|
The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) Debates, Etc. By Abdulbasit Mukhtar
Whether the Abdul-Aziz Jimoh who wrote “The OIC Debates, ETC” published on saharareporters.com http://www.saharareporters.com/column44.php is a Muslim or not is immaterial. The issues he raised about Nigeria’s membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) are more important than his religious identity, even though by claiming to be a Muslim and taking the position he did, he must have intended to prove that not all Muslims believes that Nigeria should be a member of the OIC. The implication of this thinking is that the OIC issue is not a religious one. And he is right. But where he misses the point is that a greater part of his submission is based on sentiments and gross misunderstanding of international affairs, the real issue that cannot be wished away in the ongoing debate.
On March 3, 2008, President George W. Bush named the first special envoy of the United States to the OIC in the person of Texas entrepreneur Sada Cumber. The envoy’s first assignment was his participation at the 11th Islamic Summit Conference, held in Dakar, Senegal, an event also attended by President Umaru Musa Yar’adua at the head of Nigeria’s delegation. Any observer of developments in the OIC who attempts to make sense of Mr Cumber’s appointment would not be wrong to conclude that President Vladimir Putin’s attendance at the 10th Summit held in Malaysia in 2003 and the subsequent admission of Russia to the OIC as observer in 2005 are probably part of the reasons for President Bush’s action. In other words, both the United States and Russia understand the role of Islam in international affairs and none of them would want to be outdone by the other in an important organization like the OIC.
Such foreign policy actions are not limited to the OIC. At the just concluded Summit meeting of Heads of State and Government of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Bucharest, Romania, the United States failed to get the Alliance to commence membership action plan for Ukraine and Georgia. This is the procedure required to accept the two former Soviet republics as members of NATO. That was seen as a parting diplomatic victory for Vladimir Putin, who had worked against the accession of the two countries to NATO. Putin himself was invited to the meeting, even though Russia is not a member of NATO and that body is a creation of the Cold War era. The end of the Cold War notwithstanding, the body continues to exist even as more countries scamper to get into its fold. This is how international relations work. States engage in international organizations, in one form or another to promote certain interests which, more often than not, are not identical.
In the case of Nigeria and the OIC, there are clear geopolitical and economic interests for us to pursue. All of our neighbours are members of the OIC and two of them – Benin and Cameroon - have Christian presidents and predominant non-Muslim populations. It is unlikely that they and other countries with majority Christian populations will be part of an Organization whose agenda is to Islamize their citizens, as Nigeria’s Islamophobes believe the OIC is out to do. The 57 member states of the OIC are also members of the United Nations, with Nigeria maintaining bilateral relations with some of them. Since our bilateral relations do not substitute our joint membership in the United Nations or other regional organizations, such as ECOWAS or the AU, it goes without saying that multi-layer affiliations is a norm in international relations. This demonstrates that each regional or global grouping has exclusive areas of focus common to all their members.
Economically, Nigeria has benefitted immensely from its relations with some OIC member states. Contrary to the insinuations of a spokesperson of the Northern chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), no Nigerian state is richer than any of Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia or Iran. Not only are these countries more industrialized than we are, they have also gone beyond minor developmental challenges of power supply, which we are still grappling with. It is public knowledge that Egyptian-made buses are used in Nigeria. The multimillion dollar investment going into the Malaysia Gardens projects in Abuja and the $400 million investment brought to our telecom industry from the United Arab Emirates are only a few of the benefits we have derived from our openness to the outside world. Although we have diplomatic relations with Egypt and Malaysia, decisions taken at multilateral settings where all of us are members can only reinforce our bilateral relations.
The objectives of Nigeria’s foreign policy as enshrined in section 19 of the 1999 Constitution include “promotion and protection of the national interest” and “promotion of international co-operation for the consolidation of universal peace and mutual respect among all nations and elimination of discrimination in all its manifestations.” There is no greater demonstration of adherence to this objective than the twinning of the normalization of our diplomatic ties with the State of Israel and the upgrading of our status in the OIC to full member. This must have been a deliberate move by the Ibrahim Babangida administration to say that although most OIC member states have no relations with Israel, it is not in Nigeria’s national interest to be hostile to Israel. Doing otherwise would have meant that Nigerian Christians cannot go to Israel on their pilgrimage. Other important OIC member states that maintain relations with Israel are Egypt and Jordan. This shows that our membership of the OIC was not a move to give advantage to Islam over Christianity.
It is not my intention to hold brief for any past military government in Nigeria, but I believe that Babangida’s decision on the OIC and Israel was both courageous and laudable, although the manner in which the decision was taken could be faulted, as convincingly argued by Adebayo Olukoshi in his article: The Long Road to Fez: An examination of Nigeria’s decision to become a Full Member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.” I concur that if the people who should know had been involved and necessary efforts made to convince them, we probably would have put the OIC issue behind us by now. The fact remains, however, that Nigeria’s constitution vests foreign policy decision-making in the executive arm of government, even though separation of powers did not exist during the military era. But even where it does in a democratic setting, the approach to foreign policy decision-making has not been too different. Witness the decision by the Obasanjo’s administration to cede some of Nigeria’s territory to Cameroon in compliance with a ruling of the International Court of Justice.
What Obasanjo did with the OIC was slightly different. He set up a committee chaired by former Secretary to the Federal Government Chief Ufot Ekaette to review Nigeria’s membership in all international organizations and to make recommendations as to which ones do not deserve our continued membership. Such an administrative procedure, if anything, threw open the OIC issue again. But since Nigeria did not withdraw from the OIC under Obansanjo, one can safely assume that the Ekaette Committee did not make such a recommendation. Obasanjo’s achievement was to add value to Nigeria’s OIC membership by formalizing our membership of the Islamic Development Bank, a creation of the OIC.
Since the short time that we have joined the Bank, we have indeed reaped immense benefits. In this regard, I would like to pick up Abdul-Aziz Jimoh’s challenge by directing him or anyone interested to a news report by Blessing Anaro in Nigeria’s Business Day publication of January 24, 2007 titled: Islamic Bank approves $446.3mn to finance trade in Nigeria, others. On reading the said news, I visited the website of the Islamic Development Bank and discovered to my amazement the details of the approvals which included a $25 million approval for a business concern owned by a Nigerian Christian to buy raw materials, refined petroleum products and CKD motor bicycle parts under the Bank’s import trade financing operation. This approval was made by the 242nd session of the Bank’s Board of Directors meeting and is verifiable. I hope no one would conclude that this is all we got without first checking with the Federal Ministry of Finance about other collaborations we have with the Bank. I have also discovered that, contrary to what we are being fed with by the likes of Abdul - Aziz Jimoh, the Bank’s recruitment policy does not discriminate against Nigerian Christians, as the Nigerian staff in the Bank is not 100 percent Muslim.
If it has taken us about 20 years to start reaping the benefits of our membership in the OIC through the IDB, I think the fault is ours and not that of the institutions. Like in many areas of our national life, there is something dysfunctional in the way we conduct our diplomacy. For instance, would it not surprise anyone how Nigeria hosted a meeting of the African Development Bank that was to elect the Bank’s president and yet failed to mobilize enough votes for our candidate to win the election, in our own country! That election ended in a stalemate, and when it continued in another country, we lost! Incidentally, that Nigerian who lost to the incumbent president of the African Development Bank was appointed by President Obasanjo as Nigeria’s representative to the Islamic Development Bank. This man is not a Muslim and he does not have to be. Let anyone ask him about his impression of the IDB. Take another example. Despite all the human and material resources we lost in trying to restore peace in Sierra Leone, we did not have much say in what happened in post-war Sierra Leone. We could have done that easily through the OIC which, in fact, set up a reconstruction fund for that country.
So if we have in President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal someone who recognizes our true weight and thought the OIC Summit in Dakar would not be complete without Nigeria, should we complain again? The Foreign Minister, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, told the nation that the Senegalese president sent a special envoy to our president to personally invite him to the Summit in view of the momentous decisions that were meant to be taken there. It was during the Dakar meeting that agreement was reached between Chad and Sudan to stop the fighting which had already brought Chadian refugees to Borno State, following an appeal made at the Summit by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, when he literally devolved to the OIC the task of solving the problem between Chad and Sudan. The mere fact that the United Nations Secretary General invited the OIC to act is a testimony of the OIC’s role as a partner in promoting peace in the world, a goal that is in tandem with our own foreign policy objectives. It would certainly make no geo-political or diplomatic sense for Nigeria not to be interested in an association where all its neighbours are members and whose will affect us without having any opportunity to make an input.
Other important decisions taken at the Dakar meeting was the adoption of a new Charter for the OIC, one that reflects the changes that have taken place in the world since the Organization was established in 1969. The new Charter, for example, has provisions on promotion of religious tolerance, human rights issues, including of women and children rights, strengthening international cooperation, among others. More importantly the Summit launched an Islamic solidarity development fund specifically for Africa. Perhaps I should point out that international organizations are effective to the extent permitted by the commitment of their members. The African Union’s APRM Programme is a good example. Because of political will demonstrated by African leaders, we see for the first time sovereign African states willingly submitting themselves to review by their peers. Former President Sir Dawda Jawara of The Gambia and his team were in Nigeria a couple of months ago for that purpose. Even with such efforts, does it make sense to blame the AU for the corruption in our system or the Commonwealth for the bad state of our roads? If Mr Jimoh thinks we have no business in the OIC because our membership of that organization has not improved our universities, he can as well call for our exit from the UN because of our electricity problems.
One good thing about Mr Jimoh’s article is that he calls the OIC issue a debate. Indeed it is, and no time can be more fortuitous for such an exercise than now when 50 years of Nigeria’s diplomacy is being celebrated. A recent contributor to the debate is Mr Olisah Agbakoba of the Nigerian Bar Association, who expressed his views on the OIC during one of the events marking the golden jubilee celebration. He believes Nigeria should join any club that can satisfy our national interest. In fact, he specifically voiced preference for the OIC over other organizations. Finally, it has been my contention all along that the OIC issue is not about religion but about making the best use of our diversity. If, as suggested by Mr Jimoh, an organization of Christian states is born, and Nigeria believes joining it is in our national interest so be it. At the very least, that would further prove that our so-called secular status is a myth, in addition to the fact that the word secularism does not exist in our constitution. Furthermore, the Constitution says in its preamble that we are a nation under God, and we get no less than 10 religious holidays in a year, divided between Islam and Christianity. What kind of secularism is that? |