By Charles Adagbon
Thanks to those who are directly and indirectly connected to this tornado-like kind of change sweeping across the political landscape in the region. The likes of Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mohamed Bouazizi who are remotely linked to this, and please never underestimate the power inherent in the internet, but more directly, by the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples. Mubarak might have been given the grace to cart away his 30-year-loot, having cunningly lingered further as the chief executive of the land of the Pharaohs for eighteen more days from the start-date of the protests, a ‘smart’ man that he is, I guess he had to buy time a little bit more so as to provide veritable conduits for his loot, into havens that would prove not just safe but secured, and more poignant too, with western banks habouring a chunk of it. So much for western hypocrisy! Like Joseph Stiglitz (a former world bank executive and a Nobel laureate) recently said on CNN, that there hasn’t been enough discussion of secret bank accounts as corruption facilitators and that by and large the west facilitates the grand scale of corruption in poor countries especially in African countries. That is a story for another day!
Conservative estimates put Mubarak’s worth at between 30 - 70 billion dollars. His deft approach which showed his test of wits against that of the Egyptian people, which was characterized by his initial grandstanding, had gotten him enameled to the point of casting not just shocking aspersions on the will of the people - no thanks to his recalcitrant posture of wanting to stay till September, and the villain-turned-hero speech that he gave in the wake and thick of it all. Yet, one thing resonates in all the happenstances that have catalyzed the socio-politico-earthquake that is severing the political grounds on which aristocratic governments may stand: Freedom is sweeter than honey, but just like the Tunisian story, it sure does come at a price. The Tunisians might have collectively inspired us and might have been fired up by the death of Bouazizi, but the fact that people’s anger became more incinerated over details that appeared in wikileaks publications as highlighted at the end of last year. This showed the grandiose scale of corruption and the enormous waste of their common wealth by the Ben Ali family, and the fiefdom which that country’s former first lady tried to keep together at all cost, and her visible hands in every economic activity of the nation, created yet a more destructive conflagration of the people’s anger.
One thing is apparent from the Egyptian story though, the west, particularly the US will always claim they have the vestiges of democratic institutions, and will do everything to have it ‘spread’ across the globe, the rhetoric claim of support for the ‘propagation of freedom’!! Yet, open to repression as long as American interests are not largely compromised. History is awash with such double standards and double-speak.
An American government that will not recognize the will of the majority played itself out recently in Palestine, when the Palestinians voted in Hamas. Despite this being the will of the majority, the US found it hard recognizing the will of the people in that instant, and subverted it.
Democracy is often branded as a government of the majority, but we forget in a hurry to add an addendum to such definitions - that needs an acceptance of the US. Only with the ¨recognition of the US in particular and the west in general is democracy a government of the people by western definitions. To confirm this, in the wake of the Egyptian protest, Joe Biden was quick to tell us that he wouldn’t consider Mubarak a dictator, instead, he tacitly opined that he is a ‘freedom fighter and a peace finder’, a bridge towards reaching out and ‘exemplifying’ what democracy should be in the middle east, by the definition of the Americans. However, the birthing of freedom came with its pangs for the Egyptians but their labour of pain has given us a new brand of democracy, and it is the democracy that pushes people and governments who want to foist their own definition of what democracy is on us to the sideline, while disparaging our own aspirations in the name of regional stability. We must thank Egyptians for making these agents of double standards look from the sidelines while they took their destinies in their hands. In a BBC commentary shortly after Mubarak’s resignation, a BBC correspondent said that one distinguishing feature with the Jasmine revolution but particularly the Egyptian revolution is that, those who claim to champion and propagate and project their adulterated version of democracy on us, and those who will see Mubarak as a hero and see Mugabe as an enemy of the people, despite their common history, were forced to watch events unfold from the sidelines. Obama had to align himself with the Egyptians when he noticed the unyielding posture of the people.
One thing lies at the root of these revolutions; poverty, unemployment and political repression. The realities most Nigerians know and experience all too well. The Nigerian situation is what elicits so much passion from me, not because I am craving such a dramatic revolution by dawn tomorrow, but because, there is this Nigerian element that makes people talk and talk without taking actions but at best resign to the ‘all knowing God or Allah’, a resignation to fate and the reducibility of the ills of our societies to a state of hopelessness, salvageable only by some supernatural whim. Haba!!. When these problems are reduced to awaiting-of-God’s intervention, it draws my irk to a degree that makes me almost insane.
Social media maybe changing our world. Yes it sure is! A case in point, when Goodluck Jonathan made his declaration on Facebook, there was a lot of hype. I equally joined his fan page, not because I fancy him as a leader, not in the least, but I wanted to find a way to get my words of disgust to those Facebook-advisers and contractors of his. Those contracted to manage his page at the expense of tax payers; I was even more annoyed by the comments of Nigerians on his wall. To my utmost amazement, I thought the flood gates of verbal currents would be let loose on his ‘wall’ by the frustrations that these ever vibrant and energetic Nigerian youths face. To my unpleasant surprise, most comments sounded very sycophantic. It reminded me of the days of Abacha, when sycophancy attained new heights and Kanu, or whatever the guy’s name is- was championing that Abacha should rule forever until the second coming of Christ.
Most of the comments, if not 99% of the comments then were so sycophantic it almost made me puke, I had to ‘Dislike’ his page to prevent being fed with utter gibberish on events from his page into my news feed on the site. Really, what is it with Nigerians?
As I write, I decided to take a cursory look at his page and some of the comments like, ‘Happy Val Mr. President’, ‘Long Live Goodluck, may God sugar your garri’, just to mention a few showed without gainsaying that not much has changed since the last time I took a peep several months back. Oga ooo!! I remember a saying back in the days that every misadventure or mistake in America ostensibly become a thing of fashion in Nigeria. The above comments surmise this much in its entirety. Facebook and other social media may have aided the revolutions in North Africa, I wish sub-Saharan Africa could have replete effect of the same magnitude, and not in the least Nigeria.
Out of curiosity, I googled the usage statistics of Facebook across the continent. Interestingly, it showed that approximately 3 million Nigerians are active on Facebook, excluding Nigerians outside the shores of the country. Egypt, South Africa and Morocco were 1st, 2nd, and 3rd respectively with Nigeria occupying the 4th position followed closely by Tunisia with 2.8 million. Although Tunisia has the highest percentage of its population on Facebook, a staggering 19.5%, with only 6.5% Egyptians and 7.4% South Africans and 9.2% Moroccans, while Nigeria has 1.8% of its population hooked on line as active users in 2010.
This statistics I only showed to prove that not a sizeable number of Egyptians are on the net let alone on Facebook, but managed to change their destinies with the power of these few ones. Yes the few ones!! The change we require in Nigeria may not come in my life time (I sincerely hope this is not a cause), but nonetheless we have the same leverage with the Egyptians in that if a 10th of those who throng to churches on Sunday and mosques on Friday could be galvanized to hold our visionless leaders more accountable, we would have such a dramatic effect greater than any social media. We would not only have managed to chart the part of our common destiny, but equally restore the black race’s dignity somewhat. Those who repress us, and have clothed us with a garb of poverty and expect us to sing their praises and dance to their tune of political repression have managed to do so and can only do so because we have not woken up to challenge the status quo.
As earlier mentioned the west as embodied by the US will NEVER come to help set us free. We have to look inward to challenge the malaise in our body polity and the truth in the maxim that ‘‘a dictator or bad leader is only as powerful as the power conferred on him by those he represses’. The truism in this maxim cannot be truer in the NIGERIAN context. We will always get the leadership we deserve as followers, enough of leaving things in the hand or hands of God!
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