NewsRescue
Nigeria, Africa’s largest nation and the largest black nation in the entire world, was told to bring along its “wish list” to the G7 meeting in Germany this week. We obliged and our 10-day new president Muhammadu Buhari took along a lengthy list of our desperate requests.
It cannot go much lower than this for the black race. Institutional discrimination and brutality in the USA against blacks there where black males especially are hunted down almost as prey and killed by suffocation, breaking their necks or loading them with 15 shots in their back, and pregnant black mothers are slammed on their bellies, choked and cuffed, will escalate as blacks with our lead nations in Africa rather than being a beacon and resort for ours abroad to look up to and relocate to, and for non-blacks to plead to come to, are rather resubmitting themselves voluntarily for continued colonisation and its concomitant oppression.
Now do not misunderstand. When Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari took his list which included items like: security cum terrorism, combating corruption, help with power/energy, help with the economy and infrastructure; also assistance via direct foreign investment, it is not like he was really wrong for doing this. No. If Buhari did not go a begging for Nigeria, many will die and Nigeria will likely collapse under the strain of 30 straight years of colossal looting and mismanagement and institutionalization of terror since the dictator Babangida’s entrance to power in 1985 and through its violent years under his (Babangida’s) PDP political party’s leadership. Without question, had Nigeria continued on the path of change President Murtala introduced in 1975, or the Buhari/Idiagbon regime introduced in 1983 as did Ghana (after Rawlings), by today the African nation of a population of 170 million would have been a Superpower and the entire continent would have a different status. But what made our submitting at the G7 with this kind of list of problems so terrible is as Buhari put it best in a pre-campaign statement he made to Reuters last February that has been cluelessly used for opposition party slander. The President said: “It’s a big disgrace for Nigeria. It is now Cameroon and Chad fighting the insurgency more than Nigeria. We will build the capacity and Nigeria should be able to secure its territorial integrity.”
Indeed it is nothing less than a big shame that Nigeria has been brought down so much that we have to negotiate with our not so loving francophone neighbors, Chad, Cameroon and Niger, two of whom we have had border disputes and battles with (with the same Buhari in the past having defeated Chad’s then Habre forces to reclaim 19 Nigerian Islands in the same suspiciously Boko Haram francophone militants plagued northeast region) to help us defeat a largely locally originated terrorist army. In 30 years of hundreds of billions of dollars plundering and corrupt mismanagement, an army once trumped for being the best in Africa became by all standards the worst army in Africa and perhaps the world, guilty today of direct involvement in terrorism and various war crimes, and this has gotten us into this “big disgrace” as President Buhari candidly put it. This is how helplessly hopeless we have become.
And by that same token, it is a big disgrace that President Muhammadu Buhari, a man known, cherished, revered, campaigned for and elected into power for sticking his thumb in the nose of the colonial powers; refusing at the time when they asked him to accept IMF/World Bank loans with SAP crippling policies (the reasons the CIA is alleged to have sponsored the Babangida coup that put Nigeria through 30 horrific years of pilferage to the tune of $480 billion dollars by the dictator and his PDP political party); a man who declined their requests that Nigeria devalued its currency so it can serve the colonialist to the detriment of its local populace, but who rather decided that he was going to move to the NAM (Non Aligned Movement) nations and Nigeria began engaging Brazil and other NAM nations, preparing itself for a path to self-reliance and sheer strength.
But today, just as Buhari has aged, so has Nigeria. Indeed perhaps Buhari is a microcosm of Nigeria; a reflection of the true condition of this nation of 500+ great ethnic nations. As colonially democratized as Buhari is, as politically whopped as he has become, so has Nigeria. Today, by no fault of the President, Nigeria can no longer follow the bold path Iran took to becoming a Superpower, but we need to kneel and ask the white master for help with domestic corruption, with domestic power generation, with domestic needed infrastructure. We did not go to demand for lifting of sanctions as Iran and Venezuela do; there are no foreign sanctions. Ours is a problem of 30 years of internal sanctions from our rulers and their cabal friends, and this is why we went to plead the White man’s help.
Now let’s not get this misconstrued. We do understand that we as a nation do not exist in a bubble. The problem is not that we were asked to present this wish list, or that we did. The problem is the fact that we have been so robbed and the robbers have taken away so much of our common wealth, used their loot to buy-up all our valuable land and established parallel private-cabal institutions of robbery deeply entwined in our colonial democracy to the extent that we can no longer function by the power of the federal government of Nigeria by itself. Had we not been brought to this point, a reasonable list we would have put forth will have had items like: demands the colonial nations stop harbouring terrorists and their sponsors including the economic terrorists. That the colonial powers stopped interfering in Nigeria’s domestic affairs. That the colonial powers went serious on banning their permitted illegal small arms trade, the number one cause of terror and violent death in the world. That the colonial powers paid us reparations for colonization and the slave trade (as was our wish list with – and why we voted for – late M.K.O Abiola whom they had to have killed). That they returned all looted funds in their possession and also our national artifacts. That the colonial nations respected and protected our African indigenous brothers in their countries. That the precondition for foreign visa seeking Congolese nationals to unbelievably have their applications passed through Holocaust Leopold’s Belgium for approval be scrapped immediately and apology and remuneration paid. That Haiti and francophone nations have their billions in deposit with France for their independence returned.
But rather, being so looted, we, frail and old as our wise President, have to beg for these other basics and at certain cost – because we all know it is never in the colonial master’s interest to do things without exploitative benefit to his advantage.
Yet in spite of the debilitated position we find ourselves, the “big disgrace” that this is. I have hope. I have hope in this nation of a million resilient youth. I believe Nigeria and Africa will be born again and soon return to the great position it held before the colonialist first set foot and implanted us with these problems and cultured the leaders and their coterie of kakistocrats who surely and predictably as they intended, got us here.
Dr. Peregrino Brimah; http://ENDS.ng [Every Nigerian Do Something] Email: [email protected] Twitter: @EveryNigerian
