abdulraheem
“Conquest and greed: That’s what made America great. The slavery, genocide and empire building got America off to a good start….You can’t lose with that …. It made us a military and industrial might during the twentieth century (and beyond)” – HARRYALFORD PRESIDENT (AMERICAN) NATIONAL BLACK CHAMBER OF COMMERCE QUOTED BY NII OKAIJAH, GHANAIAN FREELANCE WRITER IN “IS AFRICATHE NEXT COLD WAR THEATER?” Two weeks ago, the American Depute Secretary of State, John Negroponte, visited Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. The trip by a leading representative of the United States administration was in part a public relations trip, to soothe African apprehensions about the newly established AFRICOM, the United State’s new military command that will join a long chain of American military bases that ring the whole world. Addressing his Burkinabe hosts, Mr. Negroponte tried to prettify the bitter pill of American gun boat colonialism in our continent, by stating that Africans will take part in their our enslavement: “When we do establish a headquarters of Africa Command on the African continent”, according to Negroponte, “it will be in full consultation and in full transparency with all concerned, including of course the country where it will be established”. So far, only Mrs. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia, America’s oldest colonial possession in Africa, has accepted to host the headquarters of this new imperialist outpost. It is testimony to the unpopularity of the idea of an imperialist military command being established on the continent, that even Mrs. Sirleaf, ever pro-American and an eminent figure of right wing convictions in Africa and an Americo-Liberian herself, has been cautious in her embrace of the new American monster, that she recently stated that the acceptance of the headquarters of the force will be after it has been accepted by regional African bodies. The American promoters of the effort to colonise the African continent by subterfuge, know that it is not easy to convince Africans, even in our poverty, to accept a colonialist military enterprise in a continent with memory of a history of military adventures by previous colonial powers. On November 15, 2007, the United States Department of State posted an article on the web, which said that the new AFRICOM will promote security and spur development. The exploitation of Africa over the past fifty years by all the imperialist powers led by the United States did not spur development. So rather like the misadventure in Iraq, Africa is expected to have its ‘development’ kick started from American gunboats and the stationing of troops on our land! The article on the site is written by David Mckeeby, who stated that “helping Africans confront security challenges in their region long has been a priority of the United States”. If Africans are however worried about having the most powerful imperialist army in the world on their soil, given its records of fighting unjust and unpopular wars around the world, from Vietnam to Iraq and other places in between, then the bitter truth must be sugar-coated. Mckeeby added that sugar-coating by stating that the “New Africa Command (AFRICOM) also will prove an essential tool in continuing an equally long-standing commitment to helping communities across the continent strengthen governance, improve health care and meet economic development goals” (!?). So Africa needs the marines and naval troops from the US to find development! The skepticism about AFRICOM resonates even within the haloed chambers of the American Congress, when Stephen Mull, acting assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs, told a November 14 Congressional hearing that “he continues to encounter many misperceptions about AFRICOM”, according to David Mckeeby’s article. “AFRICOM’S purpose”, said Mull, “is to build strong military-to-military partnerships in the region”. Unfortunately for Mull, what Africans think in this endeavour of promoting friendship between the Jackal and its prey, has not been factored into the planning. In Mull’s prettifying description, “when co-ordinated and nested in this manner, AFRICOM’S contributions can help African countries effectively address threats such as political instability, terrorism, human rights abuse, cross-border trafficking and international crime”. In a related vein, the US Air force Officer nominated to head this new bridgehead of American colonial intrusion into Africa told an African audience in Addis Ababa, that “AFRICOM will assist our African partners in increasing their capacity to provide a stable environment in Africa”. But once again, the relevant question is just why Africa will need the forces of the leading imperialist power in the world, to fight its battles? It is therefore clear, that despite the propaganda onslaught, AFRICOM is not out to serve the interests of the African people. It is part of a worldwide agenda to ring the world with American military bases and other security establishments, to protect American imperialist hegemony in the international system. In the past few years, American Naval ships and military personnel have been very active in the Horn of Africa, under the guise of monitoring that region to flush out the activities of Al-Qaeda. They have actively facilitated the Ethiopian intervention and occupation of Somalia. In West Africa, American military planners described the Sahel Region as not effectively governed and liable to becoming bases for Al-Queda, the Salafist Organization for Preaching and Combat and other alleged terrorist groups. Over the past four years or so, troops from different Sahelian Countries, including Nigeria, have been undergoing training in the deserts of West Africa. The hope is to one day get our troops to die in American wars, if the need arises, the way they have taken troops from other countries to go and die in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. AFRICOM has another role, contrary to denials by the operatives of the American administration. It is related to the presence of oil in the Gulf of Guinea. Africa is outstripping the Middle East as source of oil supply for the American economy. It is said that Africa now supplies twenty-four percent of American oil consumption, as against the twenty percent coming from the Middle East. The Middle East has become a very volatile region especially in the wake of the invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq. In Africa, the United States faces the increasingly assertive presence of China and even India, in the struggle to dominate energy resources. It is in the strategic interest of the United States to dominate all areas of energy supply, so that the emergent powers of China and India would be obliged to defer to the United States. So as part of that strategic calculation, AFRICOM is actually an instrument of a new struggle for rivalry in Africa, where the United States hopes to establish its hegemony and bring the continent firmly under its orbit. AFRICOM is therefore a potential instrument of aggression and colonial domination, which does not fit into the frames of Africa’s own strategic objectives. The more far-sighted countries on the continent know that and they reject it, while it is overwhelmingly unpopular with the African peoples. The Nigerian media had reported with much interest the recent visit of the American sales man of the AFRICOM idea, John Negroponte; there was a hint in some of the newspapers’ reports that the Nigerian government seemed to have accepted the AFRICOM idea. I was not convinced, that was what happened. If it were under Obasanjo, I would have really been alarmed, because of the complete manner that the disgraced despot surrendered our national affairs completely to the diktat of the United States of America. However, there were too many factors which pre-disposed President Yar ‘Adua to a rejection of the new platform of American colonial domination of Africa’s economic, and especially, energy resources. As it turned out, the National Council of States at its meeting this week, emphatically rejected the AFRICOM idea. Nigeria, according to the communiqué of the meeting, “rejected the proposal by the United States of America to set up an African Command (AFRICOM) in the country or any part of the African sub-region as a mechanism of resolving internal crises in the continent”, as reported by NEW NIGERIAN newspaper on Tuesday November 20th, 2007. It went further that the “Council declined to permit the establishment of AFRICOM in the country or any part of Africa”, and as a clincher it preferred “to work towards the establishment of an African Standby Force as an internal mechanism for addressing crises in the continent”. The Nigerian position is how it ought to be. We must reject the surreptitious re-colonization of our continent, by a superpower whose abiding interest is the maintenance of the exploitative international relations that has profited its position as the sole superpower on earth today. A cruel, vindictive and inhumane imperialist power, the US army has fought far more unjust wars than wars in defence of the dignity of human beings. What is unfolding with AFRICOM is a determination to completely take away whatever remained of African independence. All patriotic Africans must reject the idea of the United States coming to set up shop on African soil, with its AFRICOM monster. It is not in the interest of African development and it is a subversion of the entire history of struggle by the African peoples for freedom and independence. Let us re-state that our strategic interests are not the same as those of the United States. It is an imperialist power committed to the exploitation of the resources of our countries. We are underdeveloped because we have for long been under the exploitative orbit of the imperialist powers, led by the United States. They talk about struggling against terrorism; we know that they created the conditions which helped the development of terrorism. We need conditions to break the barriers of underdevelopment; they need to defend and maintain the conditions which create underdevelopment, because those conditions facilitate their own dominant position in the world system. AFRICOM is the twenty-first century version of gun boat colonialism, and as our ancestors resisted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we must not allow its twenty-first incarnation, the new colonial platform called AFRICOM. AFRICOM will be an instrument to ensure that African energy and other resources, are brought firmly under the control of United States capitalist monopolies, in the world wide struggle for hegemony and advantages between the United States and the other emergent powers. It will also play the role of ensuring that a progressive direction of development does not take root in Africa. Stripped of subterfuge and all the sugar coating, AFRICOM is a bitter pill that Africans must not swallow; it will choke the life out of African independence and liberty
