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TUESDAY, JULY 19, 2011 TRUTH IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM
VOL. 6
NO.1,825
TOMORROW IN THE NATION ‘What is GEJ’s policy towards payment of the local debt estimated in the trillions? Economists worry it will cause inflation. But where are the morals in not paying for services rendered as a misguided weapon against inflation? If GEJ can pay trillion+ naira to politicians, he can pay contractor debts!’
COMMENT & DEB ATE EBA
T
HE ceremonies marking the transition of Southern Sudan from appendage of the north to sovereign nation would have been the culmination of Dr John Garang’s life mission. It also called to mind an encounter that nearly was, of which more presently. Garang had led the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the main guerrilla army that for more than three decades bore the brunt of the armed resistance to northern subjugation. He had led the talks with the authorities in Khartoum that broke a military stalemate and designed a phased transition programme that led to the birth of Africa’s newest nation 10 days ago. But he was not there to savour the moment and the triumph He was killed in a mysterious plane crash on July 30, 2005. At the time of his death, he was serving as a minister in the national unity government set up to implement the peace process. He was on his way back to Sudan after a secret visit with his close ally, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, when his plane, from Uganda’s presidential fleet, crashed, killing him, six aides and all seven crew members. He was aged 60. The official account says the crash resulted from poor visibility, but Museveni has maintained that sabotage could not be ruled out. Garang, who earned a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State, belongs in a remarkable group of leaders of liberation movements in Africa, all of them militant intellectuals, who did not die in the heat of battle, yet did not live to witness the culmination of the struggle to which they had devoted their lives. Call it the curse of the African liberator. This ghastly chapter in modern Africa’s history opened with the assassination in Dare-es –Salaam, Tanzania, of Dr Eduardo Mondlane, leader of the Mozambique’s revolutionary liberation movement, FRELIMO. Mondlane held a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University, and combined brilliance with charisma, winning support for his cause principally from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, but also in no small measure from the West. To the fascist regime of Antonio de Salazer in metropolitan Portugal, Mondlane was a mortal enemy who must be silenced. Capitalising on his love of reading, they sent him a book rigged with a bomb. It detonated when he opened the parcel at his Dar-es-Salaam headquarters on February 3, 1969, killing him instantly. He was only 49 years old. FRELIMO proclaimed Mozambique’s independence from Portugal six years later.
RIPPLES
OLATUNJI DARE
AT HOME ABROAD olatunji.dare@thenationonlineng.net
The curse of the African liberator
•South Sudan President Salva Kiir
Four years after despatching Mondlane, the fascist authorities struck again, this time in Conakry, in Sekou Toure’s Guinea. Their target was Amilcar Cabral, leader of the forces fighting for the independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese subjugation. Cabral held a doctorate in agronomy, but was and remains better known in intellectual circles as a revolutionary theoretician on a par with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Frantz Fanon. On January 20, 1973, agents of the Portugal’s notorious secret police, PIDE, sneaked into the residence that served Cabral as home whenever he was not in the bush leading the armed struggle, shot him to death and vanished, just like that. And so when Guinea Bissau proclaimed independence from Portugal on September 24, 1973, it was his brother Luis Cabral who had led the guerrilla army that was named presi-
HARDBALL
Minimum wage showdown: GOVT INSINCERE-Labour
I
•••If Govt says YES, it means NO!
dent. Down south, Herbert Chitepo, national chairman of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), would fall to an assassin’s bomb two years after Cabral. An urbane intellectual, Chitepo was the first black attorney in what was then Rhodesia, where a racist white minority lorded it over the majority black population When the black majority took up arms to win back their country and their dignity, Chitepo took off his wig and gown and slipped across the border into Zambia to lead the chimurenga, or war of liberation, under the banner of the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army, the military wing of ZANU Chitepo was killed on March 18, 1975 in Lusaka, when a car bomb planted in his Volkswagen Beetle exploded. The origin of the bomb remains undetermined. By one account, it was planted by agents of Ian Smith’s minority white regime. By another, it was the work of a dissident faction of ZANLA which wanted to wrest power from Chitepo. Chitepo’s compatriot, Josiah Togongara, was no intellectual. He grew up on a farm owned by Ian Smith, later rebel prime minister of Rhodesia. As field commander of ZANLA’s guerrilla army based in Mozambique, he was a key participant in the Lancaster House talks that set the clock for Zimbabwe’s independence and the end of white minority rule. Once the accords were signed, he left Britain to return to the front to break the news to his troops. He never made it to his headquarters. He was killed in a car accident, in circumstances that remain unresolved to this day. And so ended his chance of playing a leading role in Zimbabwe’s future, possibly as president or prime minister, and at the very least as defence minister. In two tours of journalistic duty in South
F final efforts to stave off the planned Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) general strike fail tomorrow, Nigerians will once again feel the wrath of workers agitating for the implementation of a new national minimum wage. State governors have promised to pay the new wage, but labour is insistent that government must go beyond just minimum wage to implement the new wage across board. The NLC has the right to agitate for wage increases, negotiate with employers, and if negotiation fails, call its union members out on strike. Starting from tomorrow, if those demands are not met, labour will begin a three-day warning strike, which it promised would be total. Ports and airports would be shut, banks would close, universities would not hold classes, and even PHCN, which it admits runs epileptic services, would do what it knows best how to do. To ensure the strike is total, labour also promised that roads would be barricaded. If agreements are not reached by today, labour is of course at liberty to embark on a strike involving all its union members.
TONY MARINHO
Africa in 1990, Chris Hani was the only black person of consequence I did not get to meet. He lived in the country, away from the din and bustle of the city. But he always figured in discussions on the future of the country. Nelson Mandela was the man of the moment and putative leader of a post-apartheid South Africa But in the bustling townships, and among the young people, Hani was the iconic figure, role model, and man of the future. His daring escape from a house in Lesotho surrounded by apartheid South Africa’s troops was indeed the stuff of legend, as were his exploits as Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK for short), the military wing of the African National Congress. At the very least, Hani, who had taken a degree in Classics at Fort Hare, would have become the minister of defence in post-apartheid South Africa, and stood a good chance of being president one day. But it was not to be. Hani was assassinated outside his home on April 10, 1993. He had asked his guard to take the weekend off for Easter, which made him an easy target The killing, by a white man, set off violent protests that gravely imperilled the negotiations to end apartheid. It took a national broadcast by ANC leader Nelson Mandela to quell the protests. To return to Garang, and the encounter that nearly was: On assignment for The Guardian in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in May 1990 to interview OAU Secretary-General Dr Salim Ahmed Salim, Emeka Izeze and I learned from Ambassador Segun Olusola, who had facilitated additional interviews with practically everyone in the Ethiopian leadership except President Mengistu Haile Mariam, that Garang was in town, and that he could help arrange a meeting with him. That would have been a journalistic coup, a world exclusive. We quickly cancelled our reservation and awaited word from Garang. Returning to our lodging after a trip downtown one morning, we learned from the housekeeper that a lanky man with a military bearing had come to ask for us, and had combed the premises as if he was on reconnaissance. That afternoon, word came that Garang would not be available for the interview. We were disconsolate. We don’t know exactly what the aide, identified as Major Deng – if he had a first name, it was a closely guarded secret – told his principal. But, to be frank, the residence was a security nightmare. Maybe that was what Deng reported in his military appreciation, that an interview at that location was not worth the risk. •For comments, send SMS to 08057634061
•Hardball is not the opinion of the columnist featured above
NLC strike and road closure Most Nigerians will probably support them. But it has not told the public why it thinks barricading roads and obstructing movements should be a part of the strike. Are commercial bus drivers and taxi operators, who mostly depend on daily income to survive, also part of labour? If labour achieves its goals, will these commercial transport operators partake in the fruits of the strike by enjoying minimum wage? Labour has the right to strike, but that right must not infringe on the rights of non-unionised workers to earn their living legitimately. They cannot be compelled to join a protest they have no interest in being a part of. If labour wants to shut down everywhere, they must look for causes that every segment of the society can identify with. More fundamentally, the current wage agitation, as legitimate as it is, brings to
the fore once again the urgency of the need to restructure the country. The present structure is unworkable, expensive, burdensome and a threat to national security. There is absolute need for a truly federal structure to guarantee peace, development and a harmonious interaction among Nigeria’s different cultures. Uniform pay structures and uniform price regimes across the country distort social, economic and political realities, thereby making frictions and discontent all but unavoidable. By stubbornly keeping up the dangerous illusion of running a unitary government in the name of federalism, we are unwisely living a lie that will sooner than later undermine the very foundation of the country. It is unlikely that labour is oblivious of these contradictions, or that it should not be part of the solution to detoxify the multi-layered rot in the system.
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