Nigeria Content Online

While we’ve been otherwise engaged, events in Africa are being dictated by old and new colonial powers.

It is hard to know
which was more dramatic: in Côte d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo was detained
by Alassane Ouattara, just as he had been when the latter was prime
minister in the 1990s. No doubt Gbagbo was an oppressor, and it is not
the intention here to try “settling the precedence between the flea and
the louse” over whether it is his supporters or Ouattara’s who have been
responsible for the most human rights abuse, rape, mutilation and
massacre in the struggle for supremacy in Côte d’Ivoire. Gbagbo should
perhaps have followed the example of his Senegalese counterpart,
Abdoulaye Wade, who – by his own reckoning – had in the past twice
swallowed the bitter pill of a stolen election rather than plunge his
country into conflict. (Yes, of course, there’s a message there for
Nigeria!)

But the
intervention of France in the events that led to Gbagbo’s arrest
(notwithstanding its disingenuous attempt to present sending a convoy of
25 tanks and armoured personnel–carriers to assault his hideout as a
‘protecting civilians’ activity, with Gbagbo’s subsequent arrest due
solely to pro–Ouattara forces who just happened to be on the spot)
cannot be dismissed as merely the result of French President, Nicolas
Sarkozy’s positioning for electoral advantage back home. Rather,
Gbagbo’s fate sends a powerful message to other African leaders who
might try stepping out of line.

It certainly trumped the efforts of the ECOWAS on the Ivorien crisis.

Meanwhile, in
Libya, British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s insistence that
“Muammar Gadaffi Must Go” at the very time when an African Union
delegation to Tripoli had secured Gadaffi’s agreement to a ceasefire
followed by talks, and was on its way to Benghazi to see whether the
opposition Libyan Transitional National Council might also agree to a
ceasefire and talks, seemed designed to trump anything the AU might come
up with too.

The LTNC gave the
AU team a civil enough reception in public, being careful not to dismiss
them out of hand; but although Libyan pro–freedom groups can find yards
more examples of democracy and resistance to oppression in Africa than
in the Arab world, they have hardly hidden their contempt for Africa and
Black Africans, and after rejecting the proposal for not accepting all
their demands, were sneeringly wondering what conflicts Africans have
ever resolved. Mind you, since South African President, Jacob Zuma, had
diplomatically withdrawn from the Benghazi leg of the trip, they might
have forgotten the liberation of the entire southern part of the
continent and Nelson Mandela’s resolution of the Lockerbie matter, to
name but two.

With Western
powers openly demanding régime change, the LTNC was emboldened to not
only reject even a negotiated cease–fire unless Gadaffi stood down, but
to demand that their Western protectors provide them with weapons:
presumably so that they can outdo Gadaffi in slaughtering their
fellow–citizens.

The excuse that
previous cease–fires have not been observed is thin. After all, those
were self–proclaimed by Gadaffi, whereas what the AU took to Benghazi
was a proposal that Africa was ready to back and seek wider
international support for. If there was justified concern that Gadaffi
would continue moving his troops into position under cover of cessation
of hostilities, what stopped guarantees on that from being part of the
negotiations?

By the end of the
week, the goal of regime change was even more baldly stated with
Sarkozy, David Cameron of Britain and Barack Obama of the U.S.A.
threatening to continue bombing Libya until Gadaffi was removed. With
no cease–fire in place, the ‘protecting civilians’ mantra was still
available to the triumvirate. But it is an increasingly discredited fig
leaf.

Britain’s World
War II Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, once famously advised that
“Jaw Jaw is better than War War.” His 21st Century heirs seem bent on
encouraging peoples who would often be better off with an imperfect
peace on which they can build, to instead continue conflicts which they
themselves are only sporadically interested in seeing through to
conclusion.

The brutality that
many Libyans suffered under the ‘Brotherly Leader’ makes it impossible
not to sympathise with their resistance to ever again coming under his
control, and while Black Africa might not expect a particularly warm
relationship should the LTNC succeed in ousting Gadaffi, his own record
on the continent is hardly such as to cause undue sorrow over his
personal fate. But a negotiated cease–fire would not have re–imposed
Gadaffi’s control over those parts of the country that had risen against
him, and could well have re–emboldened unarmed civilian protesters in
those parts of Libya that had not. So why the insistence on “War War?”

PS: I’d intended
to write something rebutting the Youth Mafia’s complaints about my
article on ‘De Yoot Vote’ this week. But I realised that I would only
be repeating my ‘The Young Do Grow’ article of May 9, 2010.
(http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Columns/5565422–182/story.csp)
In any case, they only attacked with words — what Churchill might have
called “Jaw Jaw.”