Nigeria Content Online

The
World Cup is bringing deserved appreciation of South Africa as a nation
that transitioned from white minority domination to a vibrant pluralist
democracy. Yet its achievements stand largely alone on the continent.
Of the 17 African nations that are commemorating their 50th
anniversaries of independence this year – the Democratic Republic of
Congo and Somalia will both do so in the coming weeks – few have
anything to truly celebrate.

Five decades ago, African independence was worth
rejoicing over: These newly created states signaled an end to the
violent, humiliating Western domination of the continent, and they were
quickly recognised by the international community. Sovereignty gave
fledgling elites the shield to protect their weak states against
continued colonial subjugation and the policy instruments to promote
economic development.

Yet because these countries were recognised by the
international community before they even really existed, because the
gift of sovereignty was granted from outside rather than earned from
within, it came without the benefit of popular accountability, or even
a social contract between rulers and citizens.

Buttressed by the legality and impunity that
international sovereignty conferred upon their actions, too many of
Africa’s politicians and officials twisted the normal activities of a
state beyond recognition, transforming mundane tasks like policing,
lawmaking and taxation into weapons of extortion.

So, for the past five decades, most Africans have
suffered predation of colonial proportions by the very states that were
supposed to bring them freedom. And most of these nations, broke from
their own thievery, are now unable to provide their citizens with basic
services like security, roads, hospitals and schools. What can be done?

The first and most urgent task is that the donor
countries that keep these nations afloat should cease sheltering
African elites from accountability. To do so, the international
community must move swiftly to derecognize the worst-performing African
states, forcing their rulers – for the very first time in their
checkered histories – to search for support and legitimacy at home.

Radical as this idea may sound, it is not without
precedent. Undemocratic Taiwan was derecognised by most of the world in
the 1970s (as the corollary of recognizing Beijing). This loss of
recognition led the ruling Kuomintang party to adopt new policies in
search of domestic support. The regime liberalised the economy,
legalised opposition groups, abolished martial law, organised elections
and even issued an apology to the Taiwanese people for past misrule,
eventually turning the country into a fast-growing, vibrant democracy.

In Africa, similarly, the unrecognised, breakaway
state of Somaliland provides its citizens with relative peace and
democracy, offering a striking counterpoint to the violence and misery
of neighboring sovereign Somalia. It was in part the absence of
recognition that forced the leaders of the Somali National Movement in
the early ‘90s to strike a bargain with local clan elders and create
legitimate participatory institutions in Somaliland.

What does this mean in practice? Donor governments
would tell the rulers of places like Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea or
Sudan – all nightmares to much of their populations – that they no
longer recognise them as sovereign states. Instead, they would agree to
recognise only African states that provide their citizens with a
minimum of safety and basic rights.

The logistics of derecognition would no doubt be
complicated. Embassies would be withdrawn on both sides. These states
would be expelled from the United Nations and other international
organisations. All macroeconomic, budget-supporting and post-conflict
reconstruction aid programmes would be cancelled. (Nongovernmental
groups and local charities would continue to receive money.) If this
were to happen, relatively benevolent states like South Africa and a
handful of others would go on as before. But in the continent’s most
troubled countries, politicians would suddenly lose the legal
foundations of their authority. Some of these repressive leaders,
deprived of their sovereign tools of domination and the international
aid that underwrites their regimes, might soon find themselves
overthrown.

The international community would reward African
states that begin to provide their citizens with basic rights and
services, that curb violence and that once again commit resources to
development projects, with re-recognition. Aid would return. More
important, these states would finally have acquired some degree of
popular accountability and domestic legitimacy.

Like any experiment, de- and-re-recognition is
risky. Some fear it could promote conflict, that warlords would simply
seize certain mineral-rich areas and run violent, lawless quasi-states.
But Africa is already rife with violence, and warlordism is already a
widespread phenomenon. While unrecognised countries might still
mistreat their people, history shows that weak, isolated regimes have
rarely been able to survive without making significant concessions to
segments of their populations.

For many Africans, 50 years of sovereignty has
been an abject failure, reproducing the horrors of colonial-era
domination under the guise of freedom. International derecognition of
abusive states would be a first step toward real liberation.

Pierre Englebert, a professor of African politics
at Pomona College, is the author, most recently, of “Africa: Unity,
Sovereignty and Sorrow.”

© 2010 The New York Times

I was away for too long, cocooned in a country where football is
aberrantly called soccer. I got sucked in to one of the local games they refer
to as World Tournaments. How can Boston Celtics or LA Lakers be described as
World Champions when they never stepped out of the United States of America (not
even to Puerto Rico) to play another country? Same with the Indianapolis Colts
or the New Orleans Saint’s who were dubbed, world champions after winning the
Super Bowl in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

With balls freezing under my thermo-pants (trousers please)
every Super Bowl Sunday, I would go to Uncle Sunny Oboh’s house, a fellow
immigrant and lifelong supporter of the Washington Redskins and men who wear
women’s terelin, throw oblong cocoa pod-like leather with fat hands and call it
football. And none of us would have the balls to call a spade a spade, and
declare what Americans call football is known to the rest of the world as
handball. But that is America for you, they are the world and the rest of us
are the children.

Instead of screaming foul play, we’d fake excitement because how
else could we defrost the snow that had formed icicles in our homeland
memories?

When I first came back to Nigeria, I mistakenly called real
football soccer and a co-worker gave me an evil eye full of, “this is not
America, stupid”. I had forgotten that football was sacrosanct in Nigeria, like
religion, like opium; the people get so high on it and many get killed because
of a game of kicking a spherical piece of leather around for ninety minutes.
Before America’s myopia got me killed, I learned to correct my tongue,
repeating to myself many times, it’s not soccer, it’s football, sucker! And now
the World Cup fever has seized me like a New England winter, I wonder how I
could have forgotten football, something that had been woven so tightly into my
cultural upbringing?

To forget football is to forget my late father who would find
time despite his hectic schedule to watch me and friends play football with
oranges under my grandfather’s huge pear tree, and mediate when fights broke
out because football, whether by kids or adults, is a highly competitive game.
Or to forget my mother who was my doctor and physical therapist who nursed me
back to the next bruising game.

To forget football is to forget my senior brother, Osajele, who
bought me my first Felele out of his very first salary in life. I don’t
remember telling him thank you because I bolted out the door as soon as he
handed me the light weight ball and started screaming down the street like a
Holy Ghost possessed Pentecostal. I soon became the Pele and the king of boys
in my quarter and every one of them wanted to be my friend.

To forget football is to forget my PT teacher in primary school,
who gave me a long look on the field one day and said “Oyinbo you are too thin,
go and blacken the board for the next lesson”. Till today I still hate him more
than BODMAS. That Odemwingie guy could have been me, though my senior brother
would probably kill me first before allowing me to plait my hair. He would say,
“best footballer my foot – are you a woman? ” To forget football is to forget
my good friend, Okwy Okeke, who is so passionate about the game that he talks
about it like a first kiss, good wine or that very first love making that
lingers in one’s memory like a lick of honey in a bee-less country.

To forget football is to forget the one unifying universal
language, the hope that holds the world together as one. The single pot from
which we all drink without locking horns, where you do not hear expressions
like “geopolitical zone”, where Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Esan etc, has one heart
beating inside their Nigerian body.

To forget football is to forget our dictator, late Sani Abacha
and the days he had us on his killing noose. For a brief moment, the country
breathed peace during the 1994 World Cup until the Italians sent us packing, a
situation that was more painful than the hell Abacha was meting on Nigerians.
And hell broke loose again; such was the dictator’s negative vibe.

To forget football is to forget the recent history of our dear
beloved late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s ‘cabal-liers’, who found football
important enough to include in their scripted speech from the spirit world:
“I’d also like to use this opportunity to wish our national team the Super
Eagles success in our Nation’s Cup matches in Angola…blah blah”. And the Eagles
did not come home with the cup, because lies bring bad luck.

To forget football is to forget that we now have a president
whose name is Goodluck, a man who ascended the throne despite the evil machinations
of political Maradonas. And this is why I am wishing our national team, the
Super Eagles, good luck (not through BBC). May they bring us the ultimate cup,
the true mark of world champion, no matter the tricks and maneuvering of the
other teams’ cabalists.

What
is wrong with the shape of my cap, and does it determine why any streak
of good is a freak, and any strand of evil civil? Why am damned for
being from the land of Wrong Caps, unable to stand up among the best?
Show a converse competence or do something bad, nobody shows any
surprise, since, again, I am from that part of the realm that wears the
wrong kind of cap.

When my black ink
pours on people who just happen to come from the part of the country
where they wear, by right, the right kind of cap, I am attacked,
vilified and thrown into the dungeons of other useless cretins who just
happen to be wearing the wrong kinds of caps.

What is so wrong
with my cap that when I try to live by the norms, I am labeled
conformist, or try something else and earn the tag radical? When I try
to be both, I am called unstable. What is wrong with my cap that when I
try to articulate my thoughts, I am slammed as misleading, and when I
insist on explaining, stamped controversial?

Is the shape of my
cap so bereft of beauty that for opting to do what I believe in, I am
branded fundamentalist, and because I get somewhat confused, branded
intolerant? For slowing down to figure the conundrum I am declared
un-ambitious. When I try to catch up, it is with a determination that
is too aggressive. Fighting the injustice of blanket stereotypes, I am
an insurgent. But from the prism of so many prisons, I dismiss all as
unacceptable.

To condemn me, they
say there is something wrong with the shape of my cap. So I ask: Did
the bunker-busters bury the bonds of brotherhood, interring all in
hellholes of hatred? Is the quest for liberty blinded and chained to
the anchors of a brooding bay? So why can my views not be mine, and my
voice not heard?

What is so badly
wrong with the shape of my cap that I cannot not simply be me, without
the tags of labels, or does my complexion cloud the color of my
character? Does my location limit the length of my liberty? Does the
spirit of my conviction shackle my soul? Does my maleness maim the mine
of my mind? Then why bury me for the shape of my cap?

What has the shape
of my cap got to do with the fact that today the honest are wretched
and thieving knaves knighted? Why is it that eyes are not for seeing
and ears not for hearing? Does that explain why water is everywhere yet
people thirst, or when it comes to leadership, it is ‘me’ first?

How is my cap to
blame that we live in an age where misery is carried in sacks; that our
democracy is stunted like snails on speed tracks; that worries burrow
foreheads into cracks; that tongues wag without talking; that eyes are
bright, yet unseeing, ears sharp, but unhearing or that everything is
abundant, yet life’s hardly worth living?

What has my cap got
to do with the fact that the thin wish to be obese and the obese aspire
to be thin as reeds; or that enlightenment is at a peak but ignorance
makes the horizon bleak? Is it my fault that truth flees in the face of
lies and facts are fanned by farce? Or why we live in today and yet run
from it, or hope for tomorrow and yet fear it?

All I want is a bit
of sun, and a bit of life’s sum. It is not my fault that I come from
the land of Wrong Caps. It is not my burden when brothers from grey
lands – child, woman and man and become victims in a wave of mindless,
violent death. That wave kills and crushes all within its breath –
nature’s own death. It does not speak the language of children, nor
does it understand the words of men. It only reverberates with the
tongue of death, echoing from a deep depth; yet again nature’s moment
of madness.

When blind hatred
reigns, lives, homes, all become fodder for nature’s own mass murder.
And there will be no convict because nature’s crime has no precinct. So
force a spot of humanity from within to humble the haughty and the
naughty. Even knotty, toughened hearts can be melted by malleable
murmur.

And really, there is nothing wrong with the shape of my cap.

Tomorrow
will be the 12th day of June two thousand and ten. It will be just
another day. You will observe that the sun will rise from the East in
the morning like all other days. The traffic on your way to work won’t
be any lighter. You will still see that checkpoint and that skinny
policeman who has made himself a tollgate. The beggars at the street
junction won’t look any different. There begging bowls will be no
different from today. I suspect that at this time tomorrow, there will
be no power. . I suspect that right now, your generator is even getting
in the way of your comprehension. It will just be another day in our
country. The air will smell the same.

But take time off to read the dailies. They will
all be screaming with similar headlines. They will talk about a day
gone, of a time past, of a paradise lost. They will scream with
memoirs, with pictures, with tales: Tales of a lost mandate, of a lost
opportunity, of a failure of reasoning, of the ill fate of a man and a
people and indeed their failure to learn from the past.

It’s June 12. The political editors are jumping
over each other. It’s a good day for maximum sales. Who gets the best
feature out? Who paints the best gloomy picture, a seventeen-year-old
picture, a reminder of what’s been called our best shot, a sad recall
of what could have been? It’s like our Good Friday without the eventual
Easter. A commemoration. A memorial.

For some it’s now an obsession. Like a religious
feast, marked year in year out with rallies and paid advertorials; with
outlandish interviews that progressively twist history; with press
conferences and Television talk shows by people who were either victors
or villains of the day but who all claim today to be democrats and who
wave their democratic credentials in our faces. The credentials are
made of party identity cards and stolen naira.

One of them, the most notorious of all by many
estimates recently experienced a brain wave. He not only has become so
democratic that he fancies ruling the nation again, he also think we
should, as a nation immortalise the Man the day is about. The Man, his
friend who he robbed and who like Brutus he stabbed in the back and
disappeared, claiming to be stepping aside. But he ran off to the
hilltop mansion he built with our common wealth to hibernate for a
while.

And there are those who have ridden on the back of
this day to many political victories. What did they do while in office?
They stole their bit and left us the ghost of the day. Now, they are
not sure on which part of the divide they stand. They are scared we
don’t trust them any more so today they jump into our faces again with
eloquent speeches about democracy, about how they had been persecuted
for standing behind the Man and the Mandate.

It’s June 12 again and nothing has changed. The
Political uncertainty seems even more obvious today. Flip further down
the pages of the daily and it becomes apparent that in all the talking
about 1993 the same things are being said today. The constitution
review is dragging on. There is no electoral Act. We have no voters
register. Even INEC is not sure about holding elections as scheduled.
There is indeed no schedule neither are there modalities.

Doesn’t it feel like we are in rewind mode? Like
déjà vu? Like a widening gyre? Don’t you feel the emptiness? Don’t you
see the same expression on their faces, the same deception in their
words? Aren’t we tired of the noise and the much ado about the day?
Aren’t we now bored sick of it all?

There is probably still no electric power where
you are and the generator is dying out. The potholes on the road are
getting wider, the shame and despair deeper. Poverty is still at 70%
and unemployment is weighing heavily down on us.

Tomorrow will be the same as today and yes, the sun will certainly
set in the west like on all other days. But perhaps what is different
today, is that there is a yearning like never before among our people
world over for change, and it is our duty to maintain that pressure in
what ever way we can, adding our voice to public discourse, joining a
political party, registering to vote, getting others to get involved
until the desired change comes.

Parliamentary squabbles are universal, a sign of a thriving
democracy. Anywhere in the world where the rule of law is monitored by a few
citizens instead of one dictator, the lawmakers can sometimes seem to behave
like a bunch of school children in a playground.

Words of disagreement can degenerate to fist fights, and when
blows are not enough chairs or the sacred mace come in handy to drive a point
home. Elsewhere in the democratic world, lawmakers’ points of disagreement are
usually in the interest of their citizens and country. Here in Nigeria, when
our lawmakers fight, the citizens’ welfare is usually far from the reason. It
is a fight by themselves, of themselves and for themselves.

Nigerians do not have a dog in the current imbroglio that has
engulfed the House of Representatives. The fight between the Speaker, Dimeji
Bankole, and a group that call themselves the “Progressive Minded Legislators”
is a public display of a house that is divided against itself, and if we are to
go by the news of ineffectiveness and corruption coming out of the House, it
has long fallen.

These newly minted progressives, about ten lawmakers from the six
geo-political zones, say the Speaker is corrupt, inept and high-handed. Really?
Did they just wake up to realise this or this is a case of when there is war,
any weapon is legitimate?

These so called progressives and the embattled Speaker of the
House do not appear to care about the people or the country, reserving their
passion for issues that concern their personal welfare. The laws that receive
prompt and undivided attention are those that fatten their already
budging-from-the-seams bank accounts.

All we have to do is lift the veil and peep behind closed doors
to see the true reason for this disagreement in the House. This ultimatum given
to the Speaker to resign or “be disgraced out of the office” reeks of
disgruntled elements. The row boils down to who is getting what and who is not.

The Progressive Minded Legislators claim to have incriminating
documents that will nail the Speaker and they are threatening to send these to
the EFCC. The ultimatum is clearly a bluff, and Mr. Bankole knows it too. It
will be interesting to see how the Speaker is the only corrupt lawmaker in a
House that has had numerous allegations of corruption leveled against it.

What we ordinary citizens would like, even after this rift is settled, is to
see the purported evidence against the Speaker sent to EFCC, ICPC, NSA and the
SSS, as threatened. Until then, from where we sit, they are all birds of the
same feather and what they have embarked on now is nothing short of a child’s
play.