America, their America

I have borrowed the title of this week’s piece from the book written by John Pepper Clark Bekederemo detailing his rather bitter experiences in America as a visiting scholar at Princeton in the early sixties. Bekederemo is arguably Nigeria’s greatest living poet and oracle. Reading the book even as a schoolboy, I could see how the poet and America could never gel – the one as strong-willed and explosive as thunder, the other, the Mecca of racism and White Supremacy.

There are thousands of Nigerians in America who swear they could never live anywhere else. I say good luck to them. I have visited America several times, but I could never live there for all the money in the world.

There is a lot that I admire about the United States: its great public institutions, its democracy and rule of law. America is the veritable land of opportunities. It is probably only in America that the son of an African immigrant father could make it to the highest pinnacle of political power as Barack Obama has.

The thinkers who have influenced me the most have been American: Leo Strauss, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Robert Coles. My political consciousness was shaped by the life and martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr and the heroes of the civil rights movement from W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul Robeson, Ralph Bunche and Medgard Evers.

After Oxford and Cambridge, America has the best universities in the world. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford are formidable centres of learning second to none. American charitable foundations are doing great works in Africa which I very much admire. Many Africans struggle each year for the famous “Green Card” which they cherish as though it were a passport to heaven. For me, “nein”.

In the Age of Obama, racism is still deeply embedded in the American psyche. It can surface in ways so blatant that most Europeans would be shocked. America is also the homicide capital of the world, where egregious, nihilistic violence is the norm.

The American intelligence community operates a parallel government that respects neither the Constitution nor the sovereignty of nations as enshrined in the sacred precepts of the Law of Nations. In spite of its much-vaunted commitment to liberty, the agents of the American republic think nothing about triggering civil wars, unseating governments and sowing chaos in different corners of the world; from Allende in Chile to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran. Since 1912, America has invaded its southern neighbours over a hundred times.

The historian Barbara Tuchman depicted history as “the march of folly”. This is particularly true of recent American statecraft which has brought nothing but ruin to countries such as Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

When President Olusegun Obasanjo invited American military personnel to come and train our officers ostensibly in “peacekeeping”, the brave General Victor Malu bluntly told the former President that it is we who should be teaching them. Malu was one of those gallant officers who acquitted themselves with distinction during our ECOMOG operations in Liberia. The respected General was dispatched on early retirement just before the Obasanjo administration signed the Nigerian-United States Military Cooperation Agreement in April 2001. In October 2001, soldiers razed Malu’s ancestral home village in Benue State under the pretext of trying to resolve the Tiv-Jukun crisis. His home was reduced to pulp while four members of his household were killed.

The majority of Nigerian youths love everything American. We feel a sense of “elective affinities”, if I may echo Goethe, with the over 40 million Americans of African origin. Sadly, Uncle Sam has reciprocated with nothing but contempt and perfidy. You will never find it expressly articulated in any public policy document, but it is evident from the gestalt of America’s foreign policy elites that they consider us to be their arch enemies in Africa.

Over the last decade alone, more than five separate reports have spewed out of the U.S. policy and defense community prophesying Nigeria’s eventual disintegration by the year 2015.

Nigeria’s problems with America started as far back as 1976, when General Murtala’s famous speech at the OAU Summit turned the tide in favour of the progressive forces of liberation in Southern Africa. By calling Henry Kissinger’s bluff and rallying our entire continent behind the liberation movements, Nigeria took a historic stand that accelerated the decolonization of our continent and the eventual collapse of Apartheid.

Pastor Tunde Bakare is a man after my heart. Addressing his Latter Rain congregation a few weeks ago, he caused a stir when he strongly condemned our government for inviting the Americans to come and help find our abducted Chibok girls. He revealed that as far back as 2005, God spoke to him about America’s plans to destabilize our country.

According to the infamous Wikileaks, American intelligence activities in Nigeria include “eavesdropping on Nigerian government communication, financial espionage on leading Nigerians, support and funding of subversive groups and insurgents, sponsoring of divisive propaganda among the disparate groups of Nigeria and the use of visa blackmail…the ultimate goal of which is to eliminate Nigeria as a potential strategic rival to the US in the African continent.”

American covert operatives are actively involved in the training, financing and arming of insurgents who then infiltrate our borders. I felt sick when American academics joined heads together to write a supine memo urging the Obama administration not to place Boko Haram on their terror watch list. America aids and abets the imbecile regimes in Qatar and Saudi Arabia as they intensify their drive to sink our nation into chaos. One of the Goals of the American Century Project is to dismember nations such as ours so that Africa can return to being the playing field of empires as it has been for a millennium. They have found ready collaborators in our bankrupt Northern  elites who believe rulership is theirs by right.

If Muslims and Christians in Nigeria can unite, we would discomfit ‘the Great Satan’.

OBADIAH MAILAFIA