Nigerian Nightmare...

In the years following 2005, there used to be a popular term for emails announcing that someone has won GBP 1000000 and all they have to do is contact either a given number or email to the given address - the Nigerian mail. Those who were investigating cyber crime as well as the victims of such mail used to shudder at the ingenuity with which scores of people got duped into paying hundreds of thousand bucks for the victims avarice. No one knows whether Nigerians were the originators of such fraud but the name stuck.

Nigeria is famous again - this time courtesy Boko Haram. Kidnapping of girl children from school is nothing new. Dozens of dirty organisations have done such things before. But consider this:

1. News reports suggest that these girls are being sold for $12. The world has just been told on World Mothers Day that this is the worth of our mothers, sisters and girl children set by Boko Haram.

2. Thousands of children across Nigeria have been withdrawn from school by their parents. Boko Haram has just ensured that Nigeria's young generation are pushed towards the dark ages of illiteracy and subsequent unemployment and poverty.

3. The world governments, AU, EU and the government of Nigeria are still scratching their head as to what to in the face of such brutal, inhuman and scruple-less act of Boko Haram - as though the world has not seen enough to decide swift and decisive action. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Chad, Liberia and Cambodia actually are history and we have a penchant for reading history only from our arm chairs.

4. As the world keeps twiddling its fingers, Boko Haram continues to get its arms supplies and financial back up from unknown sources. Dozens of arms manufacturers around the world and illegal financiers are minting their money. Few hundred more girls being added to the thousands of already vandalised-and-sold-into-prostitution women do not make any difference to them. Nor do they make any difference to those countries that facilitate exporting of those arms or are the conduits for the black money.

At the end of it all, we can be rest assured that ten-twenty years hence there would be an international tribunal for Nigeria and leaders of Boko Haram (who may well be on their natural way to their graves) would be sentenced to 150 years in prison. Countries would contribute monies to hold the tribunal and subsequently house the imprisoned. Lawyers on either side would also have earned their due out of the legal process. A jubilant world will observe that the end of international justice has been served well and that now there are more immutable precedences for offences against women during hostile conditions. Everyone will be happy.

In the mean time, the girls abducted by Boko Haram would have begotten their children out of their captivity with Boko Haram. Growing up in a country that fears to send its children to school and finding that their poverty is so oppressing, they may fall prey to taking up arms. They may perpetuate what Boko Haram has as yet left undone.

The Nigerian Nightmare....Hello world...anyone listening? How about doing something to stop the nightmare turning into reality?

PS: Looks like I must start writing scripts for movies. It might help me to get money to buy history books and an arm chair.  

Learning from Rwanda....

Twenty years ago, it started n Rwanda and the mayhem that played out over 100 days continues to shock the conscience of humanity. BBC recently showcased a program that highlighted the pain that Rwanda lived through and how the country has managed to heal the wounds and set its course on re-building its life. See: www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506‎

In the twenty years that have gone by, Africa has shed much blood - Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and now Nigeria. There is plenty of debate that vested interests abroad would like to keep Africa this way because, if Africa lives in peace, the potential of its people would surpass any other region in the world. So, helping Africa to remain divided in the name of tribes, religion and region helps to keep it down. It also makes good business sense because the fighting will help other countries sell huge amount of weapons to Africa. Impoverished nations will spend whatever little they have on arms, letting their people rot in poverty and in the process remain oppressed and divided. I do not know whether I should be writing like this in RG. But as we watch the horrors unleashed by Boko Haram in Nigeria by bombing bus stations and kidnapping school children, it is difficult to maintain an academic nonchalance.

Centuries of brutal colonial exploitation perhaps has given a wrong lesson in sovereignty to many countries in Africa. The leaders in these troubled countries perhaps think that colonial style exploitation and subjugation of people is the meaning of governance. A quarter century ago, there was an apt description of the politics of the elite in South Asia by Ponna Wignaraja and Akmal Hussain:

"The ruling regimes, unable to find a fundamental solution to the problem of poverty and inequality, unable to provide a political framework and an intellectual vision within which the diversities of culture, language and religion can enrich rather than undermine society, tend to show a knee-jerk reaction to the crisis. The knee-jerk reaction consists of seeking an external bogey and, on the basis of this fear, seeking to mobilise and unite their own people". This seems so relevant even today in Africa as well.

Multicultural, multi-ethnic societies coming together as one national identity must learn to accept each other first as equal citizens before working out a power sharing formula for governing the nation. Until this principle of accommodation is recognised as fundamental to building a national identity, there would be no peace in any society home to diverse communities.