Whenever Obama Visits Nigeria

Nduka Uzuakpundu

As if reading the mind of President Umaru Yar’Adua, Foreign Affairs Minister Chief Ojo Maduekwe, is guardedly optimistic, that just befor the expiration of United States President Barack Obama’s first four years in office, in 2012, he may find time to make a pilgrimage to Africa. Then, Maduekwe, who has been studying Washington’s foreign policy on Africa since the Kennedy days, in the early’60s, said Obama would be following an example already set by one his democratic sires: Mr Jimmy Carter.

Back in the late ’70s, on the eve of Second Republic, when Carter visited Nigeria, he propounded what has since been known as “The Lagos Doctrine”, which was in recognition of Nigeria’s leading and historical roles in the promotion of democracy in Africa. That doctrine was all about the pressing need for a sustainable democratic culture in the continent, subjection of the military to an elected civilian government, respect or human rights, adherence to the principles of good governance and a need to strive hard for sustainable human development.

Maduekwe thinks that if Obama were to take a cue from Carter, he would shower kudos, pretty generously, on the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) for ensuring a smooth transition from one administration to another: one of the rarest democratic achievements in Africa. He would, besides, note that Nigeria has the largest concentration of blacks in the world. But an understandably delayed Obama visit to Africa, during which Nigeria promises to be Obama’s first port of call, would be, as Maduekwe rightly observed, for the herculean task of helping the messy legacy of an America economy that is frighteningly in recession bequeathed the Obama administration by the out-going President George W. Bush.

So messy is the American economy today that it refreshes the memory of the Great Depression, of the early ’30s. The crisis, which started with the collapse of the American sub-prime housing sector, to cause what is now commonly referred to as the “global credit crunch”, has created an unprecedented liquidity squeezed in the great economies of European Union – Germany, Britain, France and Italy, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) or the emerging great economies and, amongst others, Japan and south Korea. In effect, the current picture of the global economy is that, as the American economy is in recession it is having a visibly negative effect on about 45 other leading economies around which the rest of the global economy revolves.

Economist say, in the interim, the Obama administration would have to source about one trillion dollars to kick-start the American economy. No easy task, but because of the charisma of Obama, as a person, the unique style and audacious confidence with which he ran his winning campaign, the promise and hope that he holds forth, every America and the rest of international community – in recognition of how crucial a healthy America economy is to the rest of the world – are well behind him.

Still, a one-trillion-dollar economic reconstruction chest for the Obama administration, could, amongst others, be sourced from a mid-term reduction in health care and military spending. America could not have had it so bad, but for the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The base line of Obama’s economic reconstruction strategy is the restoration of consumer’s confidence, a revival of American banking system and rectification of the distortions in the national pension scheme. “Yes, we can” and, in agreement with Obama, Maduekwe says given the great, creative potentials of Americans, their noted resilience amid adversities and diligence, they would surmount the present economic challenge; just the way they did the Great Depression under the Roosevelt administration.

For that, Madueke is far from convinced that the staggering economic challenge that the Obama administration would be faced with, as the Bush administration quits the White House, appears more of a conspiracy against the rising political fortunes of African-Americans, in general – in a milieu that is predominantly white. It’s just an accident of history, he says, that Obama would be the president of the United States at a very lean period in the economic history of that country.

Besides, Madukwe says Obama might be forced to dig into his arsenal of economic strategies, if only to endear himself and the rest of African-American to the American society that it was a non-white president that ushered in another era of boom in America.

And when Obama finally pilgrimages to Nigeria, we would be told by the Yar’Adua administration that Nigeria is no longer a debtor-nation that it once was. Nigeria has, since buying back her more than $30 billion debt, at a very great price, won the hearts of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, as Maduekwe thinks, Nigeria’s example would be of special interest to Obama because no other African country, under democratically-elected administration, has achieved such a financial and economic feat in her relations with the Brettonwood institutions.

Still, Maduekwe says, Obama would be pleased to know that Nigeria has, in keeping with the verdict of the International Court of Justice at the Hague, ceded the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroun, as a demonstration of her respect for international law and a need for peaceful co-existence in Africa. Not only that, he says an Obama visit would be a very propitious occasion for the Yar’adua administration to defend, with strong and persuasive facts and figures, Nigeria’s desire to occupy a permanent, veto-welding seat in an expanded United Nation Security Council. Whenever Obama lands in Nigeria, that day would be special to Maduekwe: he’d be delighted that it’s a fellow barrister who is the 44th president of the world’s most powerful democracy.