Column
By G. Chijioke Odom
I HAVE taken time to read, re-read & triple read chapter, verse, punctuation marks and even the white spaces in between words in the Report of the Independent Panel that investigated alleged corruption and ethical misconduct against Dr Akinwumi Adesina, Nigerian-born embattled African Development Bank (AfDB) president. Am very glad that on all counts, he was completely exonerated.
From the blast of the whistle in his travails, I knew it was nothing other than an international, monstrously dark conspiracy against not only a righteous man but Africa’s equivalent of General Alexander Haig & Lee Kwan Yew rolled into one. The poison brew reserved for such a personality by the metropolitan power centres in US and Europe, if he were an African head-of-state, is simply the Murtala Mohammed and Thomas Sankara treatment: assassination, and a regime change that will play ball and pay all the bills. Adesina is a civilian academic and a continental technocrat. So, the method has to be a bit more subtle or unobtrusive. Strategy demands that.
A righteous man is a righteous man, nevertheless. Truth be told: Adesina’s integrity, creativity, innovation, ingenuity & pragmatism are his only crimes against the imperialist white, share-holding nations partners of the AfDB. Shame on them all. His fruitful romance with China which has augered well for Africa’s development at less burdensome costs (comparatively) and consequently exposed the leviathan financial underbelly of the US and European ‘development’ partners of Africa was the genie in the bottle. Like conflagration, their already seared consciences couldn’t hold it in anymore. It turned them green with envy & their jealousy into a rage. They groaned in their greed until their hearts grew grim with grand gaucheness. Only regicide ( royal murder) would appease them. Then, God was not sleeping.
Before he was appointed President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s agriculture minster, Nigeria’s food import bills per year for only rice, wheat and sugar totalled, averagely, an outrageous US 2 trillion dollars! Within nine months of his being in office he changed the narrative with the nation even producing 21 million metric tonnes of food. In the first year of his presidency at AfDB, a record 4.4 million people across the continent were connected to electricity & water, who hitherto had no access to such. Anyone who thinks that these stories will evoke plaudits for him in the bedrooms, boardrooms, bar-rooms & ballrooms of the metropolitan centres outside the African continent is simply living in phantasmagoria. Their painful loss of sweet and sweatless revenue on an easy avenue makes Adesina fit only for the grand venue reserved for a Dathan Robespierre at the gullotine! They went to work, devising unconscionable scheme after scheme, against the bank’s extant laws, rules and regulations. They set aside the constitutionally-ordained report of investigation that totally cleared him of the trumped-up charges they had initiated. They pressed for and went ahead with instituting an independent investigative panel, a development hitherto unknown to the bank’s constitutive mandate. In their fiendish anticipation, they triple-sharpened the weighted blade, and waited with bathed breath, for his head to fall into the collecting basket!
After all said and done, his head is still firmly on his shoulders! My candid advise to Akinwumi and Nigeria, his fatherland is this: The outcome of this report is to the uttermost chagrin of his traducers. As one in the justice sector, I counsel that these powerful looser-nations will be more enraged. They will come up with more sinister but subtler designs until they see him out of their way. If the US could poison the toothpaste of Fidel Castro (he was saved by extra vigilance) in order to eliminate him, not even the water Adesina would drink at the AfDB headqurters building at Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire is safe anymore. Greater protection is needed for Adesina now than all the Presidents of the bank since it opened in March 1965 and properly commenced operations on July 1, 1966.
And greater danger abounds even in the one he drinks in a hotel on foreign trips. Mark my words. My years of experience in international criminal justice system and development strategy tells me so. The US and Europe have the most mercantilist nations and leaders on the surface of the earth from Stone Age till this 21st century! Major documents, classified as it were, of European civilisation unearthed in high-level researches vividly attest to this. When material and pecuniary or financial considerations are involved, these nation’s leaders will ‘quantum-leap space and telescope time’ (to borrow the immortal words of my late great comminications scholar and teacher, Tony Ukaga – may his great soul rest in perfect peace) to rubbish the perceived obstacle, whether real or imagined. Expropriation of resources ( pray, how did Blackwater owned by Dick Cheney, a sitting US vice-president to George W. Bush, end up having the sole contract to operating and drilling all the oil rigs in a sovereign Iraqi nation after US Operation Desert Storm, while still in office?), and exploitation of vulnerable external leadership is their fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy and international concourse. The Monroe Doctrine in the US, the Principles of the Atlantic Charter by the UK, etc, speaks volumes of this from the past. It has been so from Talleyrand and Mitternich, with regards to the entire Europe.
I blame Adesina’s travails on our African leaders who are all tied to the apron strings of their metropolitan powers. Their avowed Independence is merely in the change of flags while they are fiercely subservient, even more so socio-politically, economically & even geo- technologically to the imperialist powers. France, Belgium & their fellow European vampires could easily have influenced their African pusillanimous quislings into ruining Adesina’s reign with a blood-spattered wreath rather than a crown festooned with ostrich and eagle feathers.
Eight out of the 15 ECOWAS countries use the CFA as their currency, which is firmly tied to the French Francs. The African countries on the AfDB could not even pay for the shares alloted to them, thus compelling the need for the bank to throw open to, and shore up its capital base for subscription by, rich non-African nations, which eventually led to the presence of non-African nations on the board of an ‘African Development Bank,’ and these nations, incuding the US having enormous controlling voting rights that can vote out even a Nelson Mandela or a Mother Theresa as the bank’s president! But God will always deliver His righteous ones because He has promised to be with them always even in the day of trouble and even unto death. So, Adesina survived.
I dont know when African leaders will ever come to the truth that the imperialists are up to nothing good for Africa except their divide-and-plunder eternal agenda. Otherwise, they would have found an alternative way to selling off or creatively dispensing out the AfDB’s remaining shares to these metropolitan powers; if these non-African nations were not shareholders with substantial voting powers in the first place ( ironically, in an ‘African Bank’) where would they have come from to malign one of African best and brightest and truest sons? Matters like this make others like him to create an Inner Mongolian distance and a Mount Everest height between them and public offices on the African soil even when their home countries could benefit substantially from a single policy initiative emenating from these egg-heads’ stay or just one day membership on a government board.
My heart bleeds daily for Africa. If I have the opportunity to serve for just 24 hours as president of my country, my first assignment will be to change the education system and curriculum. In it you re-engineer and re-strategise the mentality of the people to reject the inferiorisation of their being, person & values by the white superiorisation propagandisation agenda. By looking or acting internally (locally) but thinking globally you can develope indigenous models & templates most relevant and applicable to your environment. A copy-&-paste political and judicial system, penitentiary process, which have no bearing with the perculiarities of the people, etc, cannot & will never eliminate corruption. Ask the Asian countries; ask China, ask Japan, ask Rwanda & Burundi, ask both the Eastern & Western European nations, etc, etc. It is only through the process of a reformed and relevant and dynamic and pragmatic education that you transmit eternal values of decency, respect for the rule of law, fear of God, integrity, etc, into every nerve, bone, fibre, veins and arteries of the nation, and over time it begins to speak and to heal, etc. For instance, corruption is less in China because after the culprit has been executed by firing squad, the bullet is extracted and taken to the family to bear the cost of the spent bullet from the nation’s armoury! Since it is an embarassing and humiliating experience which no family wants to undergo, every family is willing to inform on a suspected corrupt family member in order that he or she will pay for his or her sins alone before it touches the family. While I have not called for this, I am only calling for what suits our society, the African society in terms of values-re-engineering & social transmission for sustainable development, continental consolidation and state stability. A purposive education produces a productuve economy; a super-functional educational system will deliver to you a self-sustainable economy not tied to the peripheral matrix of the dinosaurs and dragons of metropolitan imperialist powers. Adesina’s travails is the sorry story of a miseducated and consequently misled continent.
I thank God Who escaped him from blackmail & victimisation. How many others did that monster swallow before him? And how many may be graced with escape like him?
You deliver the verdict!
– Jul. 31, 2020 @ 12:19 GMT |
Tags: AfDB: When metropolitan monsters couldn't swallow Akinwumi Adesina
