Loomnie

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.

I just got this in the mail. If you have any questions, write to the email addresses in the body of the Call.

“Call for Applications”

(ICD Conferences, January – March 2012)

Dear Sir/ Madam,

On behalf of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, I am writing to bring to your attention the following major programs (outlined below) hosted by us in partnership with other leading organizations. The Programs will bring together governmental and diplomatic officials, civil society practitioners, private sector representatives, journalists, young professionals, students and scholars, and other interested stakeholders from across the world for a program of lectures, workshops, panel and group discussions and social and cultural activities featuring leading figures from the fields of politics, academia, civil society, media, and business.
The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy is currently accepting applications for the events outlined below, all of which will take place from January 2012 – March 2012. .

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The European African Alliance Conference 2012

Development Initiatives, Trade Relations and Interregional Cultural Exchange in the European African Alliance  (Berlin, January 10th – 13th, 2012)
www.experience-africa.org

The “European African Alliance Conference 2012” is the first of several conferences relating to Africa. This conference will focus on the relationship between Europe and Africa in the context of development, trade, security and cultural exchange with the view to explore and evaluate Africa’s and Europe’s role in the field of Cultural Diplomacy.

Africa’s relationship with Europe and European Institutions has developed significantly over the last decade making the European African Alliance an interesting and relevant topic for discussion today. The program will consist of lectures, seminars, debates and panel discussions that will feature leading figures from international politics & diplomacy, academia, civil society, and the private sector.

This conference will focus on and analyze economic issues such as migration and employment, political issues such as the use and affect of institutions, democracy and international relations and security and trade issues.

To Apply please visit:
http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/experienceafrica/index.php?en_eaac-2012_application-form

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Cultural Diplomacy in Africa: A Forum for Young Leaders

Development Initiatives, Trade Relations and Interregional Cultural Exchange in the European African Alliance  (Weeklong Seminar, Berlin, January 9th – 15th, 2012)
www.icd-africa.org

**Participants of the forthcoming  CDA weeklong seminar will take part in the International Conference “The European African Alliance Conference 2012 (Berlin, January 10th – 13th, 2012)

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The International Conference on the African Union & Cultural Diplomacy

Cultural Diplomacy as a Vehicle of Global Governance: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy and Soft Power in the Future of the African Union (London, February 7th-10th, 2012)

The African Union and Cultural Diplomacy Conference is the second of a series of our international conferences dedicated to enhancing awareness and understanding of governing institutions. The conference is organized by the ICD and other leading organizations.

Since the Cold War, the global power axis has shifted significantly, from a bipolar world order into multiple of poles of influence, rapid market liberalization and a considerable synergy of global interdependence. This shift in power relations has not been unproblematic, especially for those countries that have been sidelined from the international decision-making process. The African Union is therefore a prominent example of the necessity of collaboration in order to protect and promote individual interests in the current international setting.

This conference will emphasize how cultural diplomacy can be used as an increasingly useful tool for building cooperation both regionally and globally, and explores avenues through which this new form of diplomacy can be used as a driving force to foster good governance, development and the promotion of human rights though the AU.

To apply please visit:
http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/experienceafrica/index.php?en_aucdc-2011_application-form

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The Power of Africa

Africa as a Stronger Actor on the International Stage (Paris, March 13th-16th, 2012)
http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/experienceafrica/index.php?the-power-of-africa

The Power of Africa is the third Africa related conference that is being hosted in the beginning of 2012. It will focus on the possibilities and barriers that the African countries are facing in terms of economic and political bargaining power as well as the prospect of speaking with one voice on the international stage.

The conference will in particular address the expectations and opinions that the outside world holds of African development and how this often diverges with what might be more realistic and customized solutions on the ground. One aim of the conference is thus to debate whether alternative forms of institutional rule and economic models can be deemed more effective in Africa than the established forms of Western governance.  The conference will look at global as well as local perceptions of African leadership and development, and the bilateral trade relationships that Africa has with China and India.  Furthermore we will explore the role of the African Union as well as civil societies in enhancing interregional relations within Africa and what prospects this holds for its future international image and bargaining power.

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The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy is an international, not-for-profit, non-governmental organization with headquarters in Berlin, Germany. The goal of the ICD is to promote global peace and stability by strengthening and supporting intercultural relations at all levels. Over the past decade the ICD has grown to become one of Europe’s largest independent cultural exchange organizations, hosting programs that facilitate interaction among individuals of all cultural, academic, and professional backgrounds, from across the world.

Previous Events

Previous events held by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy include the International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy (Berlin, May 11th-15th 2011 – www.icd-internationalsymposium.org), which hosted The Hon. Lucinda Creighton – Minister of European Affairs of Ireland; The Hon. Michael Chertoff – Former United States Secretary of Homeland Security; The Hon. Rexhep Meidani – Former President of Albania; The Hon. Senator Tim Hutchinson – Former United States Senator from Arkansas; The Hon. Judge Theodor Meron - Former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; The Hon. Yasar Yakis – Former Foreign Minister of Turkey

In March 2011 the ICD hosted the Berlin International Economics Congress 2011 (Berlin, March 9th – 12th 2011 – www.biec.de ), which hosted The Hon. Nahas Angula – Prime minister of Namibia; The Hon. Jean-Paul Adam – Foreign Minister of the Republic of Seychelles; The Hon. Alberto Jose Guevara Obregon – Minister of Finance of Nicaragua; The Hon. Al Imam Al Sadig Al Mahdi - Former Prime minister of Sudan; The Hon. Akua Sena Dansua – Minister for Tourism of Ghana; and The Hon. Edmund Bartlett – Minister of Tourism of Jamaica.

Please address any additional queries to info@culturaldiplomacy.org  or toubbe@culturaldiplomacy.org

We look forward to hear from you soon

With warmest regards

By Julie Owono in a very nice piece for Al Jazeera:

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.

From a WSJ review of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children’s fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth’s sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it’s a matter of costs and benefits: “If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building.” These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy.

System D is full of surprises. From Linda Chen, who trades counterfeit auto parts, we learn that China has a hierarchy of fake merchandise: The manufacturers of high-quality fakes offer guarantees and take back defective products, but with low-quality fakes it’s caveat emptor. Ogun Dairo buys woodchips from a sawmill and uses them to smoke fish, for sale by street vendors; her unlicensed grill is in an illegal squatter settlement in Lagos, but she buys fish that have been imported from Europe. At the euphemistically named Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, where Arthur Okafor obtains the pirated mobile phones that he later smuggles into Nigeria, the cash turnover is so high that almost every (unlicensed) kiosk has a battery-powered currency counter.

The review reminds me of a chapter in my dissertation, in which I follow a container of secondhand clothing from the Cotonou port to the used clothes market in the Beninese city, and from the market to the Seme border and then into Nigeria. I show the different regulatory regimes under which batches of the imported used clothing fall – when taxes get paid on them and when not, and how the final retailer in Lagos sometimes actually pay some form of tax on the goods he has in his small stall on Lagos Island – even when secondhand clothing is not legally supposed to be imported or sold in the country (there is a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing into Nigeria). It also reminds me of the importance of ethnography for understanding microeconomic interactions that eventually feed into macroeconomic figures of a country. (Try understanding why Benin would always have a balance of trade deficit without knowing that almost all consumer goods it imports ends up being smuggled into Nigeria.) Of course, the whole idea of the informal economy itself arose from Keith Hart’s ethnographic study of urban slums in Ghana in the 1960s.

Read the review here. H/T to Bunmi Oloruntoba on Twitter.

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.

Mao Kaci on NigeriansTalk:

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.

From Reuters:

Nigeria’s central bank plans to diversify its $33 billion in foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar by switching a tenth of the stockpile into yuan, underlining the momentum behind China’s drive to internationalise its currency.

“We are looking at anything to start with from 5 to 10 percent of our reserves,” central bank governor Lamido Sanusi said on Monday.

The central bank had already said that it was considering reducing its reliance on the dollar, which economists say accounts for the bulk of its $32.96 billion in reserves . The bank does not publish the currency composition of its assets.

But Sanusi, speaking to CNBC news by telephone from China, said Africa’s second-largest economy was not abandoning the dollar and euro. “They are going to remain an important part of our holdings,” he said.

Continue reading for more analysis of the decision. From what I’ve seen, CBN seems to be the first central bank to do this.

See also FT TIlt for more analysis.

Dr Okonjo-Iweala, the returning finance minister and new economy Czar (couldn’t resist that one) starts talking at about 4:30. She talks about agriculture, manufacturing, job creation and even Nollywood. I don’t yet have an opinion on her and her new team  -  it is much too early – but in a few months, one should begin to see beyond the platitudinous rhetoric.

From Bloomberg:

Energy companies operating in Senegal will drill three offshore wells next year as the West African nation vies to join a growing group of regional crude producers, according to the state-owned oil company,Petrosen.

Senegalese officials held talks with more than 10 oil companies this year in attempts to lure investors to its energy industry, said Joseph Medou, Petrosen’s geologist, in an interview in Dakar Aug. 25.

“If we make comparisons to what is happening in Ghana and Ivory Coast, to Sierra Leone, we think we have the same kind of plays,” he said.

Read here.

On the current political situation in Senegal, see this Project Syndicate column from Sanou Mbaye.

Call for papers for a special issue of African Identities to be published in the summer of 2012 (African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society)

More than a decade and half ago, Donal Cruise-O’Brien (1996) had declared that the African youth were ‘a lost generation.’ This fatalistic summation of the fate of the African youth was perhaps for good reason. The enormous socio-economic and cultural forces surrounding the lives of young people in Africa were [and still are] simply daunting. And at the very core of this seemingly insurmountable socio-economic atmosphere are the pervasive unjust protocols of postcolonial regimes under which most African youth live. Indeed, more recent scholarship suggests that there is no respite yet for the African youth as the hopeless situation has escalated (See Abbink, Jon and Ineke Van Kessel 2005 & Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck 2005). On account of the inclement socio-economic and political circumstances surrounding young people in Africa, what we are now witnessing across the entire continent is what Mamodou Douf (2003) describes as the ‘dramatic irruption of young people in both the domestic and public spheres,’ putting young people at the very heart of the continent’s socio-economic and political imagination (Durham 2006). But the challenges facing African youth are not peculiar to them.

All over the world, the new sociology of youth points to a growing concern about the ramifications of globalization, late modernity and general global social and economic restructuring for the lives and futures of young people. But amidst the lingering fears of the future of the young, scholars have also called for a deep reflection and rethinking of young people’s own resilience and agency in the midst of these turbulent times. This special issue of African Identities, tentatively entitled Late Modernity and Agency: Youth Cultures in Africa, seeks to reflect on the varied contours of youth responses to social change in Sub-Saharan Africa. While young people in Africa continue to face extraordinary social challenges in their everyday lives, what are the unique ways in which they have reinvented their circumstances to keep afloat in the midst of seismic global social changes? Papers are solicited on a wide range of topics on the African youth that may unravel young people not only as victims but also as active social actors in the face of a shifting global modernity. The themes may include amongst others,

- African Youth and Globalization
- Late Modernity and Social Change
- Youth and Media-Film, Television, Video, Internet, etc
- Hip-hop, Club Cultures and other forms of Popular culture
- Mobility and Social Media
- Gender and New Economies of Youth
- Democracy, Power and Youth Activism
- Youth and Conflict in Africa
- New Subjectivities and Agency
- Neo-Pentecostalism as Subculture
- The Informal Economy and Invented Pathways
- Lifestyles and Identity Constructions
- New Spatial Politics in Public and Domestic Spaces

Abstracts of not more than 500 words (including name, position, institutional affiliation, and email contact) may be sent to P.UGor@bham.ac.uk no later than September 30th, 2011. This special issue of African Identities will be published in the summer of 2012.