Nigeria, English Language & Anglo-Saxon Geopolitics

Introduction

One of the remnants of colonialism is the language(s) of the violent, rapist & civilisation-stripping colonialists. This is the case for Nigeria. It is the case of this article that beyond the ordinary, Nigeria is not just a vassal or client to London & Washington DC by other metrics but also in English Language; the so-called official language. It is the contention of the piece that the adoption of English Language by post-independence Nigeria to the total neglect of national languages truly diminishes her in the Anglo capitals and in their geopolitics. Something most Nigerians don’t want to confront.

BeforeThey came..

No one has successful disputed the fact that many nations and peoples of Nigeria before colonialism interacted significantly which involved among other things in communication beyond sign language and barter. Neighbours traded, intermarried, and exchanged and fought wars not out of mere simplistic reasons but from a complexity of dimensions that represent their core interests. It will be the most expression of ignorance to suggest that Ndigbo had limited contact with the Ekik, Nupe, Tiv, Yoruba, Jukun, Birom and others before imperial Britain arrived the scene with industrial violent rage to dominate.  (Read Political Organization in Nigeria Since the Late Stone Age by John N Oriji). There are books on these issues if anyone is sincere to confront them.  This fact speaks volumes despite imposed Berlin Conference boundaries.  In summary the nations & peoples of Nigeria are neighbours from time immemorial and interacted for ever since. (Read A History of West Africa 1000 – 1800 by Basil Davidson).

They conquered

Empire building based on conquest of other peoples, their land and resources is usually pursued on a strategically limited budget. As a business it is pursued to maximise opportunities mostly economic, and at this point difference vanishes between British, French, US & Russian colonialism. Yes, Russia (Empire) was a colonial power. (Read End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border between Geopolitics and Globalisation by Dmitri Trenin). So whole mission civilisatrice project was and remains a business venture were human beings (civilisations) were simple pawns in geopolitical struggles. The tools of conquest were industrial violence first to pacify and then cultural diminution including new religions and new educational strategies. 

I have stated in previous writing that the imperialists can only extract their profit by creating new men and new women whose unalloyed allegiance is committed to the metropolitan capital. Lord Lugard simply applied the template in Nigeria with total disregard to religious denominations to achieve his goal. If the British were so religiously unique, why did they allow the Catholic Church space to operate? Has London totally reconciled with Vatican/Catholic Church on their cultural/geopolitical differences? Well, destruction of civilisation and imposition of new cultures including new language is there to create new elite and English Language did and still does this job. Many (or most) Nigerians exposed to the new culture either have no command of their national languages or totally disdain them for a variety of reasons/justifications which you can put down to elegant stupidity.

So they Left or Did they?

What is complex to appreciate is the short duration it took the British to build and muster their Nigeria. From the late 18^th century the empire was already on the back foot with the emergence of Germany in 1871 in her defeat of France.  United Germany as an ascending power sought a finger in the African pie though Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was shrewd enough to play safe but his successors pushed the cart which led to 1914 – 1918 maximum slaughter of Europeans called World War 1. If European power elites can sacrifice their own on industrial scale, who are Africans? With such pyrrhic victory repeated between 1939 - 1945, London was caught between maintaining the balance of a weak metropole and holding a fragile empire together.  The speed of training new elites in Nigeria especially in the south was accelerated including their command of English and brainwashing their inferiority moved apace. 

English Language as a medium of expression was imposed on Nigeria with impunity and the purported demand by some power brokers for English during British rule is quixotic as offered by Chinua Achebe’s position.  In The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe concluded that proliferation of English Language in colonial Nigeria was driven by demand of indigenes.  This view is as banal as it is contextual distortion although in his 1999 Odenigbo Lecture he struck a Damascene progressive tone vis-a-vis Igbo Language. In the colonial/geopolitical enterprise English Language was/is a tool of domination, violent repression and civilisation stripping associated with imperialism. Not equality!

So we are one?

For those who have had the benefit of doing few hours in a Boeing or Airbus product or even used Information Technology, you are condemned to the baloney view of English language as global language. Or is it? Despite the political undercurrents which appear on the surface as uniting, English Language is not an instrument of (Nigeria/Africa) unity among those that logged in their statutes as official language. At least Nigeria or other African countries with English as official language have little or nothing in common with United States and United Kingdom. For all the noise of those who club me incessantly with their Queen’s English skills or rolling New England accent, sadly London & Washington DC as matter of policy are clear that Nigeria/Nigerians do not speak English or have it as official language.  

They consider Nigerians and other Africans bar Liberia for Washington DC as non-English speaking.  Try applying for UK citizenship and you are reminded that no African country speaks English while their members in the Caribbean are positive. Then you ask yourself what is Nigeria doing in Commonwealth? 

Before you digress into the ugly corner of rejection, it is clear that any young Nigerian seeking graduate studies opportunity in either US or UK will confront requirements to prove their knowledge of English via ILETS, GRE or GMAT.  This is the same requirement for Saudi Arabians, Chinese, Italians, Germans, Japanese and the whole humanity whose official languages have no space for English Language. When prospective candidates apply for these humiliating tests, their consciousnesses are removed from the humiliating and discriminatory objectives. Still they’ll continue claiming affinity with those who reject their essence.  They have been culturally ‘killed’ and ‘buried’ to notice anything wrong with such demands. Even their worldviews seem to converge incorrigibly with Anglo constructions propagated by BBC, CNN, NBC and ABC. So much for global English!

My Tongue is Stupid and Shameful

Within both cultural and political spaces, Anglo geopolitics ups the ante for those who do not question their existence especially those members of Nigerian power elite running around as underlings of London & Washington DC (consensus).  With limited appreciation of their ontology they migrate their stupidity to public policy which reduces rich linguistic heritage to just 3 languages.  Can you imagine geography like Nigeria allocating all the peoples and nations to Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa? Can you imagine the insult and abuse of eliminating nations from their true linguistic ontology by fiat of elitist imbelicility? 

To add salt to injury at state and local levels, no encouragement is given to the same majority language while the minorities are banished to oblivion because ‘English hold things and people together’. Even those gunning for linguistic revival in the name of religious institutions like Igboland Catholic Church blow hot & cold on preferred language with cosmetic aplomb. Just for the show they refuse to denote their processes in the same languages they claim in God’s name to protect.

Just attempt to travel around Europe by car or train and you suddenly confront linguistic & babelic independence every few 10s of kilometres. Even where the languages are on death row like Ireland and Wales. Less than 10% of the Irish (Republic) people speak, read or write Irish it nevertheless road signs bear them, public records have them in all documents and resources are committed to preserving it. Now with liberalisation of telecommunication technology, a flick of channels releases numerous programmes/content in Babel of languages.

Conclusion

Nigeria and other African countries should shake off their imperial blindness to recover and reinstate our languages in public spaces and for public communication. The current wars are fought viciously on the cultural fronts with heavy ‘equipments’ and serious casualties. There should be African languages in primary schools, high schools and in the university language departments’ not European languages.  

True ontology is realising and understanding one’s origin, heritage and essence and living it in interdependence with others without being overthrown and stripped into oblivion.  Nigeria’s core and strategic interests should be constructed formidably on sound footing rather than on obnoxious & retarded proxies of assumed utilisations of English linguistic variations. Abuja, London and Washington DC are not fellow travellers, rather the latter see the former as a client, servant and inferior. 

Africa’s number one economy, for wealth evaporation

By Patrick Bond

Nigeria’s ‘rebased’ GDP now beats SA’s, but ‘MINT’ mishaps follow BRICS bamboozling, Next-11 nonsense, CIVETS scamming and the pathetic PIGS.

Jim O’Neill – the Goldman Sachs banker who in 2001 coined the idea of a Brazil-Russia-India-China ‘BRIC’ serving as “building bricks of the 21^st century world economy” – has another bright idea. He recently announced a new fascination with the Mexico-Indonesia-Nigeria-Turkey countries, which “all have very favourable demographics for at least the next 20 years, and their economic prospects are interesting.” O’Neill is now completing a BBC series on the MINTs, and no doubt will profit handsomely from investments made in these countries’ financial assets, the way any scurrilous marketer does when, brandishing an insider-trading portfolio, he draws naïve consumers to a product with limited shelf life.

MINT economic prospects are ‘interesting’ insofar as Goldman Sachs makes enormous profits from churning investors’ funds through new markets, using whimsical rationales based upon silly acronyms. As Matt Taibbi described the firm’s philosophy in Rolling Stone five years ago, “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Goldman Sachs is a useful barometer of stupidity, since it brought the world economy to its knees in 2008 by creating infinitely-toxic financial products. For example, what was just a decade ago a supposedly glorious group of high-growth European countries led by ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland, became financially-cancerous ‘PIGS’ once Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain melted down seven years ago, in the process wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in paper assets. O’Neill has also tried out the ‘Next 11’ and ‘CIVETS’: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.

For more read..... 

Crimea Lesson For African Nations

Introduction

Events of the last few weeks has galvanised opinion in Europe and amongst Westophiles around the world. These views are not necessarily in regard to the status or legitimacy of government in a country rather on the apparent sanctity of boundaries albeit in Europe. While the last few decades have presented Europe as a space with frozen boundaries until 1991 dismemberment of USSR and later demise of Yugoslavia, the subject remains unchallenged. Now Crimea has seceded from Ukraine and joined Russia and we are now concerned with potential lesson for imposed boundaries of African countries.

Brainwashing Incorporated

Relationship between Europe and Africa in the last century and continuing is that of master-servant or master-client. The dominant forces (masters) whose unreconstructed appeal continues to resonate are the French and the British. The Portuguese and Spanish were already on death throes before the Scramble though left they their ugly marks. Part of this relationship architecture is sustained by an imposed education culture that diminishes or eliminates the essence of the ‘servant’ or ‘client’. The French had a sophisticated method for it called assimilation which absorbs and eliminates prior existence of the African, allowing the emergence of New Man & New Woman as French Man/French Woman with total ignorance or disdain for himself/herself only looking forward to metropolitan validation.

Part of fertile ground for sustaining infamous imposition includes but not limited to unquestioned reception and consumption of boundaries set by Berlin Conference 1884 against peoples oblivious to it. For as much as many Africans boisterously declaim their Pan-Africanism, the Berlin Conference boundaries remain sacrosanct, immutable and indissoluble except on the pain of death. If you closely review northern African countries and notice the straight lines of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Chad, Mauritania and Western Sahara; a few things start making sense. 

These are arbitrary lines drawn by European ignorami at the time and now are held in the highest esteem by most knowledgeable Africans. With justification to boot as dividers of nations, communities and peoples without their consent! Organisation of African Union (OAU) and its successor in African Union (AU) have the single objective of maintaining the fixity of these boundaries.  They cannot be enlarged or diminished even legally in new artificial construction called states. Now US AFRICOM is the caretaker of tokens of nation-state boundaries as structure for recolonisation of Africa.

Pre-Berlin Conference

When a person is dumped down so badly, such individual sees nothing positive about his/her existence, history, essence and ontology. Only the external, imposed value and potential for full agency of cultural imperialism along the lines beautifully analysed by Edward W Said’s Culture and Imperialism suffices. So it is that empirical evidence of empires of large and small territories including but not limited to Oyo, Kamen-Bornu, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Great Zimbabwe empires failed to flag up the dumped down African mind.  You can identify other empires across Africa and review their territorial and geopolitical achievements in Destruction of Black Civilisation by Chancellor Williams. Most of these empires grew organically through conquest and or colonisation. The fixity of boundary is not part of human territorial aspiration & implementation and Africa is no different.  Conditions, situations and change warrant or necessitates emergence of territorial equilibrium which ultimately changes the balance of power. 

One of the greatest difficulties for many Africans in appreciating the pre-colonial achievement borders on imposed education based on eviscerated history curricula and temporal dislocation between colonial generation and their past.  The carelessness with which heritages are abandoned in the name of modernity and new religion based on foreign history/genealogies sealed many fates. This is beautifully captured in R S Sugirtharajah’s Bible and the Third World.  Such lunatic attitudes to history have seen many project their origin to be away from their immediate neighbours rather to strikingly questionable affinity with peoples in far distance lands. This is while everyone in the world emerged from lower East Africa! 

Arise O Compatriots

With all the noise about African 'independence' propounded by those with little or clue to its implications; boundary and geopolitics escaped their horizons. While many of them erroneously ended up realising that some of their ‘compatriots’ are hardly their ‘neighbours’ or that their brothers/sisters lived across the border. The continuum of political ignorance was sustained in denying self-determination in the name of ‘Africa doesn't need further balkanisation’ without considering the rights of the same Africans to determine their territorial futures.  Except in few countries and instances where population transfers were legally mapped such as exchanges between Nigeria and Cameroon, other attempts were forestalled with industrial-scale violence and genocides.  Eritrea, South Sudan, Namibia, Western Sahara are few successful outcomes.  

Unsurprisingly the same power elites who gladly denied their peoples self-determination appreciated their client role to London and Paris later Washington DC before executing any policy. The question one should rightly ask is, what is the essence of ‘independence’ if policy must be approved by London/Paris? Of course there will be contrary argument supporting anti-balkanisation but the issues remain that the opposite case can be pursued if peoples are allowed to discuss, agree or disagree.  Self-determination doesn't always suggest independence. Bloating Interior Ministries and military budgets are deployed to forcibly eliminate any idea of self-determination in order to maintain imposed territorial integrity and continental shelves.

Beyond Washington DC, London & Paris

One side effect of one-sided knowledge is determinism; attributing events/effect to single variable. Dominance of global affairs by those capitals for many centuries didn't create any homogeneity rather generated differentiated responses at various levels. When first signs of US hegemony emerged at the end of WW1, it was expressed with re-drawing of European boundaries on the altar of Woodrow Wilson 14 Points. Russia lost territories, Poland emerged and other areas remained in wait for later Bolshevik explosion. Moscow never went aground but her story was and is still light-weighted.

When Lenin painfully accepted 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty, his eyes focused on the future in regaining lost territories of Russian Empire which he and Bolsheviks forcefully took over in 1917. The ‘breathing space’ of the bad treaty allowed his party to consolidate power to re-project it later through ‘world revolution’. Read Wheeler-Bennett’s Brest-Litovsk The Forgotten Peace.

Despite 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Germany and USSR which effectively dissolved Poland, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa which invaded USSR via Ukraine in 1941 confirmed the spirit of Brest-Litovsk in Kremlin hence full mobilisation of Soviet forces to recover and extend their territories in Europe. This was summarised in 1945 Potsdam Conference Stalin’s famous phrase on Germany, “Germany is, as we say, a geographical concept...Let us define the western borders of Poland, and we shall be clearer on Germany”. 

Truth is that contrary to the nonsense dumped by western intellectual elite, at this time Kremlin was doubly betrayed and already surrounded by an iron curtain despite her huge WW2 sacrifices.  No country suffered less in lives and assets. When one is eating with the devil, long spoon becomes the best kit, hence the size of USSR including buffer zones (East Germany & Baltic States), fresh water ports (Odessa, Crimea, Murmansk& Vladivostok) and unpredictable underbelly (Caucasus).  Subsequent Soviet leaders continued this hegemony with rather ossified & unreformable governance already in decline before Mr Gorbachev arrived.

Inheritors of post-USSR leadership may have previously advocated her demise in a similar way as Lenin but lacked his intellectual and geopolitical astuteness. So ‘breathing space’ and geopolitics was absent for Boris Yeltsin and his lot in the ‘near abroad’ countries that had no clear, defined and delineated boundaries.  Remember that USSR had only an (Moscow) international airport in her lifetime.  A hungry man is an angry mind so most of the post-USSR leaders mortgaged their strategic assets to the West and created a new powerful elite sell-out class called oligarchs. It was expected that geostrategically Moscow will be weak for a long time in fulfilment of Brzezinski’s prediction laid out in Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. 

This conclusion meant that Europe as a space of US hegemony now extends to Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. Putin thought otherwise. What it is even baffling is how current European leaders seem to absolve the opportunity of marginalising US by forging closer and balanced emergence of Euro power with Moscow.

Crucially it is no more relevant that Texas was annexed from Mexico by United States in 1845. It is no longer of importance that UK went half way around the world in 1982 to secure Malvinas (Falkland) islands. Owners of Diego Garcia Island have been uprooted from their homeland for nearly 2 generations by London with no prospect of return in sight.

Conclusion

Africa has rich history of politics and geopolitics. Boundaries are not constant and territorial integrity is subject to agreement and disagreement.  Recent Crimea integration to Russia carries huge message more as a symbolic sign of US weakness with attendant hegemonic implications & consequences. African peoples have opportunities to reactivate intellectual & cultural activities on the flexibility of boundaries for reduction or expansion, with or without consultation.  Self-determination is sacred but can only be instrumented in praxis depending on prevalent geopolitical winds.  Moscow has confirmed that way of course on the heels of Kosovo. With the foregoing it is obvious that Berlin Conference boundaries never had life. Finally, states are artificial constructions to be sacrificed positively by its true owners/peoples or negatively by impostor-pretenders in time. On this last point, Africa not only has something to say, but equally something to do by choice. 

Nigeria Constitutional Conference Ad Infinitum

Introduction

This is not April Fool! While other countries have consolidated their existence and are moving ahead with serious matters, Nigeria is still suffering from identity crisis hangover. Another constitutional conference is underway after 50+ years of ‘independence’ regurgitating the same questions of who are you and what are you. The current conference possesses crucial patterns of similarity with past ones and may likely follow in their inglorious footstep of finally occupying an innovative space in the dustbin of history. 

On the contrary, this article states that Nigeria’s problem is beyond prowling arms of constitutional conferences rather driven by experiential inexcusable inability of her leaders to deliver on tried methods or tested praxis. The thesis is based on glaring evidence of inter-generational institutional failure at all levels of all ethnic nations. If one is nuanced, the problem is not architecture or methodology; it is partly a self-imposition, a warranted crises stemming from identity confusion, collective self-abandonment and unconscious elitist deviation from ontological longitude.

In the beginning

Like every colonised entity, Nigeria is not designed for the benefit of the peoples living under her leaking umbrella, rather to satisfy strategic and geopolitical interests of the erstwhile colonial master. This is not a surprise as the onus is usually left to time to sort out post-independence direction of a new country. In the case of Nigeria, even if independence leaders played pragmatic game to sustain the momentum for British exit, evidence shows that geopolitical awareness & progressive collective cultural identity failed those leaders and their successors. 

In a sense they are mere totems of London as personified indigenous mascots of colonial continuum. This is not peculiar as Algeria continues to suffer that delirilium in her relationship with France despite genocidal independence bloodbath vividly captured by Franz Fanon in his famous, Wretched of the Earth. Even post-apartheid South Africa is now emerging in public discourse as perfect example of abysmal sell-out masqueraded as heroic post-imprisonment complex personified in Nelson Mandela. 

National and ethnic national Independence leaders made great effort to dislocate and distinguish themselves away from the likes of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Mr Ben Bella, Dr Leopold Senghor and Mr Patrice Lumumba and lately Captain Thomas Sankara.  Nigerian leaders like it neither hot nor cold! These African men of honour stated their goals clearly in advance and pursued them as energetically as possible with clarity of purpose and understanding of the odds and paid with their lives where applicable.  Each of them was clear of his identity, his heritage, his conflicts and role in collective conflicts, and lastly possessed unperturbed awareness of formidable obstacles of the geopolitical hegemonies.  For them internal progress and cohesion is the first step towards external acclamation. In these men, even in death they became rallying points of their countries, symbols of collective identities.

Who are you? Repeat

In the yawning gap of clear identity or rather an identity built on the fear of brothers/sisters, post-independence fruit of collective Nigeria failed and never rose up again. With the power elite smoothing over transition of power with duly change of posters excluding the commons, all that was left was consolidation of fear of brothers/sisters with cacophony of tales, historical strangulations and monstrous abuse of resources surely excluding the same commons.  

With welcome unleashing of petroleum riches, identity took a final battering in a murderous exchange of acceptance for what are you verses who are you. Accumulation and ring-fencing of collective wealth & resources by the power elite dominate institutions including the military became the norm. An intergenerational race commenced and continues till today. Nigeria is now globally known as that cursed geography where wealth owners have no clue of its effective management which was vividly captured by one of those odious rulers personified in Mr Yakubu Gowon. His infamous legacy is carved in his mantra, ‘the problem is how to spend national wealth, not how to manage it’. A Nigerian gift to the world! I bet his ancestors on the burial grounds of central Nigerian plateaus will be proud of him! Others of his ilk must have presented giant outcrops of infamy in their omission and commissions.

In true fashion, each of the infamous ‘emperors’ especially those that had more than ‘24 hours’ in office wheeled out barrows of constitutional conference in the same manner Caesars gorged the barns of bread for circus plebes. Keep them quiet! In each regime power elite circle the wagon of Aburi Accord, defying her spirit and defecate its noble motives.  Surely it is not just dogs that eat what they throw up. While there will be no positive trickle-down effect now advanced with elegant machination of Ghana-must-go bag, new power elite members will gleefully clap away with their own share to consolidate their family republics. Of course their ancestors will be proud of them in their graves. Regardless of Parliamentary or Presidential system, the dead have no option but to clap or nod if they can.

Parallel Destructions

The presidential option presented a nested political-geographical architecture that in principle should enhance meaningful resource distribution across 3 levels. With Federation account pumping with pressure for ever since, the evidence of its tragic effort is found in litany of abandoned projects. In a sense Nigeria is an abandoned project. Across all geopolitical zones, all ethnic nations, all states and all local government; what is obtained is a wreckage of mangled expectations, astronomical malfeasance which induces current generation to accept it as norm and sheer evisceration of human (Africa) spirit.

Despite the positive potential of current geopolitical architecture its worst attributes are exposed with panache that it even finds room for sundry justification enough to suffocate emergence of true models of opposition.  There is no doubt that the ancestors of those plunderers of common wealth must be proud in their grave especially if they received some share before departing ‘first class’. Federation account transaction is public record but few border to ask seriously what happened to our collective wealth for ages now. Instead I am distracted with ignoble terms like marginalisation, tribalism, South-South, Hausa-Fulani, Boko Haram, majority, minority and so forth. 

Yes, terms have meaning but useless meanings have no place on the pantheon of progress. What we have obtained as national heritage is consolidation of social network of plunderers with secondary and tertiary hubs in all ethnic nations, all states and all local governments.  This culture of unabashed malfeasance now holds the country hostage in a high stake game of few damning majority.

This current constitutional conference failed before its convocation because the issue of structure and methodology are nowhere near immediate needs of the peoples.  Sadly many well meaning citizen-victims are ready to suffocate their victimhood in believing that this time the sun will shine. Hmm! If you believe that one ethnic nation produces greater greed or plunderers then find another life in another planet. If you believe that this or that part of the country enjoys more from the common wealth, then feel free to transfer to that geography for instant resurrection of your fortunes. 

The common problem is sheer dislocation of identity & collaborative effort in destroying ontology that leave most individuals on the altar of desperation. Such desperation has infected all institutions including those expected to deliver on divine requirements. It is contamination incorporated!  While majority suffer and smile of course as victims, they existentially share with suffering-imposer obstruction of positive alternatives. Yes, it is not as simple as that! With mangled identity, internalised negative behaviour becomes culturally acceptable. 

Conclusion

I have no solution for Nigeria’s problem but do conjecture that convergence of positive forces will unleash opportunity to change course positively from unexpected quarters. The fact that ‘independence’ came on a platter of gold doesn't conclude that violence-oriented ones are better. Asia possess better examples as few exist in Africa bar one; Botswana for the platter.  Algeria is an example on violence. The main fact is that the positive change expected and loathed by many will not come easy and will not emerge soon. It is not a sign of pessimism rather a corroboration of existing historical patterns. In the face of rapid global geopolitical reconfigurations, at some point something will give for Nigeria to finally rise up or consciously succumb as a leaking umbrella over our collective heritage. Our (victims) ancestors will surely sleep well with eyes open to protect regardless conferences planned in the future.