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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA Time for NSE’s Big Mama To Go
I hate to be a damp squib but I am certain that if Mr. Barack Obama becomes the next president of the United States, the reader can be rest assured that the first African-American to preside over the affairs of the world’s remaining super power will make little or no difference to the way its ruling classes have tried to re-create the world in their own image since their country took over from Great Britain as the world’s top dog after World War II.
The vision of the founding fathers of the United States was of a country whose government was of the people, by the people and for the people. This was essentially what its concise and precise Constitution, written in 1787 and adopted in 1790 by its 13 original constituents, was all about.
Then things changed towards the end of the first half of the 20th century. The change was slow rather than sudden. But by 1947 the country’s government was decidedly no longer of, by and for the people. Instead, it became government of the few at the expense of the many.
Possibly the most apt description of this fundamental change from a democratic state to a “National Security State” was by Gore Vidal, a leading American essayist and distant cousin to Mr. Al Gore, the man who famously lost the American presidency to George Walker Bush in 2000, not through the ballot box but through political subterfuge in Florida, then governed by another Bush, coupled with a dubious Supreme Court decision on who won.
“Fifty years ago,” said Vidal in the 2002 collection of his essays titled The Last Empire,
At the heart of this Corporate America that has since commandeered America\s democracy is the military/industrial Establishment. Its main weapon of global domination is, of course, America’s mighty military machine.
Today, no country’s military begins to approach it in size and reach. According to Clyde Prestowitz, in his 2003 book on America titled Rogue Nation, America is, for example, the only country that has aircraft carriers in all corners of the globe each of which is like a nuclear-powered floating city.
These carriers, he said, are each 1,100 feet long, 20 stories high with flight decks 240 feet across. Each carries 70 state of the art fighter jets, is accompanied by a cruiser, several frigates and destroyers, one or two submarines and supply vessels. America, he said, has 13 of these. “No other country”, he said, “has even one.
Some estimates put total defense spending in the world at about 800 billion U.S. dollars. America alone accounts for over 330 billion, about the same as those of NATO, Europe, Russia, Japan and China combined.
Little wonder then that America would brook no challenge from any quarters to its domination of the world. Instead it would, under Bush, evolve a plan to rule the world in perpetuity. The plan’s guiding principles would be unilateralism and pre-emption. Its excuse for global war-mongering, 9/11.
The September 11, 2001 attack by so-called Islamic terrorists on New York’s twin towers using passenger aircrafts provided the perfect excuse for expanding this military machine. Quickly the commies were replaced by “Islamic terrorists” as the “Free World’s” bogeymen. Oil rich Iraq was the first testing ground of the efficacy of the new military machine. Oil rich Iran was lined up for its next mission.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, even the most awesome military machine has its limits as first, Vietnam and now Iraq, have since proved. However, unfortunately for the rest of the world, the limits of physical power has not been enough – or so it seems – to deter America’s ruling classes from trying to impose their will on the rest of the world.
By now the reader must be wondering what all this has to do with our Big Mama of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, the one and only Professor Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke, Ph.D, OON. If you’ve been wondering, you shouldn’t, unless, of course, you’ve not been reading our newspapers or listening to our radio and television stations in the last several days.
Okereke-Onyiuke, as you probably know all too well, is the battle-tested Director-General of the NSE. It seems her ample proportions have served her well in surviving the many controversies that has trailed her management of the Exchange. She has, for example, easily seen off those who have championed the battle to decentralize it into a Lagos and other stock exchanges in line with the best global practices, like there is a New York Stock Exchange instead of only one American Stock Exchange or London Stock Exchange as opposed to British Stock Exchange or Tokyo Stock Exchange as opposed to Japanese Stock Exchange. Then in 2003, she founded Corporate Nigeria in what was clearly a criminal breach of our electoral laws and equally a breach of our Constitution and used it to organise a dinner at which she raised hundreds of millions in foreign and local currencies for the presidential campaign of her self-proclaimed mentor, President Olusegun Obasanjo. Needless to say she got away with it.
Next, her mentor formed Transcorp Nigeria, touted it as Nigeria’s answer to the Western multinationals that dominate our economy, and, according to her own testimony before a Senate committee investigating his mismanagement of the oil industry as president, he literally forced her to chair it. She had no choice, she said, but to oblige in spite of the fact that there was a clear conflict of interest between her management of the NSE and her chairing a company that was a potential member of the Exchange. Again, she got away with it.
I suspect it is this her ability to defy the force of gravity which must have emboldened her to engage in her most recent escapade, which, as we all know, is the Africa for Obama 2008 organisation. Most media accounts of the dinner/concert she organized recently under the banner of the organization said she raised nearly 100,000,000 Naira.
The world, as we all know, has been euphoric in its admiration for Obama and in its hope that he will change the way America has tried to run the world as its sole super-power. In this, the bimonthly AFRICA REPORT published from Paris and edited by my good friend, Patrick Smith, is typical. Its current August/September edition has Obama on the cover with the catchy headline BARACK OBAMA: CHANGE AMERICA CHANGE THE WORLD followed by an equally catchy rider “THROUGH HARD WORK AND PERSEVERANCE, OBAMA HAS CHANGED THE RULES OF THE GAME”.
Apparently the lady boss of NSE has not been immune from this Obamamania that has gripped the world. But like every one else she is, I am sure, in for a big disappointment because the powerful guardians of America’s military/industrial complex are not about to let anyone put an end to what has since become the most lucrative business in town. If any one needed any evidence for this, it is there in the way Obama, as the presumed presidential candidate of the Democrats, has been lurching to the right from his leftish positions on almost all the major issues that confront America, notably, its war on Iraq, its unqualified support for Israel, its sneaky attempt to station its troops in Africa in the name of Africom, its support for farm subsidies that hurt African farmers and, at home, its invasion of the civil rights of its own citizens in the name of protecting them from Islamic terrorism.
In embarking on her latest escapade, it apparently never occurred to the D-G of the NSE that she was in breach of America’s laws, like she breached our laws when she organised a similar fund raiser for Obasanjo in 2003. It seemed also that it never occurred to her that her escapade smacked too much of collecting money under false pretences – what we call 419 – which is bound to reflect on the integrity of our stock exchange as a bellwether of the state of our economy.
Last Thursday August 21, she published her explanation for embarking on her escapade in several newspapers. Her full page explanation in The Guardian of the same date, for example, was that the dinner/concert was meant for “African Professionals who believe in the vision of Obama as an American and a World Leader supported by diverse groups of people across the globe”.
The dinner/concert, she said, was never a solicitation for funds to help Obama’s presidential campaign. Then in what was clearly a classic study in self-contradiction she said the money “would be utilized for advertisements including on-line to encourage Africans that are of voting status and all other Americans to exercise their franchise”.
This was sheer sophistry and a pretty lousy one at that because it begs the rhetorical question, franchise to what end? The obvious answer is towards helping Obama become America’s next president. Otherwise why name her organisation Africans for Obama 2008 and not, for example, Africans for America Elects 2008?
Like everyone else, the NSE boss is entitled to entertain illusions about what Obama can do to change the world. But in entertaining those illusions, she has no right to break our laws and those of other countries. She also has no right to undermine the integrity of one of our key economic institutions. It is time she left the NSE on her own or be shown the way out if she won’t.
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