this problem no matter how unorthodox the means we adopt. First we need to be producing something and our people first have to be mobilized and be in the money economy before we can begin to talk about basic income. Basic income is not meant for the kind of huge unproductive bureaucracies that consume most of the wealth of developing countries. A universal basic income must be tied to gainful and productive employment.

    The problem of poverty must still be addressed not in the way we are currently trying to do it by giving paltry loans of N10 thousand to poor people directly by governments.  I personally do not believe we should be sharing recovered Abacha stolen funds among millions of poor people in small bits and pieces. What business can anyone do with N10,000 or N50,000 loans  than selling roasted peanuts and roasted plantains or such puny businesses ? I know many people will say such little monies can turn the lives of poor people around but I think we should be raising the bar.  The recovered loots should be used for concrete things like building roads  , schools, hospitals , housing and improving infrastructure and opening up the country for commercial enterprises. Signs should display boldly that such important infrastructure were done with recovered stolen money. I think what needs to be done  to deal with poverty is to direct the  commercial banks through the Central Bank to set aside substantial funds to give as loans to young people particularly graduates of polytechnics and universities and possibly high school graduates who cannot proceed further but who want  to go into small businesses with emphasis on agricultural production and particularly adding value  to for  farm produce for local consumption and export. The vast majority of our people are not graduates of any sort whether of high schools or tertiary institutions. There must be a separate  program for such people. Financial assistance and farm inputs such as free fertilizers would have to be provided as well as advice for preservation of produce that cannot be sold . We need to revive marketing boards for agricultural produce to maintain reasonable commodity prices from year to year so that farmers can be assured of stable prices for their produce. This was what the commodity boards did for our farmers during the pre-independence and immediate post-independence years before the soldiers came and did away with commodities boards to promote so called market forces. Since then, production has plummeted and farms have been abandoned to old people who are dying out.

    Bill Gates while addressing the federal executive in a rare privilege granted him by President Muhammadu Buhari had strongly suggested that Nigeria must do more for their farming communities who are in the majority. He had said controversially, in my view, that roads and railway construction though important must however be aligned with the people’s needs because development is about people.   For example he was not impressed in situations of ten lane high way running from Abuja Airport to the city  which he says does not make sense where roads leading to and from the ports are left dilapidated and unmaintained for years . The same can be said for roads joining the oil producing areas with the ports of oil exportation as well as links between the productive and economic Centres necessary for the growth of the economy being left dilapidated for years. Where will the money for this programme come from?

    It is generally known that the percentage of people paying taxes in Nigeria is too low . That is the truth . People everywhere always try to avoid payment of taxes.  This is more so in Nigeria where the masses tend to feel they would not benefit from government programs. I like what the government of Lagos does after every project is completed; they would put a sign board saying the project has been paid for by taxpayers’ money.  This should be copied by all states and the federal government.. The other way to get more funds into government coffers is to shift to consumer  and sale taxes and value added tax rather than poll or direct income tax . If we can minimize corruption and reduce the ballooning bureaucracies at federal state and  local government  levels of governance , monies will be released for the basic income and assistance to everybody in a win-win situation. The important thing to stress is that we in Nigeria have reached a turning point in which we must think outside the box to tackle the problem of poverty. This problem is daily manifested in the insecurity pervading the whole country. We see this in the farmer/ herder killings and cattle rustling in the pastoral zone in the north of our country. We see the same in armed robbery  and kidnapping and human trafficking and desperate movement by young people to cross the desert and the Mediterranean Sea to the shame of most of us who see our young people enslaved and perishing in the Sahara desert. Many of our elite can no longer go to our towns and villages in the country. We all seem to be marooned in the big cities and even in the cities we are barricaded behind tall walls and our houses are guarded by ferocious dogs. This is not living. The rich can no longer sleep because the poor are awake.

  • Democracy in Nigeria

    The crowd of people wanting to contest election to be president of Nigeria in 2019 has given any intelligent Nigerian food for thought. When one looks at the individuals who want to be president, the question one asks himself is who has asked them to contest? What are their qualifications? Why are others not contesting? Do these people truly believe they have something to offer? What are their visions and missions? Are they representing themselves or hidden interests? What are the operational instruments of their promised service delivery?

    Why are they all politicians who have held offices before and made lots of money? Where are the real makers of Nigeria like trade unionists, teachers, doctors and engineers and others producers of national wealth? There was a study done on the USA senate and it was found out that 85% are lawyers.  Why are our senators and those running for president retired public servants? These are possibly eternal questions which many people ask in countries with democratic system of government.

    Right from the time of its origin in ancient Athens, democracy has had its limitations as a system of government. Franchise was limited to only citizens and men. Women, slaves and men who were under the age of military service were not eligible to vote or be voted for. But the good thing about Athenian democracy was that any citizen could be a candidate to be voted for. The system had its antithesis in the military dictatorship of Sparta which was more efficient and effective but not enduring. The synthesis of these two systems was the representative democracy which evolved in 19th century Europe especially in revolutionary France since 1789. Even then the vote was tied to property ownership and national military service (levee en masse). Before this time particularly after the declaration of American independence from Great Britain, the idea of representative government based on limited franchise based on property right had become the norm in democratic practice. This is why critics dismissed this as bourgeois democracy and the state and its bureaucracy as organized instrument to protect the bourgeoisie. The so-called “rule of law” is a clever way to defend the rights of the property owning class. This debate recently came up with President Muhammadu Buhari’s raising the debate about raison d’état and regle de loi. This was a philosophical question which was debated under Rousseau’s concept of the General Will which needed not be the sum total of the wills of individuals in the society but could indeed be the will of the minority or a few or even one person manifesting the knowledge of the higher interest of the good of the society.

    The possibility of this idea being hijacked by a ruling class or even one person is the reason for the fear by society that this can be manipulated. But this fear does not obviate the possibility of a few people rather than the crowd of people knowing what is in the overall interest of society. Democrats the world over have distinguished between mob rule and democratic rule. The difference is that those the French called the crowd may not know what is good for the society whereas the educated propertied class presumably know. This was amply demonstrated during the French Revolution by the descent into Jacobin terror which only the man on the horseback, Napoleon Bonaparte’s military intervention put an end to. The excess of democracy can either lead to dictatorship of the Left or the Right. As shown during the French Revolution, there are times when in the national interest, a strong government is needed to guarantee the larger interest of the people.

    Now back to the horde of contestants for elective offices in Nigeria. One of the problems in the case of Nigeria is that political parties that are normally designed to aggregate the views and interests of the people are either absent or inchoate. Political parties are normally built around enduring philosophy or ideology which shows a group’s world view (weltanschauugen) and how the group would want to shape the society which it wants to govern. In advanced democracies like the USA or the United Kingdom, belonging to parties is taken seriously. The Conservative and Liberal parties in the United Kingdom have existed in one form or the other for centuries either as Tory or Whig parties. Even the younger Labour Party has been in existence for more than 100 years. The same can be said for the Republican and Democratic parties of the United States. On the continent of Europe particularly in Germany, one can trace the ancestry of the existing political parties for more than a hundred years. In France, people seem to coalesce around tendencies and policies of either the Left, Centre, Far left and extreme Right. Whatever the case may be, one does not find parties existing without the cement of ideas, ideologies or philosophy of government. Perhaps because of the low education of our people, parties at least for now, only approximate ethnic, religious and regional interests. This makes it difficult for effective national parties to exist and politics therefore seems to be about sharing of whatever wealth exists and not about building or creating the wealth. Policies put in place do not build up the nation but rather emphasize the ethnic fault lines and division. Yet, during the last stages of colonial rule in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, we had mass parties like the NCNC (National Convention of Nigeria and the Cameroon (citizens) and la rassemblement nationale Africaine in many African countries in West Africa. Of course, even these so-called rallies were assemblages of all kinds of groups of students, trade unions, tribal unions and so on and were doomed to emphasize fissiparous tendencies in later years even before independence. The Action Group founded by Awolowo and the Yoruba elite was tightly organized party around the person of Obafemi Awolowo but broke into pieces when it tried to transform into a proper ideological and national party. Its counterpart, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was pure and simple, a regional party formed to defend its regional interest. The Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) of Aminu Kano was formed to defend the interest of the talakawa in the northern part of Nigeria. In other words it too did not have a national political horizon.

    Does this mean that political party formation in Nigeria is doomed and dead on arrival? One may also ask if regional and ethnic parties are of necessity bad in a plural society of different ethnic groups and different interests. These interests may not necessarily be in conflict and even if they are in conflict, are they not to be negotiated since we cannot change are neighbours? Who better to negotiate our mode of association if not people we can relate to because of our primordial ties?

    In a developed country like Germany, there is a Danish party with representatives in the local parliament in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. In Italy, there is a German party in South Tyrol (Alto Adige) and German Party in Belgium formed strictly to defend the ethnic interests of Danish and German minorities in those countries. In other words, there may be nothing wrong in people coming together to defend certain particularistic ethnic interest. This was the idea embraced by Chief Awolowo in his suggesting creation of states based on linguistic consanguinity and affinity. This would have meant some states will be large while others may be small  like in California, Texas and Rhode Island respectively but the feeling of ethnic freedom would make up for whatever imbalance may exist in the larger confederation.

    Ahmadu Bello seemed to have agreed with Awolowo but to an extent but that the historic boundaries would also count along with language. The point I am making is that perhaps the political parties of the past should have been built upon instead of decreeing into existence soulless parties not rooted in our history. Perhaps what would have evolved is the perennial coalition governments characteristic of Germany and Italy which would have taken care of the hue and cry about marginalization and exclusiveness. This would not have been perfect but neither is the present lopsided democracy in the favour of plutocracy perfect. How many ordinary Nigerians have the millions being demanded by parties for right to contest in their primaries? Our so called “fledgling” democracy has a long way to go and a situation of a few rich people of doubtful provenance imposing themselves on the vast Nigerian humanity is not my idea of democracy.

  • Africa’s external relations in age of rising nationalism

    The recent visits to Africa of the president of France, Monsieur  Emmanuel Macron, the German chancellor, Angela Markel and Prime Minister Theresa May and planned visit of the wife of President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, have at least brought attention to the usually  least remembered continent  because of the usual negativity attached to the continent. The European leaders particularly Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are concerned about the unceasing migration of young black Africans to Europe across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. It has become obvious that this migration is not welcome in Europe and it is causing the upsurge of nativism and racism in Europe and causing  negative political effect across that is destabilizing Europe from France to Germany and Italy and across Central Europe. It has become a problem for the entire European Union over sharing of these so-called refugees  if and when they land in Italy or are rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean. Because of this refugee problem, right wing parties are rapidly growing and Italy now has a right wing government that rode to power on the slogan of throwing out the refugees besieging their country.

    European leaders are now beginning to  consider whether the tide of this black peril can be stopped in Africa before it reaches Europe. They have adopted two strategies. One is to help Libya come alive through support, with or without election, some kind of “Egyptian solution” of a military strongman to emerge and hold power in Libya. This is the position of  Emmanuel Macron. This strategy of supporting strong leaders in Africa, whether democratic or not, is the position of the former British Prime Minister David Cameron. This may also be the position of Donald Trump and perhaps Angela Merkel.  The second strategy is to find jobs for young Africans through  creation of  employment by private entrepreneurs. All of these leaders now seem to encourage private investment in Africa to help create jobs to keep their young people at home instead of looking for non existent El dorado abroad. They also seem driven by not abandoning Africa to Chinese enterprises. The Chinese are particularly good in supporting infrastructural development in Africa. But in spite of the hue and cry about Chinese takeover of Africa, they are still behind the USA and Great Britain in  the volume of their private investment in Africa. The Chinese are interested no doubt in Africa’s raw materials such as copper, uranium and land for agricultural development particularly in sparsely populated East African countries. They  are financing the huge hydroelectricity project in Ethiopia, a project that has sometimes  nearly brought Egypt and Sudan into armed conflict  against Ethiopia over the control of the Nile river upstream in the Ethiopian highlands.

    As for the British,  the Brexit problem at home has compelled the government to begin to look for market all over the world including Africa. The countries of the Commonwealth immediately recommend themselves as possible areas of British enterprise and investment. A new policy of the British Prime Minister Theresa May is to tie British overseas development assistance to promotion of Britain’s investment so as to create market for British goods for what she said will be  of mutual interest and benefit to Africans and the British. She has said the budget of the ministry of international development would now become some kind of seed money for Anglo- African private joint partnership. How this will work has not apparently been determined yet. But opponents are already criticizing her for mixing philanthropy with business.

    Africa should embrace increased foreign investment no matter the motives of those investing. African states should in fact make their countries investment-friendly by having proper legal regime to protect their people and their national sovereignty. It is now well known that the best way to eradicate poverty is through private investment. This does not preclude a strong state intervention when necessary. The phenomenal development of China and Southeast Asia has been through private investment coupled in the case of China and Singapore with Chinese discipline and Confucian ethics and determination of the various authoritarian political leaders in places like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam to leapfrog several stages in development. Whether Africa has a stomach for the kind of strong regime that will facilitate rapid development is a moot question.

    A decade ago, Africa experienced phenomenal strides in economic development following the rise in commodity prices and democratization on the continent. But the collapse of commodity prices and the failure of African states to save against a rainy day has led to general collapse of the economies of African states and consequent loss of prestige, weight and influence internationally. Africa has found itself almost totally ignored in a world dominated by rising nationalism and isolationism particularly in Trump’s America. The situation is further worsened by the coarseness of the international environment characterized by the rise of resurgent Russia and the strive for global influence of the rising economically powerful China. The  situation has not been  helped by the various wars in the Middle East and the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism of which Nigeria and west and eastern Africa as well as the the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa have been victims. Even where there has been political stability on the African continent, it has been at the  expense of democracy. West Africa and in particular Nigeria suffer from threat of Islamic terror and farmer-herder struggle over fodder for cattle. The so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo has remained unstable since 1960 and the country has been carved out into territories run by warlords while a huge UN force looks on. The Central African Republic, Southern Sudan and Somalia remain the most wretched countries in the world with minimum regard for human lives in the absence of strong central governments that can impose their will on their territories. There is now a seeming pessimism globally about Africa and the endlessness of young Africans migration across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea have become manifestation of the helplessness of Africans in managing their own affairs and  thus creating problems for Europe. This is making European leaders look down on Africa and to ignore its people’s sensitivity about the lack of respect for Africa’s sovereign rights as independent countries. How Africa will emerge from this prostrate situation without a second Colonisation lies in the belly of time.

  • Foreign meddling in Africa’s domestic affairs

    Following fake news on the right wing and reactionary Fox networks in the USA that “white land” was being forcibly taken from the white farmers in South Africa and that some of these farmers were also being killed, President Donald Trump directed his foreign minister, Mike Pompeo to intervene. The strange thing in all this is that the president is relying on news network to make serious diplomatic judgements. Since 1994, the ANC has promised to look into land owning in South Africa where the blacks who constitute 80% of the population owns 20% of the land and the minority 15% of the whites and others own 80% of the land. Most of the lands owned by the whites are left fallow apparently as “undeveloped estates” in the words of Joseph Chamberlain, a 19th century British imperialist. President Cyril Ramaphosa, the newly elected South African leader now wants to do something about the injustice in land distribution. This has become more urgent in view of national elections coming up about nine months from now. Secondly, a breakaway youth faction of the ANC styling itself Economic Liberalisation Front is advocating violent seizure of land from the white farmers as was done in Zimbabwe under the former president of that country, Robert Mugabe. To avoid the ruinous effect of such eventuality, Cyril Ramaphosa has to be seen to be doing something. What his government wants to do is an orderly purchase of lands from the whites which will then be sold to blacks who want to farm. State lands would also be thrown into the pool of land to be distributed. The SouthAfrican government is conscious of its responsibility for economic stability of the nation and would not want to do anything to harm the most developed economy on the African continent.

    As an aside, this writer while hosting Thabo Mbeki when I was ambassador in Germany in 1992 offered him unsolicited advice about the need for caution on the economic front in South Africa to which the then socialist firebrand retorted that the ANC government was not thinking of nationalization of all sectors of the economy. They have kept their commitment. But critics are now saying the vast majority of the blacks have not benefited from majority rule. To prevent revolution from below, the Ramaphosa government must impose some form of socialism from above in the long tradition of social democracy. It is this development that Fox News network in America twisted as persecution of whites and the rather unorthodox President Trump seized on this to order American intervention in a purely domestic policy of a sovereign and apparently friendly ally.

    We of course do not know what kind of correspondence goes from Pretoria to Washington DC. But we know that since President Trump came to power, he has not appointed under secretaries  and ambassadors to most diplomatic positions both in Washington and its outposts in the diplomatic missions all over the world. The meaning of this is that the USA is not benefiting from professionals in its diplomatic service. Most of its missions are run by acting ambassadors who  are trying very hard to reflect the undiplomatic environment prevailing in Washington DC in the various  American missions  all over the world. But it is not only American missions that are meddling in the domestic affairs of their host countries; American  and heads of mission of some of the OECD countries go around issuing undiplomatic statements about  domestic developments in their host countries. They pontificate about election results and even criticize annual budgets of sovereign governments pointing out so-called sectoral anomalies in the budgets. Some even comment on military operations and disposition of troops in host countries. Yet these diplomats know that what they are doing is wrong and their own governments would not tolerate this kind of meddling in their domestic affairs from any foreign envoys in their own countries. They are simply exploiting the weakness of our countries particularly in Africa to ridicule us and make nonsense of our hard won independence. They do not do this in Asia, obviously because of that continent’s rising economic power. They also do not indulge in this in Latin America but only confine their crude intervention to Africa. A glaring example of this is how NATO destroyed the regime of Muamar Ghadafi with serious consequences on north and sub-Saharan African countries including Nigeria.  It is the same frame of mind that makes the International Criminal Court in The Hague to virtually confine its attention to dragging African presidents for trial before it.

    I am for making every leader accountable for their misrule but this must be universal and should not have any racist tendencies. Of course in recent times leaders of defunct Yugoslavia particularly Croats and Serbs have been taken before the court. The deterrent value of the international criminal court will not be felt until it has a global reach. The non accession of the USA and Russia to the protocol setting up the court means this is a forlorn hope.

    African countries on their own must do proper home-keeping and be above reproach. The United Nations have recently changed its protocol about intervention after the genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia and  says it would be prepared to intervene whether invited or not where there is evidence of genocide or crime against humanity. This will of course depend on whether there is unanimity among the major powers in the world especially in the UN Security Council.

    Elections in Africa need not be a matter of life or death. We should be able to hold reasonably fair elections without inviting former colonial masters to come and give us pass marks. Elections in their countries are not perfect and are not subject to international inspection and approbation. Even in their wandering inspections, they don’t bother Arab countries who are mostly monarchies nor do they bother Egypt where a military strongman is in saddle. Our foreign minister here in Nigeria must call in any ambassador roaming around criticizing the government and telling us what we should or not be doing. If there is need for such advice, there are proper channels for offering it. Our leaders in the past fought hard for our independence and some of them paid supreme sacrifice for our freedom and the present generation of leaders must not trifle with this freedom. It is really sad that our apparent weakness in Africa south of the Sahara has opened us to the humiliation of this new wave of neo-colonialism.

  • Bridges in Nigeria: Lessons from Genoa

    On August 14, a pillar supporting a bridge over the Polcevera River in Genoa Italy collapsed leading to the death of 43 people and the wounding of several others whose vehicles tumbled down from the bridge falling in some cases on people and houses bellow the bridge. To imagine that a 50 or so years old bridge will collapse in Italy with its history of expertise in road and  bridge construction dating back to Roman times raises fears not only in Italy but in the entire world. As I listened to the news of this tragedy, my mind went to the Third Mainland Bridge and other bridges in Lagos and other parts of the country particularly bridges across the Niger, the Benue and other rivers in several parts of Nigeria. The reasons adduced for the collapse of this bridge apply to the Third Mainland Bridge and virtually all the flyovers in Lagos. The reasons given are increase in vehicular traffic, lack of regular maintenance, faulty design and use of steel and concrete in the construction of the said bridge. With the exception of faulty design, all the reasons would apply to the bridges of Lagos and elsewhere.  We also do not know the correctness of their designs. The Third Mainland Bridge is particularly a matter of concern to most road users. The bridge was closed for a few days in August for the purpose of assessment and examination of stress and strain and possible problems of wear and tear. Impatient Nigerians were even complaining about being disturbed and prevented from using the bridge.  The Third Mainland Bridge is one of the longest bridges in the world. It is probably about three to five kilometres long. It was constructed by the Nigerian off shoot of the German construction company, Bilfinger und Berger known here as Julius Berger now a publicly quoted Nigerian company. This bridge was completed in the 1990S during the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. This means the bridge is over 30 years old. So it ought to be fit for purpose for at least another 30 years or more. But driving on the bridge shows some parts of it are sinking thus showing undulating contours where flat and smooth surface should be the normal thing. There has not been comprehensive maintenance in the last 30 years. Every time maintenance was proposed, the National Assembly shoots it down by spurious argument about federal character and need to spread developments to other parts of the country, ignorantly forgetting the huge contribution of Lagos to the national economy in terms of customs and excise duties and valued added tax. If Lagos were to collapse, 60% of the national economy will be gone. If these bridges collapse, thousands of souls will be lost. This is because at any given time, thousands of vehicles are stationary on the bridge in the terrible traffic snarl of Lagos. It is therefore not just an economic issue to ensure these bridges do not collapse, it is also a humanitarian issue. Apart from the Third Mainland Bridge, the Apapa flyovers have been irredeemably damaged by trucks and tankers permanently parked on them waiting to offload or carry goods from the Lagos ports that are immobilized by all sorts of problems that make running them efficiently virtually impossible. The point I am making is that we have problems of coming and imminent disaster in the collapse of some of the bridges particularly the Third Mainland Bridge unless immediate maintenance and in some cases additional construction to strengthen their foundation are quickly undertaken.

    In the Genoa bridge case, we are told the steel used to strengthen the concrete may have rusted thereby weakening the structure especially if water gets into the concrete following cracks. This is like describing the problem in Lagos. Iron rods which are routinely used as foundation for our bridges are not as enduring as we used to think. The only way to avoid disaster is regular inspection and maintenance. Italy because of the tragedy in Genoa has identified more than 450 bridges that need to be either redesigned, reconstructed or strengthened. Prevention is better than cure. I wish our ministry of works would also react proactively in spite of the usual economic and political constraints. I know certain bridges across the Niger in Jebba and Lokoja that must also be constantly watched as well as other bridges across many of our rivers in Nigeria. In spite of the fact that lives appear cheap in Nigeria, if we are to judge by how human lives are daily wasted on our roads, by herders and armed robbers as well as by the state itself, we must never give up reminding our leaders that there are irreducible minimum standards of a state’s responsibility to its citizens. If after this recent assessment of the Third Mainland Bridge, faults of design, construction or too much overload in the carrying capacity of the bridge are found out, our government should not hesitate in shutting the bridge down for months of accelerated maintenance. This is what a responsible government should do while ignoring the usual whining of the public. It is better to be alive than to die under a pile of concrete under the Third Mainland Bridge. No state of the federation where its people are facing imminent danger should, under the pretext that a bridge belongs to the federal government, abdicate its responsibilities of maintenance of bridges and roads in anticipation of reimbursement.

    While on this issue of infrastructure, I want to call the attention of the federal and states governments to the deplorable situation on our roads leading to innumerable deaths of poor and not so poor Nigerians. Death on bad roads is not a respecter of persons. It does not matter whether one is poor or rich or whether one is young or old. Our roads have been left unmaintained for many years by our different levels of government. With the exception of a few states in the country, all the states seem to do is pay salaries and allowances to their over-bloated bureaucracies with little left for development. The local governments that used to tar roads and collect garbage have abandoned their primary reasons for existence and members of local government councils merely meet to share allocation from Abuja if and when the states allow these allocations to reach their intended destinations. The result of this is total collapse of infrastructure. The road leading to people’s houses are never tarred and when tarred, are never rehabilitated or maintained.  This is in spite of payment of taxes and in the case of Lagos, huge land use levies. Nigerians do not expect much from our governments. We have gotten used to no potable water, no electricity, no security no roads or health and educational facilities that others in most parts of the world have taken for granted. But we have a right to our lives and this is a fundamental right. All I want to say to all our governments is that they should try and save us from unnecessary head aches and high blood pressure.

     

  • Aretha Franklin: Artist and preacher-man’s daughter

    I left Nigeria for Canada as an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fellow for a Ph.D. programme in History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia just as the civil war broke out in Nigeria in 1967. The Killamtrusts operate in Canada like the Cecil Rhodes Trust in England that awards the Rhodes scholarships for outstanding scholars from the English-speaking world of the Commonwealth of Nations as well as the United States of America and Germany. Killamtrusts award scholarships to the same category of scholars in the commonwealth. While Rhodes scholarships are tenable at Oxford University in England, Killamtrusts awards are tenable in select Canadian universities such as Dalhousie, Toronto, Alberta and University of British Columbia.

    Going to Canada was not my first time of traveling out of Nigeria to the western world. I had spent 1964 to 1965 which was to have been my second year at the University of Ibadan as an exchange student at the University of London precisely at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and at Queen Mary’s College. Going to Canada for a lengthy period and at an uncertain period in the life of my country was a challenge to say the least. It brought unhappiness and loneliness to me because I am naturally an introverted and racially sensitive person.

    Nigeria became independent in 1960 and a republic within the commonwealth in 1963. Those of us who were young were supremely confident of ourselves. Coming from a well-established family of the Osuntokuns also made me unprepared for the humiliation of racism in Canada or anywhere else. But that was the reality so-called “coloured” young people faced in the western world in those days.

    The 1960s were revolutionary years in the world. It was the age of the youthful and young American president, J.F Kennedy and his brothers. It was the age of the assassination of the president and his younger brother, Robert Francis Kennedy. The Kennedys shared the epoch with the civil rights leaders of Martin Luther King Jnr and Malcom X (Little) both of who were assassinated. The period witnessed the civil rights movement and the spread of communism and revolution from Cuba to southern America unsuccessfully. The 1960s witnessed the rising tide of African nationalism and the emergence of several African states and the wars of liberation in Vietnam and its beginning in Southern Africa. The world escaped global cataclysm over the Cuban crisis in 1962 when the young American president faced the inscrutable Nikita Khrushchev the Russian leader and asked him to withdraw his missiles from Cuba. These years of political and military brinkmanship were ironically the years of the production of the greatest music in an era. This was the time of Rock’n roll, pop music, and rhythm and blues. These were the years of Sam Cooke, Ottis Redding, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Keith Richards, The Beatles, the Supremes, The Jackson 5 and the inimitable Aretha Franklin to mention those who come to my memory.

    As a home sick young man in the dreary and desolate winter months in Halifax, Nova Scotia, particularly during Christmas holidays and being left in our hostel with my Indian colleagues with all our Canadian colleagues at home with their families, the emotional music of Aretha Franklin ministered to me in 1967 when she sang “A change is gonna come” to be followed in 1968 when she came out with her hit song “I say a little prayer” written by Bacharach and David and first sang by Dionne Warwick another black woman. Later in 1970, I heard her song “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. The song was inspired by a single line from a gospel song written by Paul Simon of the Simon and Garfunkel – two young New Yorkers who wrote and sang several songs in the 1960s and 1970s. Other songs with emotional appeal such as “Lean on me”, “Angel”, “ United together”, “Young, gifted and black”, “Drown in my own tears”, “Do Right woman, Do right man”, “Amazing grace”, “You make me feel like a natural woman”, “Think”, “I never loved a man the way I loved you” and  ”Respect”. She had many other songs that many people associated her genius with. But for me, the songs that brought tears to my eyes were those that came deep down from her soul. Nobody could have heard or hear today the song “Amazing grace” or “Bridge over troubled waters” without being emotional. Her songs were liberation songs for the Civil Rights movement as well as funeral dirges for its fallen heroes. The women movement also found solace in her songs about treating wives and women right.

    Most of us who were touched by her message which to me were preaching did not know the personal history of the lady behind the songs. She came from a family of five children and a dissolute father who masqueraded as pastor but involved himself in promiscuous life but managed to present a righteous exterior to the extent that when Dr Martin Luther King junior came to Detroit where the Franklins were living after moving from Memphis Tennessee, the civil rights leader stayed in the Franklin’s home. Aretha Franklin‘s mother left her husband when Aretha was 10 years old. By the age of 12, she had had a baby and by 14 she already had two sons. She was to have two more sons rapidly in what must have looked as a hopeless life. She however continued to sing in the church and her God-given voice attracted attention from music companies such as Columbia and Atlantic Records companies. Perhaps because of her terrible experience as a sexually abused and exploited child who also went through abusive marriages and partnership with men she was never really confident and comfortable with through most of her life, her songs were a kind of liberation therapy for her.  Her father led a miserable life after being shot by a deranged racist and this left him in coma for several years and was taken care of by his daughters.  Aretha grew up during the meteoric rise of Detroit as music Mecca in the United States and the production of that unique sound known as “Motown sound” which made black music not too heavy to appeal to all races black and white. I think this was why Berry Gordy Jnr, the owner of Motown Records did not sign and offer a contract to Aretha Franklin but embraced Diana Ross and the Supremes and a host of other black artistes who produced some of the greatest music of the 20th century.

    What the Motown group missed became the gain of the rest of mankind especially to those of us from religious roots and political background who felt insulted by the pervasive racism in the western world. That kind of feeling made us African students in my university in Canada to complain about a terrible and depressing film being shown all over Canada in 1968 titled “Africa Adieu” produced by Italians to depict black Africans as savages. Following our unhappiness, Ambassador Aminu Sanusi, our High Commissioner in Ottawa and father of the present emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi 11 saw to the withdrawal of the unfair film.

    Aretha Franklin’s songs always brought solace and relief to us and this was the kind of emotional relief that made President Barack Obama to shed tears while listening to Aretha Franklin’s songs during his inaugural gala night. Aretha will live for ever in her touching and liberating songs.

  • Trump presidency so far

    Since January 2017 when Donald John Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America, the world, for better or for worse, has not been the same. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality with his net worth being US$3.1 billion. If America were an ordinary country, the world would not be concerned about who wins an election there to become president. America’s exceptionalism is captured by its president being regarded as the “leader of the free world”.  This was why it used to be said when one sneezes in Washington, the world catches cold! This was perhaps more appropriate when the world was polarized into the communist and the capitalist free enterprise world. Even then we in Africa were more or less dragooned into the so-called “free world”. Even when we were not free and we were under European colonialism, we were still made to look to the USA as our political Jerusalem. Until the 1960s, most of Africa were colonies of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. Even when Great Britain, Belgium and France withdrew politically from Africa, they still maintained a stranglehold on the economy of the continent. Spain and Portugal, the latter in particular, had to be forcefully expelled by force from the continent.

    The southern part of the continent remained until the end of the 20th century under white settler racist regimes. Majoritarian democracy was still alien to Southern Africa until the wind of change mentioned by the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan reached the southern part of the African continent.

    As soon as Africa exited from white colonial domination, we joined the non-aligned nations and remained by and large positively neutral from big power competition and diplomatic entanglement. In a normal situation, we should not worry about what happens anywhere else but in Africa. But in a world of nuclear weapons where anywhere can be destroyed by pressing the nuclear button in Washington, Moscow or Beijing, Africa cannot remain isolated or insulated from happenings in other parts of the world. A world of polluted oceans washing the coasts of the world and a world of global warming occasioning climate change affecting the whole world, it is no longer arguable that the world is a global village.

    This is the world that the most powerful country and biggest economy is being led by President Donald Trump.

    As soon as he was sworn in, he must have sworn that he would undo all the landmark achievements of President Barack Hussein Obama whom he hated for many reasons first of which was being black and for dismissing him as an unserious and unelectable candidate. He targeted withdrawing from the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) which was a proposed trade agreement among Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States signed on February 4, 2016. The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), a free trade agreement among the USA, Canada and Mexico which was President Bill Clinton’s trade  agreement came under Trump’s attack and dismantling and renegotiating of which is going on. The Iran nuclear agreement among the P5+ 1 (the five permanent members of the UNSC plus Germany) was unilaterally undermined when Trump withdrew the USA from it even though Russia, Great Britain, France, China, and Germany have decided to carry on with the agreement. Trump is determined to make it difficult for European companies doing business in the USA to continue to do business in Iran. This agreement with Iran was designed to prevent the country from producing and storing nuclear grade refined uranium to produce nuclear weapons. Under pressure from Israel and the Israeli lobby, Trump walked away from a deal that at least for some time to come, made the Middle East free from nuclear confrontation particularly between Israel and Iran. Trump also undermined the so-called Obamacare, a health insurance scheme designed to insure millions of poor Americans who were previously uninsured. He dismantled the clean act regime to prevent polluting American environment through carbon emission from coal-burning power plants and automobile emission. He also withdrew from the Paris climate protocol globally entered into to save the global environment from continued degradation and abuse. Trump’s rather than stellar performance in the recent G-7 annual meeting of the most powerful economic powers in Canada during which he insulted his host, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister and colleagues almost made the USA a laughing stock in the international community. He even went to the ridiculous extent of saying Russia should be brought back into the group despite Russia’s aggressive tendencies in Europe and the Middle East. He may yet attack the United Nations Organisation as obsolete, ineffective and inefficient. He has already withdrawn America from UNESCO and treats the WTO with contempt. He is against multilateral diplomacy generally preferring to deal with countries on unilateral basis.

    The security architecture that had guaranteed peace since the end of the Second World War attracted his attention. He felt NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was somehow obsolete and that it was a burden America was no longer prepared to bear. He felt members were not paying the 2% of their budget they had agreed to pay and that unless they paid it, America was no longer going to provide additional money to run the organisation. Founding members of NATO were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the USA. Greece Turkey, West Germany and Spain later joined. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of the countries formerly in the Soviet sphere notably Hungary,  Rumania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and the rump of former Yugoslavia with the exception of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia  have joined NATO.

    So also have the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It seems Trump sees no point in these states of Eastern Europe joining NATO. He recently wondered whether under article 5 that states that attack a member in Europe will be regarded as an attack on all – would mean USA going to war if tiny Montenegro is attacked following its accession into NATO. He seems to be on the same page with the Russian President Vladimir Putin in opposing NATO’s expansion eastwards to the Russian border.

    His apparent wish for friendly relations with Putin despite  the latter’s aggression in seizing Crimea  from Ukraine and military promenade into Georgia and Eastern Ukraine and aggressively backing Bashir al Azad in Syria has raised eyebrows in the west and  among his Democratic critics in the USA. His recent kowtowing before Putin in Helsinki, Finland has led to questions about his collusion with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election in the USA.

    In spite of no rhyme or rhythm in his policies, no one can deny that Trump has made some breakthroughs in USA relations with North Korea. He has met Kim Jon Un, the leader of the hermit state and signs are that there is some positive movement in USA- North Korea relations. His attempt to restart talks with Russia is a welcome departure from recent frosty relations between the two most powerful nuclear powers in the world. He has also forced all members of NATO to commit themselves to adequately funding the organization as well as increasing defence spending. He has forced Canada and Mexico to review the NAFTA so that the three countries can see some beneficial dividends from its operation.

    At home, Trump has put in place tax reforms to benefit mostly the rich and the middle class which has led to the growth of the economy to unprecedented 4.1% and unemployment rate down to 3.9%. The question to ask is if Americans are happier under Trump than his predecessors. The answer is a resounding NO. He has polarized the country and has made racism acceptable at home and abroad by fanning the flame of nativism and nationalism. There is no doubt that his policies at home are predicated on making America white again rather than accepting the reality of a multi-racial America.  He is however right to control illegal migration to his country. No country can allow hordes of undocumented immigrants to flood its country as is being done in the USA’s southern border with Mexico. His sexism and moral turpitude and unethical business attitude in the past are unusual burden for an American president to carry as head of state of “God’s own country”. Hs Middle East policy of arming the Arabs against Iran and unquestioning support for Israel may yet lead to war.