Famine and Humanitarian Intervention in Nigeria
by africanagenda.net
The United Nations says there is an impending famine in Borno province of Nigeria. According to various aid agencies 75 000 children are at risk of starvation. Save the Children will be asking for aid donors to raise $1.2 billion at the next UN humanitarian appeal to be held in Geneva.
They are likening the potential crisis in scale to the Biafran famine of the late 1960s which was the first African famine to be brought to the TV screens of the world . The media showed horrifying pictures of skeletal children in what became the birth of poverty-porn and the rise of the NGO Industrial Complex that has been using our goodwill and money for corrupt purposes ever since. Today the soft-power tools of institutions like USAID, its British counter-part DIFD (UKAID) and the French version MSF, wield more power than any military force over their own governments and those of the numerous countries they currently occupy.
It is 50 years since the Biafran War and the oligarchs who currently rule the West rely on the fact that we do not know our history either in Britain, France or Biafra. The oligarchs` machine- like, sociopathic minds lack imagination and therefore rely on a pattern which they use over and over again under different titles and names.
Biafra
Back in 1967, it was presented to the world that civil war in Nigeria was causing millions of people to die of starvation. The Biafran region, under Colonel Ojukwu had taken up arms against the military government of Nigeria in the name of freeing the Igbo people from its persecutions, secession from the State. These times have left indelible memories across the world of human suffering on an horrific scale. In Nigeria, social divisions caused by the civil war continue to destabilize the nation and block any sense of national cohesion.
The real causes were never exposed . The truth was that Nigeria was ripped apart and millions died because of an oil war between two competing petroleum corporations – French Elf Aquitaine and British Royal Dutch Shell.
Oil reserves in French controlled Gabon were dwindling and the French petroleum giant Elf Aquitaine had discovered vast reserves in Biafra . French secret services funded and equipped the army of Col. Ojukwu and encouraged him to take up arms against the government for secession of the Biafran region. When it became apparent that Col Ojukwu`s forces were not going to win against the Nigerian government, a public relations program was put in place using a marketing company called Mark Press. The aim of this was to cause such a public outcry over human suffering that a humanitarian intervention would be called for.This led to the first military occupation disguised as an humanitarian intervention by foreign powers.
On the other side Royal Dutch Shell which up until very recent times, has used Nigeria as its private oil reserve for the oligarchs of the City of London, supported the Military Government of Nigeria in all its atrocities against the Biafrans.
Boko Haram
Boko Haram have been created as the excuse for the oligarchs War on Terror in West Africa. The organisation no longer bears any resemblance to the original Boko Haram.It has been infiltrated and utterly corrupted to be a tin-pot terrorist outfit to create havoc and justify the presence of foreign powers in the form of aid agencies, Africom and UN peace-keeping missions.
Current food shortages in Borno provence are being attributed to the regional instability caused by the presence of Boko Haram. Borno province has been the stronghold of this terrorist group since they gained notoriety world-wide thanks to the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls. This led to a massive Kony2012 style PR campaign to rescue these children. The cause was championed by America`s First Lady, Michelle Obama. Nigeria`s president at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, on being questioned about the Chibok schoolgirls responded by saying " what abducted children ?" During the Kony2012 hype to get Africom into Uganda, Ugandans were asking who was Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers.
Borno Province is situated next to Niger which has recently agreed to a new Africom base. Africom also has a base in neighbouring Cameroon. Is this forward-planning by the US Defence Department as Boko Haram are being steadily wiped-out by the Nigerian military under the excellent leadership of Pres Buhari ?
Bread and Butter for NGOs
The Nigerian government have responded to the United Nation`s alarm bells about famine, with some frank and very interesting comments. Pres. Buhari recently made this statement :
"We are concerned about the blatant attempts to whip up a non-existent fear of mass starvation by some aid agencies, a type of hype that does not provide a solution to the situation on the ground but more to do with calculations for operations financing locally and abroad."
The Real Food War
Chief Audu Ogbeh , Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development stated that Nigeria has more than adequate supplies of food and that there is no chance of a famine. Nigeria now has 110 rice mills. He explained that the price of the country`s food staple will come down once production levels have reached the necessary target. Until then demands to lower the price nationally would only demoralize farmers. The answer, he said, is to stimulate more production.
"The prices will fall, but let production reach a level where those who want to exploit can no longer do so because there is so much available everywhere".
The United Nations World Food Programme has been flooding Third World countries with US subsidized grains and cotton for decades on the pretext of food shortages and famines.The reality has been the complete annhiliation of domestic economies, leaving farmers unable to compete with free food dished out by the WFP.
The Real Nigeria
scientists at NASRDA image : pilotafrica.com
Nigeria is not a backward state unable to feed its population. It is an industrialized and thriving economy. At present it is the 20th largest economy and is worth in excess of $500 billion in terms of nominal GDP and $1 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity. In 2014 it replaced South Africa as Africa`s largest economy.Goldman-Sachs has ranked it as one of the emerging Next Eleven most powerful economies of the 21st century. Nigeria has long been the West African regional power.
Nigeria has its own space program The National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) and has plans to send its first manned mission into space by 2030, a first for an African nation. Nigeria is being partnered by China in this development to become a world-class space industry and has already launched 5 satellites since 2003 with 3 still in orbit delivering data.
Nigeria has the greatest human potential among African states with the largest population of 174 million. With such a fantastic human resource brilliant minds will be finding solutions to all of Africa`s unsolved problems. Recently two schoolchildren from Lagos Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime, aged 13 and 15, have thought up their own computer coding system and created a new search engine called Crocodile Browser Lite.
Since his inauguaration Pres. Buhari has done wonders. He has tackled corruption in his military,cabinet and in the state`s dealings with Royal Dutch Shell. He has instituted national development funds to revitalize the domestic economy. Buhari, almost uniquely among his geo-political compatriots, recognizes religious extremism as a direct result of poverty and unemployment.
Nigeria`s military have now all but wiped out Boko Haram .
Buhari recognizes, that unlike Great Britain, Nigeria is not an island and that the well- being of Nigeria`s neighbouring countries will directly influence the well -being of his nation. Nigeria cannot develop in peace while poverty reigns in the region. He has therefore given his support to one of the most exciting developments the 21st century will bring to Africa – the TransAqua Plan for the replenishment of Lake Chad.
The TransAqua Plan has for the last 30 plus years, remained only a vision for genuine African development, a vision of African industrialization and the economic co-operation of countries from the Great Lakes Region to the Sahel, a vital artery of transport, trade, energy and life-sustaining water with the potential to change the lives of 40 million people. Despite the fact that this proposed project has been put before all international development agencies over the last 30 plus years, not one drop of interest in this genuine development has come as a result.
However this dream is now turning to realization. In November 2014 the first meeting was held of the International Scientific Committee which was established to advise the Lake Chad Basin Commission,and was conducted at its headquarters in Chad`s capital city of N`Djamena. The Lake Chad Basin Commission was originally formed in 1964 by Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad with later members being the Central African Republic (1996) and Libya ( 2008). The 1960s was an era of unprecedented optimism for the continent which under leadership of that time offered a brilliant African future. Many of those leaders were either assassinated or demonized and their visions of African dignity never saw the light of day in the decades of destabilization and globalization that have followed.
So how are we to interpret the UN`s call for humanitarian intervention in a country that is clearly winning the war on terror? Nigeria, under Buhari is clearly winning a far more important and real war, he is winning the war on African poverty which is not the war that the Western oligarchs want him to be fighting.
Sources : Nigerian Civil War:
http://markcurtis.info/2007/02/13/nigeriabiafra-1967-70/
Al Jazeera documentary : The French African Connection
Nigerian economy – Wikipedia
Trans-Aqua Plan for Lake Chad – http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2016/eirv43n14-20160401/31-35_4314.pdf
note – Transaqua Plan for Lake Chad, previously published on africanagenda.net under `Buhari cutting Nigeria Free from the Ropes of Empire?`
Lake Chad is situated in the Sahel, it is Africa`s fourth largest lake and has a colossal drainage area of almost 2.4 million km2.However it is very shallow and has been steadily drying up, its complete disappearance will be a tragedy for an already water-restricted area. The plan is to transport approximately 100 billion cubic meters of water from the eastern Congo River Basin in Kivu, which is in a region of high rainfall with an excess of water which is already supplying the massive hydro plant of the Inga Dam. The water will be transported 2800km along navigable canals which will introduce an entirely revolutionary African transport system, facilitating trade and commerce and change. The canal will become an interactive commercial system based on local communities, a water-way highway, a floating market of exchange. Intrinsic to this will be the regenerationof the environment in the upper reaches of the system. Here, to reduce extreme evaporation mass planting of trees will be needed to change local weather systems; a dynamic approach to the environment as oppose to preservation and conservation only. Man`s creative thinking should realize our ability to engineer in favour of our biosphere and altering it for mutual benefit. Hydro capabilities will be used to supply electricity which is the foundation stone of mechanization and industrialization. This will lead to a transformation in agriculture and manufacturing with participating nations exporting finished products of textiles and food to international markets. Most importantly such changes will require skills from highly qualified engineers and technicians to mechanical skills, to innovators of new systems; jobs, productive employment and a secure African -based market.
But it is more than that. If we view this project in terms of its capabilities we are looking at nothing less than a revolution. A revolution to restore dignity to millions of lives, a revolution based on harnessing man`s intellectual creativity to restore decaying environments and using the Earth`s life blood to create a state of abundance based on human dignity that will reflect in all directions onto this beautiful place on which we live.
Dare to dream this dream and a revolution will take place, from Kivu, in genocide strewn DRC , through the utter poverty of the Central African Republic, to the drought ridden lands of Chad , human lives can and will be transformed. This project is the chance to give the young generation a sense of their own future of which they are a crucial and pivotal part. Let this be an industrial revolution, Africa`s industrial revolution and let us be done with useless political words, time now to build that future based on projects that will benefit nations not corporations, that will require co-operation not war, that will bring mechanization, abundant electricity,skills, innovation, employment, and dignity.
Anjan Sundaram
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78Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin and Paul Kagame are postcolonial dictators. Their grave human rights abuses are often excused or overlooked by supporters who venerate their defiant opposition to western imperialism. Kagame is an exemplar of this breed, for he even wins broad admiration in the west. There is credible evidence of massacres by Kagame's forces of tens or hundreds of thousands of people after Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and his political opponents are almost all in exile, in prison or dead.
Yet Kagame heads several prestigious UN development initiatives. Harvard and Yale invite him to speak about democracy and human rights. It is even fashionable to celebrate Kagame's leadership of Rwanda. The extent of this hypocrisy is an indication not of Kagame's dictatorial achievements or crimes, but rather of the world's hunger for postcolonial leaders and narratives. Kagame is held up as a counter to western hegemony.
Kagame is expert in crafting postcolonial myths that resonate powerfully in a world still grappling with colonial legacies. He claims he ended Rwanda's genocide, which killed nearly a million people in just 100 days, while a morally bankrupt west stood idle. There is merit in his argument that the world should be held accountable for not deploying peacekeepers during the genocide. However, genocide survivors are afraid to mention that Kagame had himself opposed the deployment of those UN peacekeepers. He was concerned they would interfere with his military takeover of the country.
Kagame claims to stand up to western imperialism, though he is himself a stark example of it. Elected in rigged polls applauded by the west, his government relies on western funding and military support to maintain power – the very definition of imperialism. Such ironies are lost in popular narratives of Kagame.
Those who support Rwanda's leader are responding to a genuine need in our world for postcolonial leaders who will help the so-called "third world" break free of the debilitating imperial discourses so eloquently described by scholars such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. And the crimes of these authoritarian regimes are no secret: Rwanda's history textbooks also position Kagame in such terms, placing him among alleged good military leaders such as Castro and Muammar Gaddafi. However, in choosing as our postcolonial symbols oppressive leaders such as Kagame, we do ourselves and all colonised nations a disservice. We make a mockery of lives and families laid waste by these leaders, and we deepen the very inequalities that we seek to redress.
Anjan Sundaram is the author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship and a PhD candidate in postcolonial journalism at the University of East Anglia