The Insidiousness of Propaganda (2)

This post continues from the one immediately prior.

I have known for decades that there is no such thing as "objective" and "unbiased" when it comes to the media. Indeed, I strive to get "news" from rival sources with contradictory biases, knowing that each side will highlight the part of the news that ties into their bias and ignore the part of the news that doesn't. Even so, I caught myself one day having a viscerally negative reaction to a politician from a foreign country (i.e. not Nigeria) after months of reading relentlessly negative portrayals of that politician from variously biased news sources from the man's home continent.

What made these sources (from the "right" and the "left") dislike the man was his contrary opinion on one specific issue on which journalists from the "right" and "left" of this particular region agreed on.  The thing is, the man had every right to have that opinion, and regardless of whether I agreed with him or not, the journalists' shared position was simply an ideological opinion and not an absolute truth.

To be honest, I didn't and don't have an opinion on the man, because I do not understand the man's language and hence have never heard (or read) him expressing his opinion in his own words, from his own mouth (or pen). Everything I have ever heard or learned about him came from the mouths and pens of people who dislike him because he doesn't share their opinion. They tend to caricature him as being stupid, looking stupid and talking stupid. I always made it a point to disregard the caricaturing, but one day, in one moment, after years of reading about him in the English-language media, I looked at a picture of him and the first thing that came to mind was he looked stupid.

I instantaneously caught myself, realized that for all my efforts to block out the propaganda, I had in fact been affected by it.

This video, pulled from Youtube, discusses how journalists, politicians and the media can subtly or openly influence and manipulate citizen perceptions of other peoples.

The Insidiousness of Propaganda (1)

I prefer not to copy and paste entire articles from newspapers' websites. Many people earn their living through journalism. Heaven knows jobs are scarce everywhere in the world, and that formal sector jobs are especially scarce in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We have neither Welfare nor the Dole, so one shouldn't make it more difficult for people to support themselves, their families and their retirement through honest work.


Having said that, there is a point I want to make, and in order to make that point, I have to be sure you read the entirety of the article I am about to post here. I don't read the newspaper from which it was sourced, but my attention was drawn to it by a writer on another website.

This is how racism takes root
The different ways the media covered two cases of men grooming children for sex show how shockingly easy it is to demonise a whole community

Joseph Harker
The Guardian, Sunday 22 July 2012 20.30 BST

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them. A shocking story. But maybe you haven't heard. Because these sex assaults did not take place in Rochdale, where a similar story led the news for days in May, but in Derby earlier this month. Fifteen girls aged 13 to 15, many of them in care, were preyed on by the men. And though they were not working as a gang, their methods were similar – often targeting children in care and luring them with, among other things, cuddly toys. But this time, of the eight predators, seven were white, not Asian. And the story made barely a ripple in the national media.

Of the daily papers, only the Guardian and the Times reported it. There was no commentary anywhere on how these crimes shine a light on British culture, or how middle-aged white men have to confront the deep flaws in their religious and ethnic identity. Yet that's exactly what played out following the conviction in May of the "Asian sex gang" in Rochdale, which made the front page of every national newspaper. Though analysis of the case focused on how big a factor was race, religion and culture, the unreported story is of how politicians and the media have created a new racial scapegoat. In fact, if anyone wants to study how racism begins, and creeps into the consciousness of an entire nation, they need look no further.

Imagine you were living in a town of 20,000 people – the size of, say, Penzance in Cornwall – and one day it was discovered that one of its residents had been involved in a sex crime. Would it be reasonable to say that the whole town had a cultural problem, that it needed to address the scourge – that anyone not doing so was part of a "conspiracy of silence"? But the intense interest in the Rochdale story arose from a January 2011 Times "scoop" that was based on the conviction of at most 50 British Pakistanis out of a total UK population of 1.2 million, just one in 24,000: one person per Penzance.

Make no mistake, the Rochdale crimes were vile, and those convicted deserve every year of their sentences. But where, amid all the commentary, was the evidence that this is a racial issue; that there's something inherently perverted about Muslim or Asian culture?

Even the Child Protection and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), which has also studied potential offenders who have not been convicted, has only identified 41 Asian gangs (of 230 in total) and 240 Asian individuals – and they are spread across the country. But, despite this, a new stereotype has taken hold: that a significant proportion of Asian men are groomers (and the rest of their communities know of it and keep silent).

But if it really is an "Asian" thing, how come Indians don't do it? If it's a "Pakistani" thing, how come an Afghan was convicted in the Rochdale case? And if it's a "Muslim" thing, how come it doesn't seem to involve anyone of African or Middle Eastern origin? The standard response to anyone who questions this is: face the facts, all those convicted in Rochdale were Muslim. Well, if one case is enough to make such a generalisation, how about if all the members of a gang of armed robbers were white; or cybercriminals; or child traffickers? (All three of these have happened.) Would we be so keen to "face the facts" and make it a problem the whole white community has to deal with? Would we have articles examining what it is about Britishness or Christianity or Europeanness, that makes people so capable of such things?

In fact, Penzance had not just one paedophile, but a gang of four. They abused 28 girls, some as young as five, and were finally convicted two years ago. All were white. And last month, at a home affairs select committee, deputy children's commissioner Sue Berelowitz quoted a police officer who had told her that "there isn't a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited".

Whatever the case, we know that abuse of white girls is not a cultural or religious issue because there is no longstanding history of it taking place in Asia or the Muslim world.

How did middle-aged Asian men from tight-knit communities even come into contact with white teenage girls in Rochdale? The main cultural relevance in this story is that vulnerable, often disturbed, young girls, regularly out late at night, often end up in late-closing restaurants and minicab offices, staffed almost exclusively by men. After a while, relationships build up, with the men offering free lifts and/or food. For those with a predatory instinct, sexual exploitation is an easy next step. This is an issue of what men can do when away from their own families and in a position of power over badly damaged young people.

It's a story repeated across Britain, by white and other ethnic groups: where the opportunity arises, some men will take advantage. The precise method, and whether it's an individual or group crime, depends on the particular setting – be they priests, youth workers or networks on the web.

Despite all we know about racism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Rochdale case showed how shockingly easy it is to demonise a community. Before long, the wider public will believe the problem is endemic within that race/religion, and that anyone within that group who rebuts the claims is denying this basic truth. Normally, one would expect a counter-argument to force its way into the discussion. But in this case the crimes were so horrific that right-thinking people were naturally wary of being seen to condone them. In fact, the reason I am writing this is that I am neither Asian nor Muslim nor Pakistani, so I cannot be accused of being in denial or trying to hide a painful truth. But I am black, and I know how racism works; and, more than that, I have a background in maths and science, so I know you can't extrapolate a tiny, flawed set of data and use it to make a sweeping generalisation.

I am also certain that, if the tables were turned and the victims were Asian or Muslim, we would have been subjected to equally skewed "expert" commentary asking: what is wrong with how Muslims raise girls? Why are so many of them on the streets at night? Shouldn't the community face up to its shocking moral breakdown?

While our media continue to exclude minority voices in general, such lazy racial generalisations are likely to continue. Even the story of a single Asian man acting alone in a sex case made the headlines. As in Derby this month, countless similar cases involving white men go unreported.

We have been here before, of course: in the 1950s, West Indian men were labelled pimps, luring innocent young white girls into prostitution. By the 1970s and 80s they were vilified as muggers and looters. And two years ago, Channel 4 ran stories, again based on a tiny set of data, claiming there was an endemic culture of gang rape in black communities. The victims weren't white, though, so media interest soon faded. It seems that these stories need to strike terror in the heart of white people for them to really take off.

What is also at play here is the inability of people, when learning about a different culture or race, to distinguish between the aberrations of a tiny minority within that group, and the normal behaviour of a significant section. Some examples are small in number but can be the tip of a much wider problem: eg, knife crime, which is literally the sharp end of a host of problems affecting black communities ranging from family breakdown, to poverty, to low school achievement and social exclusion.

But in Asia, Pakistan or Islam there is no culture of grooming or sex abuse – any more than there is anywhere else in the world – so the tiny number of cases have no cultural significance. Which means those who believe it, or perpetuate it, are succumbing to racism, much as they may protest. Exactly the same mistake was made after 9/11, when the actions of a tiny number of fanatics were used to cast aspersions against a 1.5 billion-strong community worldwide. Motives were questioned: are you with us or the terrorists? How fundamental are your beliefs? Can we trust you?

Imagine if, after Anders Breivik's carnage in Norway last year, which he claimed to be in defence of the Christian world, British people were repeatedly asked whether they supported him? Lumped together in the same white religious group as the killer and constantly told they must renounce him, or explain why we should believe that their type of Christianity – even if they were non-believers – is different from his. "It's nothing to do with me", most people would say. But somehow that answer was never good enough when given by Muslims over al-Qaida. And this hectoring was self-defeating because it caused only greater alienaton and resentment towards the west and, in particular, its foreign policies.

Ultimately, the urge to vilify groups of whom we know little may be very human, and helps us bond with those we feel are "like us". But if we are going to deal with the world as it is, and not as a cosy fantasyland where our group is racially and culturally supreme, we have to recognise when sweeping statements are false.

And if we truly care about the sexual exploitation of girls, we need to know that we must look at all communities, across the whole country, and not just at those that play to a smug sense of superiority about ourselves.

Channels TV Report on the Nigerian Police College, Ikoyi, Lagos

I criticize the Nigerian Police Force a lot, explicitly and implicitly. Every Nigerian does.

Even police officers are critical of the Force, none more so than Sergeant Musa Usman, the speaker of truth to power whom I wrote about in this post. I still don't know what happened to Sergeant Usman.  If you know anything more about his story, leave a reply or email me.

Among many posts I have made directly or indirectly about the Force is this one, about the murder of a 3-year-old girl, Kaosarat (or Kausarat) Muritala. In September of 2012, the Police Corporal accused of the crime was convicted and sentenced to death. I have not seen anything in the media in terms of an appeal, or in terms of the sentence being carried out.

There is another side of the story, one told in part by Sergeant Usman. The conditions of service of the Nigerian Police Force not only encourage things like graft and corruption, but discourage things like bravery or initiative in the face of violent criminals.

I have often said on this blog that the people who govern Nigeria do not want Nigeria to have an effective law enforcement system or an effective judiciary. If these institutions functioned properly, most of what the political and economic leadership are currently free to do in advancement of their self-interest would become impossible, difficult or would attract a higher risk of sanction than currently pertains. As such, the people most responsible for ensuring that the Police Force are effective are simultaneously the people least interested in the Police Force being effective.

This is not just true of political leadership beyond the Force, but is true of leadership within the Force. Read the blog post on Sergeant Usman, and you will see where he makes clear that the top brass of the Force are ultimately responding for the corruption and graft. They deploy their men in a manner so as to make money for themselves, taking a cut of whatever "action" their men are involved in and passing a share of that cut up the chain of command.

This paradox of the government being constitutionally responsible for an effective law enforcement system while being simultaneously opposed, in practice, to the existence of effective law enforcement has existed since the founding on the modern Nigerian Police Force as an arm of the British Colonial Government(s). From the start, the Nigerian Police Force has been obliged to systemically ignore the fact that the government(s) it served were illegitimate, that these governments could only sustain themselves in power by doing illegitimate and unconstitutional things, and that the policy-making output of these governments were inevitably going to be just as illegitimate.

Indeed, from the very start the Nigerian Police have been poorly paid, and have been expected to supplement their wages through activities that were just as illegitimate as the activities of the governments they served. Yes, believe it or not, Nigerian Police were "supplementing" their pay as far back as the colonial days. I know we have all been taught to believe that everything was perfect when the British ruled us, but that is colonial propaganda still being spread by the products of colonial education systems.

Having said that, the British were a foreign people pursuing their own interests at the expense of ours.  What is our excuse? We regained our self-rule in 1960.  Why have we continued the pattern?  Why are we consigning ourselves to a situation where public security is ephemeral rather than substantive?

As citizens, we perceive the police to be behaving badly, but in reality the police are doing exactly what is expected of them. This is what they were created to do, this is what they are trained to do.  Their original job was never to protect us from crime, but to protect the British colonialists from us and to punish us if we didn't obey British decrees that we neither approved of nor were consulted about.  What we in post-colonial Nigeria see as their brutal treatment of "bloody civilians" is the modern iteration of an institutional culture put in place from the very beginning to create a Force that sees us, the people they are supposed to protect, as people to be beaten into submission on behalf of whoever happens to be in government. Indeed, the post-colonial police have been more likely to aid in rigging an election than they have been to arrest an election rigger.

Again, one can see why the British would do this .... but what is our excuse?

I am a federalist, like every other Nigerian, so I am not philosophically opposed to "state police", but calling for "state police" ignores the basic problem. The Regional and Provincial police forces of the past were just as likely to follow the colonial paradigm, and just as ineffectual when it came to the issue of public security and crime-fighting. If things seems more peaceful in the past, it is because there were fewer armed robbery gangs, for example, and not because the Colonial or First Republic police had any particular skill at fighting armed robbery gangs. Beating up the political opponents of the major regional First Republic parties was a more likely function.

What I am trying to get you to understand is that the Police Force functions the way it was designed to function. For an individual officers, your choice is to do what the institution requires of you, or to exit into the congested pool of unemployed or under-employed formal sector Nigerians. Tell the truth, most of us make compromises of one kind or another to keep our jobs, so long as the compromise does not hurt us individually, and the Nigerian policeman is no different.

I wonder sometimes if the same men and women wouldn't have been more effective as a Police Force if our Federal Republic had been genuinely interested in making them an effective Force.

Channels TV is organizing a forum to discuss the Nigerian Police Force, and prepared this report as a sort of primer to the problems facing the Force. It seems the disincentives to effective policing start as early as the induction to the Nigerian Police College.

On the issue of Kidnapping

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is the Finance Minister and "Coordinating Minister for the Economy".  Last year,  her mother, Professor Kamene Okonjo, was kidnapped and later released.

I am vvery happy that it all ended well and safely for her mother, but the Finance Minister seemed to have chosen to use the incident to play politics, telling a press conference her mother's abduction was linked to the controversial fuel subsidy issue.

Let me stress that I am not heartless. I know exactly how she must have felt when she was told her mother was in the hands of the kidnappers, and exactly how she must have felt to embrace her mother again when it was all over. In such situations you might do or say things that you wouldn't do or say in other circumstances.

But Dr. Okonjo-Iweala occupies what is purported to be the most powerful position in the Jonathan Administration cabinet. In theory, she wields (or is meant to wield) more influence than the any of the Vice-President, the External Affairs Minister or the Defence Minister.  She is presented to the public as though she were President Jonathan's "prime minister" and guiding force of his government.  Of course, the true nature of Nigerian politics is such that other priorities and principals are likely more influential on the President's decision-making than anything Dr. Okonjo-Iweala says or does ....

.... but you start to wonder if the Nigerian Federal Government is giving the long-running epidemic of kidnapping the seriousness, focus, attention and resources it deserves.

With the greatest of respect, the kidnapping of Dr. Okonjo-Iweala's mother had nothing to do with politics or the fuel subsidy issue. It was just another kidnapping in a thriving criminal enterprise. Her mother's situation was only unique in the sense that kidnappings only make the national news when a prominent citizen is taken. Aside from having a daughter who is the Finance Minister, the Okonjo Family are Ogwashi-Ukwu royalty; one newspaper properly addressed Professor Kamene Okonjo as "Her Royal Highness".

Before I go on to talk about the scourge of kidnapping, let me take a moment to put it in perspective, since this blog post may be read by foreigners who don't have firsthand experience of Nigeria. Before the Nigeria'99 World Youth Cup, and years later in advance of the 2010 World Cup hosted by South Africa, one noticed segments of the foreign media creating the impression that as soon as you walked out of your aeroplane into Nigeria or South Africa you would be accosted by violent criminals.

I do want to discuss our public security problems, and I do consider this issue to be at or near the top of the priority list for reform, restructuring and transformation, but I do not want to add to the type of misinformation that preceded Nigeria'99.  There are at least 100 million people living in Nigeria, most of whom are not directly affected by crime of any kind of a daily basis. In all the time I lived in Nigeria, I was never affected by crime. My first personal experience of crime came after I moved to the USA for tertiary education.

Having said that, all Nigerians would agree that the rate of kidnapping in the Federal Republic is far too high, and that the kidnappers are very bold in their actions because they know the odds of facing any kind of judicial sanction are far too slim.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala's mother is not the first high-profile victim, nor is she the first family-member of a high-profile person to be kidnapped. Indeed, not too long after her release came news Nkiru Sylanus had been kidnapped. Ms. Sylvanus is a not-famous Nigerian film actress who now serves as a Special Assistant on Public Affairs to Imo State Governor Rochas Okorocha.  The criminals who kidnapped Dr. Okonjo-Iweala's mother had demanded ₦200 million; those who took Ms. Sylvanus wanted ₦100 million.

Ms. Sylvanus was released after her family paid ₦8 million. The Nigerian Police Force subsequently issued a public statement saying her family had paid the ransom though they (the police) had told the family not too. After Ms. Sylvanus' release, the police arrested and paraded suspects in her kidnapping and other kidnapping cases.

The articles I've read on Professor Kamen Okonjo's release do not mention whether a ransom was paid or not, but shortly before her release, the army (i.e. not the police) arrested 63 people for questioning regarding the kidnapping.

I don't mean to sound cynical, but our police (and politicians) have little or no credibility in public security issues. One particular boldfaced lie told not too long ago about an extra-judicial execution in Maiduguri will probably go down in our history as the most infamous lie ever told by Nigerian Police brass.  The safest position to take is to say I do not know if there was or wasn't just cause to arrest any of the suspects arrested on suspicion of involvement with these two kidnappings. Maybe there was. Maybe there wasn't.  Maybe someone, anyone had to be arrested for reasons of public appearances, and maybe someone was.

Before accusing me of cynicism, consider these two examples, the first a Vanguard article discussing the case of a pregnant woman who was arrested and held for 6 months, the second a BBC report on a lucky man who was detained without charges for 7 years, during which time he was shot in the leg and tortured, having been arrested on suspicion of being an armed robber -- his parents were told a year into his detention that he was dead.

The people described in the cases above are lucky, both to be alive (what with the issue of extra-judicial executions), but also because someone in the media bothered to tell their stories. As Nigerian citizens, we go about our daily lives with little thought for the 70% of all Nigerian prison inmates who have been stuck in prison "awaiting trial" for years or decades. Some have not been charged with anything.  Some who are arrested as "suspects", mysteriously die during or following "interrogation". Some are only in prison because they are related to someone the police is looking for (by the way, if someone is a hardened criminal, the person most likely doesn't care enough about anyone, to accept starvation and prison-borne diseases in exchange for a family member's freedom).

I don't deal in optimism, pessimism, cynicism or any other "ism". I don't even subscribe to any of the political or ideological "isms".  My thing is to look at problems that have been around for a very long time without anything being done to either fix/correct or even just ameliorate.

While the police were parading their suspects in the Nkiru Sylvanus case, gunmen were busy at work kidnapping a member of the Gombe State House of Assembly.  The linked-to article describes it as the first reported kidnapping in Gombe, but, as I keep pointing out on this blog, these type of events only make it into the news media (and attract the attention of governmental institutions) when it affects someone important, or when the event plays in to one of the broader political narratives constantly being woven by those with the loudest voices in our society (e.g. when an event can be used to reinforce inter-ethnic, inter-regional and and inter-cultural suspicion and distrust). Luckily and happily, the Gombe State lawmaker  was released on the 2nd of January in the New Year ....

.... but surely the scope of the problem is clear? Indeed, the article discussing the arrest of suspects in the Nkiru Sylvanus case also mentioned the since-resolved abduction of the four-year-old daughter of the Publicity Secretary of the Imo State branch of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)!


I have often pointed out that the nature of Fourth Republic politics obliges politicians to hire private armies of thugs in order to advance their political ambitions. In-between elections, these armed men tend to find ways to make money for themselves through smuggling, brigandage, "militancy" to extort pay-offs and contracts, kidnapping, armed robbery, and assorted other violent criminal enterprises. I am not saying that every person involved in these type of crimes moonlights as a political enforcer during election periods. I am saying the inverse -- that all of the election-year political enforcers moonlight as criminals between elections.

The respected, but now troubled, Nigerian news magazine Newswatch did a story years ago, questioning allegations that Obioma Nwankwo alias Osisikankwu, the infamous kingpin of kidnapping and armed robbery who declared war on Abia State, had began his criminal career as an enforcer manipulating elections on behalf of People's Progressive Alliance then-gubernatorial candidate (and current Governor) Theodore Orji.

It is difficult to know for sure if the allegations reported by Newswatch are factual, however, I have always maintained that the only good thing that came of the 2003-2006 Anambra State political crisis precipitated by Chris Ubah is it gave Nigerians a very clear and unvarnished view of the realities of Nigerian politics.  Politics is no different in the Niger-Delta, the Southwestern states, Kwara State and in the Northwest, the East-Middle-Belt or the Northeast.


It creates a situation, a paradox, where all three tiers of Nigeria's governments are obliged to contradict themselves, to negate their own actions when it comes to issues of law enforcement and public security. On the one hand, they do certain things that are technically designed to improve public security, but on the other hand they do other things that aggressively and deliberately render their law enforcement efforts ineffectual to the degree of being essentially nonexistent.

There have been reported incidents over the years of Nigerian soldiers arriving at the headquarters of a smuggling operation to find the smugglers had been tipped off to their arrival and had disappeared. And there was the very, very embarrassing incident of an impounded smugglers' ship escaping from Nigerian Navy custody without challenge (two Admirals were later shown to have aided the criminal escape).

For these reasons, citizens tend to suspect law enforcement agencies, security agencies and politicians know a lot more about these organized criminal groups than they admit.  The fact that they operate so freely brings up suspicions of political involvement, which are, ironically, then exploited by the three tiers of government to deflect attention from their ineffectual efforts to control and limit crime. President Jonathan has made vague allegations about insurgency collaborators in his government, and Finance Minister Okonjo-Iweala has raised the spectre of the fuel subsidy "cabal" being involved in the kidnapping industry.

The same sort of vague "gist" you get from street conversations.

Or blogs.

Central African Republic and Regional Security

This blog focuses mostly on the reform, restructuring and transformation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, so there haven't really been that many posts on pan-continental issues.

One could argue, I suppose, that matters that affect Nigeria are by definition matters of importance to the continent. What is indisputable is we Africans tend to pay too much attention to political matters in Western Europe (particularly France and the United Kingdom), North America (particularly the USA) and Western Asia ....

.... and too little attention to matters occurring in other African countries or regions.

The quality of information available, to the extent that we do follow events in our neighbourhoods (or even in our own countries) is questionable. We get a lot of "news", "analysis" and "discourse" from foreign (i.e. non-African sources) or from domestic sources that have been influenced by foreign sources (and are often led by managers or journalists who were educated abroad, or educated at home by professors who were educated abroad).  What is presented as the consensus opinion about an issue is something that sounds like what an outsider would come up with from a brief glance at the surface, and does not sound like the product of a person or people who truly understand what is going on, or even just have the complete set of basic facts about the what, why, who and how.

But I digress.

Like I said, I don't write too often about pan-continental issues except insofar as the issues affecting Nigeria are similar to the issues affecting other countries, or insofar as anything that affects Nigeria is important to Africa at large.

I did, however, write this post about African governments that disguise and propagandize their efforts at undemocratic self-preservation against the will of their citizens by purporting to be opposed to "unconstitutional changes of government" (i.e. coups).

Sometime in December, 2012, elements of three Central African Republic rebels groups united to form a new, larger rebel alliance.  This Alliance proved so successful so quickly that it was in position to overrun the capital, Bangui, in a short time. The USA shut down its embassy, and President Bozize called on his neighbours (and on France), to save his government.  Bozize is desperate to agree to offer to share power with the rebels (as though he couldn't have done this a long time ago).

France and the United States are doing the usual thing of officially and publicly professing their political non-involvement, calling for peaceful resolution, etc, etc. As to what they are or are not doing secretly, practically and unofficially, one way or the other, we will only know after we see the results.

African countries have rushed to prop up Bozize's regime. His closest ally is the government of Chad, who rely on him to not support Chadian rebels the way other C.A.R. governments have done; Chadian President Idris Deby pledged to send up to 2,000 soldiers to bolster Bozize. Support also came from Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Cameroun.  The hastily-assembled force currently on the ground to protect Bangui from the rebel alliance includes: Chad (400 troops), South Africa (200 troops), Cameroun (120), Gabon (120), and Congo-Brazzaville (120).

Look, if I lived in Bangui or had family living in Bangui, I would want to do anything to avoid the city becoming a combat zone ... again.

I understand that motivation. I have had family in a war zone before. And not just once.

However, the preservation of the Bozize Regime does absolutely nothing to fix the chronic and persistent problems (including a near-constant security crisis) that have plagued the C.A.R. for decades.

Mind you, allowing the rebels to sweep him out of office wouldn't fix the problem either.

This is my problem with Nigerian politics. It is also my problem with African politics. And while I do not have any particular visceral reaction towards the domestic politics of countries in the rest of the world, one notices the same pattern in that citizens are always presented with a situation where none of the choices they are allowed to make is a choice that would actually fix the problems they want to have fixed. You always get a choice between nothing you want, and are expected to choose the party or person that you dislike but dislike less than you dislike the other person or parties.

For other parts of the world, outside of Africa, the deliberately restricted scope of political choice is not that big of a problem, at least not at present.  For example, I suppose the average Japanese person feels some sort of effect from the fact that neither the DPJ or LDP has any answers to Japan's 20-year economic questions, but none of them suffers in the way that a citizen of the C.A.R. suffers due to the absence of a political choice representing a solution to their dillenma.

Presented with this reality, a lot of people's reactions boil down to "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" or "don't let the good be the enemy of the better", but these so-called "solutions" to the problems of countries like C.A.R. are themselves no more than lubrication for the continuation of all of the basic problems. This isn't a case of opposing an improvement in the name of perfection, but is more a case of asking why we are fanning the flames when we should be putting them out.

Remember what I said about understanding how someone who lived in Bangui or had family there would want to avoid the city becoming a warzone?  If I lived in Bangui or had family there, I would have experienced this same exact anxiety, trepidation and fear so many times over the last 50 years that I would be sick and tired of it, and would be wondering why we just keep lubricating the continuation of the never-ending conflicts. Being told that soldiers from the rest of Africa are here to make sure the same thing continues happening decades in the future would prompt me to join those people who make perilous journeys across the Sahara just to get to anywhere other than their own countries.


None of these things solve the problem.

It reminds me of a semi-acquaintance of mine, who supports the idea of sending Nigerian soldiers to go and fight in Mali. According to him, if they don't go, it would mean the forces holding the north of Mali would be able to send weapons to the insurgents behind a wave of violence in Nigeria.

But this is warped thinking.

There is nothing that Nigerian troops could or would do in Mali that would stop the flow of weapons to Nigerian insurgent groups. Even if Nigeria single-handedly conquered all of Mali, planted the Nigerian flag, and declared Mali to be the 37th State of Nigeria, all of the insurgent and militant groups in Nigeria would still be getting weapons. I wrote an essay nine years ago, ahead of the 2003 Elections, that complained about the Nigerian Federal Government's inability to do anything about the smuggling of heavy weapons into the country, among other complaints. Back then, everyone thought Mali was an African success story, rating them (along with Ghana) among the most democratic and well-governed countries on the continent.

Mind you, the fact that I wrote the essay in 2003 does not mean the problem of insurgent/militant groups' access to heavy weaponry started in 2003. On the contrary, it was already a long-standing problem by then.

Look, sending Nigerian troops to Darfur has not brought peace to Darfur, nor has it done anything to stop the flow of weapons across African borders in general, or in particular the smuggling of heavy weapons into Nigeria.  Nigerian soldiers have died in Darfur, though nowhere near as many as died in Liberia and Sierra Leone. We've also lost soldiers in Somalia in the early 1990s without there being an appreciable difference in the levels of violence for another 20+ years.

Sierra Leone and Liberia are usually presented as examples of the success of this kind of intervention, but both countries remain fragile in security terms. If anything the "peace" has provided a veil behind which the same forces that created problems in Sierra Leone and Liberia have expanded to affect Cote d'Ivoire (especially), as well as Guinea and Guinea-Bissau to a certain extent. Weapons, armed persons and (in the case of Guinea-Bissau) globally proscribed narcotic products, continue to move across the borders of the wider Mano River Region with ease.

I am not being a pessimist. What I am doing is trying to promote some kind of proactive thinking. The truth of the matter is the Mano River Region is not so much at peace as it is in a sort of inter-war lull before the next outbreak, wherever that outbreak might be.

Indeed, proactive thinking is clearly nonexistent in these many crises. Whatever one may think of the prior government of Libya (or even for that matter of the current government of Libya), the NATO countries' actions in Libya have resulted in something of a catastrophe for Mali and West Africa, and nobody foresaw the possibility or did anything to ward it off or to contain it once it became clear what was going to happen.

I love the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but I hate the "Giant of Africa" tag that our political leaders like to bandy about.  Self-hype is no substitute for basic, simple proactive thinking about strategic interests in our immediate neighbourhood, and self-praise does not hide from anyone the fact that we have little or no influence on events as near to us as Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Niger Republic, much less further afield. We watched what happened in Libya as spectators, watched the fallout as spectators.  We are now scrambling to send soldiers to Mali because other people have told us to do so, and not because we have carefully considered what we have to do to finally fix underlying problems in our country and our region. These "experts" whose requests we are obeying are the same people whose "expertise" created the problem in the first place.

You are probably wondering when I will get to a suggested solution, as opposed to a long litany of complaints.

But that is just it.  The name of this blog is "For A New Federal Republic", and it is sub-titled "Reform, Restructure and Transform" the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

We can't keep things in Nigeria the way they are, and then deceive ourselves that sending soldiers to this or that country will fix the problem with security in our country and in our neighbourhood.

We can't fight to keep the Bozize Government in place, essentially keeping everything in the C.A.R. fundamentally the same as it has always been, and deceive ourselves that we have brought peace to the place.

There is so much that is fundamentally problematic about the nature of the politics and economies of Nigeria and its neighbourhood and all of it has to be fixed, or we will remain excessively and unnecessarily prone to these type of problems.

Indeed, one can argue that the biggest reason why countries like the C.A.R. cannot reach their economic potential is Nigeria, the country that should be the engine driving the region, is doing everything in the world to AVOID achieving its economic potential.

You cannot correct this by sending soldiers here, there and everywhere across Africa.

We must REFORM, RESTRUCTURE AND TRANSFORM the FEDERAL REPUBLIC.