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Naija pessimism

By Ray Ekpu
17 May 2016   |   3:12 am
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, set a controversial tone for the anti-corruption conference that the United Kingdom is hosting in London with a rather unguarded and undiplomatic statement.

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The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, set a controversial tone for the anti-corruption conference that the United Kingdom is hosting in London with a rather unguarded and undiplomatic statement. Characteristically, a host is expected to be very polite, warm and friendly to guests he is inviting to the table. But uncharacteristically Cameron put on his most unfriendly manners when he said that Nigeria and Afghanistan, two countries attending the summit, are, “fantastically corrupt.” He was briefing Queen Elizabeth 11 on the anti-corruption summit. Cameron’s remarks caused a bit of an uproar and when he was briefing the House of Commons the next day he tried to amend his mistake. He said to them that Nigeria and Afghanistan have taken “remarkable steps toward stemming corruption and that the two leaders are battling hard to tackle the problem.

However, the press people not being people who would let a gaffe go away, pursued Cameron further on his comments on the two countries. He faced the issue frankly by admitting that he “had made many unforced errors in the past 24 hours.”

The devil is actually in the adjective “fantastic” because even Nigerians agree that there is corruption in Nigeria just as the problem exists in other countries. They also admit that their President, Muhammadu Buhari, is squaring up to it. What may have baffled many people was why the host of a conference would give two of the conferees a thumbs-down even before he has had the opportunity to learn from them how they have been dealing with the demons. Secondly, Cameron knows that some of the assets stolen by some Nigerian leaders – Abacha, Dariye, Ibori, Alamieyeseigha and co – have been warehoused in Britain for many years now and Britain is sitting comfortably on top of these assets to the benefit of its economy.

Thirdly, the revelations from the Panama Papers have shown that about 50% per cent of the law firms mentioned so far in the Panama sleaze are from the British Virgin Islands. According to the Shadow Secretary for International Development, Diane Abbott, British tax havens constitute the largest financial secrecy network in the whole world. If Britain was not a happy recipient and keeper of stolen assets, the thieves would have had to search for a sanctuary elsewhere. The Swiss whose banks were notorious for coded accounts have now been dismantling these codes because their country has been the unhappy and blame worthy custodian of stolen assets. They do not want to carry that unwholesome image forward.

Since the Cameron remark, Buhari has become the happy or unhappy bride of the summit. Reporters have asked whether he will ask for an apology from Cameron to which he has brilliantly replied in the negative. He says the Prime Minister probably spoke from what he knows. “What will I do with an apology? I need something tangible” which is a return of Nigeria’s stolen assets in Britain. That is a very sensible way of handling the embarrassing matter because in the final analysis a confrontation with Cameron will lead him nowhere in the arduous task of retrieving these assets.

I can hazard three guesses why Cameron said what he said. One, there have been a few high profile cases in Britain involving allegedly corrupt Nigerians. Alamieyeseigha, the former Governor of Bayelsa State was arrested and tried in England a few years ago. Some huge sums of money were recovered from his residence. He was granted bail and he disguised as a woman and with the aid of a fake or forged passport he was able to travel back to his comfort zone, the creeks of Bayelsa. He died recently with the matter not fully settled in the UK. Also in one of the British prisons there is another former Governor of a State, Delta, James Ibori, languishing there with his wife. They are serving various jail terms for corruption right under the nose of the British Prime Minister, so he knows a thing or two about corruption in Nigeria.

Secondly, there are high profile corruption cases going on now in Nigeria, and the fallouts are deviously interesting. Some of them touch on properties dubiously acquired in England. I am sure that the British High Commission officials are keeping a watching brief on the proceedings and may have been feeding Cameron with the goings – on in the Nigerian court rooms.

Thirdly, Nigeria is still reported in a largely negative manner to the rest of the world because most Nigerian media, electronic and print, still quote foreign news sources especially CNN, BBC, Reuters and AFP, even on stories about Nigeria. The social media are, to put it politely, not the most authentic news sources because they submit themselves to no professional or ethical standards. For them anything goes.

The stereotypes buried in the minds of the Western media and their political and business elite about Nigeria and indeed Africa are still alive and well. Mr. Cameron may not necessarily be free from these stereotypes just because he is Prime Minister. I am sure he does not get his news about Nigeria from the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), AIT or Channels. He gets them, I believe, from the global news giants, BBC, CNN and British newspapers manned largely by Western media experts who often jump into any country in Africa for a few days and go back to write tonnes of jaundiced words about the country of their brief sojourn. They come looking for violence, hunger, famine, riots, corruption, stagnation, the familiar culprits and they seek to get information to feed their prejudices.

These prejudices ought to be confronted by all Africans with a gang of brutal facts to prove that Africa has something to offer apart from the negatives. In his Thursday column of ThisDay last week, Segun Adeniyi said he turned down a foreign journalist who sought to interview him on business and economic issues including the oil industry and corruption. The reason: he didn’t want to talk to her because she apparently had her preconceived idea of corruption in Nigeria and he knows there are Nigerians ready to talk to such foreign journalists on such issues.

Most journalists who visit other countries talk to journalists in the countries of their visit first before stepping out to attend to their principal assignments. Segun missed a golden opportunity to debrief the visiting journalist by refusing to see her. Segun is more informed about the issues the visiting journalist wanted to discuss. He should have engaged her and such an engagement may have improved positively her perspective on Nigeria. Every interview is a forensic battle between the interviewer and interviewee and if the interviewee is more informed about the subject he can browbeat the interviewer. Certainly, Segun would have helped Nigeria’s image more by talking to her than by refusing to. I talk to a number of these foreign journalists who visit Nigeria every year because I believe there are a lot of positive things they do not know about Nigeria. To me that is a duty I am happy to perform.

I have attended African American Institute organised media conferences a few times that brought American and African journalists together. The issue of stereotyping Africa always featured prominently. Wars, riots, famine, crime – those have always been the universal fare about Africa. That is what a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, called Afro-pessimism. Donald Trump, the U.S. Republican Party Presidential candidate, fell into this same invidious stereotyping net when he described Nigerians recently as people who only know how to eat, how to make noise and how to make love. He conveniently ignores the many outstanding achievements of Nigerians right there in America.

Some African scholars have countered this Afro-pessimism by looking at how Africa is rising, and what is positive about various aspects of life on the continent. Their thoughts are documented in a book, titled “Afro-Optimism, Perspectives on Africa’s Advances.” The book is edited by Ebere Onwudiwe and Minabere Ibeleme. It covers Africa’s advances in arts, governance, decision-making, infrastructure, transportation, health, communication and biotechnology, among others.

There must be more conscious and sustained efforts to tell Africa’s positive story so that the negatives do not continue to define Africa. Look at this: Professor Jo Ellen Fair of the University of Wisconsin says, “Each semester when I ask my students, the majority of whom are white and middle class, to describe for me their images and ideas of Africa and Africans I get the usual litany of stereotypical, negative and often condescending descriptions. To my students Africa is “basket case,” “jungle covered,” “big game safari,” “impoverished,” “falling apart,” “famine–plagued,” “full of wars,” “AIDS-ridden,” “torn by apartheid,” “weird” and “black.” Moreover my students describe “Africans” as “tribal,” “underdeveloped,” “fighting all the time,” “brutal,” “savage,” “exotic,” “sexually active,” “backward,” “primitive.”

What these students say is the very equivalent of Cameron’s fantastic exaggeration about corruption in Nigeria. For us the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Westerners is to patiently explain to them wherever and whenever we can that Nigeria, indeed Africa, has a lot to recommend it and that our nation is not defined by those wildly exaggerated negatives.

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