Dear Emmanuel Ike Udogu,
The good news : https://www.chinadailyhk.com/article/346657
As a Nigerien said on Al-Jazeera the other day, it looks like ECOWAS has now become the military wing of the former colonial master known as France. I came to the same conclusion as I listened to the bluster emanating from one Abdel-Fatau Musah. We have yet to hear Sidie Mohamed Tunis conducting business in the ECOWAS parliament and of course, ECOWAS Secretary-General Omar Alieu Touray who hails from the tiniest ECOWAS nation, the Gambia, who have tasted the might of ECOWAS military intervention that was led by Senegal and Nigeria, when they jointly ousted Gambia's strongman Yahya Jammeh.
In the sixties of the last century which initiated the first round of coup d'états in West Africa, we (in Sierra Leone) used to joke about the Gambia, that the prospect of any coup d'état being staged in that country was zero since they didn't have an army back then, they only had a boys scout brigade, and a few police constables. (My Better Half tells me that when she arrived in Banjul - then Bathurst - in February 1969, the Gambia Police Band marched over to the plane to greet the passengers, mostly tourists, by playing the Gambia National Anthem, or maybe it was " God Save the Queen". That was peaceful, sleepy Gambia under Jarawa back then, and the not so sleepy or innocent Soup-Sweet Land Sierra Leone had already had more than a fair share of coups and had gone through no less than eight coups , in quick succession, one after the other, by the end of 1968
Which only goes to prove that the only way to ensure the final end to the possibility of military coups in ECOWAS territories is to disband all the military outfits. Sadly, even if this were to be done through legislation via any of the "democratically elected" parliaments / senates, people's assemblies , it's unlikely that the military in any of these countries would go, without putting up a fight, probably staging a coup and abolishing parliaments and so called democratic elections
Yes indeed, this very important moment in the history of Africa My Africa ought not to be trivialised by any kind of lunacy even if it's only a temporary mental condition/ aberration/delusion/bout of schizophrenia of the type diagnosed by Franz Fanon…
and visionaries…
BTW, Jagaban Asiwaju Tinubu is yet to appoint a Minister of Poetry. I don't know what to expect next since I wrote to Chidi Anthony Opara back in July, " Dear Chidi, Kedu? I understand that President Ahmed BolaTinubu is about to appoint you the next Nigerian Minister of Information and Communications" and he, preferring poetry to patriotism, and shirking the kind of responsibility some of us would like to repose on him, deftly replied that he considers himself "too old to be head of a section of officialdom and since I must write poems, the ministerial burden would not allow me that." Of course, I did not enquire from him whether or not he would reconsider the offer if - subtle bribe - Asiwaju were to increase the temptation by offering him a $1million-a-month salary and a few other benefits for the next four years , just to be his minister, an honourable member of his inclusive cabinet ( and of course to elicit a few unsolicited praise poems from Chidi, inexorably expressing his eternal gratefulness to the Super Daddy…
From Malcolm X ( Unity Rally speech in Harlem 1963 / the founding of Afro-American Unity, the African Diaspora and Africa (the ECOWAS nations included) like to brag about being "the cradle of Civilisation", although, today, in spite of all the popular knowledge conveyed by Dr.Yosef Ben-Jochannan, John Henrik Clarke, Ivan Van Sertima and that school of Afro-centric thought, tragically there are still those like the deposed President Bazoum of Niger who ought to know better since he graduated from the Sheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal, and therefore, must know what time it is , must understand what's long overdue, must understand that it's time to do away with with all that clinging on to the colonial past, begging master for a few crumbs please, from all that he has stolen from the people of Africa, as if still believing that when it's time for positive change, that change is only going to come if it's promoted by the Vatican or the ancient campidoglio in Rome, or spearheaded by strong impulses from that seminal idea, the idea that they have specialised in because it's called Democracy and was germinated in ancient Athens circa 508 BCE, not to mention the various expressions of some of those ideals and the experiment that culminated in the historic storming of the capitol in Washington D.C. on the 6th of January, 2021…
Ojogbon Falola summed up the whole mess succinctly with this punchline as its climax: " If Tinubu is trying to send a message that there will be no more coups, he is daydreaming"
Putting it more bluntly there are other synonyms for daydreaming, from the devil's political dictionary…..
BTW, on Friday afternoon, I attended the jummah prayers at the Fatih Camii mosque in Stockholm, and I was particularly interested to hear what the prayer leader was going to say in his khutbah/ sermon, since earlier in the day there had been the burning of the Quran, this time outside the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran - another provocation….but in his sermon, the prayer leader merely said that in Islam there are rewards and punishments, good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished. I had thought that he was going to say that in al-Islam good deeds are rewarded and those who burn the Quran will surely find themselves burning in Jahannam ( hell) forever and ever…
A short footnote: I mentioned Gambia as the tiniest of the ECOWAS countries, but maybe the Gambia is not that tiny after all, since area-wise, Israel ( 22,145 km²) is only twice the size of The Gambia ( 11,300 km²)
--On Sunday, 20 August 2023 at 08:19:57 UTC+2 Emmanuel Udogu wrote:Brother Cornelius Hamelberg,
"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make [real] mad!"
Your post is an excellent "food for thought." Indeed, the current Vice President of Nigeria once told us that due to the political instability in Nigeria for obvious reasons, the "most corrupt and incompetent Christian from the South should be crowned as the Senate President…" and the rest is history. It was Niccolo Machiavelli who once informed us that in politics, and probably in other professions, "the end justifies the means."
To piggyback on your opinion in this post, some scholars here and elsewhere have warned that due to Bad Governance in Africa, and especially in West Africa, it might be foolhardy to dismiss more coups in the region. Accordingly, "a word is enough for the wise."
Ike Udogu
On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 9:59 PM Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
At this juncture, Sabr ( Patience )
is the watchword.
It's a time for cool heads and we wish the Nigerian delegation well.
We wish them all success with their diplomacy.
A major question arising : And if there is a coup in Nigeria - an eventuality which is within the realm of possibility - according to some calculations - a coup that could be precipitated by disaffection within the rank and file of the Nigerian military being ordered to invade Niger which shares a border with seven of Nigeria's Northern brotherly states, if such a coup were to happen - and as always, talk is cheap , this saying still obtains : "An idle mind is the devil's workshop", Ghana's president Akufo-Addo for example speaks good French but when it comes to action and to putting his money where his mouth is, in such an eventuality ( a coup in Nigeria) and acting in accord with the same principle, the question is, which members of ECOWAS would be going to get together to invade Nigeria, in order to " to restore Constitutional order" ?
Ghana?
In the eventuality of the likely coup in Nigeria, I'd like to know, which member states of ECOWAS would like to invade Nigeria in order "to kick ass" and to restore President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to power or to restore him to " Constitutional order", to constitutional law and order?
And which countries would like to pass inhuman and inhumane sanctions on Nigeria, cut off Nigeria's electricity, if possible, maybe sanction their oil too, and prevent medicines and food being sent to the country, by land, sea and air ?
Or is it only the strong that have the right to bully the relatively weaker?
I'm thinking of Israel and the Palestinians , if in the name of Righteousness, Fair play, Justice and Mercy, and in the name of the LORD, in the name of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ,and in the name of HUMANITY, if the military wing of ECOWAS would like to send an invading force to over there - to the Middle East, to help sort things out there - after sanctions, and cutting off electricity etc. ? And maybe much closer to "home" also to Sudan and the Central African Republic..
The bloodless coup in Niger has a lot of popular support within the country.
The government appointed by the new military leaders intend to transition to a civilian government/ to a restoration of so-called "constitutional order" in three years time, a reasonable and feasible time frame, if we are to go by praxis from similar situations in the past.
For peace-loving Africans , all over Africa, including Mali and Burkina Faso, the consequences that may arise out of the proposed alternative to this bloodless coup, namely some really bloody military intervention, is far too horrible, terrible, undemocratic, to even contemplate - unless of course, the enemies of Africa would like plunge the whole region into an endless, mindless reign of terror with all kinds satanic weapons flowing in from everywhere with the sole aim of visiting death and destructions as we have seen elsewhere; and such an intervention would begin a war without an end in sight , at least not within the lifetime of this generation of the current ECOWAS military's decision makers…
The Powerful Believers & B.B. Collins : Sing to Praise the Lord
--
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