Mariam Mariam
Four weeks ago on this page, I had joined millions of Nigerians to laud the decision of the National Council of States to reject the plan of the United States of America to institute a new military outpost in Africa; the outpost that was titled AFRICOM. I had argued then, that I would have been alarmed were Obasanjo to be in power at the time the idea came to the fore, given his shameless kowtowing to the United States of America. Umar Yar’ Adua, I had believed, naively now, with the hindsight, was made of a different stuff, coming, as the propaganda about him had made us believe, from an anti-imperialist background. How foolish we were to have believed such about the man!
Last week, Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua was summoned to Washington, on a so-called state visit, but the true intention of the United States administration was revealed during the photo session which our man, the president, had with George Bush. After rambling through the various issues that he said they discussed, President Yar’ Adua exposed the REAL reason he was summoned out of Abuja, by those who call the shots in today’s unipolar world. “We have agreed to cooperate with AFRICOM” came out of the president’s mouth, and in the that very short sentence, the bubble of his so-called “anti-imperialism” busted like bubble! So in defiance of the resolution of the National Council of States, the overwhelming majority of the African and Nigerian peoples, President Umaru Yar’Adua went to Washington and collapsed on his knees to propitiate the monster of American militarism in Africa, shamelessly and without the mandate of the Nigerian people!
The Americans are past masters of manipulation and this they have shown again with the way that Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua was twisted round the small finger of Washington. A few week ago, John Negroponte had been sent on a whistle-stop tour of Africa, to sell the idea of colonialism by other means to the African people. It must have been an embarrassing spectacle for the high representative of Washington, to see the “obviously poor and helpless” Africans rejecting emphatically the sugar-coated offer to participate in the re-colonisation of Africa as well as getting African soldiers to be prepared to die in Washington’s wars in our continent, the way the Ethopian Army is presently doing in Somalia. Even a well-known asset of the United States, President Ellen Johnson Sir-leaf of Liberia, who initially offered to host the HQ of AFRICOM, was given the pause by the weight of African rejection of the AFRICOM idea.
Faced with the hostility of our people (and that was what emboldened the National Council of States), the United States took a different approach. America had been scandalosed by the level of fraud which Obasanjo, PDP and INEC perpetrated in the April 2007 elections, and it joined the world to describe the emergence of President Umar Yar’ Adua as flawed. While recognizing him as the de-facto president, the Americans also continued to treat him as a president who faces a legitimacy challenge. On the other hand, Umar Yar’Adua and his handlers needed the imprimatur of the only imperialist super power, the USA, to shore up his image in the international scene. It seemed that the USA decided to withhold that imprimatur, calculating rightly, that it would be offered along tt as a quid ro quo! The opportunity came with the stiff African resistance to the AFRICOM IDEA. When Nigeria also expressed the rejection of an imperialist military outpost on our continent, the Americans went for the legitimacy challenge which Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua faces. We will invite you to Washington only on the grounds that you will accept to collaborate with us on this doggone business of AFRICOM! It was an offer too tempting to reject and off to Washington did our man go; and as they say, the rest is history.
The capitulation of Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua in Washington, underlines the danger which a questionable mandate posits to the national weal. It is a veritable platform of blackmail and who does that better than the imperialists, as Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua found out? By accepting to collaborate with AFRICOM, President Yar’ Adua has chosen to betray the best interest of the Nigerian and the African peoples. He neither canvassed our opinions nor spoke for us that day in Washington. He showed the true colours of impunity long associated with the PDP, the Garrison Leadership of the Party under Colonel Amadu Ali and the disgraced despot, General Olusegun Obasanjo. If our National Assembly is alive to its responsibility, it must insist that Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua makes FULL DISCLOSURE of what he actually agreed to when he was summoned to Washington. Foreign policy under the disgraced despot, Olusegun Obasanjo, was “privatized” by a man whose deep-seated inferiority complex, made him to live with the delusion that the major leaders of the world were his friends(those who had encounters with Obasanjo in his days at Ao Villa, as this reporter did severally, wiil recall the way he used to drop names of different world leaders to underline his own bona fide); in the process, a lot of mistakes were made to the detriment of Nigeria’s national interest, as we saw with the handing of the Bakassi Pennisula issue, which he traded off without seeking the imprimatur of the National Assembly. The mistakes of the Obasanjo era must not be allowed under President Umaru Yar’ Adua. AFRICOM is NOT in our national interest, he was not given the mandate to accept an agency of imperialist recolonization of Africa by the sovereign people of Nigeria. No, Malam Umaru Yar’ Adua you did NOT speak in our name when you went to know-tow to George Bush, a war criminal, in Washington. The articles reproduced here should help to place the AFRICOM idea in context again. It is part of a worldwide struggle for hegemony, simple; and Africa is just a new staging post of that struggle. We should therefore reject the sugar-coated poison that Washington is offering and which our president is accepting on our behalf!
