Pitfalls of Obasanjo's InternationalismByKhicingwe W. Simji
The
paradox of power is that you either overestimate or underestimate it.
Both could lead to unpleasant consequences. From one’s observation of
President Olusegun Obasanjo’s conduct of foreign affairs, it would
appear that he risks overrating his capability in world affairs. Aside
the President’s well-known penchant for foreign trips, he appears to
suffer from a quixotic illusion of internationalism. This obsession for
an internationalist role is traceable to his antecedent as military
ruler in the seventies. After
General Murtala Mohammed had stormed African Hall at the Addis Ababa
Headquarters of the erstwhile Organization of African Unity with his
AFRICA HAS COME OF AGE speech, General Obasanjo, who took over after his
assassination, was compelled to preserve the populist tempo by carving
out a radical role for Nigeria in world affairs. Nattering
the usual anti-imperialist slogans of the day and forging a posture of
self-righteous indignation at the apartheid regime in South Africa, the
military regime managed to pass amongst the ‘Frontline’ States,
countries considered as leading lights in the fight to dismantle the
apartheid system. Soon
thereafter, following his consolidation of his previous clumsy grip of
power, General Obasanjo jettisoned Murtala’s militant anti-imperialist
internationalism for ‘constructive’ engagement with the United
States, a nation then fossilized in a cold war mentality and to whom the
word liberation spelt communism.
Another source of attraction to the idea of internationalism for the President came after he had handed over power to the civilians. By keeping to the earlier promise by his predecessor to hand over power and by actually handing over to a pliant and moderate civilian leader, he further endeared himself to his western friends, who posthaste nominated him into the Commonwealth EPG < Eminent Persons Group > to enter the apartheid South Africa to negotiate Mandela’s freedom. Although, like our own Chief M.K.O.Abiola much later on, Mandela rebuffed them, the experience no doubt gave Obasanjo a taste and aura of international statesmanship, a role he has tried without success to combine with his present duties as President of the Federal Republic. Since
his return to power Obasanjo has expended a lot of his time and energy
in pursuing foreign engagements that bear little or no significance to
the well being of Nigeria. In
a rare moment of retrospection, the President himself had confessed that
for all the trips he had made overseas, calculated by a national
newspaper to have lasted almost one third of his four-year tenure, he
had nothing to show for it. Rather than being dissuaded by this realism,
the President appears more determined in his quixotic wanderings during
his second tenure. Nigerians
have not ceased to wonder what business the President of a country whose
manufacturing sector has all but collapsed have at the gathering of
leaders of industrial countries? And yet nothing seems to delight
Obasanjo more than to mount the podium before his more powerful
colleagues at endless world summits droning them with his characteristic
sterile monotony.
The
President’s spin-doctors argue, as if the President also doubles as
the Foreign Affairs Minister, that his trips have improved the image of
Nigeria abroad. But from reports and experiences all over the world
nothing has changed. Most websites on the Internet still carry warnings
about doing business with Nigerians. Even
though there are embarrassing stories of the President’s undignified
treatment abroad, such as being stranded at airports or having
inconsequential subordinates receive him, to all intents and purposes,
Western leaders still indulge him. The
Brentton Woods institutions couldn’t have met a more enthusiastic
supporter than the Nigerian President. Within a spate of four years he
has sold the national wealth, built over decades of toil and
petrodollars, to foreigners and their local fronts in the name of
privatization. Apparently
to gratify the multinationals, and, of course, the IMF and the World
Bank, Nigerians are saddled with spiraling prices of petroleum products
in this world’s major oil exporting country. Not to mention the
cutthroat cost of telephony operated by foreigners who are more
concerned with reaping huge profits than providing quality service to
the Nigerian consumer. Incidentally, the President counts this as one of
his achievements in office!
Preoccupied
with his wars in the Middle and Far Asia and unable to sustain
manufactured new roles for President Obasanjo to play. Oblivious of the irony, Obasanjo was sent to Zimbabwe to persuade President Robert Mugabe to conduct a free and fair election, to be less dictatorial and to respect human rights. Mugabe must have been amused listening to him; the Odi and Zaki Biam massacres, in this age of the information superhighway, are not closet news. The
recent American assignment to President Obasanjo was the removal of the
Murderer of Monrovia, President Charles Taylor, and granting of
political asylum to him in Nigeria in spite of the fact that he is an
indicted war criminal wanted by a UN war tribunal, and in spite of the
public outcry by Nigerians against him for the murder of two Nigerian
journalists and several Nigerian soldiers and civilians. The
President did this without reference to the National Assembly. The
overriding interest here is clearly that of the Americans who wanted to
pacify their former colony without spilling American blood!! Under
the American designed NEPAD, President Obasanjo has labored to assure
the West that henceforth African leaders would behave themselves,
meaning, they would unquestioningly acquiesced to the agenda of the new
world order. A world order in which the economy of the third world is
plundered for the luxury of the affluent West, our social and cultural
institutions are supplanted by the ‘superior’ western civilization
and our population decimated by laboratory manufactured germs and
viruses. The
first commitment to this order, going by the scripts of the Huntingtons
and the Fakuyamas, the philosophers of the new order, is liberalism. In
the name of liberal democracy our President is spending his time and
energy to ensure that the continent is safe from military coups. He
invested his personal reputation to annul the coup in the Republic of
Sao Tome and Principe. He
is now talking to the Colonels in Guinea Bissau to reverse their putsch.
All these are well and good except for two reasons: The President’s
endeavor is aimed at impressing foreigners more than Nigerians. The
African Union does not only have a President and Secretary General but
also has a mechanism for dealing with breaches to the letter and spirit
of NEPAD, so Nigerians would have wished that the President preoccupies
himself with domestic affairs for once. Secondly,
it is preposterous for the President to belabor himself with stopping
military coups in foreign lands when the state of affairs at home, due
to mismanagement and neglect, are daily creating conditions for an
antidemocratic slide. Opinions, even from respectable and responsible
quarters, suggest that if the government does not make the dividends of
democracy available to Nigerians they would soon be disillusioned by the
system and opt for other devises. In
plain language President should be more concerned about the preservation
of democracy on our own soil. He can only do that if he stays at home
and minds the business for which Nigerians elected him. The
President may think that running a country like Nigeria makes him
powerful enough to be an international interloper but this could very
well be an overestimation. Nigeria might look powerful from the outside
but our weak domestic capacity makes us just too vulnerable. It would be
calamitous for Obasanjo to overstretch us internationally without
restoring the domestic economy. Mr. Simji writes from Jos.
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