Mr. Andrew Young

Here in America, the attitudes of the descendants of African immigrants who were brought to these parts of what used to be called the New World in significant numbers during the trans-Atlantic slave trade towards members of their race who were born in Africa, the mother continent is laced with deep-seated ambivalence. If there are exceptions to this point of view, it’s rather few and apart. The said attitudes derive in the main from several factors. One of such factors includes absolute ignorance or insufficient knowledge of the history of the slave trade, which was conducted primarily as an economic enterprise. The other of such factors is of course the centuries of conditioning that they have gone through in a social milieu that operates as the quintessence of what the late Frantz Fanon aptly diagnosed as maniacal. Such conditioning is riddled with all the harsh treatments and experiences that have come their way through members of the dominant Caucasian race who used to enslave their forebears. But unfortunately, much of their worldview seems to radiate through that conditioning.

Many African Americans hold the view that every African born on the continent is guilty of the slave trade. Continental-born Africans are often times embarrassed by this view which is often emotional whenever it is openly expressed by African Americans. There is no shortage of stories told by continental-born Africans about some of the sour encounters that ensue between them and African Americans whom they believe should rather close ranks with them. There are continental born Africans university professors who say that African American undergraduates are more likely to disrespect them in the classrooms. Some African physicians who practice here lament that they are more likely to receive bogus malpractice law suits from their African American patients. African Americans who have never left the precincts of the inners cities in the US where they were born and raised would quickly proclaim that they wouldn’t wish to be born anywhere on the continent.

Beyond these, some prominent African Americans have shown no qualms to play roles that condone the unconscionable pattern of leadership that devastate African societies in every sense of the word and make Africa the laughing stock of the world. With the exception of South Africa where they played heroic roles during the anti-apartheid struggle, the story is staunchly pathetic. Take the case of Nigeria as a typical case in point. Over the years, Nigeria’s ruthless military dictators depended on African American lobbyists to launder the sordid image of their regimes for mouth-watering amounts of cash.

The charade that Nigeria’s incumbent leader, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo currently over sees in the name of government hasn’t been an exception. This time, the launderer- beneficiary is civil rights great, Mr. Andrew Young. But he dismisses complaints about his dealings with and benefits from Mr. Obasanjo as grumblings from the latter’s political opponents. But honest persons who have visited Nigeria since Mr. Obasanjo’s second ascension to power as a civilian in 1999 concluded unequivocally that the place is tethering on the brink of implosion primarily because of misrule. The evident economic hardship that pervades the lives of all but a few Nigerians can be literally grasped with the hand. Every manner of physical infrastructure—roads, electricity supply, portable water supply, hospitals, schools, etc. have decayed beyond description. The educational system, which used to be the pride of everyone, is now spoken about in the past tense. No reasonable person would even talk about the health care system at all.

Yet, Mr. Andrew Young makes bold to praise Obasanjo who has presided over this rot in the last eight years, and has vowed his determination to preside over it by proxy for some time more, in superlative terms. He went as far as announcing the other time that he would sponsor Mr. Obasanjo for the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, as someone asked the other day: Does he know his way to where the Nobel Committee meets in Stockholm? Mr. Young does that all in the name of making money that flows from various lucrative deals from Obasanjo’s Nigeria to him on the aegis of his Atlanta-based lobby firm, GoodWorks International.

He is proud to invoke his civil rights record here in America in his own self defense. But if Mr. Young is truthful to himself, he will concede that his civil rights record have absolutely nothing to do with why he is cushioning Mr. Obasanjo’s misrule in Nigeria. How much of those records would he really translate to concrete knowledge of Nigeria? Mr. Young doesn’t know it, which is why one must make haste to educate him that there is absolutely nothing that can qualify as a given about the contraption that exists as state in Nigeria. Most of the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria regard it as illegitimate. On that incontrovertible fact lays the poor political performance bordering on the absolute that the Nigerian state accumulates over the years. For Mr. Young’s civil rights records to become relevant in Nigeria, he ought to bring it to bear on support for agitation by Nigeria’s nationalities for national reformation. One is talking about the sort that will engender the restructure of post-colonial Nigeria into a true federation to pave way the reverse of the rot that Obasanjo presides over currently.

Activists in Nigeria have accused Mr. Young of playing Obasanjo’s garbage rot for money. But he denies it. When Mr. Young proclaims: “For 40 years of my life, I was on the outside seeking change, I realized that I could be more effective being on the inside implementing it”, one is hard pressed to ask him why he must abandon his failures here in America and turn to Africa. The terrain here in the Black community is littered with social pathology in countless varieties that are indicative of the failures Mr. Young alludes to in his 40 years as a civil rights activist. But we know that he’s talking about making money for himself through Mr. Obasanjo. Perhaps Mr. Young is the physician