IkengaComments

Still On Pakistan

2007-09-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

The apparent calm that seems to herald the prompt arrest and deportation of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif upon his return from forced exile yesterday sequel to his overthrow in a military coup in 1999 by current dictator, General Pervez Musharraf might not last. There is hardly any doubt that his deportation took not only his party and supporters but also even himself by surprise. The fact that he was served papers for money laundry charges prior to being deported is indication that even the dictator and his regime may have improvised the deportation to Saudi Arabia as a last ditch measure. In which case, they were unprepared for how best to respond to the challenge that Mr. Sharif represents for them in Pakistan.

There are certainly some elements in the regime who favor the option of tackling the challenge evident in Mr. Sharif judicially. Whoever those elements might be, Mr. Sharif’s deportation may indicate that there are also another set of elements in the regime who are uncomfortable with the Pakistani judiciary, which has recently signaled with the restoration of Chief Justice who Musharraf tried to remove, and the ruling that Sharif was free to return to Pakistan, that it is unwilling to side with Musharraf and his regime.

Mr. Sharif’s deportation will further complicate the situation for Musharraf and his regime. They have clearly shown their disregard for the Supreme Court and the rule of law. By so-doing, they are likely to incite negative reactions from parts of the West, particularly the EU, which promptly condemned them for deporting Sharif in disregard of the Supreme Court ruling. Although Musharraf and his regime can resolve to become more aggressive and repressive in their quest to remain in power, there is every doubt that they are capable of stemming the anger of sections of the Pakistani society that show aversion for their continued stay in power. Gone are the days when Musharraf slept peacefully at night. Henceforth, with his regime, he will leap from crisis to crisis all the way, to the point that he may not even have the time and the peace of mind to devout the necessary attention to the task of aiding the US in its global war on terrorism in Pakistan and the sub-region.

The Hand Writing On the Wall

2007-09-07T01:40:00.000-07:00

It’s interesting that the Bush White House has refused to see that the hand writing on the wall over its myopic foreign policy gamble in Pakistan clearly indicates a big failure. The pattern of the unfolding events since dictator Pervez Musharraf’s over-reach to get rid of the Chief Justice failed could not have been less clearer: the spontaneous mobilization of various strata of the Pakistani civil society led by the legal profession produced a groundswell that not only succeeded in reversing the dictator’s over-reach, but also emboldened the Supreme Court to void his extra-legal exile of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif sequel to his overthrow of his elected government in a coup eight years ago.

This clear pattern of events ought to have been sufficient cause for the US to appraise the situation of affairs in Pakistan more objectively. Such appraisal could have been sufficient pointer to imbue credence to the fact that Musharraf’s regime had slipped into that slippery slid of difficulty that often characterizes a declining dictatorship. Instead, the White House has preferred to embark on a gamble, which is using former Prime Minister Benizar Bhutto to broker a deal that could presumably save Musharraf and his regime. Well, it does not seems as that gamble is about to pay off at all. The court boycott that began yesterday across Pakistan in a renewed campaign by the legal profession to force Musharraf from power is yet another clear indication that the Pakistani civil society, led by the lawyers clearly has the upper hand in the unfolding power situation. In fact, the US gamble may have neutralized Bhutto’s perceived potential to remain relevant in the unfolding power situation.

There is no doubt now that Sharif will return to Pakistan. There is also no doubt that he might probably lead his party, the Pakistan Muslim League in a spirited mobilization to make life difficult if not impossible for any contraption of a government that may result from the US-Musharraf-Bhutto gamble. IkengaComments predicts that most if not all actions taken by Musharraf and his regime to gain the upper hand in the unfolding power situation in the country henceforth runs the risk of back-firing on the dictator. If the ultimate aim of US foreign policy in Pakistan is anything beyond perpetuating an intractably unstable status-quo ante, then the White House is headed for yet another foreign policy failure over there. The hand writing on the wall is so clear on that.

Musharraf, Bhutto, Et Al

2007-09-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

The power situation that Pakistan’s dictator, Parvez Musharraf unknowingly provoked when he over-reached himself in the spring this year and fired the Chief Justice is not likely to resolve itself any time soon. Instead, it is more likely to sustain itself in a truly Pakistani pattern as it spirals itself indefinitely aided by events even as it claims some unsuspecting victims including the dictator himself and even his regime. Apart from Musharraf and his regime, it seems like former Prime Minister Benizar Bhutto is quickly positioning herself as a possible victim of events that she played little or no role to trigger into place in the first instance.

If that happens, it’s only clear that she must blame her extensive opportunistic tendencies more than anyone or anything else for that outcome. Our suspicion is that she may have pre-occupied herself more with listening to the Bush White House than reading the tea leaves on the events more correctly for herself, as the events unfold. In which case, one can only see her as being too myopic to the degree that makes it difficult for her to discern that US desires in Pakistan and in the sub-region has little or nothing to do with whatever her own desires are for herself, her political party, and Pakistan. If she is unable to realize that US desires to save Musharraf and his tottering regime would not further her own ambition to return to Pakistan and to power in the long run, it might be partly because of the issues in her own past that came together to help force her from power some years back. One such issues relates to the corruption charge that was leveled against her husband who could have spent an extended time in jail if she hadn’t embraced the forced choice of exile. If she hopes that the best way to simultaneously protect her husband and return to power is to lend herself and her party to the US gamble to save Musharraf and his regime, she needs to be told that she might not be that lucky.

She and the Bush White House ought to be aware that the circumstances that got Musharraf and his regime to where they are at the moment in Pakistan’s perilous political landscape were made possible by other actors who are highly unsympathetic to US desires in both Pakistan and the sub-region. They should listen to and not ignore the lawyers who successfully saved the Chief Justice from Musharraf's over-reach. That Musharraf’s over-reach was responsible for triggering the situation that gave vent to the anger in the civil society that subsequently produced the defiance that encouraged the Supreme Court to reinstate the Chief Justice and the ruling that exiled former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif has the right to return to Pakistan as a citizen is insufficient grounds for either the US or Musharraf, talk less of Bhutto to presume that they can successfully cash in and benefit is far from the truth. More than the Islamists, who have allied themselves in the past with Musharraf when they deemed it convenient, it’s the secular elements in the civil society who have the upper hand at the moment in the unfolding power game in Pakistan. They were responsible for mobilizing the agitation that compelled Musharraf to blink. They can and will do that all over again if and when they discern that the ploy to save Musharraf in power is about to be off-loaded on Pakistan by the troika of Musharraf, Bhutto and the US.

Even if Musharraf, Bhutto, and the US succeed in installing the former as president, and Bhutto prime minister in a power-sharing deal predicated on Musharraf’s removal of his general’s uniform, there’s no guarantee that the resultant truce would be durable, to say the least. How will they handle Sherrif, the civil society and a Supreme Court, which has found its constitutional voice and place as an independent player? In its quest to isolate Pakistan’s Islamists, the US will certainly ignore the need to ponder this question. But it is a question that will not go away. At the end of the day, the only guarantee for durable stability in Pakistan is a democratic arrangement, which encompasses the secularists and the civil society and places the military under civilian control in Pakistan. Anything short of that will simply sustain a perilous situation that will someday produce a regime controlled by Islamists.

No Disregard

2007-09-02T15:39:00.000-07:00

When IkengaComments debuted on April 6, my conscious decision from that outset was to devote it completely to those objectives that I spelt out in the first posting. In other words, the other commitment that I made to myself remained silent. That commitment was to completely remove myself from the postings. That commitment influenced my decision to keep my whereabouts off the blog. The commitment might be reviewed in the future. After a period of silence, which began after the last posting on July 10, IkengaComments has returned. We urge the reading audience not to misconstrue the unannounced absence as a disregard.

US Military Leadership Failure in Iraq

2007-07-10T02:42:00.000-07:00

On at least two counts, it seems like the war of choice that the US embarked on in Iraq has quickly turned into another Vietnam for the Bush White House. First, it has become a war which many people believe can no longer be won. Secondly, for members of the US military top brass, the war has increasingly exposed their inability to exhibit leadership expectations. One would recall that some analysts of the Vietnam war argue that long after it became obvious that the US military would be unable to dominate the situation in Vietnam, rather than find the courage to convey that assessment to their civilian leaders, the top brass preferred to play along in what became known as card-punching all in the bid to protect their careers. It is happening again, this time in Iraq.

Since General Shinkeshi gave his candid opinion during Congressional hearings on what he felt were the right estimates of the number of troops he thought was needed in Iraq, and was retired for it, no other serving members of the top brass has been willing again to convey their candid assessment of the situation of things on the ground in Iraq. A front-page story in the USA Today yesterday indicated that attacks on the transportation of supplies for the military in Iraq have been on the increase. From the military point of view, the implications of that story are enormous. As skilled managers of violence, US military top brass are not unaware of the fact that the inability to guarantee supplies to a highly complex outfit like the US military in a theater of operation is not a child’s play after all. There are other related indicators of the inability of the US military so far to dominate the situation in Iraq. Those are in the sense that the US military even at this stage still finds it difficult to move around the entire theater of operation in Iraq—in the air and on the ground—without hindrance. Yet, it does not seem as the top brass have summoned the courage to convey the true implications of that to their civilian leaders. If they do, there is little doubt that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their advisers will certainly be showing some inclinations towards modifying their insistence that they will not accept anything short of “victory” in Iraq. Military victory is unlikely under the aforementioned state of affairs.

The only members of the top brass who have expressed their candid assessment of the situation of things in Iraq are those who are no longer in active service. The inability of the top brass who are still in active service to express such candid assessment is plainly a failure of leadership. One is at a loss as to what the US military establishment and the Bush White House are hoping to make out of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. Someone recently mentioned in a conversation that he would not wish the military situation of things in Iraq today on his worst enemy. The top brass must help with the right leadership.

How Is the General Doing So Far?

2007-07-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Here at IkengaComments, our informed assessment has been that US support for Pakistan’s dictator, General Pervez Musharraf is a misguided gamble that has very high chances of unraveling in a manner which could shift US geopolitical calculations in that part of the world into a pitiful situation. Staking so much on the continuity of an individual, a dictator for that matter who is in power in such a precariously volatile society cannot but merit such a bleak assessment.

Mr. Musharraf’s travails since he sacked the Chief Justice have not fared that well. He has faced increasing open challenge to his regime from several sections of the Pakistani civil society ever since. If the US is less jittery about the opposition that lawyers and other notable members of the Pakistani civil society have mobilized against him in response to that singular action, the opposition that he is now facing from radical Islamists will be serious cause for worry for the Bush White House given the conviction that the end of his dictatorship will not be good for the success of the War on Terror, WoT.

The stand-off currently going on between his regime and a radical mosque in Islamabad, is not likely to unfold and end favorably for him. The opposition that his removal of the Chief Judge fanned could have emboldened the Islamists who are involved in this stand-off. The heavy gun shots fired at the aircraft he was flying in yesterday is a clear escalation of the uncertainty he is faced with. Knowing how dictators function, Musharraf will occupy himself henceforth with the task of survival. He will do that by using every trick at his disposal to manipulate the US for support even as he strives to suppress those who are opposed to his dictatorship in Pakistan. The US will be quite eager to aid his efforts to suppress the Islamists. But the unfortunate thing about that is that the General may not be quite willing to go after the Islamists in a decisive manner. The Islamists will make life increasingly difficult for him if they sense any shift in what may have been a secret pact between him and them. In other words, there is a clear risk in pressing the General to move decisively against the Islamists. On the other hand, if the status quo ante sustains, it may not last that long. The non-Islamist opposition may not relent that easily in their quest to curb what it considers the General’s excesses. In deed, so far, the General is not doing that well.

Humanity Must Protect Itself

2007-07-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

Critics of the Bush administration’s War on Terror, WoT in general and the invasion and occupation of Iraq insist that it is so ill-conceived, wrong-headed, and ill-executed that rather than achieve their executors’ proclaimed outcomes of making the world safer from Islamist terrorism, will and are exacerbating the scourge by doing otherwise. It does not take the services of a seer for an honest observer to discern from the deluge of news reports each week that the world is far from being safe from the heartless individuals who wrap themselves with the jihadist banner of Islamism and present themselves as willing zealots ready to embark on any manner of terrorist acts that unleash terror on unsuspecting people.

The recent terror-related events in Britain involving well-educated individuals from Iraq and India do not just underscore the view that the world is increasingly unsafe; they should also be cause for worry for every sensible person anywhere in the world. For one, Britain was never a target of Islamist terrorism prior to its involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Apart from Spain, which under the previous government was also a member of the clique of three that embarked on the invasion of Iraq with Mr. Bush, no other society has been targeted by Islamist terror as much as Britain since the invasion of Iraq. The lives of unsuspecting members of society have been turned upside down in virtually every part of the world because of the looming prospects of terrorist attacks. International travelers and other users of air transportation are so concerned of their safety these days that some of them resort to executing or updating their will each time before they embark on trips. We know where it all began, but we do not know when it will end.

Meanwhile, US politicians, particularly the ardent Republicans who blindly lined up support for the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq are finding it just expedient to re-calibrate their position on the occupation just to suit their political survival. In the last few weeks the gradual shift in the support of the occupation noticed in some Republican Party senators is evidently inspired by fear that they might loose their seats in their re-election bid next year. The latest shift in stance of support was expressed just yesterday by New Mexico’s Pete Domenici who is facing re-election next year. Earlier, it was the turn of Virginia’s John Warner, who is also billed for re-election next year. The troubling aspect of the shift in the support of these individual US senators for the occupation of Iraq is that it is just enough to enable a campaign stance that could translate into a message to win as many votes from many of the voters whose initial support for the invasion and occupation has completely soured. Mr. Domenici who is “not calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops” merely railed against an “Iraqi government [which] is not making measurable progress”. He is calling “for a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to continuing home”. How that path will unmake all the wrong-headed aspects of the policy of invasion and occupation is yet to be figured out.

It is high time for the rest of the world to rally and come up on their own with anti-terror policies capable of succeeding. Someone mentioned the other time that such a policy will necessarily not involve the US so along as it is intent on waging the WoT as it currently conceived it. Humanity cannot afford to continuing living in fear and stress. The world must rally and begin the task of protecting and saving itself.

Nigeria’s Dysfunctional Leadership Spawns Hostage Taking

2007-07-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

Every time there is news about Nigeria these days, it is bad news. Bad news, not in the sense that Nigerians and their country are being smeared in a conspiracy of sorts in the international press. It is bad news that come straight from bad acts perpetrated in Nigeria by either Nigerian officialdom or through neglects by it. One is talking about the regular news of hostage-taking that takes place these days in the Niger Delta where much of the hydrocarbons that provide 85% of the revenue that sustains Nigeria’s dysfunctional supra-national state, are extracted from.

Refusal by Nigeria’s dysfunctional leaders to respond honestly to the demands by inhabitants of the Niger Delta to be allowed a fair share of the wealth that accrues from the hydrocarbons that are extracted in such reckless manner which destroys and degrades their environment, has spawned shameful acts of hostage-taking by militants and even brigands that are flashed almost regularly in the international media. Up until today when a 3-year-old child of a British oil worker became their latest victim, the hostage takers have specifically concentrated on mostly foreign oil workers. In all cases, they released their victims after holding them for some time. They have consistently indicated that their intention has been to draw attention to the plight of inhabitants of the Delta who exist in unconscionable poverty even as the wealth realized from the resources that are taken from their homeland is stolen and shared out by Nigeria’s corrupt rulers.

One cannot take the liberty to condone their acts of hostage taking. At the same time, the harshest condemnation is reserved for Nigeria’s leaders who have let this state of affairs perpetuate itself. It is absolutely clear that the Nigerian supra-national state and the corrupt individuals that operate it are incapable of subduing the militants and brigands who are responsible for these acts. Why then have they refused to hearken to demands made by aggrieved nationalities in the country for an equitable restructure of the polity to give all excluded groups a sense of belonging? Amongst other reasons, their refusal bothers on the sort of irresponsibility that derives from dysfunctional disposition. It is only dysfunctional leaders who will care next to nothing about the atrocities that they inflict on their society so long as they feather their nests. Many Nigerians are sick and tired of a dysfunctional leadership that presides over their affairs in ways that spawn anger and acts of brigandage from aggrieved groups. Nigeria’s rulers are as responsible as the de facto perpetrators of acts of hostage taking in the Niger Delta. Reasonable people the world over must lend their condemnation for not just the hostage takers who have now resorted to abducting babies, but also for Nigeria’s corrupt and dysfunctional leaders.

America Is Challenged Again By Its Own Presidency

2007-07-04T00:58:00.000-07:00

Ronald Reagan’s presidency saddled America as a society with the challenge of looking at itself in the mirror and telling itself nothing but the truth about what it saw. However, American society woefully failed itself in that regard. Rather than disclose that the man Reagan lacked the intellectual capacity required for the highly demanding office he occupied, the society shielded his lack of that capacity all in the bid to protect the US presidency, an office which is so highly exalted by a good majority of Americans to the point that stokes their conviction that it is divinely-ordained to provide the leadership necessary for the so-called shining city on the hill to lead the rest of humanity out of decadence.

The eagerness to flaunt Mr. Reagan’s superb communication skills was almost suffocating. His affliction with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive ailment that cripple’s the mental capacity of its victims slowly but decisively over the course of time was probably kept from public view until it became impossible to hide successfully any more. Even then, the preference was to portray him as a cowboy riding away into the sunset but to nowhere in particular. Rather than come clean and admit that there was nothing but hollow to the man, Edmund Morris, who was commissioned to write Mr. Reagan’s authorized memoir and given unfettered access to him in the White House and even after he left the place at the end of his mandatory two terms, claimed instead that his subject was impenetrable. To the effect that what he produced as a memoir 14 years later in 1999 was a faction in which he blatantly tried to portray him as an exceptional gift from God to the rest of the world.

George W. Bush’s presidency has saddled America with a challenge almost similar to the one it unsuccessfully grappled with in Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. This time, some sections of the American society, including some mass media channels are effectively trying to sanctify themselves in their efforts to factually portray what The New Yorker starkly describes as “the callow, lazy, and ignorant President”. The four-part series in Washington Post last week entitled, “ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY” will remain one of the more explicit proof of this description of Mr. Bush. More than anything else, the series expose the systematic manner with which Mr. Cheney has taken advantage of Mr. Bush’s apparent hollowness to become “the most influential public official in the country” even though he occupies ‘what John Adams called’ “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived”. The Post series authored by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker are so revealing that there is hardly much doubt in the minds of many Americans about who is actually in charge of their affairs during the Bush presidency. The only initiative that Bush went out of his way to take without Cheney’s clearance was his unsuccessful appointment of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court. According to the Post series, that rebellion was quickly shot down by Cheney who after muttering derisively to an associate that Bush “Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself” engaged his “right-wing allies to upend Miers”. That was how Cheney finally compelled Bush to return to the short list of five appellate judges that he prepared and kept handy ahead of time, to select Samuel Alito

It took the invasion of Iraq by false pretences to awaken sections of the American society to the task of grappling the challenge that it is faced with in the Bush presidency.

The Post-9/11 Question

2007-07-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

Right after the unconscionable Al-Qaeda-scripted and directed terrorist attacks on the US in the morning of September 11, 2001, a question started making the rounds in key US-based mass media channels, particularly conservative talk radio: “Why Do They Hate Us?” The ‘They’ in the question refers to ‘the rest of the world’, and the ‘Us’ refers of course to the ‘US’. Up till date, the one answer to that question that floated most on conservative talk radio here in the US was that the rest of the world hates the US because its loves democracy and that the attach is the manifestation of the hatred of the US by the rest of the world. For any objective analyst or observer, it was an answer that begged the question because people in every corner of the world mourned with Americans over those acts: major newspapers in many parts of the world went out of their way to proclaim in extra-ordinary pieces of editorial that “We Are All Americans!” The inherent truth in this proclamation underscored the support and justification expressed by many people all over the world for the invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by the US to punish Al-Qaeda and its leaders for their terrorist attacks on America.

But beyond Afghanistan, in its reaction to those attacks, the Bush White was completely taken by its sworn conservative credentials. Going by the tenacity that it exhibited as it fished around for excuses and justifications to invade Iraq on the grounds that it was involved in the attacks, there has been little doubt that Mr. George Bush himself, his vice, Mr. Dick Cheney, and the range of their high-ranking aides all subscribe to the answer to the aforementioned question peddled on conservative radio that the rest of the world hates America because it loves democracy. Proof of this was partly revealed in a Washington Post story Monday July 2 on Mr. Bush ineffectual attempts to understand the isolation he is experiencing at a time when his presidency is about to end. In the absence of factual evidence, no one except perhaps Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their supporters, believes any more that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks. There is no doubt that many are disappointed in Mr. Bush and his administration as a result.

The story is that Mr. Bush has been spending a lot of time with individual theologians, historians, philosophers, and leading authors or groups of them that he invites to the White House to help him seek answers over light refreshments to an array of questions that include: “Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?” He does not yet appreciate that his preference for the answer to the question spawned by conservative radio is largely responsible for all the failing policy initiatives, particularly on Iraq, he has taken so far, and that they are largely responsible for souring turn in his presidency.

Although no one knows at this point what his invitees tell Mr. Bush in response to the many questions that he tables before them, every one of them who has said anything so far is convinced that he is a highly isolated individual, and that he is highly fixated on Iraq. According to a former aide who recently visited with him: “Nothing matters except the war. That’s all that matters. The whole thing rides on that.” That fixation is to the degree of disengagement from serious governance issues. His friends who made excuses for him insist that he is not oblivious of the responsibilities of the presidency. But that incompetence that pervades every aspect of his presidency so far still lingers. Rather than engage New York Congressmen that he invited to accompany him to a school in Harlem to promote his education program on issues of importance he preferred to talk baseball aboard Air Force One. One of them, Democrat Charlie B. Rangle, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which was involved in a tough negotiations with the White House on trade pacts at the time was so disappointed in Mr. Bush’s preference to talk baseball instead of serious legislative issues. Rangle’s observation that: “He talked a lot about the Rangers. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about” was to say the least aptly dismissive of one who he felt lacked the capacity for rising up to what the occasion demanded. Can Mr. Bush's reported capacity or "terrific knack of not looking through the rearview (sic) mirror" to absorb the massive wreckage produced by virtually all his policy initiatives indicate anything in his personality with regard to particularly his evident incompetence as president?

Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with the right answer(s) to the post-9/11 question for himself may be the greatest undoing of his presidency so far. The US, indeed, the world is worst off for it.

The Immigration Reform Debate in the US

2007-07-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

Beyond the charges of nativism and xenophobia that proponents of comprehensive immigration reform in the US might level at those Americans who advocate otherwise, the recent failure of the Immigration Reform Bill twice in the US Senate in less than two months is cause for a more conscientious soul-searching in both camps. Such an endeavor is necessary particularly for the reasons that it will lay bare the core issues in the immigration reform debate and pave the way for durable solutions to a major problem that knocks at the heart of what American society is all about and what most Americans aspire for.

The efforts made by representatives of those thirteen colonies that canalized into the birth of what they called the United States of America erased in the most fundamental way the possibility of any one of them ever reverting to the desire to chart the sort of independence existence which might set it separate and apart from the other members of the Union. This is in terms of forging another society distinct in language and culture from the Union itself. The slave-owning states in the South of the Union that attempted such a reversion when they found that their continued subscription to its Charters posed a mortal danger to slavery as the basis of their civilization provoked the Civil War. At the end not only that they were defeated and dragged back into the Union, they also lost the basis of their plantation-based agricultural economy. Perhaps the failure of their rebellion convinced them once and for all that they are part and parcel of a mainstream society that subscribes to one language, etc. Ever since, the idea of a separate existence doesn't hold currency in any meaningful way in America.

The Hispanics who cross into the US in large numbers in search of economic opportunities seem to have failed to realize that their determination by default perhaps to cling fast to their Latino cultures—including their language—is being seen as a challenge to what America is all about. The evident and gradual shift to bilingualism in the conduct of some official business is big cause for worry amongst many Americans who now see Hispanics as invaders who are determined to either over-run their society or establish a visibly different society within the United States. Americans were horrified to see Hispanics re-write their national anthem in Spanish language, wave different flags other than the US flag even as they sort support to be legalized. It is common place these days to hear complaints of rude and blatant behavior by Hispanics from many Americans. Americans are highly concerned about what they perceive as threats to displace them in their own society by people who give them cause to perceive them as insensitive Hispanics. There is anger towards Hispanics these days.

On the other hand, many Americans have failed to realize that better economic climate in Latin America is the most effective antidote to large-scale Hispanic immigration into the US. A better economic climate can be achieved in Latin America through more equitable policy initiatives by the US to wards Latin American countries. Polls have shown that Americans are not entirely averse to the idea of immigration reform. They seem to be averse to any endeavor which will encourage people to subvert the core of their society. Comprehensive immigration reform in the US will not be possible unless the aforementioned issues are properly understood and addressed.

Africa and UN Population Fund’s Self-Evident Prediction

2007-06-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

The UN Population Fund’s report, which was just released yesterday may sound newsy particularly with the prediction that a stupendous proportion—3.3 billion people—of the world’s growing population will, for the first time live in cities and towns by next year. As is often the case with such reports that are ritually-authored by renowned academic-experts—yesterday’s was written by Canadian sociologist and demographer, George Martine—and released by major international outfits, the aspects of its contents that will eventually make news may not reflect the more dire issues and challenges that it may contain.

For anyone who may be conversant with Africa, every city on the continent is already immersed in the blights of unplanned and unchecked urban growth. Are you talking about infrastructural decay and its manifestations by way of crime, pollution, etc. and the threats that they pose to people who reside in them, cities in South Africa and Nigeria will equally come to mind. Although, the differences in the dire condition of cities in South Africa and Nigeria are still in terms of day and night, they still threaten the existence of people who live in them all the same. The decay evident in South Africa’s downtown Johannesburg for instance ought to catch the attention of the ruling African National Congress, ANC for the particular reason that the victims are still poor blacks whose situation hasn’t improved in meaningful terms in the post-apartheid era.

However, hopes cannot be lost in the case of South Africa for the reason that, in spite of the ANC’s sluggish bearings in the expectations by many that it should rise up to the challenges of delivering the dividends of victory in the anti-apartheid struggle to the victims, indeed all South Africans, most of the elements and ingredients required to meet such challenges in a democratic society are already in place in South Africa. Such elements and ingredients include an ever-expanding democratic culture, which seems to show the capacity to hold political leaders to the obligation to conduct public business with responsiveness. One is talking about popular participation in the direction of the affairs of society.

Much to the contrary, Nigerian cities are in an endless precariousness altogether. The prospects of achieving the sort of democratic culture already in existent in South Africa in Nigeria are increasingly disappearing by the day. The increasing decay evident in every Nigerian city is reflective of the degeneration and decay that plagues Nigeria’s politics and the conduct of public affairs in Nigeria. In Nigeria, everyone’s obsession is the proceeds from the sale of the hydrocarbons being drilled with unparalleled recklessness in the Niger delta. Typically, impunity, and high-handedness in their worst varieties constitute the norms that characterize the conduct of public affairs in Nigeria. Corruption and the attendant cynicism that result manifest in such huge proportions that seem like they will nullify the chances of turning things around towards a healthy path in the conduct of public affairs in the Nigerian society.

The scare therefore is that for an indefinite period, every Nigerian city will continue to epitomize the worst indices cited in the just-released report by the UN Population Fund—lack of water and sanitation, terrible housing, etc.—that threaten “the environmental quality of the city” and those that dwell in it!

A New President at the World Bank

2007-06-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

As Mr. Robert Zoellick who US President George W. Bush nominated to replace Mr. Paul Wolfowitz whose embattled tenure as president at the World Bank provoked a power situation that paralyzed Bank mission steps into his new position this week, there is every need for observers of the Bank to raise a crucial and pertinent question. That question is: How much does the Bush White House, its appointees, and all those who associate themselves with the ideologically-driven mission that Mr. Bush and his administration subscribe to understand about the post-Cold War World?

The logic inherent in that question is that the ideologically-steeped neoconservative elements who influence US foreign policy in the Bush administration seem to be fixated on just their understanding that the end of the Cold War led to the emergence of the US as the lone super-power. They are so obsessed with this reality to the degree that it tends to dictate not just their perception of global events, but also the actions that the embark on to shape world affairs as well as their reactions global events including the response of other global actors to US foreign policy. They strongly believe that the most important, if not the only change that matters is the emergence of the US as a lone super-power, which therefore implies that everyone else must subscribe to America’s prescriptions on world affairs. But the truth is that the rest of the world, which includes European states and significant proportions of Europe’s masses are averse to that obsession.

That not withstanding, the Bush White House is still driven by that obsession which guides every foreign policy initiative it takes. The result hasn’t been a resounding success in each and every case. Paul Wolfowitz’s presidency at the World Bank failed particularly because of his personification of that obsession. Mr. Zoellick will succeed at the Bank as president if he extricates himself from that obsession. Going by the broadside he threw at Venezuela two weeks ago during his pre-tenure tour of Africa, Europe, and Latin America, the concern that it might be difficult for him to do that is real. It is clearly evident that apart from the frosty relationships between Venezuela and the US, Mr. Zoellick might not be that happy with Venezuela’s determination to bring its oil sector firmly under state control. The two global oil giants—ConoccoPhilips and ExxonMobil—that are about to be locked out of Venezuela’s oil sector following their refusal to accept a new regime which gives majority control to Venezuela are US-based. Their assets in Venezuela run into $3.5b and $800m respectively. What Mr. Zoellick may have forgotten before he threw his broadside is that the rest of the world including Europeans may not share his perceptions. Proof of that can be found in the fact that the defiance expressed by ConoccoPhilips and ExxonMobil couldn’t deter other European oil giants—Chevron, BP, and Total—from falling in line. Mr. Zoellick must realize that US lone super-power status not withstanding, the world is still a diverse arena. He may not immerse himself into Mr. Wolfowitz's problem at the Bank, but the potentials for other problems are still out there.

When Peacekeepers Become Targets

2007-06-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

The car bomb explosion Sunday that killed six UN peacekeepers from Spain and Columbia in southern Lebanon is bad omen for the possibilities of achieving durable peace and stability in Lebanon. Lebanon is a highly fractured country. In deed, Lebanon is a living example of what could happen to a country and society that have been tied into the nexus of a highly destabilized Mideast. On yet another count, targeting peacekeepers with this kind of violence will negatively affect future UN deployments in parts of the world where their deployment will be critical for saving the vulnerable from annihilation through state-sponsored violence.

It’s both sad and unconscionable that all stakeholders in the Mideast have handled their involvement in the sub-region’s politics and affairs in manners that negate their proclaimed intentions to achieve durable peace between the contending parties in the age-old crisis that bedevils the sub-region. There’s no doubt that each of these stakeholders that include the countless local Mideast-based factions, the US, the EU, France, the Russians, Israel, and several Mideast states understand that the crisis which manifests in different parts of the sub-region derives mostly from the Palestinian-Israel problem in the main. The other underlying issue in the Mideast crisis is the quest by particularly the US to realize the sort of resolution of the Palestinian-Israel problem that will guarantee indefinite upper hand for the US in the affairs of a region that retains the most known quantities of hydro-carbon-based sources of energy.

It is unfortunate that the determination by the US to realize that desire and not the quest for durable peace in the Mideast is actually what drives its Mideast policy, which tends to exacerbate rather than resolve the crisis year after year. Talking specifically about Lebanon, there is no doubt that the perennial instability that reigns in that country can directly be linked to the determination of groups and factions in the region to resist what they see as US grand design to dominate their affairs and resources. The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri is a concomitant outcome of that perception. Granted that the assassination is unconscionable and that the perpetrators ought to be brought to justice, the determined push by the Bush White House to establish a UN tribunal charged with the responsibility to get that process underway right now is ill-advised. It is ill-advised in the sense that the situation in the entire Mideast is highly charged by current US policy. So much that the tribunal which was recently approved by the Security Council may not even take off at all even as its existence gives anti-US vested interests all over the region another cause to muddy Lebanon’s politics even further.

Mideast factions that perceive the UN as an agency through which the US pushes its Mideast policy are now targeting UN peacekeepers to dislodge UN presence in Lebanon. Their ultimate aim no doubt is to frustrate the possibility of the Hariri tribunal ever taking off. Of what use will the tribunal be if it does not take off at all? Even if it does take off, of what use will it be if it stokes rather than stems instability in Lebanon? Peacekeeping is one of the few tools that the UN can still use to save vulnerable societies from state-sponsored violence in a highly turbulent world.

Ikengacomments supports the vow by Major-General Claudio Graziano, the Spaniard who is also the commander of the 13,000 UNFIL contingent in Lebanon that the peacekeepers will remain, we must add that no party, not even the US should let itself get to the point where its policies will expose UN peacekeepers to the sort of violence which makes it difficult to deploy peacekeepers anywhere in the future. Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer was ill-timed, and ill-advised. Not only that it was a disaster for Israel, it led to the deployment of UN peacekeepers that are now being targeted in Lebanon by an unknown group or groups with car bombs. Vulnerable societies should not be exposed to the annihilation that will result if the UN is unable to muster peacekeepers because of the wilful actions that fit the ones taken last summer in Lebanon by the Hezbollah and Israel, and the one the US took when it pressed for the Hariri tribunal.

Al-Qaida Cashing in On the Mess in Palestine
Al-Qaida's call in a video posted on the web today through it's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri for Muslims all over the world to rush support and supplies to Hamas in Gaza vindicates our consistent argument that US policy in the Mideast will rather complicate an already complex mess. Even if Hamas comes out to decline al-Zawahri's call as unsolicited, the bad blood has already been transfused. Accusations and counter-accusations will ensue and every stakeholder would discern whatever it likes from the scenario and proceed to act on the basis of that to justify its actions. The crisis will escalate endlessly, more violence will ensure and countless lives will continue to be lost, needlessly. Some interests will be served by all that though, but the cause of peace in Palestine will not be part of those.

Marx, Violent Crime, and South Africa’s Future

2007-06-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

An earlier version of this piece was written for Business Day last year. This slightly modified version is published herein to highlight the inherent folly in the reluctance of Mr. Thabo Mbeki's government to address and help resolve the continuing crisis in neighboring Zimbabwe where Mr. Robert Mugabe's mis-governance has steadily run the economy into the dust. Recent reports indicate that the huge flow of economic refugees from Zimbabwe into South Africa is provoking a hostile back-lash from South Africans.

Notwithstanding that he lived and died more than a hundred years ago, and that the former Soviet Union, which represented the first human society that implemented the socio-political ideology that he formulated with his benefactor Frederick Engels, aspects of Karl Marx’s thoughts remain quite relevant even today. One such thought is his prediction that economic systems or modes of production lay foundations for those that succeed them. We must recall that he was most particular about that in his predictions that capitalism would lay the infrastructures in the science and technology realms that socialism would inherit once it dawns under the auspices a workers’ vanguard Party. No where is that prediction most applicable today than in post-apartheid Republic of South Africa. In spite of all of the evils that it represented, as an ideology, apartheid provided its architects, advocates, and supporters with the basis for the unprecedented exploitation and management of African labor in a manner never seen before on the continent in the twentieth century. Like all other modes of production before it, apartheid crumbled at the very time when it couldn’t cope with its inherent contradictions and the crisis they unleashed in South Africa, which rocked and threatened international capital quite tremendously. That was to the degree that compelled the various stakeholders in South Africa and elsewhere to reconsider their quiescent support and collaboration with apartheid. As they say, the rest is history, but today apartheid is no more in South Africa. Only the most cynic who visits South Africa today would ignore to acknowledge that the extensive fixed capital—extensive road network, efficient power and portable water systems, educational, healthcare—and others that were embedded in South Africa under apartheid remain the attraction for the stupendous capital from abroad which fuels South Africa’s continuing economic transformation. These are in spite of the truism that the quality of life of Africans was extensively marginalized by apartheid and all that it represented while apartheid and the state that practiced it lasted.

Around this immediate point revolves the problem that represents the most serious threat to South Africa’s future as a multi-racial and democratic society. That threat is represented by violent crimes. Hardly does a week pass without screaming front-page headlines in all manner of South African newspapers about one violent crime or the other that took place in parts of the country. The more eye-catching are the violent crimes that involve the death of police officers and other security agents. The one of Monday, July 17 last year that claimed the life of 37-year old officer Lesley Mashaba in Kliptown is typical for the reason that it knocks at the heart of economic and politically-driven immigration from within Africa, which is one of the issues that this piece addresses. Officer Mashaba, a fifteen-year veteran of the force in Gautang province was allegedly killed in a shot-out that involved suspects who are Mozambican nationals. He is one of the 51 officers killed in South Africa’s eight provinces, including Gauteng between January 1 and June 30 last year. Gauteng, which was described by the Johannesburg Star as “the deadliest province for police officers to work” claims 23 of the 51 off and on-duty police officers who have lost their lives to violent crime during the period. Gautang province includes Johannesburg, the vibrant commercial nerve centre of the South African sub-region which attracts economic migrants from across the continent.

In Durban during the next week in July last year, delegates to the International Sociological Association, ISA sixteenth World Congress of Sociology who came into town to be hosted by their South African colleagues for their body’s four yearly gathering were literally made ‘prisoners’ in their hotel rooms after five of them fell victim to muggings. The experiences of the delegates to the ISA Congress are hardly isolated by any means.

In the same month of July last year, an official world alert on crime in South Africa was issued by major industrialized West European and North American countries—Australia included—to their nationals who travel to South Africa as tourists and cautioned them that the former is unsafe for holidays. The alert is hardly frivolous. It came on the heels of a survey of clients’ travel insurance claims by Norwich Union, a United Kingdom-based insurance company. Norwich Union’s survey revealed that more than travelers to other countries, travelers to South Africa were the most likely to be victims of a range of crimes that include violent robberies and the loss of luggage and other belongings. Johannesburg’s Berea and Hillbrow inner city enclaves, KwaZulu-Natal’s central Durban, beachfronts, Zululand, and Northern KwaZulu-Natal, the Table Mountain in Cape Town, and virtually all the country’s isolated picnic points and beaches were indicated as likely places where violent and serious crimes reign.

Some analysts and even South African public servants have been quick to simply lay the blame for the problem on apartheid. Some others have preferred to merely spin it away in ways that minimize the dangers that it represents for South Africa’s future as a vibrant economy and new democracy. Such dangers are too real for ANC, the South Africa Communist Party, SACP; the Coalition of South Africa’s Trade Unions, COSATU; and other stakeholders in the current multiracial dispensation not to appreciate them. Violent crimes in South Africa derive from two principal sources; internal and external. On the internal front: Apartheid’s uneven development of South Africa, its peoples and economy is indeed responsible for creating the internal situation in which those South Africans who were left behind in the impoverished homelands and townships from where they can now migrate to the cities and other places without restriction where they embrace crime to survive. The external sources are the surrounding countries in the sub-region and the rest of sub-Sahara Africa where political instability, bad governance and gross mismanagement of all sorts wreck havoc on economies and drive able-bodied individuals out to South Africa where they seek economic refuge, and in most cases succumb to lives of crime.

The current emphasis on law enforcement by South Africa’s policy makers at all levels of government is the equivalent of band aid, which will not stem the trend of violent crimes in the country to any meaningful degree. The bold measures must come by way of a package that must alongside law and immigration enforcement, include on the one hand, initiatives that would extend the dividends of multi-racial democracy to impoverished areas of South Africa, on yet the other hand, others that will help to restore or bring about political stability, good governance, and sound economic management to those African countries that export economic refugees in droves to South Africa.

Urgent steps must be taken to extend the ‘built environment of facilities’—roads, airports, ports, cable networks, railways, pipelines, fibre-optic systems, electricity grids, water and sewage systems, housing, factories, offices, schools, and hospitals, and the like—to the homelands, townships, and other areas in South Africa where apartheid wouldn’t have them. The absence of such ‘built environment’ in the homelands, townships, etc. will sustain the age-old status-quo whereby capital ‘in all its physically mobile forms, continue to actually move over’ them and perpetuate their economic impoverishment, which will in turn perpetuate the flow of uneducated, and jobless individuals to where they must adopt crime to survive. Political stability in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, etc. will translate to good governance and sound resources management all of which will dove-tail to less number of economic refugees into South Africa. Manageable numbers of internal and external migrants in South Africa is one of the logical solutions to its growing violent crimes rates. In that regard South Africa must step forward to assume its leadership role on the continent without equivocation. There’s no alternative to South Africa’s leaders going beyond the call of duty to compel and convince the leaders of countries that send economic refugees to South Africa to sit up and govern their countries and manage their economies well.

This is where all of the stakeholders in South Africa’s multi-racial democracy must step forward and take the bold initiative to secure their country’s future. Continuing to do otherwise translates to the sort of irresponsibility that Karl Marx once decried as sitting by and waiting for the roast pigeon of science and technology to fall into one’s mouth. It’s a choice that resonates all over most of the rest of Africa, which is at the root of the economic stagnation that prevails on the continent.

Pakistan's Dictator Buys Additional Insurance

2007-06-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

It is sadly absurd that US analysts prefer to view the new nuclear reactor which Pakistan is building at the Khushab nuclear site, located 100 miles south, from its capital Islamabad solely in the context of the decades-old rivalry that exists between it and India. Granted that Pakistan is already a declared nuclear state, it does not require a sophisticated mindset to discern that the current upgrade in Pakistan’s nuclear capability although linked to the rivalry with India, has more to do with its dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s desire to make himself and his regime to remain relevant to US geopolitical calculations in that part of the world on the one hand. On yet the other hand, he wants to continue holding the US to ransom at this point in the War against Terrorism, WaT when his dictatorship is increasingly under a lot of pressure at home since he got rid of the chief justice a few months ago.

The dictator considers the recent nuclear pact that the US entered with India a slight given his cooperation in the WaT. The new nuclear endeavor is capable of producing enough weapons-grade plutonium for 50 additional bombs annually. He is intent on improving Pakistan’s nuclear bombs, no doubt. What will an impoverished country like Pakistan need so many nuclear bombs for?

The feeble request from the US earlier to Pakistan not to expand its nuclear capability is obviously being ignored, and the US is obviously unconcerned about Pakistan's quest for additional nuclear capability at a time when it blows hot and cold over Iran’s determination to acquire its own nuclear capability. The under laying logic that it is risky for the US to diminish support for the dictator might seem logical. This is in view of the claim that the US cannot afford to forsake the dictator for fear that if he goes, Pakistan might fall into the hands of Islamists. But the policy of standing firmly behind a dictator although completely in sync with the dictates of real politic, does not guarantee that the dictator will remain in power indefinitely. It’s at best a gamble that has high unraveling potentials.

The dictator is sufficiently savvy in his dealings with the US, which is why he keeps buying up additional insurance policy by adding to Pakistan’s nuclear capability. He seems to be succeeding. John Negroponte’s meeting with him last week is clear evidence of that. Only time will prove that even though the US may go along with dictator Musharraf for some distance, his dictatorship will most probably not have durable pay-offs to deliver to the US for the extensive aid and support it offers him and his regime.

A Summit that Might Be Called a Gang-Up

2007-06-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

How much of the popular will do the traditionalist regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Qatar, U.A.E. represent in the Arab and Muslim world? This is a question which has not been explored by pollsters even though it craves their attention day after day. However, in spite of the absence of those descriptive statistics from polls that would throw some measure of definitive answers to the question, there are also several other objectives indicators that one might glean meaningful answers to the question from.

One such indicator is the refusal of all traditionalist Arab rulers and regimes to even make the least venture towards opening their holds on state power to any form of true democratic test. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who makes the least seeming attempts in those regards counters his gestures with blatant rigging tactics all in the bid to retain absolute control over state power. Those traditionalist regimes are all scared stiff of popular participation in the affairs of their countries. There is therefore no doubt the alliance that these traditionalist rulers enjoy with the US is predicated on the protection they receive from the latter.

As these traditionalist rulers jockey and maneuver around these days fronting here and there on behalf of Washington to counter what the Bush administration calls rising Shiite influence in the Mideast, one wonders why not even one of them foresaw the possibility of an upsurge in Shiite influence stemming from the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US. Seymour Hersh’s investigative pieces in The New Yorker have severally exposed much of the support that Saudi Arabia’s rulers rendered the Bush administration from behind the scene in the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. It would be difficult to discern why the Saudi rulers rendered hidden support to Washington to invade and occupy Iraq.

These traditionalist rulers lack the credibility to successfully counter rising Shiite influence in the Arab and Muslim world. The masses of their people who do not see their regimes as legitimate will simply conclude that their efforts are gang-up on behalf of the US. This is one of the reasons that the announcement today of a summit Monday by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan with Israel in support of Mahmoud Abbas’ Unilateral Declaration of Independence, UDI in the West Bank is more likely to further complicate an already complicated situation. As unconscionable as the suicide bombings that Hamas has been known for are, wishing the organization away as an unknown stakeholder in Palestine is probably ill-advised. One does not know how the summit will advise Abbas to handle those Palestinians who support Hamas and mistrust Fatah. The latest poll placed the percentage of Hamas support amongst Palestinians at 37. It will be perilous to ignore this significant percentage of people.

Mr. Tony Blair’s Reward?

2007-06-20T19:24:00.000-07:00

Although Mr. Tony Blair’s aides did dismiss it as untrue, but The Washington Post reported it as a done deal that US president, George W. Bush will soon announce his appointment of retiring British Prime Minister Tony Blair as his new special envoy in the Mideast with the responsibility to over-see governance and economic issues in Palestine. The appointment, which is reported to have been in the works since the past two months would take effect some time after Mr. Blair relinquishes his office at the end of the month.

If this appointment takes place, many will rightly interpret it as Mr. Bush’s reward to Mr. Blair for his unquestioning support and alliance to the US over the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. The appointment might not be worth more than finding something doing for Mr. Blair because the odds seem to be staked against any likelihood of his been effective in the position. Apart from the fact that the Mideast has profoundly been polluted by policies and actions that Mr. Blair himself was part of, last week’s violent factional face-off between Hamas and Fatah has muddied the Palestinian-Israeli crisis even more. The other thing is that the Bush administration, which doesn’t seem to be genuinely keen on fostering the much-needed atmosphere that could encourage sincere engagement between all the stakeholders in the crisis, will not cede the necessary leeway to Mr. Blair to function effectively as an envoy. It seems like crucial aspects of US Mideast policy will still be in the hands of Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleezza Rice.

We mustn’t forget that former World Bank president, Mr. James D. Wolfensohn, who held the position that Mr. Blair might assume resigned in frustration in January last year after only twelve months on the job when he couldn’t convince the Bush administration and others that withholding aid from the Hamas-run government was a bad idea.

There is little doubt that Mr. Mahmoud Abbas’ recently declared UDI in the occupied West Bank might have encouraged the leak about the decision to appoint Mr. Blair. Apart from portraying the US as being in the play, the announcement indeed the appointment whenever it is formally announced, wouldn’t amount to much. Mr. Blair lacks the credibility of an impartial envoy. This reward may not amount to much at all.

Another Blunder Is Underway in Palestine

2007-06-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

The US, Israel, the EU, indeed the international community are all co-joined once again to commit yet another blunder in Palestine. The notion that encouraging Palestinian Authority president, Mr. Mahmoud Abbas to embark on what amounts to a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, UDI from the Gaza Strip, which was over-ran by Hamas militants in last week’s factional violence will advance the course of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is clear blunder if not worse. It compares to countless other blunders that all parties involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict committed in the past.

Mr. Abbas is playing along in this blunder oblivious of the near certainty that it will get the Palestinians, and even the Israelis nowhere. At the most Mr. Abbas and his clique will receive the monetary and other forms of aid that the US, Israel, and the EU have promised to steer their way. They will, as has often been the case, continue to cushion their posh lifestyle with all that aid even as the cause for Palestinian statehood suffers. Perhaps Mr. Abbas needs to be reminded of some hard facts: Himself and his organization, Fatah lost a popular election last November, and clearly couldn’t even hold their own in the violent face-off against Hamas last week. In a neighborhood where muscular tactics matter a lot in politics, their inability to hold their own and preference for relying on external support to remain in the game will certainly not win them much-needed credibility.

Without condoning neither the violence that gave Hamas total control of Gaza last week, nor its resort to certain unpalatable tactics, it will amount to sheer hypocrisy to absolve Abbas, and Fatah of blame over the confrontation with Hamas. Their willingness to lend themselves to geopolitical power play in the region to the point of continuously acting like the election that Hamas won was of no effect was partly responsible for provoking that violent face-off last week. The laughable thing in tha is that Fatah was routed in a face-off that it helped provoke.

It is unrealistic for Mr. Abbas and Fatah to continue to presume that they will find themselves relevant by not encouraging the sort of behavior that would wean Hamas off its hard-line tendencies without fracturing Palestinian unity. When he proclaims that his UDI has created the atmosphere to engage the Israelis in peace negotiation, Mr. Abbas is simply operating from denial. Peace with Israel is absolutely necessary, but his UDI cannot enable it. Peace with Israel cannot obtain in the absence of Palestinian unity. The emphasis on security for Israel as a pre-eminent necessary and sufficient condition for meaningful engagement in the peace process is bound to continuously chart the path of failure. Israel’s security is just one of the several other issues that are involved in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. In order for any effort to solve the crisis to become meaningful, all of the issues—including economic, well-being for the Palestinian, the return issue, etc.—involved in the crisis ought to be addressed together. Isolating Hamas will not help matters in that regard at all. It will encourage it to remain stuck in bad behavior.

Piling support and aid on Mr. Abbas and Fatah to encourage their UDI will worsen a worsening situation even more.

Ethiopian Government’s Alleged Abuses in the Ogaden

2007-06-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

In journalistic terms, the story in The New York Times today on claims made by the Ogadeni people that Ethiopian government troops routinely commit atrocities against civilians in the course of their pursuit of fighters that belong to the Ogaden National Liberation Front, ONLF against which it has been engaged in a separatist war since 1994 would qualify as news. This is in the sense that stories on this claim haven’t been international media staples, even though the rebellion has been underway for about thirteen years now. However, the news is true-to-type. This is in the sense that the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the one in neighboring Eritria headed by Isaias Afworki, ever since they ousted Mengistu Haile Miriam in 1991 seem to be in competition with themselves to see who will come tops in the repression of their citizens. Human Rights Watch, the European Parliament and even the US State Department have all implicated the Zenawi government in abuses.

The interesting thing is that at no time has either Afworki or Zenawi lost support for a long time from the US. During the Clinton presidency both individuals alongside Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, were show-cased as the epitome of new African leaders. Since the Bush White House began the War against Terrorism, WaT, Afworki and Zenawi have upped their competition against one another to be the favorite boy-supporters of US anti-terror efforts in the Horn of Africa. In return Washington looks the other way and ignores their repression of internal dissent. Only last year, Zenawi went out of his way to rig general elections to perpetuate himself in power, and went as far as unleashing his security forces on opposition protesters, many of whom were shot on the streets of Addis Ababa, the capital, when they protested. He is still holding unknown numbers of opposition elements in indefinite detention. He has been involved in a campaign against Al-Qaeda-backed Islamists in Somalia as US proxy. The ONLF has certainly played into Zenawi’s hands by killing Chinese oilmen alongside Ethiopian troops recently. If that act convinces the US to listen to Zenawi’s plea to declare the ONLF a terrorist organization, there might be no secrecy or denial again whenever his troops step up their alleged acts of brutality against Ogadeni civilians.

If Zenawi gets away with the allegation being made against him in Ogaden, it will be another affirmation that the Wat is indeed a ploy to let dictators in Asia, and Africa brutalize their people and get away with it so long as they lend themselves to the Wat.

Un-Making Obasanjo’s Evils

2007-06-17T18:50:00.000-07:00

The onus to cleanse Nigerian society of all the evils that Olusegun Obasanjo inflicted on the land in the eight years he was in power has fallen on the judiciary. So far, it seems like the judiciary will summon the courage this time to redeem itself and give the polity another chance. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Governor Peter Obi’s petition for the Court to imbue him with the legitimacy to finish his four-year term as governor, and the court ruling last week too, authorizing the release of the leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, who has been in indefinite detention by Obasanjo since 21 months ago, are indicators of that fact. The indefinite detention of Dokubo-Asari and the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra's, MASSOB Ralph Uwazurike indicated not only Obasanjo’s evil side, it also made a mockery of the rule of law, which was supposed to be the basis of civilian rule.

Mujahid Dokubo-Asari’s release is just the beginning. Uwazurike should be allowed to return home as well.

Discharging the obligation to cleanse Obasnajo’s evils will not be easy. It will take courage though. It will entail serving justice to all petitioners at the various election tribunals that were established to examine the massively rigged elections this April. All the allegations of corruption leveled against the governors who presided in some of the states in the country in the last eight years must be examined and looked into without fear or favor. The sale of public corporations, the allocation of oil blocks to friends and cronies of Mr. Obasanjo are the other areas that must be investigated and cleaned up. The other big task will be to attend to the recent suit brought by Chief Anthony Enahoro and others challenging the validity of the 1999 Constitution. It is an unparalleled fraud for the country to operate a constitution in the name of the people when there is no such document that was established on their mandate. The cleansing would not take people who are geniuses. It can be done.

False Antithesis in Palestine

2007-06-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

For the Bush administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the factional violence between Hamas and Fatah may have been God-sent. This is in the sense that it has severed the links between Hamas, which both the US and Israel still call a terrorist organization, even though it won a democratic election and formed a government last year as a result, and Fatah, whose leader and Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas is seen by both as a negotiating partner.

The resultant split from that factional violence has given rise to two separate Palestinian territories in Gaza, where Hamas is in total control, and the West Bank, where Mahmoud Abbas has declared his readiness to establish a separate government, which will operate by decrees, after he announced the dissolution of the Hamas-led government yesterday. Buoyed by out-right declaration of support from both the US and Israel, Abbas issued a decree in which he annulled a law that required legislative approval before his appointment of a prime minister could stand as legitimate. Hamas has not wasted time to dismiss his actions and decrees as irrelevant.

The logic in Mr. Abbas’s moves is that both the US and Israel will open up to him with aid and other forms of support. To what extent will an Abbas-led factional Palestinian government be able to truly carry the majority of Palestinians and sympathizers of their cause in an engagement with Israel? The answer to this question cannot be a definitive Yes! In which case, the unfolding scenario is therefore irrelevant as far as the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis is concerned. If the desire on the part of the US, Israel, and even the EU is to suspend the crisis in the sort of precarious limbo that stokes anarchy, then the gamble that is unfolding by way of aid and support to Mr. Abbas and squeezing of Hamas is well-aimed. But if the intention is to enable a situation that would entail peace between the Palestinian antagonists, on the one hand, and between the Palestinians and Israel on yet the other hand, then, aiding Mr. Abbas and squeezing Hamas is false antithesis. All the squeezing that was directed at Hamas since it won the elections last year didn’t come to much. It didn’t seem to have weakened it at all. There has to be a better way of forging US policy amongst the Palestinians if at all the ultimate desire is to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis.

Cause for Hope in Nigeria

2007-06-15T01:45:00.000-07:00

The ruling yesterday by Nigeria’s Supreme Court in Abuja in favor of Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State in his suit in which he prayed the Court to validate his demand to serve out a full four-year term as governor sequel to the validation of his 2003 election might be cause for hope that the country might be bracing up to correct some of the extensive wrongs that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo inflicted during the last eight years. The Court’s decision is indeed courageous and significant. Moreso, in that it came so quickly on the heels of Mr. Obasnajo's return to his Ota Farm only a few weeks ago.

On both counts, the decision should provide a cue to particularly the various tribunals that are handling all the petitions that derived from the shameful elections that Mr. Obasanjo rigged in the most blatant manner to extend his rule albeit by proxy. If those tribunals show the necessary courage and deliver justice in each of those petitions brought before them, they would have restored the meaning of transition to all that went awry on Mr. Obasanjo’s deliberate watch. By so-doing, the stage will then be set for Nigeria to proceed on a sound democratic path, so to say. For that to happen, the meritorious petitions brought to challenge the installation of Mr. Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor, Mr. Umar Yar’Adua must produce a verdict that will nullify his claims to the presidency and order a fresh election to be conducted by a credibly electoral body, which will not be the INEC chaired by Mr. Maurice Iwu.

Mr. Peter Obi’s historic feat will be enhanced only by how well he positions himself as governor. He must exhibit unparalleled independence from Abuja in order to assert that the unitary power grab by Mr. Obasanjo is illegitimate and bad for good governance. He doesn’t even need to go cap in hand each month for the so-called allocation from Abuja. He could govern Anambra credibly by raising revenue from alternative sources within the state. His worthy victory in the Supreme Court has placed him on the worthy pedestal to redefine governance in Nigeria. One would hope that he wouldn’t squander the opportunity.

Anarchy Unfolds in Palestine

2007-06-14T05:08:00.000-07:00

In a neighborhood, which has for a long time been associated with violence, the assassination death of a law maker in Lebanon, and the continuing high intensity warfare amongst the Palestinians that qualifies as a full-blown civil war are the sort of events that could be taken for granted. But any informed watcher of the Middle East should not but conclude that the pattern of violence this time in Palestine points to an unfolding anarchy that will seriously hurt any prospects for peace there and the neighborhood that it is part of in the long run.

The foundation of the unfolding anarchy in Palestine was laid after the election that gave Hamas victory last year. The refusal of Israel, the US, and even the Europeans to acknowledge the outcome of that election on the ground that Hamas refuses to renounce its non-acceptance of Israel’s existence, and the open declaration of support for Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas by the US, even though they lost the election, were gestures that gave wrong signals to Palestinians. Hardliners within Hamas may have been gratified by those gestures however. All the same, the crippling of the incipient Hamas-led government after aid and support from the US and Europeans was cut off, did not in any way compel Hamas to comply with the demand to recognize Israel. Instead, Hamas has forged ahead on its own terms. The latest step in that regard is its unfolding determination to militarily over-run and subdue Fatah to possibly pave way to consolidate its power in Gaza. There is no doubt that by so-doing, Hamas has throttled events to the degree in which Israel, Mr. Abbas, and the White House have been caught flat-footed in their own desire to steer the course of events in Palestine to reflect their desires. The truth therefore is that the quest by Israel and the US to shape the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli problem according to their subjective worldview may have suffered yet another big set back.

Perhaps, new efforts will now be scrambled together by the US and others who share that subjective worldview to achieve the kind of resolution of the crisis they crave all in the bid to rescue Fatah and Mr. Abbas. There is no doubt that such efforts will stoke the anarchy further, and deepen the factional divide between Hamas and Fatah. It is sad, but the truth is that the policies that led to the present scenario were avoidable. Such policies may have been informed by the belief that violence could coerce concession from the Palestinians, experience has shown that the crisis in the Middle East has been deepened by initiatives that were meant to lift it out of the doldrums towards a solution. The fact that the crisis end up each and all the time, not being resolved is cause for the parties concerned to step back and rethink. No one involved in the quest to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli problem has shown the necessary courage to step forward to assume the role of an impartial arbiter between the Palestinians and Israelis. Until that happens, the violence and blood shed will sadly continue.

Hurting America’s Bona Fide in the World

2007-06-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and the events that they provoked when the Bush White House embarked on several activities in the world may have over-shadowed the big blot that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election represents in the perception of the US by many in the world. But it is worthy of note to mention that many people the world over read cynical meanings from the 2000 presidential election on the grounds that it was rigged by the Republican party. I still recall a friend in Nigeria mockingly suggesting that the US could have been better off if the Republicans had approached Nigerians to teach them the ropes of how best to rig elections. Who would imagine that the US would be thought of as an importer of a primer on how best to rig elections! On their part, unsavory political actors in parts of Africa became comfortable with the assumption that they could rig elections in their respective countries and get away with any criticism from the US by simply turning the table at the US.

The continuing revelations about the incompetence of US Attorney General, Mr. Alberto Gonzalez don’t help matters at all in this regard on two counts: It has been established beyond doubt so far that he is incompetent, and his refusal to resign and President George W. Bush’s refusal to relieve him of his position have given the world further cause to presume that the US is not different from other societies where incompetence in public office don’t have consequences at all for individuals. The longer the mess drags on the more entrenched that notion becomes in the minds of people in different parts of the world. But the decision to halt the erosion in US credibility depends more on Mr. Gonzalez than his boss, the President. If he decides to resign, he would not only aid his country, he would also rehabilitate himself as an honorable individual.

Incomplete Diagnosis

2007-06-12T01:26:00.000-07:00

Ms. Michelle Rhee, whose appointment as the new superintendent of the District of Columbia Public Schools system is slated to be announced today by Washington, DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty may have gotten off on a rocky start before even she could begin her new job. Her diagnosis of the problem with the troubled DC Public School System is wrong. She strongly believes that only good teachers will make the difference in any school.

But I respectfully disagree with her. The problems facing the DC Public Schools System are several and multi-faceted. They range from the various broken dawn homes and families from which most of the children in DC public schools come to the faceless bureaucratic machinery that over-burdens what actually transpires in the schools right in the classrooms. A child who is not properly brought up to respect the authority of significant others and adults is not ready for the rigors of academics. That child will refuse to abide by all the rules that make schools what they are. When schools are not seen as institutions, teachers cannot perform as authority figures, and everything else will fall by the way side as a result.

The first problem with educating children in the DC Public Schools System derives from their homes. One is aware of the legacies of slavery, etc. that make it difficult for black people to be trustful of authority in the US. Such legacies have for a long time made it possible for teachers to take advantage of the system to prey on the children placed on their care. This is to the degree that teachers go out of their ways to place children on the path that will systematically lead them to self-destruction. In a normal world, teachers teach and nurture children under their care but nit destroy them. But parents must also be trustful of the teachers under whose care they place their children; else they will not be trustful of their judgment. Parents, even if they lack the ability to impart discipline on their children, must be willing to cede some authority to the teachers to hew off whatever rough edges that their children bring from home to school. Those rough edges are indeed, some of the factors that interfere with the teaching and learning processes, when they are brought into the classrooms and allowed to fester.

Mr. Fenty must return to the voters, to parents in the City to ascertain the degree to which they are willing to rise to their responsibility as parents and as partners in the education of their children. Unless that happens, it is only going to be a matter of time before a burn-out sets in to erode the Mayor’s confidence in Ms. Rhee. That burn-out will affect her credibility, and things will begin to fall apart, as has often been the case. She will not be a miracle woman who will deliver what is not there. The problem with the DC Public Schools system must be fixed in the over all for it to functional well. Otherwise, Ms. Rhee’s appointment will be another musical chair, and as has been the case in the past, the cheers may not be there when she moves on.

The Bottom Line Remains Unchanged

2007-06-11T11:18:00.000-07:00

Ever since the occupation of Iraq began, there is one central puzzle that has been left addressed even as the US continues to tinker with all manner of strategies aimed at achieving what President George W. Bush and members of his inner circle in the White House and in the other sections and arms of the US government call ‘victory’. That puzzle is: How much do Iraq’s diverse groups want continued US presence in their country? The invasion proper was rightly preceded by that puzzle, but the derivative response to it was fraught with extensive assumptions steeped in fantasy. That was why the architects of the invasion proclaimed that the Iraqis will receive US troops with flowers. Well, no flowers were seen when US troops entered Baghdad, or thereafter. But all the same, the occupation has continued in the absence of a valid resolution of that puzzle.

It seems that the need to resolve that puzzle has been lost in either the debate over continued US presence in Iraq, which was heralded by the mid-term election that brought the Democrats to a slim majority in Congress in November 2006, or over the White House’s over-zeal to plod on with the occupation like nothing has changed at all in the initial support for the war by most Americans. The decision to escalate the number of American troops in Iraq was made in spite of the non-resolution of that puzzle. So was the kite flown last week by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the Bush administration’s desire to have troops in Iraq for an indefinite period of time.

The current decision to arm members of the Sunni religious sect to combat al-Qaeda is riding on the back of that vacuum as well. One is hard-pressed to believe that the same Sunni community whose leadership was routed and humiliated by Saddam Hussein’s ouster and execution, which was televised globally, would willing and truly stand behind the US in its occupation of Iraq. The decision to arm the Sunni is indicative of US desperation, because going by instances in the past when what was received from the US by the Iraq security forces was deployed against US troops by elements in them, there is no proof that the current arrangement to assist the Sunni will not turn out that way as well. The only litmus test that it would not back fire can be found in a change in the bottom line, i.e. the Sunni people must genuinely declare their acceptance of continued US presence in Iraq. It is only when they do that that the US can then begin to court them as allies. They haven't do that yet, and don't seem ready to do it at all.

The Government of Tanzania, the UAE Royal Family, and the Hadzabe Nationality

2007-06-10T10:38:00.000-07:00

Africa’s contemporary reputation as a continent where impunity reigns is playing out once again, this time in Tanzania where the government of President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete is about to sacrifice the Hadzabe, an indigenous nationality that inhabits the country's Yaeda Valley for a few dollars more simply because they are vulnerable people. The Hadzabe, who still retain their simple hunting and gathering life style which they evolved over the past 50,000 years are being forced to vacate their homeland to make way for the United Arab Emirate, UAE royal family which has leased 2,500 square miles of their land from the Tanzania government for safari and other pleasures that its members feel that they must enjoy elsewhere other than their own land. Some members of the UAE royal family are not content with the chunk of the Hadzabe land they already have and share with other members of their family. They want some more of the Hadzabe land to themselves even at the expense of the indigenous owners who must be driven out to make room to accommodate their greed, simply because they have the money to pervert the Tanzania officials involved.

Elsewhere the Hadzabe would be a protected national treasure. But Tanzania prefers to force off their land, even though it is clear that driving them off their land and a life style that they have been used to will amount to driving them into extinction. It has already been established that the Hadzabe cannot cope with a sudden thrust into the so-called modern life style. Some of them who were carted to prison by the Tanzania government for simply raising their voice to disagree with the quest to force them out never returned alive.

The most unconscionable aspect of this episode of impunity is that the Tanzania government cared so less about the Hadzabe that it found absolutely no needs to consult or include them in the processes that made the deal with the money-bag UAE royal family. This petty act which could not have taken place in Tanzania while the late Julius Nyerere was alive and in office as president in Tanzania must not only be condemned by all decent people and groups the world over, but must also be stopped. Referring to an indigenous people who do not constitute a threat to the government as “backward” and primitive simply because their homeland has been sold for money is raw and uncivilized. There is no need recommending that the Hadzabe who number less than 2,000 should take their case to the courts in Tanzania because they will not get a fair hearing.

The Hadzabe situation is a perfect challenge to the civilized world. The UN and its relevant agencies must rise up to the challenge to save a vulnerable people from a government that lacks morality and decency. This case is the type that the International Court of Justice at The Hague was made for. Some justice-loving group or individuals must act on behalf of the Hadzabe and take the case to The Hague to help them secure some arrangement that will protect them and their culture from extinction by the government and the royal family in the UAE.

Stalling Tactics

2007-06-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

There is yet another indication that Israel’s political establishment lacks the genuine intentions to seek and establish the credibility necessary for lasting peace with the Palestinians. It is not that it requires the services of a fortune teller for any ardent watcher of the Palestinian-Israeli problem to discern that Israel wants anything less than a resolution that hinges completely on its own terms, but the report today that Prime Minister Olmert’s government has made back channel overtures to negotiate with Syria with the aim of returning the Golan Heights is capable of creating the impression that there’s a lack of genuine desire for peace particularly because the same report disclosed that Israel’s overtures is aimed at isolating Iran.

That mindset which compels those who hold it in the Israeli political establishment and their international supporters to stop at nothing in the pursuit of whatever frustrates the possibility of solving the crisis falls within the realm of stalling tactics. The assassination of Yshak Rabin under a highly poisoned political atmosphere which was generated and stoked quiet openly by opponents of the Oslo Accords that he initialed with the late Yassir Arafat is yet another indication of the existence of the said mindset. Seeking and making peace with Syria with the aim of curbing Iran’s growing influence in the region will be the latest one. But the question that craves a serious consideration is: Is there really an alternative to a lasting resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis?

The harsh and truthful answer to that question is indeed, no! So far, nothing indicates that there will come a time when the prevalent circumstances in the Middle East would respond to the desires of the holders of this mindset. There is no denying that given America’s unflinching support, Israel will continue to enjoy the upper hand in the balance of military power in the region. But Israel’s military power has proven insufficient in curbing Palestinian resistance and all the destructive violence that characterize the use of military power to quash that resistance. Meanwhile, both sides have continued to bleed in every sense of the word. Nothing can be better than a lasting solution in this case. So far, the will for that is lacking in Israel’s political establishment and in the ranks of its supporters. The Palestinians do deserve their own share of the blame here, but one is convinced that Israel is the more powerful adversary in the conflict. However, that in and by itself places a good measure of the burden to credibly set the stage for genuine peace on Israel and its international supporters. Stalling tactics will not get even the most powerful party in this kind of protracted conflict far enough.

US Intelligence Establishment on Castro

2007-06-08T02:05:00.000-07:00

One of his last public acts as US National Intelligence director before he re-deployed to the State Department was Mr. John Negroponte’s appearance before the US Senate Intelligence Committee. The only seeming bomb shell that he handed out during that session was his authoritative 'disclosure' that Cuba’s President Fidel Castro’s death was imminent, in fact, a few months away from then. Negroponte’s ‘disclosure’ came a little after Mr. Castro disappeared from the public because of the ailment, which he is still recuperating from.

Contrary to Negroponte’s ‘disclosure’, Mr. Castro is still alive. The only thing that US intelligence got right was therefore the ailment, which up until recently kept Mr. Castro out of total circulation for 10 months in a row. Although Negroponte’s almost bogus disclosure didn’t make the media radar screen beyond the first few days, the truth remains that it doesn’t bode well for the credibility of the US intelligence establishment. This is especially in the light of the big intelligence failure over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, WMD program. If the circumstances had warranted it, the intelligence from which Negroponte derived the logic of his ‘disclosure’ from was actionable enough to inform critical policy decisions by the White House. As Iraq burns, the need for US policy makers to trust but verify every manner of intelligence from the US intelligence establishment before it can be used to support or justify serious foreign policy decisions cannot be over-emphasized.

There is indeed a difference between wishing death on Mr. Castro and predicting on the basis of hard intelligence that he would die within a specific time period. Now that Mr. Castro has defied the prediction of his death by the newest intelligence clearing house established by the US government in the wake of the intelligence failure over Iraq, where then does it place the US intelligence establishment on credibility?

The Best News, Probably

2007-06-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

China’s official announcement today by its State Council had taken new measures to re-invigorate the country’s over all food an drug safety monitoring standards is probably one of the best news on globalization this time around. What started with the importation of tainted pet food into the US from China not long ago had gradually grown to assume enormous proportions when there emerged other cases of tainted toothpaste from China that was alleged to have killed at least 100 people in Panama.

The global frenzy for cheap manufactures literally made China the first stop for international monopoly concerns that find China’s huge appetite for economic growth so luring that no one seemed to have risen to the challenge of ensuring that safety wasn’t sacrificed for quick profits. It is all so good that the Chinese government seemed to have risen quickly to the challenge of restoring global confidence in its safety food and drug structures. That process which began with the death sentence handed last week to Mr. Zheng Xiaoyu, who used to be the head of China’s Food and Drug Administration for taking bribe and over-looking strict adherence to regulation standards, has been extended to the administration of tighter safety standards as well as enforcement procedures at all levels of China's food and drug safety establishment. The new standards include aspects that would prevent errors as well as those that will track and investigate errors if and when they are detected.

The issues involved here are not political at all. They knock at the heart of what drives the world economic system even as it shows signs of terminal crisis. There’s hardly any doubt at all that China is part of if not the heartbeat of the world economy. The other time what emerged as slight quakes in China's stock market sent global waves that almost crashed major stock markets in the major and even minor financial centers in the world. What is needed this time from everyone concerned is cooperation with and support for the Chinese as they proceed with the task of restoring global confidence in their country's food and drug safety regime. Anything else will translate to the most counter-productive outcome that will probably drive the world economy to the lowest low in what Immanuel Wallerstein calls its terminal crisis.

Turkey’s Incursion Into Iraq

2007-06-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

Reports today that Turkish troops chased Kurdish fighters into northern Iraq are worrisome but not unexpected. Turkey has never hidden its readiness to foil any attempts by Kurds on its side of the border to take advantage of the nominal independence status that Iraqi Kurdistan is enjoying to re-invigorate their fight for independence from Turkey.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ warning to Turkey last week for it not to invade northern Iraq may not have been in vain after all. Today’s reports indicate that Gates’ warning may not mean much to Turkey by way of deterrence. It doesn’t and may not constitute one. The reason being that Iraqi Kurds who are determined to assert their independence from Iraq someday soon will likely continue to extend a hand of support to their kinsmen across the border in Turkey. Kurdish desire for independence from the rest of Iraq and support for their kinsmen in Turkey will present the US with serious challenges that it may not be able to handle easily. The reasons being that on the one hand, the US cannot easily talk the Kurds in Iraq off their desire to assert their independence, and on yet the other hand, unless the Bush White House acts true to its established swashbuckling persona, sending US forces into northern Iraq and possibly into Turkey to neutralize the latter’s significant military presence will further complicate things for the US in the region. But only time will tell what will unfold in Iraq sequel to US invasion.

Not Without Europe

2007-06-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

Even as the US wrangles with Russian President, Vladimir Putin over its projected missile defense system that will tie all of the NATO members, one unacknowledged piece of fact is at the heart of this latest element of US self-appointed role as an advocate and defender of democracy in the free world. That fact is that the Europe will always remain relevant to US foreign policy. For good or for bad, the US cannot afford to ignore Europe in its quest to sustain what Immanuel Wallerstein calls hegemony in the world.

The missile defense system will definitely re-validate US bona fide in Europe on NATO’s auspices. The great economic strides made by countries in the parts of Europe that former Defense Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld described as ‘old Europe’ when he became exasperated by their refusal to rubber stamp US invasion of Iraq during the post World War II years were partly responsible for deflating some of their allegiance to US world leadership. The collapse of Soviet Communism was the other variable that contributed to that deflation. In the absence of the threat that the Soviet Union posed, West Europeans don’t see the logic for them to play the second fiddle in their relationship with Washington. The call on the political leadership in most of Western Europe by Europe’s masses that the time for them to enable the enjoyment of the dividends of peace is intricately linked to the end of the Cold War. Even in the parts of what used to be in the Soviet Warsaw block, the missile defense system is being seen as a ploy by the US to cash in on the on-going War against Terror, WaT to rope the rest of Europe into a geo-strategic set-up that will re-invigorate Europe’s allegiance to the US. But it doe not seem that Europe's masses are very interested in being part of a muscular alliance with the US any more.

Although Iran is being positioned as Europe’s new common enemy in the current bid to win support for the missile, a re-invigorated US alliance with Europe will probably be more relevant for countering China’s growing reach in Africa and Asia from where it is poised to compete with the US for all manner of mineral and natural resources that it badly needs to sustain its stupendous economic growth. But US difficulties in convincing Europeans that China is a threat is deeply steeped in China’s refusal to let the US succeed in drawing it into Cold War-type enmity. China’s biggest concern at the moment centers on the realization of economic growth to sustain its huge population.

Even after the missile defense is put in place, the dividends that it will yield for the US might not be extensive and durable. It does not seem like the masses in Europe are enthusiastic about building alliance with the US on the basis of military defense. Europe’s masses seem to be more interested in rebuilding their alliance with the US only on a plank that emphasize world peace on an equal partnership.

Mr. Charles Taylor

2007-06-04T02:42:00.000-07:00

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor who goes on trial in The Hague, Netherlands today for human rights abuses is a reminder of one of the problems with Africa. Mr. Taylor is accused of orchestrating a civil war particularly in nearby Sierra Leone by buying and receiving diamonds from warlords who he supplied weapons in exchange. The more serious aspect of that is that his warlord allies then went out of their ways to unleash unparalleled brutality on countless civilians who were deliberately mutilated in unspeakable ways.

The impunity and sadism that characterized Mr. Taylor’s reign in Liberia is peculiar to Africa. The continent is home to the likes of Mr. Taylor who feel at ease to trample on people that they claim to govern. That is why it has become almost a cliché in the international media that Mr. Taylor’s trail will be a long-awaited lesson for his likes on the continent. But the reality is that the cliché is more of an exaggeration than anything at all. If not for the mutilation that Mr. Taylor’s allies in Sierra Leone unleashed on innocent civilians, chances are that he could have gotten away with the impunity and sadism that characterized his rule of Liberia. Western leaders could have found justifications on the grounds of law and order to leave him alone. The state of affairs produced by such tolerance of governance which is sustained by impunity, sadism, and lack of responsiveness is one of the continent’s greatest undoing. The destitution and decay that societies in country and after country in Africa are consigned to by their so-called leaders is no less unconscionable than the acts that Mr. Taylor will begin to answer for in The Hague today.

Dragging just one out-of-control former leader to The Hague for a show trail will definitely not rid the continent of the others. Mr. Taylor’s trial is just an exception, which will not establish a pattern. One who bets that Mr. Taylor's trial will not be followed by even one more will not be wrong at all. The only measure more likely to put a stop to governance by impunity on the continent is one that empowers Africans to compel their political leaders to become responsive. That measure is still lacking for Africa. In most if not all cases, the heartless individuals that unleash reigns of impunity on their fellow Africans find supporters in the West. A politician or warlord who does not need to worry about international acceptance even when he achieves political power through illegitimate means will not bother to govern responsively. Africa’s post-colonial supra-national states are just conducive for abusive rule. The clamor for the restructure of those post-colonial supra-national states in parts of the continent will mark the beginning of that measure which will help establish responsive governance in Africa. The interesting thing about that is that without Western interference, Africans can and will accomplish the task of establishing the basis for responsive governance for themselves.

"Let Them Come. We Are Ready"

2007-06-03T05:17:00.000-07:00

If there were any doubts at all about the motive of Fata al-Islam, the previously unknown Islamist jihadist group that has been embroiled in a siege inside a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Tripoli in Lebanon, with the Lebanese army since a fortnight ago, the declaration yesterday to the Associated Press today by Abu Hureira, who is also one of al-Islam’s leaders clears them all. Faced with imminent death in the hands of the Lebanese army, which has completely surrounded the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp where the group has holed itself in ever since the siege began, Mr. Hureira, a Lebanese whose real name is Shehab al-Qaddour, taunted the Lebanese army to “come. We are ready”. The group is clearly apocalyptic and its members are determined to martyr themselves to probably win following of some sort in the future, if not in the present in Lebanon and the larger Middle East.

This sort of die-hard determination for martyrdom is a dimension in the War Against Terror, WaT that must compel serious thought in the minds of policy makers who are involved in prosecuting the war. The world is not served well at all if pluralities of future Islamists are created whenever one or a group of them submits themselves to a gun battle to be killed by military forces anywhere in the world. This reality is the sort that makes the WaT an endless war. Wars are definitely not good, because they lead to the destruction of lives and property. The architects and prosecutors of the WaT can only be ignorant of this evident fact if they lack proper education. Else, they are guilty of deliberately exposing the world to an endless war when they could have achieved the same goal of dealing with the scourge of Islamist terror by other more pains-taking methods.

In the case of the on-going siege in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, the best approach could have been to encircle Fatah al-Islam and wait them out for as long as it takes for them to surrender. That tactic could have taken some time and nerve for sure, but in a situation where the civilians in the camp are reluctant to accommodate al-Islam members, it would have been a matter of time before they surrender. Violence begets violence. In a region and neighborhood where violence has hardly solved any of the long-drawn conflicts that have broken out there in the past, the resort to violence each time when new ones break out is rather counter productive.

Given the hapless performance of the Lebanese army in the current engagement with Fata al-Islam, the Lebanese authorities who talk tough ought to know that they lack what it requires to actually claim the upper under in this kind of conflict. They might be heartened by the quick gift of weapons that they received from abroad these past two weeks since the fight with al-Islam broke out. However, it is one thing to receive quick military aid, it is still another for that military aid to be used in ways that achieve decisive outcomes. Such decisive outcomes would include in their case, getting rid of trouble-making militants once and for all, and securing lasting peace. If military aid is good only for achieving blood revenge alone, then it becomes counter-productive.

Iraq As South Korea

2007-06-02T16:50:00.000-07:00

When it comes to Iraq it does not seem like the Bush White House will ever get tired of coming up with all sorts of ideas. But the sad thing about that is that none of those ideas has been effective in any sense of the word when it comes to achieving what can be called transparent success. A military undertaking that was started to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, WMD has steadily morphed into an occupation without end in an environment, which remains exceptionally hostile to the US.

The report today in The New York Times that the Bush White House has started to openly fly the kite for an indefinite US military presence in Iraq cannot surprise anyone at all. After all while Mr. Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary there were several reports that the US was briskly building several permanent military bases in Iraq. The more interesting aspect of this kite is that US occupation of Iraq is being discussed in the context of US military presence in South Korea after the Korean war, and of course in Japan and Germany after World War II. Those who are doing this comparison cannot be ignorant of the stark differences between the situation of things in South Korea, Japan, and Germany and Iraq and the Middle East. For one, at no time was the credibility of the US and its values as a super power at odds with the Koreans, Japanese, and Germans as is the case today in Iraq and the Middle East. The closest comparison to the evident realities that obtain in Iraq as regards the desire by the Bush White House to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq is Lebanon at the time when former President Ronald Reagan sent the Marines there in the 1980s. There’s no need recounting how that mission tuned into a failed misadventure. But it’s worthy to mention albeit very briefly why it did: the US lacked the bona fide necessary for accomplishing such a mission in that region. Today, the credibility of the US in the region has deteriorated even more than what was the case in the 1980s.

Like the invasion of Iraq proper, indefinite US military presence in Iraq will be an endeavor that will not succeed beyond its implementation. So far, the only successful US endeavor in Iraq is the invasion itself, for the reason that it enabled de facto US military presence there. But a comprehensive balance sheet on Iraq will starkly show that everything else has been a woeful failure. It is one thing if the desire is to maintain an indefinite US military presence and call it a success in and by itself. It will be yet another thing to presume that such an undertaking will mirror US military presence in South Korea, Japan, and Germany. The cost of an indefinite US presence in Iraq will surpass the ordinary. It may not worth much at all. US policy makers must spend more time thinking about what they can do to repair the serious damage that the invasion of Iraq has done to its over all credibility in the Middle East, and less on fantastic desires that will further damage its already damaged credibility in the region. At this time the incendiary kite of an indefinite military presence in Iraq is one such damaging idea.

Not So, Mr. Chavez

2007-06-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

One would rightly wonder what Venezuela’s President, Mr. Hugo Chavez expected by way of reactions from opponents, of his government and even fair-minded individuals at home, and of course governments abroad, over his government’s recent refusal to renew the broadcast license of Radio Caracas Television, or RCTV. That action forced RCTV off the air Sunday for what is meant to be for good, since a new government-owned public television began immediately to broadcast on RCTV’s channels. That act by Mr. Chavez and his government is typical of an over-kill and over-reach. Mr. Chavez should not be surprised at all that it is attracting the sort of immediate protest demonstrations in Venezuela by opponents of his government and condemnations abroad from groups and even governments. He doesn't need such at this point in time!

His declaration that the negative reaction over that act of over-reach and over-kill stems from "international rightist, extreme-rightist and fascist movements [who] are attacking Venezuela from everywhere - from Europe, the United States, Brasilia" is disingenuous and sad to say the least. One can concede that RCTV was an arch-supporter of the coup that claimed to have ousted him from power just briefly the other time. One can also agree that RCTV has been an ardent opponent of his government and its policies. But his expressed expectation that Venezuela should be devoid of voices of opposition would not augur well at all for his government and Venezuela. Irrespective of how he feels about his opponents, they are necessary evils that he must rely on for reality checks on his policies and governance. Considering his vast popularity amongst poor Venezuelans who out-number the owners and the audience of RCTV by far, Mr. Chavez has very little to worry about RCTV’s programming.

Forcing RCTV off the air this way has opened him and his government up for justified criticisms from not only known opponents of his government at home and abroad, it will also generate bad blood between sympathetic observers of his policies in the sub-region and elsewhere. It is not too late for him to correct the error he made by forcing RCTV off the air. He would earn some goodwill for himself and his government by allowing RCTV to return to the airwaves. In fact, by so-doing he might even give some people cause to start to view him as responsive. The time for him to correct that error of over-reach and over-kill is now.

At The World Bank, and In Lebanon

2007-05-31T02:17:00.000-07:00

The announcement yesterday by US president George W. Bush of his replacement for Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz at the World Bank may not be the last word that the world will hear in the days ahead about that multi-lateral lending institution, its activities, and governance. The fact that the man, Mr. Robert B. Zoellick, who will replace Mr. Wolfowitz was a principal in the Bush administration during the first term, might still raise a red flag in some quarters where the concern over the radical rightist ideological positions of the Bush presidency is strongest. People, particularly in Europe and at the Bank who hold such concerns may not deem it prudent at this point to express it.

The fact that Mr. Bush and his advisers would still find it difficult to reach beyond the inner circles of their administration to select Mr. Wolfowitz’s replacement even after the turmoil that embroiled his brief stint at the Bank might still be another big cause for worry amongst some of the Bank’s employees, and others elsewhere. Their preference could not have stemmed from the lack of competent Americans who are not directly associated with the Bush White House. There’s certainly an ideological streak to it. In which case, some people would rightly wonder why ideological posturing is more important to the Bush administration than far-reaching and concrete achievements that could stand the test of time at the Bank and in the poor parts of the world where it funds and oversees different projects. The degree to which Mr. Zoellick will attain a successful tour at the Bank will depend a lot on how he plays his hands ideologically. From his initial interviews to reporters, it does seem like he will try to dust up some of the China issues he pursued during his tour as US trade representative. If he does, it will not be lost on the Chinese that his quest will be to check-mate their growing economic reach in the world, but it will still be up to the Chinese to deal with that if and when he gets on their case. He may not get into trouble at the Bank over that. But he will definitely get into trouble if and when he decides to act with imperial impunity.

The approval yesterday at the UN Security Council of a resolution that will establish an international tribunal, which will try those who have been implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr. Rafik Hariri may likely over-heat politics in Lebanon further. Abstention by China,Russia, Qatar, South Africa, and Indonesia from supporting that resolution and the clarifying statement released by their ambassadors on their countries' decision are proofs of that assertion. The question that must be raised at this time is: Would such over-heating further US interests in Lebanon and the Middle East at this time? Mr. Hariri’s assassination is a cowardly and unconscionable act, but the quest to prosecute those who have been implicated in his assassination right now might not even yield much particularly in a situation that Syria has continued to deny its involvement. They could still be prosecuted, but at a later time.

Ms. Cindy Sheehan

2007-05-30T01:51:00.000-07:00

Anyone who prefers to gloat over the ‘resignation’ of Ms. Cindy Sheehan from the protest campaign she started in August 2005 over the Iraq war after her son Casey, an Army specialist lost his life in an ambush in Baghdad, Iraq the previous year, does not actually understand some of the issues at play in this war and why it hasn’t generated and may not ever generate a de facto protest movement. Going by the angry tone of her blog posting in which she announced her ‘resignation’, it doesn’t even seem like Ms. Sheehan understands some of those issues any better herself.

Ms. Sheehan is obviously distraught over the way the Democrats who won control of the Congress with a slight majority last November approved a no-strings-attached funding for the war last week. One would wish that she understands that her efforts to galvanize America to protest the war in large numbers failed not just because she is not loved by America and its politicians. Or that they do not feel her pain. Love and feeling someone else’s pain are radically different from feeling one’s own pain. It's mostly because only a tiny insignificant number of Americans have suffered a loss like hers.

At the most, even as George W. Bush’s troop surge is still underway, the total number of US troops in Iraq at this point in time does not exceed 160,000. The expectation is that the number will come to about 179,000 when the surge attains a peak. In a country of 300m people, one would not need a fortune teller to conclude that 179,000 soldiers do not constitute a significant proportion of that population. Even if you were to multiply 179,000 by ten and use the quotient to represent the network of family, friends, and peers in the general US population who are connected to the troops serving in Iraq, you will not have difficulty to conclude that such a network is indeed highly confined. There’s no critical mass there at all. The other thing is that because of the present all volunteer force, AVF structure, most Americans do not feel the imminent threat of having a family member, friend, or peer shipping off to Iraq on military service duties. It wouldn’t therefore be illogical to infer that as an AVF, the US military is technically a ‘mercenary’ force that lacks the demographic peculiarities of the society it serves. It is composed in the main of the sons and daughters of poor families from America’s inner cities and the hard-scrubble midlands of America who opted for military service particularly because it seems to be their only ticket out of the grim economic situation that stands in their way in a globalized economy that evaporates well-paying manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America, and brings low-paying Walmart-type jobs in return. This military hardly contains and is not meant to attract the children of upper middle class and rich families in great numbers. Most, if not all of what happens in Iraq comes through to the larger society as a story, which is watched on television with the detachment that is associated with Hollywood thrillers. It is therefore because of some of these reasons that this war in Iraq is not like the one that was fought in Vietnam. No matter how long it lasts, no matter how much the casualties mount, it may not hit home as Vietnam did, if at all.

Ms. Sheehan’s greatest undoing in her struggle to rekindle an anti-war movement over the death of her son stems directly from the AVF. The AVF is also George W. Bush’s greatest benefactor in his unflinching resolve to achieve what he calls victory in Iraq. One does not want to be misunderstood, but the harsh truth is that in the light of the AVF, the mounting casualties in Iraq will not even resonate in the larger population sufficiently to threaten political careers in the Congress. Although people are pained by the mounting casualties in Iraq, the pain is still not theirs. That feeling of relative deprivation that stems from Iraq war casualties is still restricted to the handful of grieving parents like Ms. Sheehan who have already lost or who will loose a child in Iraq. These do not in any way imply that the lives that are being lost in Iraq are worthless. One wouldn't go as far as echoing someone who recently opined that given a population of 300m people, those lives are indispensable. It's just that rebellions are not made out of restricted feelings of relative deprivation. There has to be that critical mass, the AVF structure would not allow that critical mass to evolve and coalesce into an anti-war movement.

The Real Solution

2007-05-29T02:37:00.000-07:00

The on-going exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York that show-cases “a grasp of the depths of world poverty and ingenious ways to attack it” is an eye-opener particularly with the seeming novel ‘inventions’ that are on display. The exhibition is an eye-opener in another but related regard as far as the issue of world poverty and how it can be attacked in Africa is concerned for instance. It’s probably only the starry-eyed Westerners who will quickly presume that the solutions that could emanate from the ‘inventions’ being show-cased at the exhibition would be far-reaching enough to bring about the much-desired dent on world poverty in any culture where some of the inventions are adopted.

This is because some of those ‘inventions’ may not rival some of the age-old methods that villagers in say Africa use to preserve whatever harvests they bring in each year, build durable homes to respond favorably to their tropical environment, etc. without being caught in traps that bind them to the whims and caprice of a Western manufacturer or their failed state structures at home. The items that are featured in the exhibition might look good and trendy, but some of them seem to have the potentials of creating new levels of dependency for the rural dwellers. Take the Lifestraw drinking filter as a case in point. Although it is capable of killing bacteria in the water that is sucked through it, it does raise issues of dignity of use as well as affordability. Stooping down to use it doesn’t seem dignifying at all. Are people supposed to carry it along with them everywhere they go? Where will it be manufactured and fabricated? A device that purifies water from source would be a more appropriate tool for rural African dwellers as far as solving the problem of unhealthy drinking water supply is concerned.

A visit to local universities in Africa will reveal that poverty remains endemic on the continent not because Africans have been incapable of devising credible ways to attach it themselves. The continent’s greatest undoing can be traced to the state structures that plague the lives of its peoples. There was an invention sometime ago at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, which delivered photocopying by capturing solar power. The inventor of that device refused to pitch it for fear that he’d be penalized by jealous individuals in the University administration. In Kenya’s Kenyatta University, professors are being compelled by the University authorities to submit the outcome of their research for vetting prior to submitting it anywhere else for publication. The ploy is to ascertain if they have funding that they University can cream 15% from.

The complexities of poverty in Africa should be properly understood. Westerners who are keen on helping Africans break out of poverty must coordinate their efforts with locals to ensure that they don’t deliver them into another bind altogether.

Over-Kill in Venezuela

2007-05-28T02:58:00.000-07:00

Reports today that the oldest privately owned television station in Venezuela has gone off the air for good and has been replaced by a government-owned public station don’t hold well for diversity in that country at all. RCTV has for long incurred the ire of President Hugo Chavez beginning from the time when it sided with the coup that ousted him from power for a brief period of time. But its existence is a necessary element in a society which is striving to attend to the welfare of a vast population of underprivileged citizens. It could serve as a check on reality for the government. Where does Mr. Chavez want the category of Venezuelans whose views are represented by the RCTV to go to? Underground? They will pose a serious danger from underground than they could have ever posed if they were left alone.

There’s no doubt that RCTV is the victim of the ideological tangling which has been going on between Caracas and Washington since that failed attempt to oust Chavez, who believes that the US was involved. Although it is not a secret that there is no love lust between the George W. Bush White House and Mr. Chavez, it doesn’t seem like it is in the interest of international co-existence for either side to be constantly engaged in acts that over heat the hostile relationship between both countries. Chavez has been unrelenting in accusing the US of planning to overthrow his government. Washington has denied that all the way. Proceeding on acts that polarize society in Venezuela will not in any way amount to long-term good. The government has the resources to counter whatever propaganda that the owners of RCTV are capable of inflicting on Venezuelan society. Compelling the station to go off air by refusing to renew its license is an over kill. One would have hoped that Chavez and his government were more realistic and reasonable.

It's Still About the Palestinian Question

2007-05-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

It may not be so, but the fact that another high intensity war has broken out in Lebanon almost a year after the one that broke out between Hezbollah and Israel last summer is sufficient cause to infer that the present conflict between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam fighters in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, near the Lebanese port city of Tripoli might be the continuation of last summer’s war this time by proxy. Logic for this inference is made stronger when one factors the speed with which weapons and other military supplies have been arranged for and flown from the US and some Arab sources to the Lebanese army in the equation. There could be other indicators that support this inference.

However, what I think is the main issue at play here is that both violent flare-ups derive from the unresolved Palestinian question. Some people, including elements in the coalition government in Lebanon will dispute that there’s a link between the current flare-up involving Islam al-Fatah and the Lebanese army, and the Palestinian question. Such elements will back their argument up by saying that Islam al-Fatah is composed of fighters from the Arab world including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Syria. In fact, authorities in Lebanon have already asserted that Islam al-Fatah is Syria’s proxy, even though Syria has denied having anything to do with the group.

The leader of Islam al-Fatah is a Palestinian, even though the group does not seem to have popular support amongst Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who number an estimated 400,000. Islam al-Fatah, which even some elements in the Lebanese authorities acknowledge lacks links to al-Qaeda could not have settled so easily in Lebanon if there were no Palestinian refugee camps. The circumstances that created the camps in the first instance, and the agreement between Lebanon and other Arabs that prohibits the Lebanese army from entering the Palestinian refugee camps are some of the variables that aid and abet the likes of the current flare-up. Islam al-Fatah will have no sanctuary if there no refugee camps. Apart from 33 Lebanese soldiers, 27 Islam al-Fatah militants, 18 Palestinian civilians are included in the number of lives lost so far in the fight.

Not withstanding how the current flare-up, which elements in the Lebanese coalition government, the Hezbollah, and other stakeholders in the area agree would not require a military solution, is resolved, it will not be the last. Rushing military supplies to the Lebanese army is therefore misplaced. The more logical option will be to fashion out a just resolution of the Palestinian question. That resolution which could have been realized the day before yesterday will save the world the continuing bloodshed in that part of the world.

Sanity in Zimbabwe At Last

2007-05-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

At last, it seems that sanity is about to prevail in Zimbabwe between Mr. Robert Mugabe’s regime and its opponents in the two factions of the MDC. There are indications that both stakeholders in the crisis that stem from Mr. Mugabe’s misrule of the country are beginning to engage each other in South Africa-brokered talks behind the scene. Although the talks do not involve prominent regime and MDC elements at this time, the fact that they are taking place at all is cause for hope. The MDC has obviously become more realistic particularly by putting aside its unrealistic demand that Mr. Mugabe must first acknowledge that he is an illegitimate president before it would accept to talk to him.

Considering the circumstances under which he emerged as president in all the elections that have taken place in Zimbabwe since his misrule triggered the current opposition from the MDC, no one is saying that the issue of Mr. Mugabe’s illegitimacy as Zimbabwe’s president is devoid of logic. What one is saying is that considering the weaknesses that riddle the MDC and the fact that the objective conditions in both Zimbabwe and the sub-region would not be conducive for the kind of armed resistance that some elements in the MDC might prefer to adopt against Mr. Mugabe’s regime, digging deep and firm on the demand for Mr. Mugabe to acknowledge the obvious before talks is not only unrealistic, but is also foolish. That demand is foolish because it will at best achieve the opposite by buying Mr. Mugabe the time to foment more intransigence, adopt more repressive tactics against the opposition even as he continues to ruin Zimbabwe in every sense of the word.

Talks between the MDC and the regime will open the necessary avenues for the eventual resolution of the crisis. Zimbabwe has been ruined enough already. The time to begin its resuscitation can no longer be shifted. Let the talks continue.

How About Nigeria?

2007-05-25T02:19:00.000-07:00

As the people of Pakistan get increasingly restive in their protest against the dictator, General Pervez Musharraf who has straddled their political landscape since he kicked out the last nominal democratic government in their country, alarms are increasingly being sounded in some US print media channels to warn the policy makers in the US foreign policy establishment of the dangers ahead. Suggestions are clearly on the side of reigning in the general at least if not nudging him towards an alternative which will usher in another nominal democratic government that will include his secular opponents. Although, it shouldn’t have gotten to this point, but it’s unfortunate that the foreign policy establishment gets US foreign policy into this kind of situation every time and again for reasons that clearly boil down to short-sightedness.

Nigeria is one country that has continuously stumbled through an endless transition as a result of the over-bearing influence of short-sighted US foreign policy. Rather than take sides with the people in their quest to resolve the issues that emanate from unfinished state building, US foreign policy prefers to take sides with interests and actors in the country that spawn instability. US support to install and sustain Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo as president in 1999 was obviously the direct cause of the madness that gripped him over the last eight years. The initial promise for responsiveness he showed in 1999 simply varnished almost immediately when he realized that the US would help him reign in the military to render it incapable of intervening in the political process through coups. The immediate outcome of that was that he went on a field day that translated to running the country into the dust literally. That madness got the greater part of him to the degree that he proclaimed himself a messiah and stated to plot to succeed himself as his second term was about to come to an end. When his desires in that regard couldn’t materialize, he embarked on the project to self-anoint his successor. He schemed and scammed and manipulated the electoral process much to the chagrin of the many at home and in the international who condemned the stage-managed charade that took place in April in the name of elections in Nigeria.

Although, he successfully produced a winner-beneficiary from that manipulated process in the person of Mr. Umar Yar’Ardua, there is no doubt that Mr. Obasanjo has saddled Nigeria with yet another crisis which will consume the attention of everyone even as the country continues on the path of economic degeneration. It didn’t have to be that. Genuine democratic progress that will never undermine US interests is still possible in Nigeria. That alternative can only be realized by lending support to Nigeria’s political actors who are basically keen on resolving the question of state building amongst the nationalities that colonialism made to constitute Nigeria once and for all. Such actors abound in Nigeria, and Chief Anthony Enahoro is the most prominent of all of them. Bringing him close and consulting him will be the beginning of that genuine democratic progress.

Africa's Crumbled Universties

2007-05-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

The story in The New York Times, May 20 about the decrypt condition in which universities in Africa struggle to educate the continent’s younger generations is as tragic as it is disturbing. The story portrays the decrypt and over-crowed classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and living quarters as the norm in Africa’s universities. But the most unfortunate issue in that story which show-cased Senegal’s Cheikh Anta Diop University, in Darkar, is the one that wasn’t mentioned. That issue is the views of the political class in Senegal, whose ineptitude and blatant corruption render what used to be an excellent education system a mere caricature of its past.

One is only saying that the views of a government official could possibly provided the necessary insight to prove that the unfortunate situation of affairs in the Cheikh Anta Diop University is likely to persist for an indefinite period. Senegal is not alone. The rest of the continent except perhaps South Africa and Botswana, are in similar conditions. In most of the continent, the situation may be even worse than it is in Senegal. There are places on the continent including Nigeria, which realizes stupendous amounts of dollars daily from the sale of hydrocarbons, where the educational system has all but collapsed. In Nigeria, universities stay closed longer than they stay open in any given year. So much that a course of study meant to be completed in four years take more than six or eight years to be completed. The reason being that aggrieved professors are perennially on strike action aimed at pressuring the government to improve their conditions of service. Yet, everywhere, the political class in each society continues in their evil ways to run the future of their societies into the dust.

If the story in Senegal is scratched a little deeper, it will reveal that the children of Senegal’s political class are all in universities abroad where they study in comfort. Their parents prefer to steal the public coffers dry, and use the money not only to educate them abroad in comfort, but to also buy real estate abroad. At the same time, the health and education sectors where the money is meant for are left in the decrypt conditions portrayed in The Times story.

All said and done, the harsh conclusion that can quickly be drawn from the unfortunate conditions that obtain in African universities is that the continent will remain in dire straits for a long time to come. A continent that ignores the education of its young generations is simply destroying itself by the slice.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

2007-05-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

One cannot help but wonder why US foreign policy establishment and the individuals who run it make the decisions that back-fire on US national interests so quickly. Let’s take Pakistan as a case in point here.

It is not out of place to infer that the US may have looked the other way while Pakistan acquired its nuclear weapons for the sole reason that a nuclear Pakistan will counter-balance its Indian neighbor, which acquired its own nuclear weapons earlier. Although Pakistan acquired its nuclear weapon while it was under a nominal democratic government, it is not lost on the world that it was indeed the Pakistan military that spear-headed the quest for and its realization, perhaps as a possible chip to white-mail the US to condone its ambition to intervene in governance whenever it pleased the generals. It wasn't long after Pakistan acquire nuclear weapons that the nominal democratic government which was in power at time was ousted by the generals led by Musharraf.

There’s little doubt if at all that since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks gave the US the justification to embark on the current endless War on Terror, the men and women who make and implement the policies that drive the campaign seem quite comfortable with Pakistan’s dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. The US staunchly stands by him on the logic that his ouster might put US interests in the sub-region in jeopardy, especially if his replacement is close to Islamists. Musharraf has been the recipient of a generous $2 billion plus worth of aid each year, most of which by war of reimbursements for what his military spends as US proxy in the War on Terror, fighting Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces in that neighborhood. But there is no guarantee that Mr. Musharraf is playing straight with the US at all. It wouldn’t be illogical to argue that he may not last a day longer in power if he goes close enough to where Osama Bin Laden and his inner circle might be hiding in the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan.

Musharraf is no fool. He understands the US dilemma, i.e. he is needed by Washington for fear that his ouster might jeopardize US interests. The extensive aid that the US showers him with gets the worst of his autocratic tendencies out of him. He can afford to repress his opponents with the strong conviction that the US will not easily withdraw support from him.

In predominantly Muslim Pakistan, US dilemma over what to do with Musharraf cannot be easily resolved given that the perception in most of the Muslim world is that the current War on Terror is targeting Muslims. It may not be easy at all to nudge Musharraf out of power, and he is not likely to relent in his autocratic tendencies. But he will certainly get to the point when he will run out of options. Things will come full cycle then for the US, because some other autocrat or group of autocrats will assume power in Pakistan at that time. Who knows, they may not be amenable to Washington's overtures. What then would the individuals who call the shots in US foreign policy establishment do?

There’s More On the Way On Mr. Obasanjo From Mr. Atiku

2007-05-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

The statement attributed to Mr. Abubakar Atiku in some Nigerian newspapers today that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo is experiencing “disengagement trauma” may not be the last damnable thing that he will have to say about the latter in the next few weeks following their stand-down as vice president and president respectively May 29. Mr. Atiku, who is currently visiting Washington, DC in a private capacity, has disclosed to some people that he is privy to a dossier of damaging information on Mr. Obasanjo.

This is part of their continuing feud. According to one of the individuals who has been meeting with him during his stay here in Washington, DC, Mr. Atiku believes that the information that he has on Mr. Obasanjo is so damaging that aspects if not all of them could land Mr. Obasanjo in jail. He disclosed to this individual who is also related to his running mate in the last presidential election that he is simply waiting for Mr. Obasanjo’s hand over May 29 before he will begin to release the dossier in a systematic manner.

The specifics of the contents of the dossier are still unknown. So also are the logistics and conduit through which he will release whatever is contained in the said dossier. But if one were to go by the trend and the pattern of events in Nigeria’s judiciary, the enormity of the dossier’s contents may not necessarily earn Mr. Obasanjo even a night in jail. The most likely sanction against him will come by way of public opprobrium. Much of the land is already abuzz over the reckless statements that he made over the last week. The one that he made that Mr. Bola Ige, who he appointed attorney general in his first term, may have been assassinated by drug barons drew the immediate ire of Mr. Ige’s daughter, who proclaimed that his late father’s ghost is haunting Mr. Obasanjo. The suspicion in some quarters in Nigeria is that Obasanjo may have been involved in Mr. Ige’s assassination.

People are predicting that Mr. Obasanjo has very difficult years ahead of him because of the enormity of the misrule he inflicted on Nigeria in the last eight years. The fact that he capped that misrule with the most outrageous election rigging in Nigeria’s history wouldn’t make the situation any better for him.

Did They?

2007-05-21T03:10:00.000-07:00

As the scandal in the US Justice Department involving the firing of nine US attorneys unfolds and makes things look clearer to the lay public, it does seem like Mr. Olusegun’s out-going autocracy and his PDP in Nigeria borrowed a page or two from the scripts written by whoever has been the hidden architect in the workings of the Bush White House in the last six years plus, to achieve their desire to retain power. In the case of Nigeria, the process has been predictably brazen particularly for the reason that Nigeria is an autocracy. But the nature of the system in the US has compelled the actors to be insidious.

In today’s editorial, The New York Times has argued that: “A disproportionate number of the prosecutors pushed out, or considered for dismissal, were in swing states. The main reason for the purge — apart from hobbling a California investigation that has already put one Republican congressman in jail — appears to have been an attempt to tip states like Missouri and Washington to Republican candidates for House, Senate, governor and president.” The editorial insists that: “It is hard not to see the fingerprints of Karl Rove”, the acclaimed architect of Mr. George Bush’s electoral successes, in the unfolding scandal. In other words, the firings constitute a chapter in the scripts written by Mr. Rove as a manual that would help him build the permanent Republican majority that he once boasted he would establish in Washington, DC. Some people who still recall how the then Bush-Cheney campaign tenaciously fought to achieve victory over Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election have had no problem seeing the logic in The Times editorial. The tactic is to use the Courts and the Justice Department to sway elections if they don’t favor Republican candidates. The Atlantic Monthly did a story some time ago that showed when and how Mr. Rove invented that tactic and tried it out before 2000 in parts of the country.

It will not be impossible for the swarm of lobbyists who service Mr. Obasanjo from Washington, DC to have copied a page or two from Mr. Rove’s script. Going by the nature of US political system, dismantling the architecture for a permanent Republican majority in Washington, DC is possible and can be achieved by the Congress, which The Times insists must be done by compelling the attorney general, Mr. Alberto Gonzales, who is currently embattled by the scandal to resign, and restoring the Justice Department’s “traditions of professionalism and impartiality, and re-establish that in the United States, the legal system does not work to advance the interests of a political party”. In Nigeria, the task can only be accomplished through means that are more innovative. But it is a task that must be accomplished in order to imbue politics in Nigeria with relevance and sanity.

Mr. Jimmy Carter on Bush

2007-05-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

Former US president, Mr. Jimmy Carter’s statement Saturday on the impact of George W. Bush’s presidency on US in the eyes of the world is nothing new. According to Mr. Carter who occupied the White House in the period 1977-81, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Bush presidency “has been the worst in history”, on the “overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including (those of) George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others”.

Apart from former South Africa president, Mr. Nelson Mandela, Mr. Carter is the other prominent world personality who did not mince words from the outset in his disapproval of Bush’s determination to launch his pre-emptive war on Iraq. Mr. Carter wasn’t as prophetic as Mandela, who predicted that the invasion of Iraq would plunge the world into a holocaust. His criticisms rest mostly on the damage that the policy of pre-emptive warfare has inflicted on US leadership in the world. As he puts it: "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered," he said. "But that's been a radical departure from all previous administration policies."

The White House’s description of Mr. Carter’s latest criticism as one that renders the former president "increasingly irrelevant” pales in the face of reality. The latest proof of that can be found in Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s recent failure as president at the World Bank. When everything that transpired in the course of the tenacious but failed efforts made by both the White House and Mr. Wolfowitz himself to make the latter retain his job at the Bank is put together, it wouldn’t be difficult to infer from the total package that even America’s age-old European allies are at best very lukewarm believers in the relevance of its leadership role in the world. The story is similar in the traditionalist regimes that dot the Arab world. They appear to be increasingly irrelevant to situation of things as they unfold each day in their neighborhood. Although the situation of affairs as far as the impact of the invasion of Iraq on US leadership role in world affairs is still unfolding, anyone who decides to argue that the over all outcome will be favorable to the US might be running a huge credibility risk. Sharp rhetorical rebuts to one like Mr. Carter who had simply reiterated some of what he had said in the past may not earn the White House the much needed points where they count, i.e. restoring America’s much damaged credibility in the world.

The Same Shilling and One Penny?

2007-05-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

In The Decline of American Power, the book that he authored in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the continuing crisis which the world capitalist economic system slipped into in the 1970s will not easily be resolved because of several reasons. One such reason is that everywhere and in all ideological spheres, the state, which has been the system’s age-old stabilizer, has continued to loose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. The erosion of faith in the state is the push factor responsible for the upsurge in non-governmental organizations, NGOs. But mark you, it's not all the time that those NGOs will operate according to the expectations of all. Some of them, as we've seen already are bound to be deviants. Society must therefore accept the responsibility of creating the void that enabled the emergence of deviant NGOs whenever they emerge.

People no longer sustain faith in the state and the actors who assume power on its auspices and fail to meet the expectations of the former. The upsurge in political corruption and dwindling trend in leadership responsiveness evident in western Europe and North America in the present time has placed societies in those areas almost at per with African, Asian, and Middle Eastern societies that are often seen as the traditional bastions of political corruption and zero leadership responsiveness.

Assessment of reports and analysis in most US media indicates that Americans strongly see the Bush White House as an institution that refuses to acknowledge wrongs and mistakes by its operatives, and prefers to reward them instead, and by so-doing, puts them in the stead to make fortunes and careers out of their dismal record of public service when they leave office.

The other day, on his campaign trail for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2008, former New York City Mayor, Rudolf Guiliani praised and disclosed that former US Defense Secretary was busy writing his own book. Even though he has been described as “the most comprehensively excoriated man in America” because of his obvious failures as a public servant, former CIA director, George Tenet racked in four million dollars from his. Mr. Douglas Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for policy who is implicated as a major actor in the Iraq war is writing his own book too. There is no doubt that Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz will embark on writing his own book now that he has failed to retain his job as World Bank president.

Someone indicated the other day during a conversation that people in public positions in the US seem to have perfected the art of going out of their ways to embark on disastrous policies all in the bid to enhance their chances of landing multi-million book deals when they are done. If that is the case, the only difference between them and their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East is that the latter use their positions to feather their nests even as they occupy them. Is it then not the same one shilling and one penny?

Finally?

2007-05-18T02:27:00.000-07:00

The announcement late yesterday that World Bank president, Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz would bow out as president may not end the crisis that began with his presence at the Bank if the Bush White House appoints a replacement who will try to continue to implement what many staffers see as an ideologically motivated right-wing agenda. From the very outset when the scandal over Mr. Wolfowitz’s role in the transfer of his girlfriend to the US State Department from the Bank on a spectacular salary scale broke out, Ikengacomments has consistently indicated that his problems at the Bank has very little to do with the scandal. His antecedents were grounds for the dislike that Bank staffers developed for him prior to his arrival. He basically confirmed their worst fears when upon his arrival he energetically used what they saw as the same arrogant, insensitive, and high-handed management style that they associate with the Bush White House to implement an agenda that the staffers felt unbecoming of the Bank.

A Bank staffer who spoke to Ikengacomments then disclosed that several Bank employees resigned very quickly because they couldn’t deal with his outlandish style. In a chat with Ikengacomments yesterday, the same Bank staffer emphasized that although reports in the media have focused mostly on the scandal, the biggest concern in the Bank is Mr. Wolfowitz’s emphasis on and preference for anti-terrorism projects in the non-European parts of the world where they believe the Bank should focus on anti-poverty projects. The staffer specifically mentioned education, health care related, and other such projects that have been defunded or over-looked by the Bank ever since Mr. Wolfowizt became president.

The crisis may not be over yet if Mr. Wolfowitz is replaced with another individual who will want to proceed like him. The Bank staffers’ insistence that Mr. Wolfowitz does not need to wait until the end of June to depart is a signal that they would want the Bank to quickly return to its established mission as a catalyst in the quest to eradicate world poverty, as opposed to becoming another mega-tool in the ‘War against Terrorism’.

Evidence of Things in the Offing?

2007-05-17T00:44:00.000-07:00

The indication late yesterday that beleaguered World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz and his handlers in the Bush White House are about to throw in the towel in their hard-nosed drive to help him retain his job may have come as a surprise to only the most ardent of his fellow neo-conservatives, and of course the editors of The Wall Street Journal who claim that he is a victim of European conspiracy to assume control of the Bank. What seemed like a sudden change in the combative tone that characterized Mr. Wolfowitz’s engagement with the Bank since the scandal over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend from the Bank to the US State Department and the run-away salary scale that she was awarded was indicative that together with his handlers, was reported to have even robbed some members of the Bank’s board of directors sorely because of his refusal to admit that his role in the affair qualified as conflict of interest. Even then, his plea to the Bank's board of directors is somehow humbling: "I implore each of you to be fair in making your decisions, because your decisions will not only affect my life, it will affect how this institution is viewed in the United States and the world". So is the admission by the White House "that he made mistakes". They are now striving to exploit their only option, i.e. negotiate his exit from the Bank by asking that he be exonerated of any wrong-doing by the board in exchange for his voluntary resignation. Whether or not this demand will be acceptable to the board is still uncertain.

It’s rather sad that Mr. Wolfowitz and the Bush White House seem oblivious of the issues that underlay the problem that they are dealing with at the Bank. Their antecedents had alienated many people in the world long before Mr. Wolfowitz was appointed to head the Bank. Those antecedents were to the degree that Mr. Wolfowitz wasn’t much liked when he arrived the Bank as president two years ago. His arrogant and high-handed style of administration compounded and even sealed his fate at the Bank subsequently.

The tendency in the ranks of US neo-conservatives who hold considerable sway in the policies of the Bush White House to be selective in their perception of global realities seems to be part of their greatest undoing in their unparalleled determination to dominate world events. It’s therefore fascinating that they still believe that the character of the alliance that the US entered with West European states at the end of World War II when the latter’s economies were in tatters, and presided over throughout the course of the Cold War when the fear of soviet invasion pervaded Western Europe would remain the same in the post-Cold War era. For one, Europeans have come into their own economically. Also, the threat that the Soviet Union represented to them has completely disappeared. Why then must they subscribe to America’s arrogant world leadership especially when it tends towards robbing their citizens of their desire to reap the dividends of peace by plunging them into a cycle of endless international hostility?

Some people attribute the continuing difficulties being experienced by the Bush White House in most of their domestic and foreign policy engagements to incompetence. At the same time, it is not very difficult to discern that it is the same lack of wholesome calculation that got the Bush White House into Iraq that is also responsible for their troubles at the World Bank. It seems increasingly clear as the days roll by that the only way that they will get out of the difficult situation that Iraq has become for them is the way that the situation in the World Bank is compelling them currently to follow, i.e. bow to the reality of humility and the recognition that the rest of the actors in the global arena deserve to be acknowledged.

Jerry Falwell, 1933-2007

2007-05-16T02:14:00.000-07:00

Never in my life have I seen such provocation of deeply expressed resentment and disapproval of an individual from so many within such a snippet of time. In less then two hours from the time—1:57-3:31pm—when The New York Times.com announced his death yesterday and asked its readers to comment on “what will be his legacy, and who might take his place as a spokesperson for the religious right?”, Jerry Falwell, who is regarded as the man who ignited the passionate fire of Judaio-Christian fundamentalism in the US and directed it at the kind of partisan political activism which enabled the likes of Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and George W. Bush and the Republican Party to win elections into the White House in 1980, 1988, and 2000 respectively, provoked 50 passionate responses from readers. There is no doubt that the number of Americans who miss him will be as many as those who will not.

The rationale that underlay such passionate expressions of resentment can partly be assessed from the fact that Monica Goodling, who is in the center of the unfolding scandal over the firing of nine US attorneys, is a graduate of Regent University, the bastion of Christian fundamentalist faith that Falwell founded and charged with the obligation to educate a cadre of people who will turn America into a society that reflects his brand of Christianity in every sphere.

There was no single one of those comments that have something positive to say about him. When the fact that The New York Times goes out of its way to moderate and edit comments from readers to the forum before they are posted, into your assessment of the flood of negative-only comments on Jerry Falwell, you will quite appreciate that he was indeed, an individual who will not be missed at all by millions of people here in the US. One reader simply said: “Legacy?—Evil often hides in plain sight”. The one that follows him said: “Finally, one of the biggest bigots and hypocrites in American history is dead! I’ll raise a toast in celebration tonight.” But it was the second comment that seems to capture the irony and negativity that all the comments associate with Falwell: “Falwell’s legacy will be bigotry and hatred. How sad that a person with such a powerful voice used it for such negativity and divisiveness.”

Throughout the course of his active life, Falwell was an individual who willingly exploited Christianity and used it to champion the cause of what many believe is racial bigotry in America and elsewhere. He was an ardent advocate of US hegemony in the world. He is one of the few prominent individuals in the world who openly opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail. He was a passionate supporter of the apartheid regime in South Africa. But today, not only that Mandela is free, apartheid has been dismantled, and Jerry Falwell is dead!

The Bandwagon Effect?

2007-05-15T02:33:00.000-07:00

The report yesterday by a committee of the World Bank that its president, Paul D. Wolfowitz’s role in the reassignment of his and award of salary package to his girl friend is in violation of the Bank’s ethics and governance rules should not surprise anyone. The same is also true of the Bush administration’s reported stepped-up efforts to forestall his ouster as Bank president.

Some people are beginning to link what they see as the aversion for responsiveness on the part of the Bush White House as a beckon of bad behavior for autocrats in Africa and elsewhere in the non-European world. Ever since the start of the war on terror, every autocrat in Africa and elsewhere has been quick to label opponents of his regime as terrorists. In Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo’s degeneration into a raving autocrat took a dramatic turn right after Bush’s war on terror began. He capped it with the most brazen manipulation of the electoral process in the country last month. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe often calls his opponents terrorists. The on-going turmoil in Pakistan started when the dictator, Musharraf removed a judge who is seen by many as an obstacle to the dictator’s resolve to use the war on terror to silence opponents of his regime.

Without the People

2007-05-14T02:15:00.000-07:00

In 1983 when the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo announced on the heels of the electoral fraud that returned the National Party of Nigeria, NPN and Mr. Shehu Shagari to power, that his party, the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN and himself were not going to the so-called election tribunals to context what they felt was the theft of the electoral victory that could have been theirs, he probably was thinking and talking about just the futility of a court fight. Their experience in 1979 when they tried and failed to prove in the same tribunal that victory was rigged from their hands and handed to the NPN and Shagari had sufficiently proved that to them.

In perhaps his last major interview to a media outlet, he told the editors of The Guardian that he had retired to his country residence in Ikenne to await the day when the people will come for him to lead them: “When the people want me”, he said, “they will come for me”. Whether or not he meant it, that assertion implies that he believed that there is such an entity, a polity capable of inspiring the kind of consciousness in “the people” and make them “come for” a leader like him, capable of leading them sufficiently well. There was of course a military coup on New Year’s Eve the same year, but no people came for him. He died the next year.

The only reason the people never came for Chief Awolowo in the way he expressed his belief that they will when they needed him is that they don’t exist in that regard. A common consensus on Nigeria is grossly lacking. Reasons abound for that. There will be another day to recount some if not all of those many reasons. But it’s the absence of that common consensus that one like Olusegun Obasanjo takes advantage of knowing that he will get away with whatever he does to retain control of proceeds from the hydrocarbons that are extracted from the Niger Delta. I have heard that Nigerians are resilient. They may be so, but they do not yet constitute the people.

If there were the people in the true sense of the word, tell me what could have stopped them from pouring out in huge numbers to protest and stop the fraud that took place in the name of elections last month in Nigeria. The absence of the people is not only real in Nigeria. It’s evident in most of Africa. Wherever the people exist, it’s often difficult if not impossible for anyone to steal elections and get away with the theft. The sort of autocracy that pervades Africa derives from the absence of the people.

Different Strokes for Africa

2007-05-13T03:05:00.000-07:00

The editorial in The New York Times Sunday, May 13 on “Hunger and Food Stamps” in the US, has, even without saying it, still said a lot about the problem of hunger in Africa and elsewhere in the South. It is cheerily clear in the editorial that although the ranks of the objective conditions of poverty-stricken households and individuals who reside in them in the US are anything but shrinking, no one can justifiably argue that all hopes of bringing the right efforts to bear on finding solutions to problem of hunger are lost. The institutional structures required to tackle both poverty and hunger abound in the US. The task, as the editorial makes clear lies in getting those institutions and their structures to rise up and play the roles for which they were established.

From Angola to Zimbabwe, no one can say anything similar about poverty and hunger in Africa. In reality, Africans face a double bind on poverty and hunger. The state and the autocrats who preside over them are out of control as they rampage all facets of society, throttling society and exacerbating poverty and hunger. The irony about that is that in its infinite strength—say weakness—the African state exists as a shameless bulwark that ravages the remnants of Africa’s age-old traditional institutions and structures that provide safety nets for the poor and hungry on the continent. Almost everywhere in Africa, the state keeps stretching its hands out to lenders and multilateral agencies abroad to receive anti-poverty aids but quickly retreats to barricade itself from society. The state readily bolsters its military and security forces and ignores the rest of society. It hardly forgets to bully society and its vulnerable members though.

Orthodox narratives on poverty and hunger in Africa are tied stories. But as diplomats in African embassies and missions here in the US read the Times’ editorial during breakfast this morning, one would hope that it tickles something in those of them who still have the wisdom and conscience. It’s understandable that those of them who feel that tickle might lack the courage to raise a cable home on the subject of the editorial. At the same time, the editorial must serve as yet another reminder to them and the rest that the state and leaders they serve are manifestations of irrelevance on the continent.

How Much of the World Bank Did Wolfowitz Understand?

2007-05-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

The landscape of history is littered with the skulls and bones of actors of all type who lacked sufficient understanding of their arena of activism prior to getting involved. That is why in the realm of politics for instance, there are dictators in the mold of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and those in the mold of Mr. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. In the case of Castro, in spite of all the constraints that he has been faced with from the US ever since he came to power in 1959, he continues to pile one success after another that helps him retain support from a majority of Cubans. Zimbabwe under Mugabe is a contrast. Mugabe’s greatest undoing was his inability to appreciate that the land question in Zimbabwe involves more than possession. There’s also the issue of economics. It is indeed, that issue of economics that makes the difference between possessing the land and tilling it in such ways that would entail productivity.

A close look at the travails of Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz at the World Bank would reveal that he hardly understood that institution sufficiently when he got there. He may have understood that the Bank is a presidential institution, but his belief that everything else will fall into place there for him on the grounds that he represents the US was completely off mark. It seems like that same assumption has been a crucial aspect of the drag on the Bush administration that he came from in most of its endeavors. The outcome in case after case is impeccably clear. Is it the UN, the War Against Terror, Iraq, Katrina, the termination of the eight (now nine) US attorneys, one can go on and on. Ideology hasn’t been and wouldn’t be sufficient in each of these cases. There has to be a clear and proper understanding of the issues at steak beyond the conviction that it is the might of the US that will make the difference and translate to success.

If he succeeds in retaining his position as president at the Bank, or goes to another arena of human endeavor, Mr. Wolfowitz must realign his style of engagement in a way that makes understanding the first act in his play.

They Keep Dropping Off

2007-05-11T01:51:00.000-07:00

If former CIA director, George J. Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, and his arguments and assertions therein were a multi-legged stool, it doesn’t seem like it will be left with any leg to stand on before long. A set of the legs fell off even before the book’s actual release April 30, because both The New York Times and the Associated Press that bought advance copies were whole-hearted in their declaration that it raised more questions than it answered particularly on Mr. Tenet’s candor over his role in the intelligence on which the Bush White House based its case for the invasion of Iraq. In its recent issue, The New Yorker magazine dubbed the book an episode in the Bush administration’s almost perfect score in “perfecting the art of unaccountability”. But Mr. Tenet still cleared a hefty four million dollars from his publishers for the book.

Not withstanding that, the legs keep falling off the book and its author’s arguments and assertions. Yesterday, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair who has been called the only man who could have single-handily prevented the invasion of Iraq by insisting on the need to be a little more circumspect in the handling of the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, WMD announced his resignation as from June 27. Some people including The New York Times are convinced that his resignation is another casualty of the decision to invade Iraq. The Times is even unequivocal that “Mr. Blair’s once boundless prospects and personal credibility imploded after he became Mr. Bush’s most articulate enabler on Iraq”.

In this same week too, came news of the arrest of six men in New Jersey who have been indicted for plotting to inflict terror on a US Army formation in Fort Dix. The more shocking aspect of the crime that these men are alleged to have been plotting is the fact that although they are all Muslim, the investigation which trailed them in a period of more than a year before their arrest claims that their plan is home-grown. The other aspect is the fact that they are not of African or Asian extraction. When these two facts are stood side by side with some of the forceful assertions made by Mr. Tenet in his book and in his promotional interviews in the media to the effect that the next terrorist attack on America is more likely to come from people of Asian and African descent already here in America, who are connected with al-Qaeida, it becomes one additional shade clearer that he lacks valid knowledge of the possible sources of existing terrorist threats being faced by America right here at home. There goes some more legs of the book by Mr. Tenet.

The danger in such unguarded assertion by Mr. Tenet is that it might throw vigilance off certain sources of threats while concentrating it elsewhere. Highly placed public servants who are reluctant to be candid in he discharge of their duties posse as much threats to the security and well being of society as those who go out of their ways to plan and inflict harm on innocent people in pursuit of ideological motives.

East Timor, Nothing Succeeds Like Success

2007-05-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

Reports today indicate that the second round of presidential election that took place Wednesday in East Timor was a success. Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta is headed to a victory, having bagged 70 percent of the number of votes counted so far.

The news worthy aspect of this story is that his opponent, Mr. Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres, a former combatant leader in the struggle that freed East Timor from Indonesia’s occupation in 1999 had indicated earlier that he would abide by the outcome of the election. That position has been confirmed today by his spokesman who said, "In a democracy whoever get (sic) the most votes wins”. Mr. Ramos-Horta is currently the prime minister. But it doesn’t seem like he took advantage of his current office to manipulate the election to favor him. The UN special representative in East Timor proclaimed that the election was free and fair, without intimidation.

As recently as last year, East Timor has been wracked by post-independence political violence. The outcome this election which began last month when none of the eight candidates failed to achieve an outright victory can without doubt qualify as success in a new nation. When you compare East Timor’s with what took place in Nigeria last month in the name of elections, it’s like night and day. There is therefore cause for optimism in East Timor as it braces itself for another try under the guidance of a new leader without the cloud of illegitimacy hanging over his head. No one can say the same about Nigeria and Mr. Yar’Adua.

Zimbabwe!

2007-05-09T02:30:00.000-07:00

The continuing internecine schism in the ranks of the opposition to Mr. Robert Mugabe’s destructive regime in Zimbabwe is to say the least, heart-breaking. At a time when they should close ranks against their common foe, the factions of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC have preferred to sustain their self-destructive activities against each other. The more damning is the increasing evidence that the ranks of both facts of the MDC are filled with individuals who prefer to lend their efforts and resources to destructive factional engagements.

It has gotten to the point now that many people in Zimbabwe and abroad are beginning to presume that the opposition, indeed the MDC is part of the problem in Zimbabwe. As erroneous as this presumption is, it is still reasonable to infer that the task of compelling Mr. Robert Mugabe to shift his stance on his conviction that his regime is good for Zimbabwe cannot be realized in this situation of internecine fighting in the MDC. One does not want to resign to the defeatist option of blaming the state of affairs in the ranks of the MDC on the fact that factionalism was also evident amongst actors during the struggle to abolish Minority rule. Even then, it will not be out of place for the one to ask present day actors in the struggle to free Zimbabwe from Mr. Mugabe’s regime if they think that the only elements that they can borrow from the history of resistance against autocracy in their country are those that give respite and joy to their common enemy!

It is not unlikely that the ranks of the opposition have been infiltrated by Mr. Mugabe’s bogeymen. That is to be expected, but that infiltration would not have occurred to the extent that is currently evident if the MDC hadn’t exposed itself to factionalism. The disagreements over power, ideology, and prestige that resolved the MDC into factions were misplaced. Democracy is about compromise, the kind that involves give and take. The expectation is that advocates and activists of democracy must subscribe to the tenets of democracy: the willingness to compromise and live by the give and take that is involved in the practice of democracy. On at least two occasions, the leader of a faction of the MDC, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai failed that expectation. First when he allowed himself to be caught in a sting by Mr. Mugabe's regime where he was alleged to have discussed what may have amounted to violence against the person of Mr. Mugabe. The second time was when he refused to accept the vote by the majority for the MDC to participate in the November 2005 Senate election.

If both factions of the MDC cannot at this stage find the will to heal themselves and come together to continue the fight to salvage what is left of their country from Mr. Mugabe's misrule, then the most honorable thing for them to do is relinquish their claim on being the opposition. In which case, their leaders must truthfully make it known to the peoples of Zimbabwe, indeed the world that they are incapable of the struggle. Anything other than that amounts to milking the goodwill of their benefactors abroad while throttling the peoples of Zimbabwe who are bearing the brunt of Mr. Mugabe's misrule most. I know that it is hard to talk about honor when it comes to the pattern of public activity in Africa, but the option of disengaging from the struggle is the only honorable thing left for the two factions of the MDC and their leaders to do if internecine squabbles are what they are only capable of. I have no doubt that when that happens the peoples of Zimbabwe will take it upon themselves to mobilize themselves more properly to engage Mr. Mugabe’s regime properly.

A Fool's Paradise

2007-05-08T01:46:00.000-07:00

It is only a fool who will buy into the conviction being expressed by British and other European leaders that accepting the charade that took place last month in Nigeria in the name of elections is worth getting rid of Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo who stage-managed every step of that process to retain control of the status-quo in Nigeria’s power establishment when his attempts to alter the even flawed military imposed ‘constitution’ to perpetuate himself in power beyond May this year failed. What they forget each time when they spring one of the band-aid type solutions to avert the threat of implosion in Nigeria is that two wrongs can never make a right. It's only in a fool's paradise that such a wish can obtain. Nigeria does not seem to be such a place.

The crisis that Nigeria’s unitary political structures represent is gradually and consistently limping out of control. The consistent interest in the quest to keep Nigeria the way it is even when it remains clear that Nigeria as it is lacks equity and justice for the distinct nationalities that constitute it is the cheap hydrocarbons that the West receives from the Niger Delta. But the state of affairs in the Niger Delta today has radically shifted from what they used to be in the decades before the 1990s. Its inhabitants have signaled their unequivocal resolve not to stand by and watch the unmitigated rape of their environment for those hydrocarbons even as they exist in dire poverty while the rulers of Nigeria loot and share the proceeds from those hydrocarbons.

Although the West may have succeeded in keeping Mr. Obasanjo out of power by accepting his brazenly rigged elections to install his hand-picked candidate, Mr. Yar’Adua, it had better think twice. I don’t see the chances of getting the inhabitants of the Niger Delta to back down in their resolve to engage the Nigeria state where it is most vulnerable. They will sustain their efforts to disrupt the extraction of hydrocarbons from their land. Their resilience in those regards will deepen the crisis and time will come when there will be nothing left to salvage out of Nigeria.

Now therefore is the time to do the only right thing capable of solving the crisis. That one thing is the restructure of the Nigerian state to reflect its composition. Nigeria as a true federation is the answer. To accomplish that will not translate to the disruption of the supply of hydrocarbons to the West. It will simply guarantee it.

Predictions

2007-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

In the course of our conversation the other day a friend of mine expressed his concern that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo will still teleguide the activities if the man he selected to succeed him when he returns to his abode in Ota come May 29. There’s no doubt that it’s Mr. Obasanjo's desire to do just that. But my prediction is that he is in for the shock of his life. That he made such a presumption at all is indicative of his limited sense of realism. The other time when he was out of power every one witnessed how helpless he was after one of his wives was slain like a dog on a Lagos street. His inability to bring whoever that killed her in broad day light to account is indicative of his powerlessness. Just tell me why it’d be different this time around.

The only thing that he can be sure of the day he vacates the seat of power in Abuja is whatever amount of cash that he was able to stash away from the money that accrued from the sale of petroleum. Even that too would run out if he doesn’t invest it in productive economies elsewhere in Western Europe or North America. The political economy of the entity called Nigeria revolves around just the sale of crude petroleum. Only those who have direct access and control over the sale of that crude petroleum the way he did in the last eight years are likely to successfully pull off the tricks that are required to steer things the way he did during the period. His imminent by-stander status will become real beginning from May 29. Although he personally installed Mr. Charles Soludo as the Governor of the Central Bank, he will notice that his command for cash from Mr. Soludo will seize to be automatic.

The neglect that Obasanjo imposed on all ramifications of the basket economy in Nigeria will begin to afflict him too the day he returns to Ota. All those equipments that he imported with money that he simply took from the CBN from all parts of the industrialized world for use on his Ota farm will begin to break down one after the other. At first, it will be possible to use the likes of Andy Uba to replace them. But with time the decrepit economy will be unable to service and even repair them and he’ll find himself once again at that point that he was when the farm was making a mere twenty thousand naira a year as was reported in the media the other time. The economy is not production oriented at all. Where will the electricity to run the farm come from? Where would the work ethic come from? Where are the roads? Is he going to return to Ota with a helicopter that he will be allowed to keep for good?

Similarly, no one should loose too much sleep about what role the PDP will be used for again by those that Obasanjo will leave behind. My prediction is that the PDP will wither in the course of the next four years. You will witness the speed with which they will fall over each other as they scramble for proceeds from the sale of petroleum. The absence of a mandate will make it difficult if not impossible for Yar’Adua to keep them in line. After all they all know the tricks, lies, and theft they used to bring him in. Where then would he find the moral courage to call them to order? It’s going to be only a matter of time before the cookies Mr. Obasanjo baked will begin to crumble.

Why They Continue To Come

2007-05-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

From his roost in Johns Hopkins University’s the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studiesin Washington, DC where he teaches American foreign policy, Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a recent op-ed piece in The Washington Post in which he decried that one of the major follies of US president George W. Bush’s foreign policy is his determination to achieve colonialism abroad in a post-colonial era. Mr. Brzezinski who was former president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser is in the best stead to make such a charge and be taken seriously for it.

The thrust of Mr. Brezezinski’s piece is that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq under what has turned out clearly to be false pretense by Mr. Bush does not have the least chance of achieving any of the fantastic desires that its architects have continued to brandish since their earlier rational of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, WMD has fallen flat on its face. Mr. Brezezinski’s argument has been made by many other thoughtful analysts and public figures before and after the invasion five years ago. Former South Africa president, Mr. Nelson Mandela was one of the first prominent personalities who publicly castigated Bush on the eve of his invasion of Iraq in the speech where he called him somebody “who does not and cannot think properly” who is intent on plunging the world into a holocaust. Although Mr. Bush satisfied his desire and invaded Iraq, it is abundantly clear that his occupation of Iraq has been anything but effective.

The intriguing thing about Mr. Bush’s invasion and occupation of and Iraq is that the more the American public disapproves of it, the more Mr. Bush and those who think like him in the Republican Party seem to be convinced that it is the right thing to do. When news that Mr. John McCain who was considered the front runner in the Republican Party for the nomination in next year’s presidential election was out-raised in funds in the first quarter of this year by Mr. Romney, who only declared his interest to be president last year, some close observers attributed that to Mr. McCain's unwavering support for Mr. Bush's invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. Someone that I know even joked that Mr. McCain has let George Bush to destroy his tenure in the White House even before he could win it.

These not withstanding, in their first debate, which took place in Ronald Reagan’s presidential library in California last week, every one of the contenders for the nomination in the Republican Party endorsed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With all that has become crystal clear to the world about the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq today, the Republican White House hopefuls have clearly shown that they are all die-hard colonialists. At the same time, it’s lost on them that it’s unrealistic to achieve colonialism in a post-colonial era.

Can Buhari Be Trusted?

2007-05-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

I find it difficult to believe that Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd.) can be trusted on the issue of resolving the nationality question in Nigeria. At the core of that question is the issue of compelling Nigeria’s unitary state to relinquish monopoly control of the revenue that is realized from the petroleum which is drilled from the Niger Delta. More than anyone else, Buhari has been extensively involved in that monopoly first as a petroleum minister, then as a military dictator, and under Sanni Abacha as the chairman of a task force that was in charge of importing and allocating pharmaceuticals.

His quick rejection of the suggestion by the other opposition parties to boycott the April 21 farce did not come as a surprise to many people. His reason then was that the farce must be allowed to proceed and that voters must then defend their vote. Well, the farce has been concluded and his kinsman, Umar Yar’Adua has been declared the ‘winner’ as everyone expected. Since Yar'Adua did not receive votes from real people, there's no one to defend anything at all. What does Buhari have in stock now that all has been said and done?

Obama's Is Really Genuine

2007-05-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

The news this week that Senator Barack Obama has been given Secret Service protection is yet another indication that his bid for the White House is as mainstream as any other serious campaign in the history of the US. The Department of Homeland Security secretary, Mr. Michael Chertoff who authorized the Secret Service protection for the junior senator from the State of Illinois, a spokesperson for the Secret Service itself, and even the Senator’s campaign aides have all denied that the decision to extend Secret Service protection to him this early in the campaign was not prompted by any specific threats. The observation made in an interview yesterday by the Senator’s wife, Michelle Obama to the effect that “we are moving to the next level” of the campaign which entails “unusually large crowds and attention” is clearly an allusion that underscores the weight of the Obama White House bid.

From the very outset, beginning with his formal announcement in February, Obama’s bid has consistently continued to generate considerable support and attention that cut across America’s racial and economic divides. The announcement last month by his campaign that he brought in more than 24 million dollars in the first quarter of this year is yet the other clear indication of the continuing reception of his bid in America’s mainstream. It is not just that the amount of money that he raised was clearly close to the 25 million dollars raised by the other Democratic contender, Senator Hillary Clinton, also, the spread of Obama’s donors indicates that his support is more extensive and more mainstream than Mrs. Clinton’s. His senior colleague, Senator Dick Durban of Illinois, may have triggered the protection that he received when he expressed the concern to the Senate leadership that the large crowds that Mr. Obama is drawing on his campaign trails are sufficient grounds to extend protection to him. “I love this guy”, he is quoted to have said, “and I never want to see anything happen to him”, he told the Chicago Tribune.

There is hardly any doubt at all at this stage in the current run for the US White House that Mr. Obama’s campaign is indeed real.

There’s No Viable Alternative

2007-05-03T12:09:00.000-07:00

It only takes a little scratching of the surface for any objective analyst to appreciate that the on-going immigration reform debate here in the US encapsulates two crucial issues that knock at the heart of much of what America is all about. The one is about border security while the other is about the accommodation of those who are already here into the mainstream of an immigrant society.

On the first, it will amount to irresponsibility for anyone to even imagine raising opposition to the suggestion that it’s the legitimate responsibility of every state and its citizens to uphold and secure the integrity of its borders. It seems oblivious that the camp in the debate that spews the more strident rhetoric is composed of those who were either responsible for or in support of the House Bill that passed last December, which would have criminalized the act of being in America without proper documentation.

On the second, supporters of the position in the bill do not seem to realize that it will be impossible to dredge out and deport the estimated 12 million people who reside in America currently without documentation. Most of them are Hispanics. The more certain outcome of that piece of legislation would have been that most of the 12 million will go underground. That would have been another way to create another permanent underclass in America.

Back tract to that era in the history of the US sequel to the emancipation of slaves, and pull out all that we know about efforts made by some prominent individuals in society at the time to repatriate those who had just been emancipated from slavery back to Africa. The rationale that underscored the convictions of advocates of repatriation of emancipated slaves was their presumed in-assimilability into the mainstream of American society. When the quest for repatriation failed, advocates of repatriation embraced policies and an unaccommodating mindset that produced a permanent underclass of citizens who still constitute a continuing burden and drag on society and its members. Anyone who is in doubt about the burden and drag of an underclass of Black citizens on America needs only pay a visit to the penitentiaries where most of the confined are Black and male. If the one factors the amount of public dollars (127 billion in 1998 alone) spent yearly on incarceration into the social costs of incarceration, the one will have a better idea of what I’m talking about. When history repeats itself the outcome is often farce or tragedy.

For a nation of immigrants, there’s no viable alternative to a whole-hearted absorption of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants who are already present in this country. The fact that most of them are Hispanics has no bearing on the practical logic that calls for their absorption.

Why do I believe so? Those who clamor for criminalizing the presence of 12 million people lack the logistics of getting rid of them. They also lack the higher responsibility of permanently locking them out. Any measure that drives such a stupendous number of people underground and pave the way for creating another underclass of non-citizens and citizens, because it will make it impossible for 12 million people and their children to position and prepare themselves adequately for life in this society. A permanent underclass of 12 million people will establish an extensive legacy that will haunt America today and beyond.

An experience that I had three years ago gives me cause to conclude that the alternative to absorbing these twelve million undocumented people would amount to suicide for America. The experience began when I deposited a check into my account in the ATM at a branch of my bank located in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. My check got missing for a long time, and was almost lost due specifically to the limited literacy of the Hispanic employee of the bank who processed checks deposited in the ATM that day. An investigation revealed that she was unable to decipher the digits of my account number as I wrote them, but rather than call the attention of her supervisor she left it unprocessed and simply bundled it along with the rest. The shortage of a well educated Hispanic work force played a role in my ordeal. Like all the other businesses, my bank was driven by the quest to attract and retain Hispanic customers in that neighborhood to hire and deploy an all-Hispanic staff in that branch. No one can condemn such a practice, but at least one of them lacked sufficient English language skills that were needed to process my deposit.

The day will come when the dictates of liberal politics in a liberal democracy will enable Hispanic Americans to elect one of their own into the highest office in the land. To presume that such a day will not dawn will be wishful. America will have itself to blame if it doesn’t ensure that when that day dawns, the individual who will be elected will be qualified enough to discharge his duties credibly. A punitive immigration bill will not be part of that preparation.

Nigeria’s Grossly Flawed Elections Hold Continent-Wide Implications

2007-05-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

Not that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo would care about this in any way. But the fact is that his blatant rigging of the general elections in Nigeria last month in his over-zeal to retain his party, the PDP in power holds continent-wide implications for Africa. For one, Obasanjo has once again confirmed for any skeptics out there that Africa’s path to true democratic political development will not be paved by the manner of elections that he recently conducted in Nigeria. Thanks to Mr. Obasanjo, events in Nigeria may once again help to warp efforts made elsewhere on the continent for democratic transition.

One is talking about Zimbabwe as a case in point here. Just this morning a story on the wires indicates that Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has stepped up his brutalization of members of the opposition to his regime using the police. He is reported to have even extended the brutalization of the opposition which he began in March, to ordinary Zimbabweans. The unofficial curfew that his police enforce in some the suburbs around Harare, the capital continues to take its abusive toll on ordinary people. A just released report by Human Rights Watch quoted one Zimbabwean who it interviewed as saying: “Right now, no one walks about after 7 pm unless you want a beating”.

With the cloud of illegitimacy hanging over his head, as the beneficiary of Nigeria’s rigged election, one like Mr. Musa Yar’Adua cannot in any way be in the position to lend a voice of rebuke at Mr. Mugabe or a beneficiary of a flawed election anywhere on the continent. It’s therefore time for Africans to rethink the hope they repose on the mere conduct of elections. Elections cannot be worth the faith of Africans until they liberate the process of conducting it from the clutch of the likes of Obasanjo and Mugabe.

What Mr. Wolfowitz Doesn't Acknowledge

2007-05-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

From the vigorous self-defense mounted by Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz yesterday in Washington, DC before the World Bank’s board of directors, it does seem as he’s in self-denial over the real issues at stake in his troubles at the Bank. My informed conviction is that the allegations of misconduct leveled at him over his role in re-assigning his girlfriend from the Bank to the State Department on unusual salaries constitute a gift that he handed Bank employees most of whom were uncomfortable and even averse to his presence at the Bank.

His fate at the Bank was sealed long before he even got there by his prominence in the ideologically-driven presidency of George W. Bush’s administration and what many see as the muscular style that characterize its policies. One is talking about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which is seen by many people in the world as an outright over-reach and violation of international law. Mr. Wolfowitz compounded the aversion that many of the Bank employees had already cultivated for him when he brought some aides along with him from his previous job and they proceeded to behave in ways that gave Bank employees cause to believe that those aides had been unleashed on the Bank to implement the administration’s ideologically-driven worldview on the Bank’s auspices.

The charge he made that “a conscious campaign to undermine his effectiveness as president” at the Bank is therefore off mark. So is the one that his ouster will send a “terrible message” that would make “an impossible situation for any successor”. Bank employees did not want him around as president from the very outset. He quickly confirmed their worst fears upon arrival when his aides brandished the same muscular administrative style that Bank employees associated the Bush administration with.

My other suspicion is that both Mr. Wolfowitz and Bush are quite aware of what got them into this trouble at the Bank. Their refusal to throw in the towel amounts to the stubbornness that many people associate them with. Two things are certain here: His continued stay as president at the Bank will have a negative impact at the Bank. The declaration of good faith that he seeks from the board to pave way for his ‘voluntary’ resignation may not be enough to salvage him from the damage from his previous job for any future appointment to Bank-type multilateral institutions.

The Lessons of Abia and Lagos States

2007-04-30T12:22:00.000-07:00

Mr. Maurice Iwu’s inability to deliver the governor’s mansion in Abia and Lagos states to the PDP should not be seen as indicators of proper conduct. After all, Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, who Mr. Iwu believes he serves was quite interested in capturing both governorship positions in his do-or-die resolve. In Abia state his lackey, Mr. Onyema Ugochukwu was well-positioned for the trophy. Lagos itself was Mr. Obasanjo’s last appearance to campaign before he retired to his farm in close-by Ota to await the outcome of the charade that he choreographed.

Mr. Obasanjo was simply out-rigged in Abia by Mr. Orji Uzo Kalu. Mr. Kalu has used the outcome of Mr. Iwu’s charade to prove again that he could successfully stand up to Mr. Obsasanjo’s bullying. If you recall, Mr. Kalu has been unrelenting in his open castigation of Mr. Obasanjo. He even called his bluff over all. When Obasanjo sent Mr. Ribadu after Kalu and his mother, the latter successfully used his own thugs to fight the EFCC thugs off. Not only that he contested as a presidential candidate, he is still walking about unmolested by Mr. Ribadu and his thugs.

Mr. Obasanjo may also have been out-rigged in Lagos by Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu who delivered the governorship to his new party the AC. But when you find that Mr. Obasanjo’s PDP was prevented from laying hands on any of the state and National Assembly seats in Lagos, you’d perhaps attribute that to Tinubu’s access to funds beyond his state’s allocation from Obasanjo’s central government. He put those funds to good use, which is why he was able to out-rig the PDP in Lagos too.

The lessons in Abia and Lagos do not portend good at all for the evolution of democratic governance in Nigeria. However, they are proof that even dictators too can be out-done in their own games.

Food For Thought

2007-04-29T10:41:00.000-07:00

Former CIA director, George J. Tenet disclosed yesterday that US president George W. Bush is not adequately informed by public servants whose job positions and job details obligate them to. That disclosure in itself is quite damning. The US, in deed, the world has been paying dearly for that failure on the part of the public servants who surround Bush. The big puzzle in this disclosure is: Is this state of affairs not the concomitant outcome of a situation when a position of authority and power is occupied by an individual who lacks the sharp mind necessary for asking specific questions and insisting on hard facts as answers?

Another Scary “Slam Dunk” from Mr. Tenet

2007-04-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

Al-Qaeda has responded to the U.S. intelligence focus on young Arab men as potential risks, he says, by recruiting "jihadists with different backgrounds. I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to."--The Washington Post, Saturday April 28, 2007.

The excerpt above is from a Washington Post story on former CIA director, George J. Tenet who is once again in the news because of his book, At the Center of the Storm, slated for release Monday, April 30 by HarperCollins. One of Mr. Tenet’s preoccupations in his book as well as all the promotional interviews—including the one he gave to CBS’s 60 Minutes, which will air tomorrow evening—is the imminence of future acts of terror here in the US by al-Qaeda.

That, in itself is not scary. Al-Qaeda founder, Osama Bin Laden who is presumed to still be alive hasn’t for even once indicated in any of the video and other messages that he has released on the World Wide Web or through Al Jazeera television that his terror organization was going to back down on their terror campaign. The scare in Mr. Tenet’s assertion is encapsulated in the fact that the US intelligence establishment has rendered itself incapable of countering the menace that al-Qaeda represents. It has done that by allowing the typical American bias for cultures and things unfamiliar to color its perceptions and judgments.

Listen to Mr. Tenet again: “I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to”! When you see that this rock-solid conviction is based solely on al-Qaeda’s shift to recruit “jihadists with different backgrounds” in response to US intelligence “focus on young Arab men as potential risks” one cannot but marvel. If this man, Mr. Tenet is incapable of realizing that al-Qaeda’s recruitment of jihadists hasn’t been restricted to Arabs, Asians, and Africans, there is indeed serious cause for worry.

Ever since the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, and the declaration of the war on terrorism the same year by the Bush White House, people of all races have been implicated in al-Qaeda’s or related cause. These include American citizens who were born and raised here on American soil. Recall John Walker Lindh who was captured in Afghanistan fighting in the ranks of the Taliban? Another, Ryan Anderson, a member of the National Guard in Washington State was caught in a sting in 2004. There’s yet another! He’s name is Adam Gadahn, born in the state of Oregon, 28 years ago and he converted to Islam when he was seventeen years old. Known in al-Qaeda as Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American), this person who holds membership in al-Qaeda’s media committee is a senior cadre. He is said to be hiding with Bin Laden and others in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region. He has been implicated in five different videos addressed specifically to the US—see The New Yorker magazine, January 22, 2007.

Do you now see the scare in Mr. Tenet, the man who is reputed as one of the actors who made US president George W. Bush affirm his determination to invade Iraq with his “slam dunk” statement? The Washington Post said that in his book, Mr. Tenet confessed that “he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed”. His take in the excerpt above indicates that the inability to deal with integrity is not the only lapse he has. He’s obviously a xenophobe. If people like him remain in America’s intelligence and policy making establishments, then Asians and Africans will be unduly profiled in the endless war on terror. But the sad thing about that is that it will leave American still vulnerable if terrorists acquire Caucasian physique.

Mr. George J. Tenet

2007-04-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

The story in The New York Times today, April 27, 2007 that former CIA director, Mr. George J. Tenet has used his book billed to be published Monday by HarperCollins to accuse particularly Vice President Dick Cheney—and others in the Bush White House—of rushing America to war in Iraq without a “serious debate” is hardly news. That fact is well known here and abroad. Mr. Cheney himself has neither denied nor apologized for his role in the rush to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussien. Mr. Tenet’s accusation is yet another confirmatory pointer to the credibility problem that every one of all the powerful players in the Bush White who are associated with the invasion of Iraq will carry for the rest of their lives.

This 549-page book, that he entitled: At the Center of the Storm, which the Times described as: “By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical” may not be sufficient to put out Mr. Tenet apart from the others who were in the center of what is seen by many people as a wrong war. He is insisting that his “slam dunk” “remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” was put out of context by a White House that was already braced itself up to invade Iraq when he made it.

If Mr. Tenet has been listening attentively to stories of Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s travails at the World Bank he will no doubt take time off to ponder that his own future in any public service capacity may not be starkly different. After his retirement from the CIA, Mr. Tenet got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he says in the book that he was “not at all sure I wanted to accept” from Mr. Bush, and he has now got $4 million dollars advance for his book from HarperCollins. Meanwhile the war in Iraq rages on.

Gyrating on His Daddy’s Empty Grave

2007-04-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

I have never met Ken Wiwa, the son of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa in person. But I sensed something awkward about him a few years ago when I read his memoir, In the Shadow of A Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy. That awkward thing was the feeling that in spite of the book he still seemed clueless about that legacy, which his father who was hanged November 10, 1995 by the then Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha on trumped-up charges created through his activist quest for justice for his nationality, the Ogoni and left behind.

The late Saro-Wiwa was a genuine activist who came through the ranks and kept growing all the way in his quest for justice and equal treatment for his Ogoni nationality. Up until his life was snuffed out in the noose that fateful day, he didn’t recant his conviction that the Nigerian supra-national state as it’s currently structured cannot deliver justice, fair play, talk less of economic, social and political development to the nationalities that were made to constitute it.

In the review piece that I wrote on the young Ken Wiwa’s book for an irregular column that I used to write in TheNews magazine, Lagos, I still recall mentioning that the young Wiwa appeared in the book to be on a celebrity chasing mission as opposed to a quest to understand his late activist father’s legacy.

Well, I confirmed that feeling as fact Monday this week after I read a story in the New York Times on Mr. Musa Yar’Adua, who as Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor as the president of Nigeria emerged the “winner” of what has been roundly condemned by local and international observers as the worst election that they have seen in their lives. My jaw dropped when a read a quote by Mr. Ken Wiwa, who was described as Mr. Yar’Ardua’s spokesman in which he brushed aside complaints about the unparalleled fraud, violence, etc. that characterized the exercise as baseless: “The elections are over. We’re now faced with moving Nigeria forward”, he was quoted to have said.

It’s been awhile since it was announced that the young Ken Wiwa had been appointed an adviser by Mr. Obasanjo. Some people, including me thought at the time that the young man would be hesitant to let Mr. Obasanjo who has refused to even oblige him the demand to exhume his late father’s bones from the mass grave where he was dumped with the other eight Ogoni activists after they were hanged by Abacha and his regime for proper burial, to placate him with a sweet appointment. To the fact that the grave where he performed funeral rites on for his late father is still hollow. One didn’t have the least suspicion that he accepted the appointment quite alright and was only kept waiting in the flanks for this moment when he’d be used to play a normalization role for Mr. Obasanjo. Come to think of it, young Ken Wiwa will do so in what will obviously become a regime that lacks legitimacy, and is headed by one of those his late father fought till death for inflicting environmental degradation and poverty on the Ogoni even as they siphon away enormous oil wealth from under their homestead, farmlands, creeks, and waterways.

If young Ken Wiwa’s new role is his way of continuing the quest for self-definition that he mentioned somewhere in his book as a pre-occupation that has always tugged his conscience, well, he certainly has betrayed his late father’s activist challenge to the forces that despoil the Ogoni environment and keep them poor! Guilt should tug at that conscience of his too. Even in the mass grave where his bones lay, Ken Saro-Wiwa will find space to roil in discomfort over his son’s choice to gyrate atop the empty grave that his son is satisfied with as his father's final resting place. The consolation in this, is that the late activist's bones are safely elsewhere.

The Monkey's Fateful Day in the Marketplace

2007-04-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

“One day be one day when monkey go go market i no go return” (It will be on a fateful day that the monkey will not return from a trip to the marketplace) is common pidgin English wise crack amongst Nigerians. The shame that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo made of what should have been general elections that were meant to usher in a successor government to the one he currently heads has sufficiently qualified him as the proverbial monkey mentioned above. His brazen violation of all decency in his style of governance during the past eight years has brought him to the proverbial day when he wouldn’t return from the marketplace. The elections that he manipulated so assiduously from the outset have produced a “win” for his PDP. But it has rightly been roundly condemned by all local and international observers. The condemnation has been so extensive that three days after Mr. Umar Yar’Adua who he hand-picked to run on the PDP platform was declared the winner by the largely discredited INEC, not even a single message of congratulation has come his way from any world leader.

Mr. Obasanjo is the deep-dyed dictator who has straddled and frustrated genuine socio-political evolution amongst the peoples of Nigeria in the periods 1976-1979 and 1999-2007. But he has no doubt out-played his hands this time. The feeble excuses he has been making about the inherent imperfections in elections conducted on Nigerian-type societies haven’t gotten any traction at all. The swift manner with which the National Assembly jettisoned the emergency rule extension that he imposed a few days ago on Ekiti state is clear signal that his return from the marketplace is not imminent. He should indeed be sent back to his Temperance Farms at Ota from there. The Senate’s prompt vote of confidence on its President Kenechukwu Nnamani who Mr. Obasanjo sent his upstart Information Minister, Mr. Frank Nweke to vilify for his condemnation of the flawed electoral exercise, is another pointer to the fact of his long day in the marketplace. There’s no doubt that Mr. Nweke’s act was meant to intimidate the National Assembly.

The National Assembly must not hesitate to accord Mr. Obasanjo an underserved reprieve at all. Mr. Obasanjo’s extended stay in the marketplace is indicative of his exhausted arrogance and bluster. This is the time to embark on a comprehensive legislative effort to ensure that Mr. Yar’Adua’s illegitimate victory is not actualized. That effort could begin with an immediate scrutiny of the flawed elections to find the proper way to invalidate them. If that proper way will lead to fresh elections, they must be organized by a restructured INEC without Mr. Maurice Iwu, who has established his bone fide as Mr. Obasanjo’s baggage man. That proper way must also include the ouster of Mr. Ribadu from the EFCC or any public establishment that he may have been sent to by Mr. Obasanjo.

Those will not be all. There’s everything wrong with Nigeria as it is presently structured. The unresolved question of state building in what exists as Nigeria must be tabled and resolved once and for all by the nationalities. The logic must be to ensure that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo is that last dictator that walks Nigeria’s political landscape.

Guest Post From Naomi Wolf

2007-04-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

When I embarked on this project a few weeks ago, it never occurred to me that there would be cause for me to vacate a day's space for a guest. But so far, my experience indicates that the blog is just like any other medium of mass communication: the dynamism of society dictates what gets posted on it. So, I'm constrained to lend my space today to an American citizen, Ms. Naomi Wolf to republish her seminal piece on the Bush administration. The piece which was first carried by the Manchester Guardian today April 24, 2007 deserves extensive play. The piece doesn't necessarily reflect the views of IkengaComments. However, we belong to the school of thought whose adherents believe that George W. Bush and his presidency represent unique phenomena. They are unfolding before everyone's eyes. Would there come a day when Americans would ask: How did all that happen?

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all. Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.
Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise. Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place. At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately. But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution. Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched. In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny. In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone. Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list. In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list". "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee. "I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." "That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest. Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list. It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933. Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro-bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job. Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already. The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration. Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.) We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction. Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that. Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone. That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs". What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise. What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now. "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

A Wall in Baghdad

2007-04-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

Early in the year it was the announcement of “a surge” of troops to pacify Baghdad. The announced “surge” began quite promptly, and is continuing. But there has been no respite in the deadly violence that unfolds almost daily claiming untoward number of lives in the Iraqi capital ever since US occupation of the country began. Then Saturday came news that as part of its pacification efforts in Baghdad, the US military had started to erect a wall in the middle of the city that will block a Sunni neighborhood from other parts of the city. Although the Bush White insists otherwise, the construction of the wall that takes place only under the cover of darkness is yet another symbolic manifestation of the continuing failure of US occupation of Iraq.

This obvious is beside the other facts about this wall in Baghdad. From the sharp reaction of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr. Nuri Kamal al-Maliki who spoke against the wall from a safe distance in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, it does seem like either the decision to build the wall was a unilateral undertaking by the US occupation forces or it was endorsed by Mr. al-Maliki who acted like a puppet and summoned the courage to change his mind when the wall drew opposition from his Shiite benefactors. According to reports, Mr. al-Maliki who spoke in a press conference that he held with Arab League secretary general, Mr. Amr Moussa said: “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop.” He also insisted that: “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.”

It is an interesting paradox that the US that stood opposed to the Berlin Wall built by the East Germans with obvious support of the Kremlin during the Cold War would find logic in building a similar edifice somewhere else this time. It will be recalled that for the duration of the Cold War, the US was unequivocal in calling for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. During his tenure as president, Mr. Ronald Reagan made one of his monumental anti-Soviet speeches in West Berlin in what was then West Germany. In that speech he issued his now famous proclamation in which he called on then Soviet leader, “Mr. Gorbachev [to] tear down this wall!”

The Baghdad wall drew instant opposition from all round Iraqi stakeholders not only because of its physical barrier presence but also because of its symbolism as an edifice that demarcates the city by sects. Mr. Moktada al-Sadr’s Movement called it “the first step toward (sic) dividing the regions into cantons and blockading people there”. “Today”, he said, it happens in Adhamiya. Tomorrow it will happen in Sadr City.” He was referring to Mr. al-Sadr’s stronghold in a part of Baghdad. The Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party charged that the wall “will enhance sectarian feelings”, in addition to harming the areas concerned “economically and socially”. In what seems to depict their obvious embarrassment over the idea of building the wall, a spokesman for the US military called it a temporary measure.

When will US President George W. Bush who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this morning is in “a state of denial over Iraq” get to grips with reality? Reid who also indicated that “the new Congress will show him the way” to a better Iraq policy have a lot on his hands in that regard.

SHAME!

2007-04-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Democracy is about process. Wherever and whenever that process is abused, violated, altered, or not instituted at all, democracy is harmed. Honest watchers of what has been going on in Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s Nigeria will attest that it has been devoid of a process in the true sense of the word. It’s sad that one man alone has spear-headed what has amounted to a free for all violation of what ought to be the electoral process all in the bid to satisfy his bloated ego. Compare what has been underway in Obasanjo’s Nigeria in the name of elections with what has been going on in France and reach your own conclusion. Mr. Obasanjo is obviously satisfied that the script he authored has produced the drama he envisaged. But what he produced is indeed a shameful drama, which is why this medium tells him, SHAME!

It’s Time to Go, Mr. Wolfowitz

2007-04-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

We have ardently followed Mr. Paul D. Wolfowitz’s embattled career at the World Bank. Although his appointment by US President George W. Bush provoked a comparison with the appointment of Robert McNamara by President Lyndon Johnson some years ago in many quarters, many of the Bank’s 7,000 employees in Washington, DC saw it differently from the very outset. One of them who I know disclosed to me during a conversation in the first few months of his presence at the Bank that some of her colleagues had indicated that they would leave specifically because of him. In fact, thereafter, she subsequently confirmed that some of those colleagues including her, did take leave of the Bank.

There is no kidding around the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz is not well like at the Bank by many of its employees in Washington, DC. They simply are averse to what can succinctly be called his ideologically-steeped politics. Mr. Wolfowitz is seen as the manifest presence of George Bush’s worldview at the Bank, and Bank employees don’t seem comfortable with the thought of their president using the powerful trappings of his office to implement that worldview in the name of the Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz played directly into the hands of the employees’ aversion for him by his conduct as soon as he assumed his new job.

Ever since the saga over his role in the transfer of his girlfriend to a position in the US State Department with an unusual pay increase and future promotion broke out, Bank employees have been steadfast in their insistence that his continued presence as president would negatively impact the Bank’s mandate. Just this Wednesday, one of his two deputies, Mr. Graeme Wheeler, told him to his face to resign. There is no doubt at all that Mr. Wheeler speaks for majority of the senior managers and sundry Bank staff. Last week, Mr. Wolfowitz was even booed off the podium by 200 Bank employees when he tried to reason with them in the atrium.

The 24-member executive board is immersed in the bureaucratic wrangle over whether or not he should stay. What is currently underway now seems to be a test of will between that governing body and the Bush White House, which sustains its support for Mr. Wolfowitz. What remains clear here is that but for the big clout that the US wields in the board, Mr. Wolfowitz could have been a goner. In other words, notwithstanding his determination to retain his job, he doesn’t have a viable future at the Bank as president any more. It’s therefore time for him to resign and seek professional fulfillment elsewhere.

The Danger Ahead in Iraq for the US

2007-04-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

America’s defeat in the Vietnam War was cause for profound soul searching in the Pentagon particularly. One of the outcomes of that soul searching was the appointment of the Gates Commission by the Congress to review and recommend an alternative military manpower policy. The thinking in some quarters at the time was that the public oversight that resulted from the draft that furnished the military with which that conflict was prosecuted represented a burden that made it a more difficult war for the US. That was in the sense that American society’s high sensitivity to the high casualty rate in the war eroded public support for the Nixon White House and tied is hands extensively. The Commission’s recommendations for a new military manpower policy well steeped in tenets of the marketplace was meant to by-pass a repeat of such scenario and make things not so difficult for America’s military establishment and its commander-in-chief in future conflicts. When the policy was adopted by the Congress, its outcome is the current all-volunteer force, AVF.

But the paradox of the AFV is that it violated one of the central tenets of raising military manpower by the state since the French Revolution, by detaching national defense from society. The AVF solved what was considered as the problem of public oversight of war prosecution and squarely made it the responsibility of the Pentagon. No one has cared to examine the down side of such a military establishment. For one, it makes military adventures possible and even easy. The mounting casualty rate in Iraq is hardly evident.

Perhaps the invasion and occupation of Iraq might excite such examination. That aside, there is another serious issue inherent in America’s presence in Iraq, which hasn’t attracted the right attention that it deserves. Any serious analyst of military events would discern from the several errors chalked by the White House and the Pentagon under then Defense Secretary, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, on Iraq that planning for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was probably done only on the best case scenario, i.e. successful invasion and occupation. There certainly was no contingency plan for possible withdrawal in the event that the invasion or the occupation failed.

Even in dreamland, only few people will imagine that a mega power like the US will insert its enormous military machine in a region so far away from the continental US without a contingency plan for its withdrawal. But this is the considered concern in some quarters. To pile on the machine already in Iraq is certainly the easy part. The bad news is that the White House’s antecedence of pig-headedness since the war makes it absolutely impossible for anyone to embark on such a plan during the life of the Bush administration without running the risk of hashing frenzy for the media. Such frenzy is the least of the dangers that lay ahead.

Given the continuing deterioration of its military fortunes in Iraq, can the US still afford an expeditious withdrawal of its military machine from Iraq? Withdrawal from Iraq, which will certainly become expedient in a matter of time runs the risky of being hasty because of the likelihood that the withdrawing forces, will face sustained harassment as they withdraw. Many types of equipment might be abandoned, and they will fall into the hands of the pursuers. In deed, the over-looked aspects of this conflict of choice will continue to plague it for as long as it lasts.

Mr. Andrew Young

2007-04-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

The Eagle is Perched on the Vintage Once Again

2007-04-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

A few months ago when Chief Anthony Enahoro who as a young man made what was then considered quite a radical and move the motion for Nigeria’s independence from Britain in the federal parliament, announced that his political party, the National Reformation Party, NRP would not participate in the general elections slated for this month, not many of the other political parties found the need to lend their support to him and the NRP. When Chief Enahoro made that announcement, he was unequivocal that every indication is that Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo and his PDP are highly determined to remain in power. He called the country’s attention to Mr. Obasanjo’s misuse of the EFCC and the INEC in their bid to accomplish that.

What happened Saturday, April 14 in the elections for state governors and legislatures have largely vindicated Chief Enahoro and the NRP. Saturday’s exercise finally gave the leaders of all the political parties except the PDP cause to strongly proclaim their lack of faith in the INEC in the conduct of the presidential and National Assembly polls this Saturday. As the party leaders wrangle amongst themselves on how best to proceed, they must be reminded that once again, the most reasonable option available now for them is to embark on a process that will achieve the reconstitution of the INEC, and make it capable of conducting free and fair elections. The present INEC is highly contaminated by Mr. Obasanjo. How the parties will accomplish this is something that will require commitment and selflessness on their part. But if they summon the courage and dedication to embark on that process, one way will be to trigger the relevant sections of the flawed military imposed 1999 Constitution to devolve power in the interim to the Senate President and have him over-see an impartial transition process within six months. Such transition process must address all the thorny issues that lie at the heart of state building amongst the nationalities that were made to constitute Nigeria. There’s already a blue print that will guide that process. It was produced by the Pronational Conference Organizations, PRONACO, which was co-chaired by Chief Enahoro and Wole Soyinka. PRONACO, which was constituted of several organizations and stakeholders were able to produce a comprehensive document that details the way forward for the peoples that constitute Nigeria. The choice before the nationalities today is clear: Do they want to sustain the sterile status quo, or do they want to dig themselves out of it? Once again, Mr. Obasanjo has offered the nationalities another opportunity to sort their affairs out. The eagle has perched on the vintage canopy once again. But will the hunter take an accurate aim?

There, and Here

2007-04-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

It was a lunatic, who after his thatched hut that he torched was totally consumed by the resultant inferno looked around from a distance and gleefully announced to onlookers: “Finally, light has been made to prevail”. Time and again the world is treated to such acts by the countless lunatics that dot most parts of the African continent. In the last eight years it has been Nigeria’s Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s turn to set the country that he presides over as president ablaze. What started as a normal four year presidential term in May 1999 was gradually turned into a torching exercise by this individual who suddenly proclaimed his self-conviction that he is a messiah from God to deliver the nationalities that British colonialism cobbled together into an artificial supra-national state early in the last century. In the period since be began his second term in 2003, Mr. Obasanjo stopped at nothing to extend himself in power. When his blatant machinations to alter the constitution failed in the National Assembly last year, he began to use state agencies including the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which is mandated by law to conduct elections as an impartial umpire, to erect road block after road block all in the bid to undermine the process.

The difficulty that he encountered from a cross section of the land in his determination to extend himself in power does not derive from his self-anointment as much as it does from the dismal record of lack of any tangible achievement that he chalked in the eight years that he has been in power. Last Saturday witnessed the start of that inferno he brought to bear on the land. The first in the line up of elections that he recklessly dubbed a “do–or-die” affair for him and his party the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, translated to exactly that. At least, 22 people were officially reported dead in the course of one day. The world has been made to witness the most violently rigged electoral exercise in recent time. But like the proverbial lunatic, Mr. Obasanjo has simply pronounced his satisfaction with the conduct and outcome of that clearly flawed exercise.

Not withstanding Mr. Obasanjo's delusion that by burning down the hut called Nigeria he would pave the way for what he alone consider as better visibility, healthy-minded onlookers believe otherwise. We’ll see what will become of him this time when the inferno he started dies down completely.

Then, the shooting incident yesterday at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia that left a reported total of 33 faculty and students dead. People have been scratching their head asking countless questions as they deal with what has been described as the worst campus shooting incident in US history. What went wrong with the shooter who has been described as a student in that institution? How was he able to wreck this magnitude of havoc in two episodes that were interspersed by a couple of hours? Should American society not afford to deal with this sort of horror? More questions than answers, one would say. This is certainly yet another incident strong enough to compel America to embark on an extensive soul searching. The time to begin is now.

Africa Comes to His Rescue

2007-04-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Irrespective of the outcome of the scandal that World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz got himself into over his role in the saga that developed around his girlfriend, Ms. Shaha Riza, the episode became one of those rare moments in international affairs when a US power broker found relevance for Africans whose support he needs to save the day for him. At a time when development and finance ministers from different countries who attended the just concluded annual meeting of the Bank in Washington, DC found cause to express “great concern” in regard to the impact of the saga on the Bank’s ability to continue to fulfill its mandate, some key West European ministers haven’t hidden their desire to have Mr. Wolfowitz resign. Some of the ministers have made quite critical comments about him and his credibility in the course of expressing that desire.

UK’s Hillary Benn opined that, “this whole business has damaged the bank and should not have happened”, while her Germany counterpart, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul insisted that Mr. Wolfowitz should decide “whether he still has the credibility to represent the position of the World Bank.

There’s no gain saying that the behind the scene lobbying that Mr. Wolfowitz was reported to have undertaken last weekend to convince the ministers to extend support to him in his quest to retain his job as Bank president was not selective. But it seems that he achieved success in that regard mostly from African ministers. One of them, Ms. Antoinette Sayeh, a former Bank employee who is now Liberia’s finance minister boldly praised him for his “visionary leadership”. Ms. Sayeh went as far as proclaiming that “he has certainly championed Africa’s cause in the two years of his leadership”. N’Gandu Magande, her counterpart from Zambia thinks that “he has made us believe in ourselves”. Their support for him tallies with the one from South Africa’s Trevor Manual earlier in the weekend.

These African ministers who stepped forward to assert their views and support for Mr. Wolfowitz deserve to be commended. They have certainly gone against the grain of orthodoxy here. Rather than flow with the tide of events in support of the position held by their West European counterparts, they found the courage to express an independent position. One hopes that Mr. Wolfowitz will remember them in the future for throwing him such vital life lines of support.

China’s Burgeoning Foreign Exchange Reserves

2007-04-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

News reports this past weekend have it that China’s record as the country that owns the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves has not diminished at all. In the first quarter of 2007, it added a record $135.7bn to bring its total foreign exchange reserves to $1,202bn. This impressive increase beats the total of $247.3bn for the whole of last year. China’s economy continues to attract considerable foreign investment: A significant chunk of this new increase came from foreign direct investment, FDI to a total of $15bn and a trade surplus of $46.4bn. Analysts point out that as much as $25bn has found its way into China in this year alone. Also macro economic moves by the Peoples Bank of China, PBoC in its capacity as the country’s central bank have made and will continue to make this increase possible into the future. Such moves include arrangements with the country’s commercial banks that encouraged currency swaps aimed at retaining funds onshore. There are views also that calibrated gain in value by China’s currency; the renminbi could be attracting what The Financial Times calls “hot money” into China.

The announcement last year by China that it’d establish a new outfit to take charge of investing its expanding foreign reserves is where the rubber meets the tarmac for political economists who believe that how that new state investor goes about its responsibility would have far reaching political implications amongst others for many in the non-European world. If for instance, that outfit favors the practice of buying government bonds in the US, one implication will be that China will become a staunch behind the scene US well wisher. China would not want to be part of moves that would adversely impact the viability of the US economy, as it would not want to run the risk of not cashing the bonds that it holds when they mature. The other implication is that China’s role as a supporter of repressive regimes in the non-European world would be enhanced. China’s investment presence in parts of Africa and Asia where there are abusive regimes is already a fact. The expansion of that presence will bring a new dimension to the support that repressive regimes in the world receive from Western and North American corporations.

There is therefore no doubt that China’s growing economic presence in the world will certainly complicate the existing crisis in the capitalist world economy.

Paul D. Wolfowitz’s Continuing Embattlement at the World Bank

2007-04-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

When embattled World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz pleaded with his critics at the Bank and others who are opposed to his continued leadership in the statement that he released Thursday, to separate his present job from his previous position as Assistant Secretary of Defense and a major architect of the invasion of Iraq, he was probably either mindless of or had forgotten that he has already established a track record since his arrival in 2005 to head the apex financial institution sufficient and clear to give his audience enough cause to believe otherwise.

Many in the Bank as well as beyond argue that what is being portrayed as his self-proclaimed penchant for wedging an anti-corruption campaign of sorts in poor countries of the world on the Bank’s auspices since he arrived there has not extended to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, three countries that are in the center of the Bush White House’s global strategic interests in its "War on Terrorism" global campaign. His quick suspension of Bank program in Uzbekistan right after the latter refused to authorize landing rights to US military aircraft is said to be yet another dot in the said pattern. Many in the Bank and amongst its shareholders are convinced that he was nominated to use the Bank to implement the same Bush White House agenda which is in the center of US prickly relationships with the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA over the invasion of Iraq. Bush’s decision to send Mr. John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, who is openly contemptuous of the world body is another fact being cited by many to buttress the argument that Wolfowitz’s presence at the Bank will only further the Bush agenda. It will be recalled that IAEA director Mr. Mohamed ElBaradei, became a target for removal from his job by the Bush White House over his agency’s report in 2003 that the claim that Saddam Hussien had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program was not supported by hard fact on the ground in Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize that he jointly won with the IAEA is seen as a clear rebuke of the Bush White House for its over zeal by one of Europe's principal institutions.

Reports claim that even some members of the Bank’s 24-member board of directors have voiced their claim that Mr. Wolfowitz carried the Bush White House secretive style of doing business over to his new job as Bank president.

The revelation from documents released Friday that Mr. Wolfowitz's role in the Riza saga had been high handed, and unilateral even though he cast it after the fact as being otherwise in addition to enjoying the Bank’s blessing, haven’t helped matters at all for him talk less of smoothing ruffled feathers at the Bank and amongst some donor countries.

Many in Europe, including The Financial Times insist that Mr. Wolfowitz’s continued presence at the Bank as president will undermine its credibility and efficiency. But as the Bank’s annual meeting continues this weekend in Washington, DC, there doesn’t seem to be that kind of oceanic pressure from all quarters strong enough to orchestrate his ouster. Some stakeholders, most of whom are known friends of Wolfowitz have tepidly spoken out in his support. They include South Africa’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel who was disparaged by award-winning journalist John Pilger in his recent book Freedom Next as a recovering progressive activist. Excerpts from the book whose author was banned from South Africa by the apartheid regime, which is highly critical of post-apartheid economic policy in South Africa as having not changed from what it used to be during apartheid was published last summer in The Sunday Independent, published in Durban. Manuel was praised by Wolfowitz as a great leader during his recent visit to that country.

“Lingering Shockwaves of 9/11 on America and the World”

2007-04-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t seem like the rest of the world is about to stand down on its suspicion and mistrust of the Bush White House. For many, that mistrust stemmed from the Bush administration's preference for muscular conduct of foreign policy that culminated in what a good proportion of people still regard as the unwarranted invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq. The refusal or the inability of Mr. Bush, his administration, the present and former central players therein to realize that as a fact is complicating their inability to engage the rest of the world with credibility. The continuing rocky tenure of Mr. Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank president ever since he was nominated by Mr. Bush is a clearly a good pointer in that regard.

From the very outset when he arrived at his World Bank post, Mr. Wolfowitz who as the deputy Secretary of Defense was one of the architects and ardent proponents of the invasion of Iraq has been literally without sleep. Stories began to appear in major newspapers from the outset detailing the uneasy and suspicion of his intentions at the Bank by many of its employees. Two of his former aides at the Pentagon who he brought along with him are said to throw their weight around the place in ways that have stirred resentment in Bank employees. He has been accused of making unilateral decisions to disrupt loans to certain countries on the grounds that their governments are corrupt.

But the matter that became a serious bone of contention is his involvement in the transfer of his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza to a position from the Bank to the US State Department with a salary increase that placed her on an annual non-taxable salary of $132,000 to $193,590, $10,000 more than US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. At first Mr. Wolfowitz simply dismissed the allegation of impropriety with claims that he had nothing to do with the decision on Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary, and that the appropriate office of the Bank was consulted and approved of it.

Only yesterday just as the Bank’s 24-member executive board was in session in Washington, DC preparing for the annual meeting scheduled for this weekend, Mr. Wolfowitz emerged with an apology for his role in the saga of Ms. Riza’s transfer and salary. His statement read inter alia: “I made a mistake, for which I am sorry”. He expressed his willingness to abide by whatever decision that would emanate from the board by way of sanction. His biggest challenge appears to come from the Bank’s staff association which insists that he has out-lived his usefulness, because he “destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership” and “compromised the integrity and effectiveness” of the Bank through his unethical involvement in the Ms Riza saga. The staff association was responsible for pushing for the investigation that revealed that he was short on the details of his role in the Ms. Riza saga. His attempt yesterday to address about 200 Bank staffers ended unexpectedly when they started chanting for him to “Resign, Resign”. The board itself has promptly indicated that it will move expeditiously to resolve the fate of Mr. Wolfowitz at the Bank. It doesn’t seem like he’d be forced to resign, though.

He certainly refused to realize that the Bank was an arena quite different from the Pentagon. That may have blinded him on the need to curb the impunity with which he engaged the world from the Pentagon. He must have sensed that his past and role at the Pentagon may be part of his undoing at the Bank when he said: “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate with me in my previous job, I’m not in my previous job”. Calls have come from The Financial Times for his resignation. If he retains his job, his effectiveness at the Bank will depend considerably on his willingness to dissociate himself from the grand and reckless agenda that many in the world associate with the Bush White House, and to instruct those aides he brought with him from the Pentagon to modify their arrogance accordingly.

The Anger that Emasculates Black America?

2007-04-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Sections of society in the US, particularly the Black community and various mass media outlets have been consumed by what amounts to reckless and racially-inspired expressions made by shock jock broadcaster Don Imus, who is Caucasian on his morning show, Imus in the Morning on Good Friday morning about Rutgers University’s female basketball team, the Scarlet Knights. He apparently singled out the eight black members of the ten-person team and called them “nappy-headed hos” in remarks he made on the air chatting with his producer, Mr. Bernard McGuire.

Almost immediately, those remarks drew sharp angry responses from elements in the Black Civil Rights establishment including the Revs. Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson. Mr. Imus’ moment of contrition began almost right away with an appearance on the Rev. Sharpton’s own radio show early in the next week where the latter made it clear that the former’s apologies were insufficient. By Tuesday many in the Black community including some Black leaders who the New York Times reported as saying that “Mr. Imus has not understood the depth of the hurt his remarks caused” were not only expressing their anger openly and extensively, but were also calling for NBC, Mr. Imus’ employers to fire him for cause. The two week suspension without pay slammed on Mr. Imus by the NBC, which simulcasts his show, and CBS Radio, his primary employers could hardly assuage the anger caused by his remarks in the Black community. Rev. Sharpton who promptly insisted during an appearance on the Today Show on NBC that Imus’ suspension “is too little, too late, further called it “not really enough”.

At the news conference called by Rutgers University, the head coach, Ms. C. Vivian Stringer tearfully observed: “It’s not about them as black or nappy-headed. It’s about us as a people. When there is not enough equality for all, or when there has been denied equality for one, there has been denied equality for all”. Members of the team, who took Mr. Imus’ offer to meet and apologize, have equally expressed their outrage at his remarks.

All that anger seems to be having the desired effects for those who continue to express it: As at today, MSNBC, the cable affiliate of NBC has dropped its simulcast of Imus in the Morning, and seven advertisers have pulled their business altogether from it. Who knows what will be by the time the team gets off the Oprah Winfrey Show to which it has been invited.

If one were to go by conventional wisdom, the one would discern that the quick backlash from the reaction of prominent figures and others in the Civil Rights establishment to this ugly incident particularly amongst Caucasians would add to feelings of animosity directed at the Black community by Caucasians many of whom routinely regard Blacks as too angry. In fact, such miscast of Blacks in this regard remains a major obstacle in age-old attempts by the former to seek remedies for centuries of mistreatment they rightly feel that they have been subjected to in American society.

Without minimizing the ugliness of Mr. Imus’ remarks, some people who talked to IkengaComments expressed the view that this kind of anger expressed in the Black community, underscores the miscast of Blacks by their fellow citizens who are Caucasians. People who hold that view insist that it doesn’t do much good for Blacks. Those who hold this view argue that while such dragged out anger benefits the Civil Rights establishment, which one individual characterized as ‘shake-down-the-tree experts’, it alienates many Caucasians who could be their allies, and even tends to distract the Black community from engaging to solve some of the harsh pathologies—single parenthood, crime and prison, extensive high school drop-out rates, etc.—that plague its members.

One person pointed out the case of the Duke University lacrosse players who were alleged to have kidnapped and gang-raped a Black female stripper March 13, 2006 to buttress his argument. That incident which attracted similar expression of anger in the Black community and in the Civil Rights establishment subsequently fell to pieces when their accuser kept weaving inconsistent tales. All charges in the case were dropped only yesterday by North Carolina attorney general, Roy A. Cooper during a news conference where he said: “We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and failure to verify serious allegations”.

A few years ago too, there was the Tawana Brawley incident in New York that featured the Rev. Sharpton’s prominent role. Tawana Brawley who was a teenager at the time in 1989 had alleged that she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by Caucasian NYPD officers. At the end, a government report revealed that the teenager’s story was invented. So did Les Payne, a Black journalist with Newsday. But that was after the Black community roiled itself extensively in anger.

Anger, particularly on the excessive side is often counter productive. How different could it have been for everyone involved to have settled with Mr. Imus’ apologies, while members of the team use the opportunity of the meeting he invited them to get to him to pledge some serious contribution to and involvement in a course that targets one of the terrible pathologies plaguing the Black community for solution? Although some would consider that akin to accepting blood money from Mr. Imus, how would the destruction of his career help solve a single pathology in the Black community? There’s certainly wisdom in an Igbo proverb, which says that: uka di ire bu ndetu onu—a serious discourse doesn’t need to be belabored!

Postscript: Finally, Mr. Don Imus was fired this afternoon from his radio show by CBS. In his announcement of the firing, CBS President and CEO, Leslie Moonves said: "There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society. That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision"

Need for Soft Landing in Zimbabwe

2007-04-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

The crisis in Zimbabwe that stems principally from the continuing fight between the government of Mr. Robert Mugabe and its opponents is getting out of hand, and increasingly so by the day. The recent brutalization of members of the opposition by the Police and other security outfits is not only disheartening. It’s also tragic, and doesn’t bode well at all for society and people in Zimbabwe in both the short and the long runs. The same is true of the recent announcement by the US State Department that it’s actively involved in funding the opposition to Mr. Mugabe’s openly brutal regime.

Unsophisticated assessments would wonder why I would lump both acts—the brutalization of members of the opposition and US State Department's open disclosure of support—to the same trajectory of events and argue that they don’t bode well in the over all for Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans. They belong together because they might back fire and earn Mr. Mugabe more time in power. Anything capable of dragging out the crisis in Zimbabwe in any shape or form is counter-productive for Zimbabwe and its peoples. The battered and brutalized face of MDC faction leader, Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai is a sad metaphor of sorts, with sour implications for anyone who is genuinely concerned about the continuing deterioration of society in Zimbabwe as the crisis sustains. One of those implications is that the MDC factions are riddled with weaknesses so rife that they are incapable of delivering Zimbabwe from the brutal rule that Mr. Mugabe’s government represents. Any anti-systemic entity which is incapable of protecting itself—particularly its leaders—from such brutal man-handling cannot be worth its salt. This immediate point will be mute if in this case the beatings received by Mr. Tsvangirai and his colleagues were deliberately courted to sensitize the world to Mr. Mugabe’s immense capacity for brutality. Even if that were the case, courting world sympathy that way could portray the MDC as an entity being run by individuals who have a cargo cult mentality. A weak MDC will drag out the crisis, while cargo cult mentality is certainly not the mindset needed to repair the damage already done on society by Mr. Mugabe’s regime when it finally ends.

IkengaComments is privy to the boiling anger in opponents of the Mugabe regime. Many of them have proclaimed their readiness for armed struggle. An objective assessment of the hard realities in Zimbabwe points to one harsh truth—chances of initiating armed struggle in Zimbabwe today are next to nil. Furthermore, if armed struggle is initiated, its chances of success are equally nil. The end of minority rule there in Zimbabwe, dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, the end of civil wars in Mozambique and Angola amounted to an era shift that completely voids the possibility of a successful armed struggle project anywhere in that sub-region. If former freedom fighters who are currently in charge of state affairs in most parts of the sub-region have found it difficult to warm up to the idea of supporting the MDC all this while, it will be unrealistic to presume that they will support armed struggle. For one, they all still consider Mr. Mugabe one of their own. The MDC’s continuing weakness derives from some of these variables!

The announcement by the US State will only give Mr. Mugabe more ammunition as he continues to demonize the MDC as agents of the US and the West. He’s after all a seasoned activist. Anyone who refuses to appreciate that a seasoned activist like Mr. Mugabe has all that it takes to play the current situation in Zimbabwe for his own extended survival is being unrealistic. He’s not unaware that he’s incapable of turning society around in Zimbabwe having plunged it this far into decay. He’ll diligently strive to drag out the crisis and make it survive him. He’s in good health no doubt, which indicates that Zimbabwe might go through at least five more years of decay! Mr. Mugabe’s horizontal departure from Zimbabwe’s public sphere would necessarily mean that the other goons who currently assist him now in the regime will not roll over and give up the day after. Look at Guinea after Sekou Toure!

Assuming that the MDC acquires the superior capability over night to out-do the violence that Mr. Mugabe is unleashing at them currently, and ousts him, what is the guarantee that Mr. Tsvangirai and others wouldn’t loose their heads over their new found capacity to wield actionable violence? The dangers exist for that in a future Zimbabwe under the control of an opposition that achieves change violently. Look at what Mr. Meles Zenawi transformed himself into in Ethiopia. The story of the man in Eritrea, Mr. Isaias Afewerki, who fought in the same trenches with Mr. Zenawi to oust Mengistu Haile Mariam from power in Addis in the early 1990s, is not a better copy.

The need for soft landing in the crisis becomes increasingly acute by the day. By that I mean a process that will put Zimbabwe back on the part of sanity without any of the actors in the current dispensation being subjected to prosecution by the victors. South Africa and the other stakeholders in the sub-region must sell a project that has something for Mr. Mugabe by way of immunity from prosecution to both the MDC and the former. It’s sad that Zimbabwe’s White community doesn’t seem to be interested in an amicable resolution of the crisis. Most of them including the farmers prefer to pack their bags and go elsewhere. Ian Smith, the Prime Minister in the White-only minority regime left to live for good in South Africa. He could still be part of the process that will bring about the soft landing from where he is currently though.

The Islamic Republic of Iran and Tony Blair's Government, Round Three

2007-04-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

If the truth is to be told, it seems British Prime Minister Tony Blair may have set his government up again for another trouncing by the Islamic Republic of Iran again, but this time over the aftermaths of the fifteen sailors and marines captured and released by the Revolutionary Guards after eleven days. In the first round of the wrangling over the captured personnel, which began right after their capture, the Islamic Republic seemed to have won. The reason for that verdict being that the hot rhetoric from Mr. Blair's government could compel the Islamic Republic to yield. In fact, it was Mr. Blair that backed down and changed his tone from harsh to mild and conciliatory. The second round of their wrangling ended with the Islamic Republic voluntarily releasing the captured personnel. for that, they also scored a PR victory over Mr. Blair.

The post-debrief story given to the British and international media by the sailors and marine is that they were held and interrogated in isolation from one another, which amounted to psychological torture. According to reports, they claimed that that made them to feel pressured to confess all that they were shown to have confessed in the videos that were released by the Islamic Republic on state television.

Well, going by a statement from the Islamic Republic today, a documentary video and book on those British servicemen and woman will soon be released to the public. The claim is that both the video and book will contain everything from the capture of the fifteen, where exactly they were captured, and up until when they were released. Many Iranians who were interviewed by some international media outlets have expressed their surprise at the claim made by the fifteen personnel that their interrogation in isolation from one another amounts to torture. Those Iranians who talked to the BBC indicated that it would be unrealistic for people who were captured and held for violation of Iranian territorial waters would expect that they would have been interrogated together.

If and when the video and book are released and they show unequivocally that the captured personnel had truly strayed into Iranian territorial waters and that what some people all over the world called coerced confessions from them were otherwise, then it would mean that the Islamic Republic has scored yet another media victory against Mr. Blair’s government in the episode.

The Flamingo and His Detractors!

2007-04-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

Even at this early stage in Senator Barack Obama's campaign for the White House, one would have been surprised that there are no right-wing groups ready to go up in arms against him. So, I wasn't at all taken aback this morning when I accessed the dashboard to post here on IkengaComments and saw an ad that claims its intent to expose 'The Real Barack Obama' in a 'free special report'. The ad by an entity that calls itself "Human Events" solicits e-mail address from IkengaComments audience with which it would send them the 'free report'.

Well, my journalistic curiosity compelled me to access the ad, which reveals that "Human Events" prides itself as the 'Leading Conservative Movement Since 1944'. The hidden faces behind this campaign against the Senator's campaign are alleging that he has 'a radical stance on abortion', and is prominent 'in corruption scandals that has been (sic) virtually ignored by the mainstream media'

Although I wouldn't for the life of me lend them my time and e-mail address to help them push their tommy rot, it's obvious from their ad that they want to disseminate cooked-up lies as 'ammunition ...to end Obama's White House dreams once and for all'. Without raising alarm over this shadowy entity and those who are funding it, one obvious inference that anyone can easily draw from them is that: they are certainly worried already that Senator Obama's campaign is striking the right chords in mainstream voters across the board in the US population.

One shouldn't be under any illusion that they won't stop at anything to undo his campaign. But my assessment of Senator Obama's quest is that, the man and his bid for the White House is already a dilemma for evil-minded people and what they represent in America since its history. My prediction is that given the Senator's sound over-all credentials, anyone, be that one a detractor or an admirer who doesn't carefully assess his/her negative views on him before they are aired, will run the risks of self-destruction. Attempts to smear him will bounce off him so cleanly that those who are behind such attempts will regret ever trying. Such potential manufacturers of smear against Senator Obama must ask Australia Prime Minister, John Howard his experience when he tried to use the usual aiding-the-terrorists charge against the Senator when he used his annoucement to condemn the invasion of Iraq. If you recall, from the outset that charge was perfected by supporters of the invasion of Iraq and used effectively to silence their opponents. Even Senator Joe Biden who tried to say something complimentary about Senator Obama was almost burnt when people felt that he was being unnecessarily patronizing. Senator Obama reminds me so much of the flamingo in Igbo lore. The immaculately white-feathered Mr. Flamingo was smeared with charcoal by his detractors, and behold, before they could blink an eye Mr. Flamingo re-emerged after a brief encounter in a slight drizzle with a more impeccable attire of white plumage.

As the Igbo often say, the only thing that detractors would possibly say to a spotless beauty is, 'please move on with your beauty'--elechasia onye mara nma, asi ya biko mara gawa!

An Open Letter to Nigeria's PDP Presidential Candidate, Mr. Yar'Adua

2007-04-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

Why Not You? Why Not in Nigeria?

Dear Mr. Yar’Adua:

Greetings to you, sir. I must start this letter to you with the apology that you forgive me if it turns out that it fails to capture or meet the conventional letter writing style that used to be taught in schools. I have gotten so accustomed to the e-mail that I will not be surprised at all to hear someone observe that I no longer possess the age-old letter writing skills. However, in that regard I think what actually should matter in this case is the extent to which I succeed in conveying my heartfelt feelings about the issues that spurred me on to write you.

Although you and I don’t know ourselves from Adam, I still believe that your aspiration to claim the highest public office in the land is enough grounds for me to bring my views on issues of national importance to your doorsteps. The issues that I have to bring up here to your attention relate to your health. There has been a lot of speculation on it in the newspapers. Aspects of that speculation claim that you suffer from a kidney ailment, which requires you to undergo regular dialysis. Up until now you’ve preferred to let that speculation go on and on without doing what is expected to confirm or debunk it. The other time I read a report in one of the newspapers that a prominent member of your party, the PDP—I don’t exactly remember who it was, please forgive me for that minor tinge of amnesia—proclaimed at a campaign event that you used to be ill but that you recently received some sort of Devine healing. One would wish and hope that you’re indeed the recipient of such rare cure in an age when miracles are no longer common place.

Many people still have not forgotten that you were rushed abroad, to Germany only a few weeks ago where you were treated for “catarrh”. In fact, the stoppers were pulled from the rumour mills at the time. Some newspapers went to the degree of publishing your obituary. Many of your supporters were roundly relieved when you spoke to them on the telephone directly from your hospital bed in Germany at a campaign event. Like them, you were obviously upset with those individuals who peddled the rumours of your death. I did listen to clips of the interview that you gave to the BBC from the same hospital bed. But I don’t recall hearing them ask you the specific health condition that necessitated you to abandon all your presidential campaign commitments to check yourself into a hospital in far away Germany.

No human being can claim that he or she is immune to ailments or even poor health. Given your status in the land, particularly in a situation that you are being seen as the next president of Nigeria, I’m one of those who think that it’s only right for you to make an immediate public disclosure on the state of your health. That, is exactly the way it’s done in the civilized world. Just this morning, today’s Thursday, March 22, former Senator John Edwards, who is also one of the men who are campaigning to let Americans assess then for the presidency of the United States, and his wife Elizabeth called a world press conference to announce that the cancer that the latter is battling has spread! If you recall, Mrs. Edwards is not even running for any office. They took the same approach in 2004 after she was diagnosed. Their approach indicates their unparallel respect for the American people. Their full disclosure saves them and everyone the adversities from the speculations that Americans could have been inundated with in the newspapers. Their approach is the norm here in the United States.

I’ll urge you to consider embracing a similar approach as the Edwards. If you lack faith in the Nigerian healthcare system and doctors, you can fly your German physicians into the country and authorize them to tender a clean bill of health on you if that is the case in a news conference. Embracing full disclosure on your health will not undermine your political ambitions at all. Instead, it would give an in-sight into who you are and the nature of leadership you’ll offer the country. You will, by so-doing, show the world that Nigeria is capable of rising and claiming the highest world standard in leadership responsiveness. I wish you well, sir.

Sincerely

E.C. Ejiogu

Epilogue: This piece was meant to play two weeks ago in an outlet that I write a weekly column in Lagos, Nigeria, but couldn’t because it was considered too sensitive by the editor. I’m releasing it here less than a week before the Nigerian elections.

Lessons from Iran-UK Stand-Off

2007-04-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

Although many commentators have weighed in on the recent stand-off between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Tony Blair's government, there are still a few things that have been left unsaid by all the commentators. One of such unsaid things relates to the lessons that future British Prime Ministers would have to derive from the stand-off and how it was resolved: Nothing should discountenance independence in the formulation and execution of foreign policy. If Tony Blair had sub-let the conduct of the efforts to resolve that stand-off to the Bush White House, there's no doubt that it could have ended differently. From the out-set, it was evident from his sharp rhetoric that he was about to do just that. But as that drew immediate sharp response from the Islamic Republic, there's no doubt that some more reasonable people quickly scrambled to rein Mr. Blair in and saved the day by so-doing.

The news report that the Bush people had offered to assist with sending warplanes to buzz overhead around Revolutionary Guards barracks could certainly have provoked the Islamic Republic to a good degree. The outcome of that could have been far from positive for the captured British navy and marine personnel. Going by its conduct since after the events of September 11, 2001, any rational analyst would agree that as far as the Bush White House is concerned, intimidation seems to matter more than positive outcome in its interaction with the rest of the world. Only a fool would have assumed that flying noisy warplanes over head in Iran would have secured the release of the 15 Britons.

If Mr. Blair had been reasonable in his interaction with the Bush White House, perhaps the latter could have thought twice before embarking on its war of choice in Iraq. Maybe, the misguided elements who embarked on the July 7, terrorist attacks in the London subways and buses could have thought twice as well. The British public, no doubt could have been well off for those.

My Mission and Intentions

2007-04-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

This venture stems from my conscious desire to pitch my tent alongside the rest of the growing community of bloggers in their quest to educate, inform, entertain and even provoke debate. I intend to use this resource and medium to participate and contribute to debates on both current and remote issues that affect Nd'Igbo, Africa and its peoples, and humanity in general.

I don't intend to be shy in my participation in any debate that I deem fit. At the same time, I don't intend to allow myself the lazy luxury of using or lending this medium for propaganda of any sort. Every worthy subject and issue that attracts my intellectual attention would be featured and addressed in my postings. I will not hesitate to show remorse and remedy by way of apology whenever I get facts or issues wrong. I'll welcome comments and suggestions from readers and well wishers.