I review Edward R. Carr’s book for SAIS Review. An excerpt:

Underlying typical research is the assumption that a more intense integration into the global market economy is the solution to development problems, and that GDP growth brings an improvement in the well-being of a country’s citizens. Most existing development indicators have these same assumptions behind them. In a case study example, Carr shows how development data collected with these sorts of assumptions are often interpreted to signify what the interpreter wants, while a more careful reading would show that the data, in and of themselves, mean nothing. As Carr puts it, “The result is an echo chamber of misunderstanding with regard to life and events along globalization’s shoreline,” because the questions that are asked, and the data that are gathered to answer them, are “detached from the processes and events that really matter on the ground,” which, in turn, is due to flawed understanding of globalization and development.

And:

… Carr urges us to stop devising methodologies that aim to find out whether development projects might work or why they do or do not work without first asking basic questions about the social, cultural, economic, and political situations that have produced the situations that the projects aim to tackle. Instead, we should consider proper understanding of the situation as a prerequisite for any engagement, and proper understanding starts with leaving the echo chamber of development and globalization to question one’s assumptions.

The full thing is here (gated).

The New York Times yet again last week displayed a disquieting pattern of presenting dead Africans on the front page of its great newspaper, while refusing to present dead Americans in the same fashion. In the latest instance of what I call the pornography of African, Times editor prominently displayed on the top left corner of its April 24 front page “the burned body of a boy.” The disturbing photo might seem appropriate — unless one considers that the children killed by, for instance, American drone attacks in Yemen or Pakistan, never receive similar photographic display. So even on the narrow grounds of newsworthiness, the contradictions are evident and ample: for mysterious “reasons,” dead Africans can be displayed in lavish fashion — this photo of this dead boy was in color! — while death inflicted by Americans cannot be displayed. Neither are the deaths experienced by Americans in combat suitable for front page photographic treatment (or inside the paper either).

The full article is here.

WHEN BABANGIDA SEIZED POWER ON AUGUST 27, 1985, the country owed $12 billion. The squandering regime raised the national debt to $33 billion in only about six years. When he hijacked power, only N11.8 billion naira was in circulation in Nigeria. At the termination of his misrule, General Babangida, Osoba argues, had injected ‘an intolerably high level of cumulative devaluation and inflation in the national currency and economy’ by increasing the money in circulation through the printing of currency to N100.5 billion.

Even if the answer to the economic crisis surpassed him, Babangida found an answer to the lack of sufficient naira to fund his self-perpetuating project. His regime resorted to what Dr. Osoba described as ‘the sheer orgy of printing of currency notes.’

In a cover story in April 1992, which provoked the Babangida regime to shut down all the media empire, the Concord Press, owned by his friend, Bashorun MKO Abiola, Dapo Olorunyomi, who later became the Chief of Staff to Nuhu Ribadu, noted that Hannibal, who Babangida described as one his two key heroes – the other being Chaka, the Zulu – was ‘brilliant, witty, multilingual and deeply resilient’. However, Olorunyomi added that, Hannibal ‘was capable of the most recondite passion of kindness, but could also show transcendental acts of cruelty, treachery, and avarice.’

However, corruption, and its accompanying vices, non-transparency and non- accountability, survived the Babangida regime.

Even though he instituted a War Against Indiscipline and Corruption (WAIC) in an attempt to reclaim the anti-graft stance of the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, Babangida’s successor, General Sani Abacha surpassed the former in graft.

In what would count as one of the many ironies in Nigeria’s history, Abacha set up the Pius Okigbo Panel of Inquiry into the operations of the Central Bank accounts under Babangida. The Okigbo Panel report reportedly implicated Babangida in the disappearance of the $12. 4 billion that accrued to Nigeria from the 1990 Gulf War oil windfall – the matter for which Keeling was deported. However, the report was never publicly released. Abacha must have held it as a weapon to hold his endlessly scheming and dangerously mischievous retired comrade-in-arms on leash.

The Abacha regime also instituted the Failed Banks Tribunal which tried bank executives who had taken liberty with depositors’ and shareholders’ monies. In spite of Abacha’s apparent ‘anti-graft’ measures, his regime was one which a news magazine described as ‘Plundering and Looting Unlimited’. The infantry general, his close officials, family members and cronies ‘turned state power into a weapon for stealing the nation blind’. By the time he gave up the ghost on the laps of Indian prostitutes – as the rumour mills have it – more than US$4.3 billion were traced to 130 banks around the world to Abacha and his family members. Ismaila Gwarzo, Abacha’s National Security Adviser, alone reportedly siphoned US$2.1 billion into coded accounts in foreign countries.

Apart from condemning and acting against corruption and deception under generals Babangida and Abacha, Obasanjo, as president, also pursued with messianic zeal the recovery of Abacha’s loot.

Perhaps it is a cruel irony. But when Chief Sunday Afolabi, President Obasanjo’ssenior in high school and later his minister of internal affairs, in a moment of indiscretion, said his colleague in the cabinet and political rival, Chief Bola Ige, had been called to ‘come and eat’ in the Obasanjo government, he was imposing an epithet on the Obasanjo administration that was similar in its devastating implications to what was imposed on the Babangida regime by Obasanjo – eight years earlier.

For the now late Afolabi, public office in Nigeria was an eatery to which a select people were invited to ‘come and eat’.

R. Wraith and E. Simpkins argue that this culture of ‘come and eat’ has existed in Nigeria – like in the rest of the West coast of Africa – since independence. They contended further that this culture ‘flourishes as luxuriantly as the bush and weeds which it so much resembles, taking the goodness from the soil and suffocating the growth of plants which have been carefully, and expensively bred and tended.’

Alhaji Bashir Tofa, the presidential candidate of the National Republican Convention (NRC), who was unofficially defeated by Bashorun Moshood Abiola, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the June 12, 1993 election – eventually annulled by Babangida – said in early 2009 that ‘no Nigerian can fight corruption.’ Tofa argues that corruption ‘will continue as long as the masses depend on corrupt officials to earn their livelihood’. Corruption in Nigeria, said the politician, has gone beyond the ‘issue of greed, it is now a disease. People who steal have no sense of proportion because there is corruption everywhere.’

The perceptive anti-graft musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, had used the metaphor of the intersection at Ojuelegba, on the Lagos Mainland, where there was neither traffic lights, nor a traffic warden, to illustrate the confusion that arises when there are neither rules nor rule-enforcers.

Sings Fela: ‘With this confusion wey e dey, police dey inside well, army dey inside well. Who go come solve dis confusion? …Confusion e breaki bone, nko?’ [‘In the present confusion, the police are implicated, the Army is implicated. Who will then solve the problem? ....Confusion breaks bones, doesn’t it?] In the song, ‘Confusion Break Bone’, Fela concludes with the parable of a corpse which is involved in an automobile accident. His musical verdict was that this translates to ‘double wahala for deadi bodi and the owner of deadi body.’ [‘double trouble for the dead and the relations of the dead.’]

It is a metaphor for his country.

From Wale Adebanwi’s A Paradise for Maggots. 2010. Pp 118 and 119.

On November 11, 2011 the French newspaper Le Monde published two pages advertising what it described as the “free and fair” Cameroonian presidential election of October 9, 2011, which resulted in the election, for the sixth time, of Paul Biya, who has ruled the country since 1982. Frederic Meixner, International Advertising Director at Le Monde Publicite, confirmed by telephone that these two pages were paid at the rate publicly available. This would have cost 468,832 euros ($628,000) including taxes, and this price doesn’t include the possible cost of negotiations to make this publication possible.

Some French journalists, such as Pierre Haski, found the advertisement disconcerting: On October 9, 2011, Le Monde published an article denouncing the “cacophony” reigning on the day of the presidential ballot, in total contradiction with the advertisement run on November 11. Meixner explained that this was an advertisement, and thus had not been written by Le Monde‘s editorial staff. Meixner refused to reveal the name of the possible author of the advertisement, but research found the name of Stratline Communication, an agency owned by Yasmine Bahri Domon. The PR campaign of President Paul Biya during the latest election cost 5m euros and was the work of PB Com International, another French agency well known by Gulf of Guinea heads of state, and owned by Patricia Balme.

Few know that the architect of Paul Biya’s web campaign is François de La Brosse, the director of the French company ZNZ Group, and who is also Nicolas Sarkozy’s communication advisor in charge of French President’s Internet strategy. This is what Patricia Balme herself confirms in this video.

This leads us to question the relations between those whom French journalist Vincent Hugueux names the “White Sorcerers”, and the syndicate of presidents of France’s former colonial empire. Those men and women mix politics, communication agencies and journalists in the frame of the well-known “Francafrique” network (France’s sphere of influence in Africa): Justifying themselves with their deep interest in the development of Africa, they organise campaigns to ensure the international legitimacy of the continent’s presidents. This is done at the expense of real investigative journalism, and leaves small place in the political and media landscape to local activists and bloggers, who try with significantly less financial means to show the reality of the Gulf of Guinea.

The article is here.

2. What’s your flavour? Italian or Spanish? – BBC Business Editor

3. Black France - Africa is a country

4. The dangerous cocktail of global money and local politics – Moisés Naím

5. On Nigeria’s Petroleum Industries Bill – Mallam Nasir El-rufai

This is a synopsis:

Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation that recently celebrated its 50th year of self rule.

Click here to support the project.

Any time I recall scenes from that video showing security officers of the Nigerian state ferret men, young and old, able and disabled, from behind closed doors in their homes and efficiently shoot them to death in the streets of Maiduguri in 2009, I find myself thinking: If that had been a nightmare, and not an event in actual history, it would still have had the power of occasioning some form of insanity. I ask myself: What manner of people would view such scenes of cold mass murder, executed by agents of the state in the country whose citizens they are, and still carry on as though there were something like human society in Nigeria? But apparently we all did carry on that way—and yes, there is human society in Nigeria; maybe not quite humane, or maybe just humane and inhumane by turns. We all watched that video and expressed our shock—I still feel the bile in my mouth when I think of that old man in crutches, escorted out of his house, made to lie face-down in the street, and finished off with a bullet. We all spat out our shock or held our mouths open in disbelief, and afterwards we carried on as if nothing strange, nothing disturbing, had happened. Perhaps nothing strange, nothing disturbing, indeed, had happened. There had been Ogoni, Odi, Zaki Biam, etc., etc., before Maiduguri. The Nigerian state does not only underwrite our citizenship, it also has the right and power to overrule our life and issue us with death, even on a large scale. That, for you, is the Nigerian state under which we organize what may be taken as Nigerian society.

In 2009, there was genocide in Maiduguri. I am not being sensational in making that claim. I am not even being as ‘sensitive’ as Wole Soyinka or as ‘insensitive’ as OBJ. I am only stating the fact as I saw it captured in that video. I do not recall that the dead in the Maiduguri genocide were ever memorialized in a public ceremony or even much remarked in the media and public discourse. For us, sensitive and insensitive Nigerians alike, life went on. We reduced it all, at most, to the extra-judicial killing of one man—Muhammed Yusuf, the leader—or as I believe—the front or fall guy of the Boko Haram.

Part of the tragedy of the matter is that we were not the only ones to forget the dead in the Maiduguri. They were also forgotten by the Boko Haram, the terrorist group whose attacks on the police and the populace provided the pretext for that murderous police action. The people have never mattered to the Boko Haram. Their wellbeing was never the issue; otherwise such a moneyed and globally networked group like the Boko Haram would have used its resources to establish a socio-economic enclave, an alternative to the Nigerian ‘shitstem’, wherein the people may feel a sense of ownership of and participation in governance. Rather the people themselves are the hostages and victims of the Boko Haram, their human shield and cannon fodder, their pawns and counters in the enterprise and gamble of violence. The Boko Haram have never included the dead in the Maiduguri genocide in their bill of grievances. Rather, they supplanted the massacre of people with the murder of their figurehead, making the latter the only issue that requires reckoning on the part of the police force.

Here.

According to the latest dispatch of cables by wikileaks, the Nigerian envoy told US officials that he was shocked that Zimbabweans spent their time in queues without so much as batting an eyelid.

“They line up for hours to get a few dollars from their bank accounts,” Adenyaju said. “Then they go home and do their chores and come back the next day and line up again. If this was Nigeria we would burn the bank down.”

From The Standard of Zimbabwe.