The Nation Newspaper

Tag: America

  • What is America’s national interest in the Middle East?

    What is America’s national interest in the Middle East?

    It used to be said that America’s national interest in the Middle East is mainly the access to reasonably priced petroleum which is widely located in Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and other states like the UAE, Kuwait and Iraq. The Persian state of Iran also produces large amount of petroleum and has vast amount of crude petroleum deposits. Of course since the removal of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran in 1979, by Ayatollah Mohammad Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian oil has been out of reach of the Americans. Now that petroleum is becoming not so popular as fuel because of concern of climate change, it is reasonable to suggest that the presence of petroleum is no longer a major commodity of attraction for America in the Middle East. After all, the USA virtually walked away from the Orinoco valley in Venezuela which harbours the largest amount of crude oil in the world because of political problems.

    The USA itself has vast amount of untapped crude petroleum in Alaska in the Gulf of Mexico and other places in America. The scientific innovations surrounding the use of liquid hydrogen and the adaptation of the internal combustion engine to electrical vehicles has reduced the need of petroleum to drive automobiles. There is therefore bound to be a quantum reduction in the use of hydrocarbons in the world if not now certainly in the future. Of course hydrocarbons at least for the next thirty or so years would continue to be a commodity of high value but the reduction of the significant need of hydrocarbons  means a radical decline in its value. It therefore follows that if the Middle East is going to remain relevant to America, it must be because of some other reasons. The location of The Suez Canal linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea must be an important consideration for interest of a big power like the USA or any other power because whichever power has the command of the sea controls the world.

    The Middle East is almost at the centre of the world linking the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean together. The Middle East is the centre of human civilisation and home of the three monotheistic universal religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and whatever anybody may say, religion for a long time to come, will remain a potent force in human history and action. Because of considerations of security, the United States and the other major powers of the world like China, Russia, India just like Britain and France before them will continue to have serious interest in what goes on in the Middle East.

    When war broke out between the Palestinians in Gaza and the Israelis early in October, most people were surprised about the speed with which the countries of the western alliance namely the USA, Britain, France, NATO and the EU rushed to Israel to declare that that they would support Israel militarily and financially.  Was this as a result of collective Western guilt of the various acts of antisemitism culminating in the holocaust or because of joint Israel- American military and intelligence research, understanding and investment? The USA virtually transferred the executive branch of its government to Israel with its president, foreign secretary and Defence secretary meeting with Israeli war cabinet to plan the country’s strategy of attack against Gaza and to decide what the country would need to execute its attack on Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. Those of us who are keen observers of international relations knew that the love affair would not last when other vital interests are threatened.

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    After about a month of Israeli bombing of Gaza, the rest of the world began to question the disproportionate collective punishment visited on the Palestinians by the Israelis. It got so bad that the Arab leaders refused to meet with President Joe Biden who wanted to go to Jordan to meet with them. They refused to meet with him because they alleged that the “Arab street” would be hostile to such a meeting. This is a case in which “public opinion” trumped diplomacy. This is also a case where American dollars liberally donated to Kingdom of Jordan and to Egypt annually had no effect on the behaviour of the political leaders of those countries and the American president had to return home to Washington shamefully.

    America hopefully learnt a lesson that even-handedness and diplomacy would have paid it better rather than relying on arming militarily, the state of Israel against a ragtag Palestinian terrorist group like Hamas. America has also deployed vast amount of military assets like sea power, combat aircrafts, and several marines warning states in the Middle East not to get involved in the conflict. Ironically, it is the USA that has been bombing so-called Iranian backed groups in Southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen on the pretext that American troops in the area were being attacked. It seems America wants to draw into the conflict, Iran so that a joint Israeli-American airpower may jointly remove Iranian troublesome presence in the Middle East. The United States seems to have forgotten the warning of former American president, General Dwight Eisenhower that the United States should guard against allowing the country to be taken over by the military industrial complex. War does not solve all problems and by abdicating other means of political resolution of the problem between the Palestinians and Israelis, a great lesson was missed. The war party in Israel and the United States and their representatives in Congress seem to want to plunge the Middle East into general conflagration.

    The United Nations has been rendered ineffective because Israel has the support of the UK and the United States, two permanent members of the Security Council and have regularly vetoed any action that would have made Israel realise that there are better ways of solving the Middle East problem without its regular resort to war and sabre rattling. The result of this is that once rendered ineffective and redundant in the Middle East, the UN will remain like that in other theatres of military conflicts like say in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine which poses existential threat to global peace and human survival.

    If the Israeli-Gaza war continues for long, it may radically affect the moral standing of the USA and her allies and increase racial conflict in the world with Arabs feeling that their lives do not matter in relation to those considered superior to them. When racism is added to religious fanaticism, a terrible brew which the world will be forced to drink will be the result with terrible consequences. The carefully designed Abrahamic/Ibrahimic diplomatic outreach between Israel and the Arab states has become the victim of the military policies of Israel and America in this Gaza-Israeli conflict and will be difficult to resuscitate. The economic consequences of this war if it metastases into general regional conflict will have dire consequences in the world. It is already affecting medium oil producers like Nigeria and Angola whose markets are being taken by cheaper oil from Russia and Saudi Arabia sold at discount because of the uncertainty of the times.

    It is certainly not in America’s interest to plunge the whole world into war fuelled recession. It is simply concerning that with generous aid of $5 billion annually, America cannot shape Israeli foreign policy in such a way that it will synchronise it with overall American policy and interest in the Middle East without sacrificing Israeli security.

  • America savours Lola Akinmade’s ‘Everything Is Not Enough’

    America savours Lola Akinmade’s ‘Everything Is Not Enough’

    America came first on October 22. Not in a marathon. Not in its many a battle around the world but in the release of ‘Everything Is Not Enough’, the sophomore novel of Lola Akinmade Åkerström. The Nigerian edition is slated for February 2024.

    The author has held readings in Washington and Richmond, Virginia. 

    The novel is a sequel to Lola’s ‘In Every Mirror She is Black’, which ended on a cliffhanger. It is thus not surprising that this new novel picks up on a dramatic note.

    In this continuation of the stories of Brittany-Rae, Kemi and Yasmin,  there is enough drama to keep the reader turning the pages.

    By the time Yasmin and Brittany’s paths cross, the dramas in their lives are at their peak. Secrets are being unearthed, facts are surfacing and what used to be truths becomes barefaced lies. There are even suspicions that their men are mean fellows capable of violence of unimaginable proportion.

    At this moment, Kemi’s confusion has taken a leap so high it makes her fear about tomorrow, not just her tomorrow but that of the significant other growing in her. 

    The men in the novel, like the women, are flawed but some of them are either outright racists or closet ones. Some of them objectify women, especially black women. One of them, despite all his wealth, shows traits of a mental health challenge. Or how else can you explain a man who keeps changing women like mothers change diapers for babies? His fetish for black women borders on the absurd. Simply ridiculous. He is so terrible that everything is not enough for him. 

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    This novel also parades a number of memorable fringe characters such as Kehinde, Kemi’s twin sister and moral compass. 

    Though predominantly set in Sweden, some key actions happen in London and Washington. Courtesy of those scenes, we see bits and pieces of these powerful cities. 

    The work also touches on the evil of conflicts, conflicts that displace people and force them to seek refuge in places where even when they spend decades, they will never fully be accepted but just tolerated. Through Ahmed and Afran, the author opens the sore that conflicts represent. Through Yasmin’s parents’ fate, we feel the senselessness in wars and conflicts of any kind.

    All in all, Lola Akinmade creates so much crises that one may worry about how she is going to resolve them. This is one of the aspects that a reader is likely

    to give her her flowers because not only are all the seemingly scattered threads brought together, they are merged with panache and grace and the outcome is a fitting climax to an exhilarating ride!

  • Why America’s politics is global politics

    Why America’s politics is global politics

    Some people especially in the so-called third world say we should worry more about what goes on in our countries rather than be bothered by the political wrangling in the United States. There is some sense in this statement but nobody, not even the Russians and Chinese can afford to ignore happenings in the USA. This is simply because America and Russia have enough nuclear weapons to bury the world five times over. The Chinese are not far behind them in their ability to end all our lives.  There are signs that the three of them are planning to resume underground nuclear tests which they have not done for decades. The American dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the printing of which only America has control over.  The movement of the BRICS nations to have another reserve currency is inchoate and lies in the future and not in the next decade. Much work needs to be done as to what currency that would be among those of Russia, China or India whose interests are not and will not always be the same.  Or perhaps BRICS is working on a brand new currency which will take time to work out the details.

    It took the first and the second world wars to put America at the military and economic pre-eminence it is today and the whim  or strategies of a few countries will not remove it from there until the world is convinced that there is concrete and safe alternative.  The recent invitation to economically insignificant state like Ethiopia and bankrupt country like Argentina to join BRICS in 2024 casts a shadow of doubt on the intention and seriousness of the organization. The power of the American dollar is backed by America’s production of strategic and critical goods and the overwhelming power of the American military and not just the fact and ability of manufacturing consumer goods.

    In other words, America’s ability to project power globally is a critical part of what the world has reluctantly accepted as a reason for the ‘dollar imperialism’ at least for now. The fact that most of the major countries of the world have Diasporas in America is another reason for global interest in what goes on in America. If people sneeze in Washington DC, the rest of the world catches cold still remains true as it was before. If America tears itself apart, one may not be sure of which faction will have its hands on the nuclear button.

    Sometimes last week,  Joe Biden the president of the United States in an emotional lecture entitled “The legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our Democracy” delivered at the opening of Senator John McCain’s library at the University of Arizona in Phoenix said America was about to lose its freedom and democracy if it allowed  undemocratic MAGA extremism in the Republican Party to dominate not only the Republican Party but the country as a whole. This was at a time of dysfunctional propensity seen in the Republican threat to shut down the government by its members in Congress who are in the majority. President Biden said former President Trump was playing to the dark side of the American soul which he said was antithetical to American idealism of equality and freedom. He harked back to the idealism of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 about “the self-evident nature that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and that all Americans must rise to secure those rights together without allowing any man or movement to abridge those rights. Although he tried very hard not to mention Trump by name, but everyone knew who he was talking about. The divide and differences in the American population are too glaring not to notice. This divide was what Trump was implicitly exploiting under the rubric of MAGA (Make America Great Again). Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party were cleverly exploiting the various elements of diversity and divide in America ranging from race, gender, sexual preferences, divide between the poor and the rich, the educated and not too educated, management and Labour, Christian and Jew, Pentecostal and orthodox, citizens and immigrants (whether legal or illegal), southerners and northerners, urban and sub urban communities and country bumpkins and urban residents.

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    In short, between liberals and conservatives, between gun lovers at home and those who would use guns to bruise the noses of those opposed to America abroad and between isolationism and a globally engaged America. There is much in the United States for any populist politician to use to divide the country. These were the points made by the American president and that Americans must stand up firm and not allow its institutions and the constitution to be destroyed. He continued to mention the fact that the American constitution is the only one or at least the first one based on idealism of equality even if it had not always measured  up to its founding principles. He brought the memory of John McCain to bear on the point of working together despite the divide of politics and ideology.

    He said Trump was  always denigrating America and calling the most powerful military power in the world weak while at the same time insulting the memories of fallen soldiers  including the president’s own son who contracted disease while serving as a Major in Iraq  and  also serving officers at the highest level of the military. Trump called General Mark Milley, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s highest ranking officer, a traitor for assuring his Chinese counterpart at a time of tension between China and the USA during the Trump presidency that America was not interested in war or about to attack China.

    The contact between the top military commanders of the super powers was routine to avoid miscalculation or wrong judgment. The seriousness of this incident led to special military arrangements made to protect the General who accused Trump of wanting to be a dictator. Trump had during his presidency ignored the routine payment of respect to Allied soldiers in the vast military cemetery in France and had once said he had no respect for captured soldiers like McCain who spent five years in Vietnam captivity. It can easily be dismissed that President Joe Biden was campaigning for re-election in 2024 and that there is no apparent threat to democracy. But one would be missing the point. Misunderstanding the power of the president as absolute, refusal to accept the results of elections and goading one’s supporters to almost militarily invade Congress and refusal to transfer power in orderly fashion after a concluded election constitute a threat to democracy and a blow struck against democracy and the American ideal and example to the whole world. America would lose the symbol of being the light at the end of the tunnel for a troubled world would have been lost for ever if the republican extremism was allowed to prevail.

    Listening with attention to this particular lecture of President Biden in Phoenix Arizona brought back to memory of the Republican candidate for president in 1964 in the same Arizona the heart of Republican extremism. Senator Barry Goldwater scared the whole world by saying “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” especially at the time when the world was just getting out of the Cuban crisis which almost turned the Cold War into a hot war of thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Happily, President Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater who like Trump was determined to exploit the anger and uncertainty about socio-political changes in America into politics of confrontation to the discomfiture of the whole world.

    Let’s hope America would again rise as a body to reset the course of American history as a bastion of democracy.

  • Sex: What’s love got to do with It?

    Sex: What’s love got to do with It?

    Tina Turner burst into the music scene when she won a Grammy Award for the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance with the song, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” This song also won the Record of the year Award.

    That day was one of the happiest days in the life of Tina Turner. But what she actually achieved that day was the worldwide popularisation of the connection between sex and love. She asked a very important question, “What’s love got to do with it?”

    Like Turner, everybody seems to be searching for love. But this searching, in the light of our divorce rate, continues to be as elusive as a mirage.

    As I see it, the problem of not finding true love seems to lie with two factors. One factor is that the ‘world culture’ is highly intoxicated with sex. Sex sells. We are bombarded on every side. There are so many sex maniacs.

    A study published way back in 1991 revealed that one-fourth of all Americans claimed that they best can be described as “sexually insatiable”. That’s about 54 million people, folks! The study concluded that, “in America, sex is an obsession”, and “sex for the majority of Americans, is available for the asking”.

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    These are indeed sobering words. And to think that this estimation is just America’s, and many years ago for that matter.It is no wonder that young people have come to equate their active sex life with love.

    The second factor is with our collective self-deceit which we parade as cultural civility. We have coined some fine words in place of calling a spade a spade. All around the world, it is socially accepted in many circles to say that one is “having an affair” rather than say that a person is fornicating or committing adultery. And in many of these circles, people actually don’t think there is anything wrong with “having an affair.”

    We say that one is “making love” instead of saying that one is having sex. You do not make love: you love or do not. Period! You cannot make love in the literal sense of the term. You can have sex, and have it all the time if that were possible. But what’s love got to do with sex?

    The phrase ‘making love’ is terribly misleading. You cannot make love. You love! It is sad that we have reduced this high concept of virtue-love-to only the erotic level of sexuality.

    We have come to equate love with giving sex or having sex. What does love have to do with sex? Love is not romance, let alone eroticism. It is not even sentiment or emotion. It sounds abstract but it leads to positive attitudes and concrete actions. We need to have love, and give love. Not having and giving sex.

  • The right to life – but only of the unborn (white)

    Trump’s America is, to say the least, a profoundly baffling country; it is one of the most confounding societies in the developed, liberal Western democracies, if not indeed in the entire world. There are many facts and experiences that one could adduce to prove this observation or claim but none is more telling, more indisputable than the stone-age fanaticism that surrounds and pervades the fight against women’s reproductive rights by the so-called “right to life” crusade which is more correctly and better understood as the anti-abortion movement. This is the subject of this week’s column. Let us get right into it.

    The central question is: why should there be so much passion, so much vitriol, so much intolerance around abortion? It is perfectly understandable, though not excusable, that on the basis of scriptural or faith-based considerations, many decent people can be against abortions. Moreover, although it is stretching things too far to assert that a six-week old fetus is already a human being with all the rights that all living human beings have, we can still understand the sentiment, the life-affirming ethics behind such a claim. But to go from that claim to the assertion that there are no considerations whatsoever that can make us weigh the rights of the fetus against the rights of others – including and especially the rights of its mother – is that not fanaticism taken to the nth degree? But that is precisely where the anti-abortion crusade has pitched its battle in the United States at the present time: absolutization of the rights of the unborn fetus and near complete evisceration of the rights of the mother. In effect, this amounts to the abrogation of the reproductive rights of all women. Let us put some concrete flesh on the bare bones of this incredible contention in order to arrive at the real-life politics of this fanatical right-to-life crusade.

    Flash back to last year’s epic battle over the nomination by Donald Trump of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. There were no attempts made to hide or to dissemble about the calculations as to why the success of the nomination mattered so much to the anti-abortion crusade: if Kavanaugh became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the balance of anti-abortion and pro-abortion justices on SCOTUS would tilt in favor of the anti-abortion side. And that would mean, sooner or later, indeed sooner than later, that the established legal protection in settled law for the reproductive rights of women would be gone for good. The ruling that established that legal protection for women is known as “Roe V. Wade”.

    Well, as we all know, although Kavanaugh almost lost the battle for the success of his nomination for SCOTUS, he did get in narrowly. But that was enough. Enough for what? Enough for the avalanche of extremist anti-abortion laws from state legislatures from around the country controlled by the crusaders, the right-to-life fanatics. The goal, the purpose of these laws from around the country is the end, the nullification of “Roe V. Wade”. And when that happens, America would become perhaps the only country in the world in which no reason, no consideration of any kind could make any woman legally obtain abortion. What of a woman who gets pregnant from a criminally violent rapist? She will not have access to legal abortion in a post-Roe V Wade America. And a woman who gets pregnant from an incestuous rape by her father or sibling? Ditto. The fetuses that such victimized women carry in their wombs have more rights than the traumatized mothers who want to end their trauma, pain and shame through a safe and legal abortion.

    It is perhaps useful to explore some of the theological and ethical grounds for the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders. Here’s one line of argument: life is precious because it is a gift from God, a gift beyond human capability to create. In decadent, promiscuous and amoral America, this gift of life is being all too casually destroyed by the easy availability of abortions. The tragedy of this situation is worsened by the existential fact that the human fetus is the most defenseless and vulnerable being in nature and society. The teaching of Christ on this is clear: it is our duty to protect and defend the rights of the defenseless and the vulnerable, especially those like, fetuses, that absolutely lack the means and the ability to protect and defend themselves.

    These arguments and considerations seem rational and humanistic, though they are also endlessly naïve and gratuitously sentimental. Why so? Well, this is because throughout the history of all human societies, the survival of our species has been augmented by carefully balancing the rights and privileges of fetuses and infants against the rights of their parents, especially the childbearing and child-rearing mothers. The main reason for this is the enormously crucial fact that of all living beings in creation, the passage from fetus through infanthood is the longest amongst us, human beings. Where nearly all the other species take at most a few months to complete the passage, we take years during which the dependency of the fetus-infant is near total. This, in fact, is the reason why bearing and raising children, which used to depend almost solely on women, have gradually over the course of time been gradually democratized to more and more involve men. This is why, among liberal families in America today, you will not hear a man say, “my wife is pregnant”; what you will hear him say is, “we are pregnant”.

    Beyond the theological and sentimental arguments, there is another factor driving the anti-abortion crusade in the United States that is notable for the silence around and about it. As a matter of fact, I would argue that it is the single most important factor of all, even though hardly anyone talks openly about it. What is this factor? It is the Malthusian fear or angst that among all the racial and ethnic groups, population growth is overwhelmingly against Whites. The current projection is that by mid-century in the current hundred-year cycle, Whites will no longer constitute the demographic majority of the country. Here, we encounter an irony: Malthusianism usually entails a vigorous push against population growth; among the ranks and throngs of the anti-abortion crusade, the driving force is for more population growth – among Whites.

    Let us admit it: contemporary White nationalism in America should not be equated or integrated with the anti-abortion crusade. This is because there are legions of many Non-Whites in the armies and foot soldiers of the movement since, in fact, the ideological core of the movement is religion. But all the same, there are eminently valid reasons why race should not be ignored in any discussion of the fanaticism of the right-to-life movement. This issue is captured in one seemingly very simple question: why do people who claim to care so much about life, people who claim that we should cherish life in all its stages, why do such people again and again demonstrate that they do not care about Black lives, about Brown lives, about the lives of immigrants and refugees? They shout to the skies that they care about life and yet they wildly cheer Trump’s savage separation of children from their parents among the asylum seekers on the southern border of the country – all because they are not White enough? Let us look more closely at this issue.

    Why has the Black Lives Matter movement become so poignant as a cross on the moral conscience of America? Is it because the shooting of unarmed Black men, women and children by White cops happens again and again? Perhaps. Or is it because most of the White police officers who shoot down these unarmed Black people almost always go unpunished? This we must register: perhaps even more than the regularity with which the phenomenon happens is this fact that most of the perpetrators go unpunished.  Or is it really that a great number of White officials and community leaders show little or no interest in bringing the practice to an end as quickly as possible? I think this is it! For not only do White police officers who shoot down unarmed Black men often go scot-free, they in fact are often protected and even treated as vilified heroes by Policemen’s Benevolent Associations dominated by Whites and by prominent voices in White communities across the nation. Indeed, the very phrase, “Black Lives Matter” arose precisely because it seemed more and more indisputable that to many Whites across the length and breadth of the country, Black lives didn’t seem to matter at all. At least not as much as the lives of fetuses.

    This preceding bitter remark is intended to bring some distancing perspective to our discussion. What do I mean by this? Well, mainly, I mean that the conversation about the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusade is so charged, so irrational that people quite easily forget that most people in America are for women’s right to safe, regulated and legal abortion as an indivisible part of women’s reproductive rights. What does this tell us? It tells us that the anti-abortion crusade does not have the demographic and political strength that it claims and projects. In this regard, it is very much like the National Rifle Association (NRA) which deliberately projects the image of being majoritarian in the country, when in fact, most Americans support reasonable gun control and background checks on all potential gun owners and buyers. To look at how devastatingly effective the NRA has been in preventing legislation for gun control, one would think that the organization has the support of most Americans. But this is not the case at all, by a long shot. Yes, America is without equal in the world in gun ownership and mass homicides from gun shootings and a lot of the responsibility for this comes from the NRA’s effective lobby against legislation to curb the uncontrollable circulation of guns in the country. But like the anti-abortion crusade, the NRA does not have demographic advantage, not to talk of numerical superiority, on its side.

    I confess: it was a deliberate act on my part to bring the anti-abortion movement together with the NRA in my reflections on the demographic politics around the veneration for life that is at the heart of this essay. Of all the Western liberal democracies, America is without parallel in the number and constancy of violent deaths. On the surface, it would seem that the fanaticism of the anti-abortion crusaders is a humanistic response to this overall cheapness and fragility of life in the country. In other words, one could say that the anti-abortionists have had enough of how cheap life has become in America, more so in Trump’s America. But this is completely false. As we have seen, the crusaders care only or mostly about the lives of fetuses, not the lives of mothers and parents whose responsibility it is, not the government’s, to give their children real, meaningful and dignified lives.  Of especial concern is the reverse Malthusian angst of many conservative Whites driving the crusade against abortions. When you look at this without sentimentality and without any quasi-religious blinkers, what the crusaders are really about is a new and reconstructionist view of childbearing women as factories which, absolutely without fail, must bring the fetus to term and life, no matter under what circumstances it was conceived. This is why, for instance, in all the recent legislations imposing more and more restrictions on abortions, the punishment is entirely on the doctors who provide their services to women seeking abortion: punish, not the vessel carrying the fetus, but the “technician” who empties the vessel of its cargo.

    Life is indeed precious, unquantifiably and immeasurably so. But it is all of life, not life only at the moment of its inception. Of very special consideration is life that brings life: the mother and the fetus-that-will-be-the-child. Oh, how presumptuous, how hubristic it is to try to silence the voice and the choice of the mother in this chain of being!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Atiku goes to America

    It ordinarily would not qualify as news, but even a flight into space would not generate as much fuss as has the story that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is about to secure a visa to the United States of America. Indeed, the development, which remains yet in the realm of speculation, has polarised the country into two camps as the supporters of the former Vice President are rolling out the drums while his opponents are quaking and kicking. For the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), however, it is the fulfillment of a life time dream in same manner as his recent reconciliation with his erstwhile boss, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Former Ogun State governor and Director General of the Atiku Campaign Organisation, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, had set the tone for the controversy when he announced on Channels Television about one month ago that the hope of Atiku securing a US visa after years of fruitless search for same was on the rise. Officials of the United States, he said, had hinted that the former vice president could now secure a US visa if he applied for one. “I can also confirm to you that in the last few days, there have been signals from the American officials that he (Atiku) should indeed come forward so he can be granted visa. So between you and I, all the issues are perception,” Daniel had told his interlocutor.

    Atiku himself has at various times voiced his frustration over his inability to secure a visa to the US amid public mockery that he was banned from entering the country following allegations of corrupt practices levelled against him in the aftermath of a US congressional report that probed his numerous international financial dealings. Former US Congressman, William Jefferson, who was jailed in the US for his involvement in various bribery deals, was said to have told an American investor, Lori Mordy, that he would need to give Atiku, who was then the Vice President, the sum of $500,000 “as a motivating factor” to make sure that Mordy’s company and one other obtained contracts in Nigeria.

    Apparently following from the foregoing, the authorities of the US have been hesitant in granting Atiku entry into the country. But that seems about to change with recent hints of a visa in the offing for the presidential candidate. This, however, is not music in the ears of the ruling APC. The party is miffed that the turn of events is a product of alleged intense lobbying by former President Obasanjo who had previously described the conduct of Atiku while he was vice president as something that fell below the expectations of honest people.

    In a statement issued by its Acting National Publicity Secretary, Yekini Nabena, last month, the party said it had credible information that Obasanjo had started lobbying the US government to issue Atiku an entry visa.

    Nabena said. “We have come across credible reports that former President Olusegun Obasanjo has made moves to secure United States entry visa for the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, whose candidacy he endorsed on Thursday. It is learnt that the former President, who during and after leaving office insisted on Atiku’s unsuitability to govern Nigeria based on his knowledge of the latter’s extensive corrupt practices while he served as Vice President, is lobbying US authorities to withdraw the ban reportedly placed on Atiku from entering the United States following a 2005 $500,000 bribery scandal that involved Atiku, his fourth wife, Jennifer and former United States Congressman, William Jefferson,” the statement said.

    Information and Culture Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at a news conference in Abuja on Thursday, advised the US against granting visa to Atiku, saying that doing so at this point in time could give the impression that the US Government is favouring the PDP presidential candidate over others in the forthcoming 2019 poll.

    Mohammed said: “As you all will be aware, for more than 12 years, there has been a congressional bi-partisan investigation of corruption against certain individuals which had made it difficult for the former Vice President to secure a US visa. I am sure you will all recall the Jefferson case and what they called the cold $90,000 in the fridge. This is not the making of this administration, it has been ongoing. Our position is that if the former VP already has a US visa, we have no problem about it. What we warn the US Government against is not to give the impression that it is endorsing one particular candidate over the other. That is what is going to happen if, for instance, the former VP is granted a visa.”

    Be it as it may, Atiku securing a visa to the US, whether by crook or by hook, is a victory worth celebrating, considering the pall his inability to do so for more than a decade has cast on his integrity. But getting an American visa is just half victory. To come out whole, he must get Obasanjo to retract all that he has said about his (Atiku’s) integrity. The retractions must also be done in a manner that would convince right thinking Nigerians that they are not coming as an after-thought.

    All said, concerned Nigerians must be alarmed that a former vice president who is now seeking the chance to take charge of our collective destiny was linked to a scandal resulting in a travel ban from a country as strategic as the US.

  • Midterm elections, 2018: America at the edge of the precipice?

    I am writing this piece on Friday, November 2, 2018. It is four days to the midterm elections that will take place throughout the United States on Tuesday, November 6. This is indisputably going to be the most consequential midterm election in America in living memory, if not in fact in the entire history of elections in the United Sates. By the time that this piece appears on Sunday, November 4, we shall still not be in a position to know what the results of the elections are. This means that in all probability, I shall be writing on the results of the elections in next week’s column. Meanwhile, please note that the term, “midterm elections” has a meaning, a role in the American political order that is unique to the country, that indeed has no equivalent in the world. What is this role and how is this role encoded in the term?

    Basically, the term refers to elections held two years after every American presidential election. Since American presidents are elected for a four-year term, this means that every American president must go through midterm elections that come halfway through his presidency (there has never been a female American president). In other words, in these midterm elections, the American presidency itself is not in contest; rather, it is the president’s political party that must contend for Congressional seats with the other party in the two-party American political system. If the incumbent president’s party wins in a midterm election, this is usually taken as both an endorsement of the president’s policies and actions in his first two years in office and an indication that he is likely to win if he competes for a second term at the end of his first term. But the general tendency is that in midterm elections, the president’s party does not win. In the last 21 midterm elections, the incumbent president’s party has lost an average of 30 seats in the House of Representatives and an average of 4 seats in the Senate in each midterm election. Moreover, in the same period, only twice has the incumbent president’s party gained seats in both chambers of Congress. This is the challenge that Donald Trump faces in the coming elections of Tuesday, November 6, 2018. And it is the subject of this essay.

    In historic terms, in the midterm election of 2018, Donald Trump faces a challenge that every incumbent president before him has faced. However, beyond this, Trump faces a challenge that no president before him has ever faced. What is this challenge? Well, put in very simple terms, Trump faces the challenge of winning the approval, the endorsement of the American electorate for the far-reaching and unprecedented actions, together with a style of governance, that are gradually turning America into a neofascist autocracy supported by tens of millions of the populace. Dear reader, perhaps the best way for me to explain what I am saying here is to draw your attention to the fact that for much of  its 20th century history – and especially during the decades of the Cold War – America either propped up many brutal and corrupt autocracies in many parts of the world or undermined and helped to destroy popular democratic governments that the U.S. deemed defiant of its global or regional hegemony. The countries that fell to this American tradition of either support or exportation of fascism and dictatorship or subversion of popular democratic governments are legion: Iran, Chile and many other states in Latin America, The Congo of Patrice Lumumba, Apartheid South Africa. This was all outer-directed to other countries and governments in the world. What Trump has done and will continue to do with greater zeal and energy if the Republicans win next week’s midterm election and retain control of both chambers of Congress is bringing home to America what America has for a long time been exporting to many parts of the world: a homegrown fascist, authoritarian and brutal political order. This is what I have in mind in my invocation of the term, “the precipice” in the title of this piece. If the Republicans win on Tuesday, next week, America might very well tip over into the precipice, the abyss.

    It is a terrible fate for a country, any country, to fall under a fascist, autocratic regime under the control of a megalomaniac supported by a sizeable demographic segment of the population. The telltale signs of such a development can be succinctly stated. One, a hatred of a free and independent press, stoked by incessant assaults on journalists and their media as “enemies of the people”. Two, mass support of the Leader, based on an unthinking hero-worshipping of him or her and often leading to a cult of the Leader. Three, megalomania of the Leader himself leading to intolerance of any criticism of his actions, policies, and personality. Four, sharp rise in hatred of, and violence toward all opponents of the Leader, especially those who belong to racial, ethnic, religious and national others.

    Donald Trump has met and surpassed all these distinguishing marks and expressions of a fascist and autocratic style – and substance – of governance. Four things stand as a composite bulwark against his move toward a full-blown incarnation of this brand of radically anti-democratic, fascist rule. These are, first, Trump has not completely suppressed opposition to his rule within his own political party; secondly, the Democratic Party is solidly united in its opposition to him; thirdly, about 60% of the populace is against him, even if they have not found the most effective ways through which to translate their opposition to a winning strategy; fourth, America is one of the oldest democratic republics in modern history and as such, the institutions that have been created and consolidated to protect liberal democracy cannot be easily dismantled or fatally degraded in the space of half of a four-year presidential incumbency.

    It is perhaps useful to put some concrete flesh on the bare bones of Trump’s creeping transformation of American liberal democracy into a proto-fascist, authoritarian state. Let us go over this step by step. Trump hates the press in the manner in which Third World dictators hate the press. In this respect, the closest Nigerian analogues I can think of are Buhari’s military dictatorship of 1983-85 and Abacha’s murderous hatred of journalists, 1993-98. As a matter of fact, Trump has gone one or two steps beyond Third World dictators: he and his followers have created a billion-dollar alternative press that creates and peddles its own facts, truths and claims, all of which have no basis in the realities of the country and the world at large. Furthermore, in his two years in office, fear and hatred of racial, ethnic and religious others have become so blatant that many White supremacists are openly running for political office and are campaigning on the platform of the Republican Party precisely because that party has been effectively transformed into the party of Trump. Finally, Trump has made it a matter of deliberate policy and practice to form friendships and alliances with dictators and fascist movements around the world while simultaneously showing maximum disdain for the traditional liberal democracies of the Western alliance of which America has, so far, historically been regarded as the ultimate “protector”.

    Trumpworld has become a sizeable enclave, a significant factor in the demographic and political calculus of where America is headed and what the future of the country will be: that is the essence of all I have been saying in this discussion. In the term Trumpworld, read White nationalism or White supremacy; read racist, sexist and xenophobic hatred and fear of the Other; read the resurgence of ancient animosities between racial groups, together with extremely crude and violent stereotypes of Black and Brown people, Moslems, foreigners and especially migrants; read the reversal of the long tradition of America’s encouragement and implantation of ruthless autocracies in many parts of the world in the mistaken belief that this was good for its economic and political interests, its global hegemony: what has been vastly implanted in many parts of the world is now coming back to roost in the American heartland itself. That is Trumpworld for you.

    If even if, as we all should hope, the Democrats win and regain control of either one or both chambers of Congress, Trumpworld will not automatically fade way. It has unleashed a beast in the heart of American liberal democracy and for a long time to come, that beast will slouch around and about all parts of both the real and the imaginary landscape of the Union. But Democratic control of even only one chamber of the legislature will reinstate the system of checks and balances that the legislature has the constitutional obligation to exercise over the executive, an obligation that the Republicans have completely failed to meet under Trump. In concrete, practical terms, if the Democrats win, we will see gory details of many of the criminal, indictable things Trump and members of his administration are hiding in plain sight right now. This is the only thing that stands between America and the abyss, the precipice. In next week’s column, we will be exploring this matter – about which we are for the present in the dark since we don’t know how things will go in the forthcoming election of Tuesday, November 6, 2018.

  • America, the anxious

    America gave the world a new type of nation-state. It is a befitting irony that as the nation-state paradigm itself begins to unravel at the seams, much of the rest of the world would enter into contradiction with the most successful expression of nationality—and nationalism—that the modern world has witnessed.

    As a rampant Republican presidency and a refulgent nation continue to confound friends and foes alike, there is a profound anti-American animus abroad. The global liberal intelligentsia are still reeling from what they considered the shocking and inexplicable defeat of the democratic standard bearer in the just concluded presidential elections.

    In much of Western Europe, particularly in France, America’s foremost bete noire, the atmosphere is of funereal gloom and depression. Famously, The Mirror of England wondered how fifty eight million people could be so dumb.

    A lot of this hysteric mush boils down to pride and prejudice on both sides of the divide. It is the jaded arrogance of the old world contending with the blithe contempt of the new. In many respects, it is also the return of the repressed. Four years ago when George W Bush controversially prevailed over Al Gore despite losing the popular vote, many saw a plutocratic conspiracy to crowd out America’s democratic masses from political contention.

    This time around, it was clear that it is the son of the older Bush that has connected with the electoral mystery that is Middle America. Why then must the rest of the world feel it has the right to legislate the destiny of America for Americans? And having conceded that crucial point, why would Middle Americans be so blatantly contemptuous of anti-American sentiments abroad? Is this brilliant rallying to the star-spangled banner a heroic defense of American core values against the tired cynicism of Europe, or the reflex circling of the wagons by a nation under global siege?.

    The case from abroad is arguable enough. As the most powerful and militarily dominant nation the world has seen, and as the richest society in human history, America should lead the world to a more humane and civilized society. This can be done by a more multilateral approach to global issues, less belligerence abroad and a political conservatism that is at once compassionate, conciliatory, less conflictual and more consensus seeking.

    The American riposte to this stinging indictment is equally telling and bespeaks a mutual misapprehension of historic magnitude. The way to a more humane and civilized world is not through liberal flip-flopping or paying protection money to diseased despots but a proactive policy of exemplary retribution which is as retroactively punitive as it is harshly pre-emptive. There must be no dialogue with “the Axis of Evil”. The nations so branded must be militarily subdued and pounded to submission.

    That it is this Samurai code that has found resonance with the American moral majority, particularly after the spectacular siege of September 11, 2001, is no longer contestable, whatever the consternation of the rest of the world. When it was reported that there was a record turn out in the last presidential elections, many were the tele-pundits who thought that the real owners of America were on the march to reclaim their nation.

    Alas, it turned out the other way round. The quiet Americans had turned out to validate the machismo mantra of the son of George Herbert Walker Bush. The world may never be the same again. Is this then the new face of an empire that has been in denial for a long time, or the evidence of a sharp divergence between European democracy and the American mutant?

    America was founded on the ruins of feudal Europe. It was a bold and brilliant attempt by revolutionary visionaries to create humanity anew. When George Washington, its first president, declined another term which could have turned him into a new type of king and the American presidency a monarchical institution, he set America on the path to becoming a radical democracy and the first truly revolutionary society the world has seen.

    This may seem a moot point, but when set within the context that succeeding revolutionary attempts to create humanity anew have often ended up with the founders dying on the throne or mutating into senile and murderous despots, the issue becomes clearer. Take a sample: Lenin-Stalin, Mao, Tito, Castro, Jong, Khomeini, Neto, Cabral, Mugabe etc.

    The dictatorship of the revolutionary vanguard, rather than transforming into a genuine democracy, often becomes a historic nightmare: the privatized rule of the paranoid patriarch or the protocol of berserk elders.

    George Washington might have been responding to the push and pull of a truly modern society, and the republican zeal engendered by the fact that that at that point in time, there were more lawyers in America than armed soldiers. Whatever it was, it set America on the path of a nation in which institutions and institution-building were more important than the cult of the exceptional individual.

    The military would never dare to take over power in America, and neither would a putative tyrant survive for very long in the White House. The democratic institutions and a vigilant civil society would take care of that. The system may occasionally creak at the joints, there may be a murmur of muted disorder as new and unenvisaged historical realities intrude, but the over-ride gear prevails and America reverts to its default settings.

    The anarchic obverse of this sterling coin is the triumphalist and naïve optimism it breeds, the belief that the nation can even afford to live dangerously, and that everything would be alright eventually. Worse still, every American voter considers himself or herself to be a miniature monarch, a mini-sovereign entitled to determine the destiny of the nation.

    In periods of strife and anxiety, this may turn the presidency itself into an agenda-driven, divisive platform rather than a subtle mechanism for aggregating contending national interests. But again, this is part of the irony of the American dream in which a man’s destination is more important than where he is coming from; in which anybody can technically aspire to the greatest positions in the land without being thwarted by the circumstances of birth. What is important is how far you can push yourself.

    When it works, the American dream is a glorious advertisement for egalitarianism and the democratic empowerment of the gifted and driven individual. When Benjamin Franklin, the Philadelphia publisher and inventor of genius, arrived in Paris as the ambassador of the new nation, he affronted not a few members of the chic Parisian elite with his brashness, his brazenness, his boundless vivacity, his spontaneous bonhomie and his obvious refusal to be fazed by the frigid norms of a frozen feudal fiefdom.

    It was then sniffily observed that it was only in America that such a man could become an ambassador. It was meant as a despairing put-down, but it was also a stupendous compliment to the American dream. As it was in the beginning, so it is beginning to look at mid-day.

    Till date, the French political circles never tire of inveigling against American brashness and vulgarity, their aversion for the finer points of taste, political sophistication and diplomatic savvy, while the Americans are openly disdainful of the cloak and dagger elusiveness and unreliable political somersaults of the European political elite in general, and the French in particular.

    In a memorable diplomatic bust-up, an American secretary of state once famously dismissed his British counterpart as a duplicitous bastard while the Whitehall mandarins eternally wring their hands about the global disaster of having diplomacy conducted by American boy scouts.

    This perilous background of mutual misperception explains the current European –and global—anxiety about the direction of the American nation, and it is a function of a divergent trajectory as the impact of globalization and America’s unrivalled dominance finally hits a world in denial.

    The American success is predicated on relentless and often manic competition: competition among individuals, competition among institutions, competiton among federating states, competition among professions and competition in the family. The working spirit is driven to the threshold of endurance until humans become unfeeling automatons and cyborgs on auto-pilot. Even eating is a competition.

    You do not eat a sandwich but you grab one and ram it down to go back to work. In restaurants, you are asked whether you are still “working’ on the stuff. Compare this with the epic feast of pounded yam eating in Things Fall Apart, the stupendous orgy of consumption at a Yoruba ceremony or the elaborate twenty-four course meal of the French, and you begin to sense that there is no freeloading in Uncle Sam’s cabin.

    Yet if this neo-Calvinist ethos with its harsh protestant Puritanism has produced the richest society the world has seen, it can also turn a nation into a hard and unfeeling monad. America is by far the richest country in the world, but it is far from being the happiest society. The competition and work ethics criminalize poverty, and the poor are looked upon with a mixture of disdain and pity.

    There is a Victorian prudery abroad which often provokes its own sexual pathologies, and there is a zero-tolerance for filth and squalor which often induces an obsessive neatness and primness in public places. A reflex hostility to theocracy prevents a sustained dialogue with Islam and often hardens into a puritanical contempt for the thieving fascist clerisy that dominates the Middle East.

    Yet no one remembers that Islam itself started as a revolutionary doctrine, a new covenant between the ruled and their rulers. A new, bible-thumping fundamentalism of the self-righteous right is in danger of unleashing on the world a technological dark age and a new march of modern crusaders.

    Blissfully unaware of the danger to itself and the menace it constitutes to the global order, America romps on in rampart militarism. Honed by competition, relentless training and ceaseless self-surpassing that has turned its military into the supreme fighting machine of the epoch, buoyed by an embarrassment of riches beyond the compass of human imagination, America carries all before it in a triumphant swing which would have made the Romans wince in envy and admiration.

    It is a shinning city on the hills, and there is no room for doubts, or for the old world philosophers of gloom and prophets of scarcity. This is the city that George Bush, a reformed alcoholic, lapsed playboy and self-reinvented aristocrat with his mangled syntax and disdain for elevated discourse has mysteriously connected to.

    It is a classic odyssey in itself, and a supreme tribute to the power of self-belief and the ability of the human will to prevail over personal failings. Perhaps we are witnessing the stirrings of the first truly post-modern society, a post-primate order in which ordinary people achieve the extra-ordinary. Perhaps it is a prelude to a catastrophic unraveling. Whatever it is, America—and George Bush—should pause momentarily and look back at the old empires of history. If they cannot do this on their own, let them import philosophers from the old world.

    First published in 2004 

     

  • UNN set to export ginger to America

    Barring unforeseen disruption, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) will export the first batch of its ginger to McCormic Company, a major producer of spices, flavouring and herbs in the United States (U.S.) by December, the Vice-Chancellor (VC), Prof Benjamin Ozumba, has said.

    The VC made the disclosure while inspecting the school’s ginger farm sited on over five hectares of land. The crops were planted in April on the Nsukka campus.

    “We have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with McCormic Company to off-take any quantity of ginger we produce,” Prof Ozumba said, adding that the farm was a pilot study for large scale ginger production by the university.

    The MoU, according to the VC, was facilitated by alumni of the university based in the U.S. with the intention to providing good teaching point for students and generating revenue to the institution.

    He said the farm was established for research, teaching and agro-business purposes  in line with the land grant mandate by the institution.

    “As a land grant university, agriculture is one of our strong points,” Ozumba said.

    Besides, the VC said his administration had invested in other areas of agriculture, including pepper production, cattle fattening and ranching, snail farming and poultry farming.

    He said the university was making arrangement to bring in 300 dairy cows with robotic milking from Michigan State University before the end of 2018 to commence milk production in the university.

    “We want our students to know that there is money in agriculture,” Prof Ozumba said.

    Under Ozumba’s administration, the school’s moribund farms have been revived, including the establishment of feed mills, cassava flour processing plants and the building of green houses.

     

  • Ghana as America’s latest neo-colony?

    From the latest reports coming out of Ghana, and also carried by reputable international news outlets, the Ghanaian parliament has ratified a military cooperation agreement with the United States that would allow the US to station its troops and equipment in the West African country. What this means is that Ghana would permit the US to establish a military base (or bases, as the case may be) in its territory. In international relations and international law, a treaty or an agreement, once ratified by parliament, automatically becomes an integral part of a country’s law, and the obligations arising from it are binding and cannot be willfully derogated. Now that Ghana’s national legislators have ratified it, that military cooperation agreement now has the force of law and it is binding on Ghana. Unfortunately as is always the case in the relations of developing states with the great powers of the world, Ghana is the one holding the short end of the stick. Without question, Ghana has become America’s latest colonial enclave!

    Since the establishment of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) by President George W. Bush in 2007, Washington has been surreptitiously encroaching on the defence establishments of most African states. Though Nigeria initially stiffly resisted the overtures to accept basing US troops on its soil, it was the abduction of nearly 300 teenage Chibok girls that forced it to acquiesce to some form of US military assistance. In spite of this assistance and the often secretive presence of thousands of its troops in numerous African countries, the US has been unable to persuade any of them to agree to host the headquarters of AFRICOM, which up till now remains in Stuttgart, Germany.

    In the column I wrote for the Nigerian Tribune (June 17, 2014), I made it known with evidence that there was a gradual but surreptitious US re-colonization of Africa through a strategic military lockdown of the entire African continent. I had mentioned the establishment of AFRICOM and the existence of American military bases and US troops (both secretive and openly acknowledged) in no fewer than 35 African countries. Well, that figure has just increased with Ghana joining the ranks.

    Though most of the finer details of the agreement are not yet well known, the reality from the little that is already in the public domain proves that Ghana has knowingly mortgaged a substantial portion of its sovereignty to the US, effectively making the independent country a modern-day, 21st Century colony. Nigeria at independence had a similarly one-sided defence agreement with its former colonial master, i.e., the infamous Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact, but had to unilaterally abrogate it in January 1962 under sustained domestic opposition and massive pressure from the mass media, students, the labour unions and the intelligentsia, thus saving it from what was a carefully packaged neo-colonial entanglement.

    Ghana has of its volition joined the ignoble company of America’s neo-colonies in Africa. How does this sound to the hearing of proud Ghanaian intelligentsia who are familiar with Kwame Nkrumah’s articulations in his Neocolonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism that “a state in the grip of neo-colonialism is not a master of its own destiny.” Is Ghana therefore on the way to becoming the headquarters of AFRICOM which no African country had been willing to host? Though the full details and implications of this agreement are not yet known, but reports indicate that it would, amongst other things, give the US troops “unimpeded access to agreed facilities and areas to U.S. forces, their contractors and other related services.”

    These facilities “for the exclusive use by U.S. troops or to be jointly used with their Ghanaian counterparts” will include “a runway that meets the requirements of United States forces,” free use of Ghana’s radio spectrum, and exemption of payment of taxes “on equipment to be imported into Ghana.” Well, since these equipment are exempted from taxes, they are also automatically exempted from Customs inspection! Wow! Additionally, Ghanaian authorities would have neither access to nor authority whatsoever over those military facilities or what goes on in there. In reality, Ghana will be host to a foreign army of occupation for the promise of a mere $20 million to be spent for training and equipping Ghana armed forces personnel. Donald Trump was probably not far off the mark when he referred to African states as shitholes! What other self-respecting country except a shithole would so casually exchange its hard won sovereignty for a mere promise of $20 million dollars, a fat chunk of which will end up in American pockets anyway.

    Unfortunately, Ghanaians would not even know if and when the Americans are bringing in and stockpiling dangerous weapons in their country, nor if their country is being used for dangerous military experiments or their people as guinea-pigs for developing, testing and storage of chemical, biological and other weapons of mass extermination. Before I am accused of fear-mongering, it is a known that America has always used people of colour across the globe, even African-Americans and Indigenous Americans, as guinea-pigs for offensive chemical, biological, bacteriological, pharmaceutical and radiological weapons research and experiments. A reputable American scholar and professor of international law, Francis Anthony Boyle, who has published several books on the subject of biological warfare and terrorism, has even insinuated that the US may be directly culpable in the outbreak and spread of a genetically modified version of the Ebola virus, which ravaged West Africa from 2014 to 2015.

    Once the virus began to spread uncontrollably at the time, troops from Fort Detrick in Maryland, USA, a known US facility for biological weapons programme, were swiftly deployed to West Africa, ostensibly to offer assistance! This is in addition to several US-funded secretive bio-weapons research laboratories in a number of severely exploited African countries like Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone where American researchers have been testing all manner of viruses and biological agents for years.

    It is without question a sad turn of events, a dangerous and frankly repugnant development that Ghana, the once proud Black Star of Nkrumah’s era, the first truly Black African country to gain political independence in 1957 and gave Black Africans their pride in the community of nation-states, has become America’s latest colonial enclave in West Africa. And guess what: it is not by direct military conquest but by an insidious bilateral agreement ratified by Ghana’s own parliament that would make the country host to a foreign army of occupation! If anything, it stands as a tragic irony that this happened the same month Ghana celebrated its 61st independence anniversary.

    Pray, who has bewitched the once proud and pace-setting Ghanaians into this obviously sinister neo-colonialist enslavement? Is this the land of the Ashantis who so courageously resisted colonial conquest before they were finally subdued by superior British military firepower? Was it not for the liberation of this same Ghana from colonialism that Nkrumah and several other patriotic Ghanaians had to go to jail? Can this be said to be the same Ghana of the intrepid of Kwame Nkrumah which shook the African continent in the 1960s, or a mere hideous doppelganger, a monstrous apparition? How times change and how quickly are memories erased!

     

    • Prof Fawole is of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.