As mentioned last week, the privileges of being an academic include the many learning events regularly available. At the tail of last week’s Column, I mentioned that Mambayya House (Bayero University Kano’s Aminu Kano Centre for Democratic Research and Training which is aptly located in the late Mallam Aminu Kano’s residence) last week hosted African American political science scholar Prof Horace G. Campbell, Kwame Nkrumah Chair at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana. Prof Campbell, who could ideologically be placed to the Left of Leftism, spoke on “NATO and the Destruction of Libya” and how the murder of Gaddafi precipitated the destablising upheavals all across the Sahara and the Sahel, where guns have become cheaper than water, figuratively-speaking.
I spoke to my colleague Mustafa Ibrahim Chinade (musti4cn@gmail.com), Editor of “BUK Today”, who was event rapporteur at Mambayya, and the following are some of our joint thoughts and recollections.
The 60-slide Campbell presentation (available from Mustafa for those who want to read more) was an emotional and heart-wrenching experience for the audience as he espoused his argument about the reasons for the NATO intervention in Libya, the immediate consequences and what lessons for African leaders, intellectuals and citizens. Given the restlessness that had gripped the youths of North African region in general, Campbell argued, perceptive readers would tend to think that the outbreak of pro-democracy agitations in Libya provided the immediate background for the NATO intervention.
But the scholar pushed back the roots of the invasion plans to the US’s Bush Administration, quoting Jeremy Keenan in his book “Dark Sahara and Dying Sahara”, the subtitle of which was an entire statement: “The Bush Administration fabricated an entire front in the ‘war on terror’ for its own political purposes.” Campbell pointed out that lack of “firm evidence that ‘terrorists’ from Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Middle East were taking the Sahel route or indigenous cases of terrorism” did not deter the US. It is no wonder therefore, he argued, that the launch of a Sahara front in the ‘war on terror’ created immense anger, frustration, rebellion, political instability, and insecurity across the entire region.
The next critical factor, according to the scholar, was a secret agenda of regime change. Campbell quoted a British Parliamentary Committee report that accused the British government, and by extension NATO, of pursuing “an opportunistic policy of regime change,” despite telling parliament in March 2011 the contrary. The report gave as evidence false claims that Gaddafi ‘was about to carry out a massacre of genocidal proportions,’ rushing into a military intervention without first pursuing other options and deliberately creating a fertile ground for the emergence of militias and ISIS offshoot.
And it was no surprise that the West was not happy with the North African country of Libya or its fiery leader Gaddafi. After all, it could easily be recalled that Libya (or more precisely Gaddafi) had for long defied the West and had bank-rolled the liberation struggles in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Therefore, the NATO war was actually punishment time.
The major trigger that translated the US and NATO agenda into military action was perhaps the French national interest that wanted Gaddafi eliminated because of the threat he posed as France’s rival on the African continent; his grandiose plan to fund the long-sought and long-hoped-for diversion of the excess waters of the River Congo to feed the dying Lake Chad, his plans for the Trans-African highway and, particularly, his advocacy for and near-realisation of a single African currency tied to gold and backed by Libya’s considerable reserves.
According to Campbell, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy explicitly stated the reasons for the attack on Libya in a leaked email he sent to Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, as “a desire to gain a greater share of Libya’s oil production, increase French influence in North Africa, improve his [Sarcozy’s] internal political situation in France, provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world, [and] address the concerns of his advisors over Gaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.”
The immediate consequence of the invasion of Libya was the death of over 50,000 people, creating over two million refugees (or one third of the total Libyan population of six million), destruction of civil order and plunder of Libyan oil and gas resources. Plus all the Sahelian upheavals burnished and furnished with cheap weapons. The $65-$70 billion foreign reserves belonging to Libya’s Central Bank and the $67 billion of the Libyan Investment Authority funds remain frozen – perhaps to be appropriated in the near future by the invaders as part-payment for rebuilding what they destroyed, the balance as debt on the unborn.
Campbell then asked African intellectuals, citizens and leaders to remember the assassination of their leaders by Western powers, urging them to support the Pan Africanist Movement’s backing of an AU peace process and call for investigation of NATO for exceeding its mandate and challenging the UN for failing to protect the Libyan people as provided for in UN Resolution 1973 of 2011.
Further, he advocated, African countries and leaders must pick up where Gaddafi left off – for Africa to be connected politically and economically, the natural way (even if quite expensive) would be to channelise and connect the continent’s great water bodies through linking its mighty rivers. Such connections could recharge almost dead water bodies such as Lake Chad (incidentally the subject of a Presidential Summit in Abuja this week) and provide alternative means of commerce, transport and improved livelihoods in the continent.
The very next day after the Campbell Lecture (after which the scholar interestingly headed to Damaturu, Yobe State, a couple of days before the Dapchi Abduction), Mambayya House again hosted another intellectual discourse – Ambassador of the Republic of Ireland to Nigeria Sean Hoy came in to speak about the Irish Peace Process. He presented the lead paper to a panel discussion on “The Road to Peace: Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process”. Lessons, essentially, for Nigeria and Africa.
The envoy traced the roots of the Northern Ireland Conflict to the post-independence partition of Ireland by the United Kingdom (UK) in 1922: 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties gained independence (from the UK) while the other six counties formed Northern Ireland and remained part of the UK. The lesson of the Northern Ireland peace process, he said, is imperative of dialogue and perseverance, as “the road to peace in any situation will involve a process where both sides will have to listen to each other and to be open to change. Negotiation is not about victory but compromise”. He also cautioned about “external forces, driven by wider agendas …keen to manipulate local unrest…there is evidence that these groups will also seek to pick scabs and reignite conflict where possible. This is a growing phenomenon across West Africa”.
Two days, two different speakers, two different perspectives – all leading to one objective: a better Africa and, by extension, a better Nigeria.
If only the leaders would hear!