10042018 - Why I'm seeking a 2nd term — BUHARI

Vanguard, TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2018—31
Martin Luther King Jr and the
legacy of a permanent influence
WEDNESDAY 4th April this
year marks 50 years down to
the very day, when African-American
civil rights leader Martin Luther
King Jr was felled by an assassin’s
bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. The
year was 1968. He was visiting the
notoriously racist southern state to
support striking sanitation workers.
It is one of the great ironies of history
that a man who had dedicated his
entire life to fighting social injustice
strictly through nonviolent peaceful
means was himself killed in such a
violent manner. Many people do not
realise that he was only 39 when his
life’s work was ended.
Many saw it coming. His house
had once been bombed, with his wife
and children barely able to escape.
A deranged woman once plunged a
butcher’s knife into his chest, missing
his heart by a hair’s breadth. The FBI
under the demoniac Edgar Hoover
had hounded him relentlessly. He
had a premonition of his own death.
At a church service the night before,
he left his last testament in his
famous Mountaintop Speech:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead.
But it doesn’t matter with me now,
because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
THE Nigerians who cross the Sahara
on their way to Europe were exploited
by all kinds of people: in Nigeria in Benin
by the agent, in Sahara, on the way to
Agadez, by Bedouins and Berbers who
extorted money from them.
In Libya, they were sold as slaves usually
because they could not pay the asking price
which had doubled since they left Benin or
for any capricious reason by the racketeers.
Many thousands die in the Mediterranean
Sea while crossing Italy or Greece. When
rescued; they sought asylum. Many ended
up in immigrant camps, with little food and
water. Some escaped or are helped to escape
for a fee to get to Europe, the Promised Land.
Those who did regard their ordeal as a
success. Some soon settled down, marry,
work; send money home to parents, build
houses, in Benin and elsewhere, etc.
All these economic migrant adventurers
claim that the reason for leaving was there
were no opportunities in Nigeria for them
to work.
There is some evidence to support this: for
example, 6 million Nigerian were refused
university places in five years. Nigeria has
massive graduate unemployment even
among the few who go to university. There is
no viable scheme for skill acquisition and
no political will to engage the unemployed
beyond slogans.
Frustrations make them fall into the hands
of racketeers – African and European, which
make them prey to the recruiter (huntsmen)
and racketeers.
We in effect have a self-perpetuating myth
because the inadequacy of Government,
business, and family to respond at all levels.
The upshot is the inability to manage
ambition, even when these ambitious are
irresponsible and unrealistic.
Europe’s hunger for cheap labour, cheap
sex, stories which Europeans tell back home
about opportunities in Nigeria/African
encourage the traffic; expatriate salaries in
Africa compared to local salaries merely
exacerbate a bad situation.
Some feel that if Europeans can earn such
huge salaries in Africa, why should Africans
not have such differential pay in Europe?
Even legitimate services – an expatriate
doctor or engineer – earns well above his
Like anybody, I would like to live a
long life. Longevity has its place. But
I’m not concerned about that now. I
just want to do God’s will; and He’s
allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen
the Promised Land. I may not get
there with you; but I want you to know
tonight that we as a people will get
to the Promised Land….so I’m not
worried about anything; I’m not
fearing any man. Mine eyes have
seen the glory of the coming of the
Lord…”
All hell broke loose following the
news of his assassination. Black
youths set fire to shops, warehouses
and buildings. Sporadic violence
broke out in Washington DC,
Chicago, New York City, Pittsburgh,
Detroit, Baltimore and other cities,
with some 45 people died, over 2,500
wounded and some 15,000 arrests
were made by law-enforcement
agents.
President Lyndon Johnson, himself
a progressive reformer, was at his
wit’s end. Robert Kennedy, a
presidential candidate and younger
brother of the assassinated John F.
Kennedy, made an impassioned
speech that seemed to have calmed
Victor, CNN, Libya and slavery (2)
Nigerian counterpart in Nigeria. When the
Nigerian doctor or engineer works in
Europe the Nigeria has no such luck: in fact,
his pay, some claim, is usually less.
Victor was sold as a slave, rescued in Libya,
deported to Nigeria. CNN traced him back
to Benin where his story originally began
and thus informing CNN’s story of how the
trade is conducted.
The CNN does not tell us how or by whom
Victor was rescued. When slaves are sold it
is usually for life but Victor is able to escape.
Large swarth of Southern Sudan is occupied
by Nigerians – at last count – over 1.5 million
– usually people on their way to Mecca who
failed to do so. There are Nigerians in
almost all the countries in Africa. But they
are not slaves.
Long before the CNN exposé, Nigerian
women have been recruited and trafficked,
mainly by people from East European
countries – Serbia, Montenegro, Chek,
Slovakia, and Russia. Others are Italian,
Dutch traffickers who use a different route –
He had, he claimed, returned
to poverty which was worse
than slavery
the women fly into these countries and join
an elaborate network of prostitution, menial
labour during which they pay off their
recruiters, sometimes with promises that the
Nigerians arrange for their sisters, and
relatives and friends as new fodder for the
system. Hundreds are enterprising, work
hard, pay off their debts, marry locally, and
send money home. Benin is full of houses
built by women who live overseas.
Back to Victor: he is vocal in captivity –
and returns to Nigeria. If CNN can find him,
so can many other organizations. What has
happened to Victor and other returnees in
Nigeria? Our security service presumably
has debriefed them. If so how come no arrest
of the traffickers in Benin and elsewhere
despite the boast of Edo State Attorney
General.
There are Nigerian’s who are enamored
to NGOs. Why is there not one trying to help
returnees?
Government response has so far been short
of any coherent policy and woefully
the waves: “For those of you who are
black and are tempted to be filled
with hatred and distrust…against all
white people, I can only say that I
feel in my own heart the same kind
of feeling. I had a member of my
own family killed, but he was killed
by a white man. But we have to make
an effort….to go beyond these rather
difficult times. My favourite poet
was Aeschylus. He wrote: In our
sleep, pain which cannot forget falls
drop by drop upon the heart until, in
our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful
grace of God.”
Barely two months later, on 5 June
1968, was Robert Kennedy mortally
MLK often said that a
man has not begun to
live until he has
found a life-purpose
big enough to die for
wounded by a Palestinian fanatic
named Sirhan Sirhan.
Martin Luther King Jr was born
into a privileged middle class family
on 15 January 1929. His father was
a Southern Baptist Minister in
Atlanta, Georgia. MLK attended
Morehouse College in Atlanta,
graduating at the rather young age
of 18. He went for graduate work at
Boston University, where he earned
a doctorate in Systematic Theology.
After graduation, as fate would have
it, he began his pastorate at the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama. He was
barely 25.
Like most Southern cities,
Montgomery was mired in Jim
Crow racism. The young pastor,
barely in his twenties, was caught up
in mass boycott of public buses by
black people protesting
discrimination. On December 1
1955, a seamstress by the name of
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat
in the “coloured section” of a public
bus. Her subsequent arrest provoked
a mass demonstration by the black
community in Montgomery. A
movement was born, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). The people looked for
leadership and they found it in the
frail shoulders of this newly arrived
young pastor at the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church. The rest, as they say,
is history.
Martin Luther King Jr. did not seek
fame. Rather, it was fame that sought
him. He had a dream and a calling.
His dream was to liberate his longsuffering
people from racial
oppression. His calling was to be the
servant of his people. MLK often said
that a man has not begun to live until
he has found a life-purpose big
enough to die for. His campaigns
centred on desegregation, voting
rights, fair wages and access to
education and health. His high
watermark was the famous March
on Washington in 1963, which
culminated with his famous “I have
a Dream” speech; one of the greatest
in the annals of political rhetoric.
MLK became a leader of world
stature. In October 1964 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
In 1965 he led the marches from
Selma to Montgomery. In 1966 the
movement turned its attention
farther north, to Chicago. Their focus
was on segregated housing. The
SCLC became a nationwide
movement mobilising African-
Americans and all men and women
of good conscience in the fight for
social justice and human dignity in
the United States of America.
When MLK turned his attention to
the injustice of the Vietnam War, it
seemed to the Establishment that he
inadequate. An old
adage is don’t give
fish to a person:
rather teach him
how to fish.
If a CNN
reporter can
identify the
traffickers in
Nigeria, so can
our security forces
– why not
persecute and jail them for their activities?
The usual panacea of job training,
counseling, etc. should be employed in
Nigeria for Victor and his ilk. What is the
ministry of Nigeria Foreign Affairs doing
in Libya? We always had a robust security
service system in Libya and Niger and Chad?
What happened? Is there no Consular
Service in Libya?
However, we should ask the Bleeding
Hearts of the United States and Europe, who
broke Libya? The traffickers started
operating fully, after the West removed the
most effective Government in Libya since
1966. They orchestrated the destruction of
Gadhafi without replacing him with an
effective Government – a feat they repeated
in Egypt and Iraq and Iran. Western interests
in these areas are different and opposed to
the progressive interests of the people of the
area.
The West must own the vessel they broke
in Libya in as much the same way as they
must own that broken in Egypt and the rest
of the Maghreb.
Why does Libya want slaves? Don’t they
have enough workers? The CNN does not
tell us this because it would explain why a
widespread practice of two or three auctions
is held daily in Libya.
Victor wants to be a designer but there are
technical colleges in Nigeria – why didn’t
he go there? What was his qualification
which made him unable to get a job? Many
of the returnees have claimed that they saved
N1.5 million which they spent on the Libyan
adventure.
According to CNN, there is international
complicity in the trafficking of slaves. The
arrival of these economic migrants is one of
the feedstock for the far right movement and
the isolation politics in Europe.
The world response when CNN aired this
programme operation of slavery was
had crossed the Rubicon. He was
labelled a rabble-rouser, communist
agent and a philanderer. He had to
die. Despite all his detractors, his
name and legacy will endure through
the ages. MLK was a drum major
for social justice; an apostle of peace
— the moral conscience of America.
Without his legacy the idea of an
African-American as president of the
United States would have been wellnigh
unthinkable. By the sheer moral
force of his spirit, MLK transformed
the very meaning of what it means
to be an American.
MLK was in Accra on 6 March
1957 when Ghana celebrated its
independence as a sovereign nation.
He identified with the leading
independence leaders of the New
Africa. He saw the destiny of the
Mother Continent as inseparable
from that of his captive people in the
Americas and the islands of the seas.
But we must never idolise any human
being. MLK had his own
shortcomings – after all, he was only
human. What stood him apart was
that he had moral courage. And he
was a man of compassion, truth and
justice. And he loved the Lord greatly.
The world will never be the same
because Martin Luther King Jr.
passed through it. He once appeared
to me in a dream several years ago
when I was a struggling young
university lecturer in London. He was
in tattered rags with dirt and wounds
all over him; silently weeping.
Without words, the message came
to me: that the work that he lived
and died for is not yet ended. We must
take up the baton where he left it.
With the immense suffering, poverty
and injustice that we see everywhere
around us – in Nigeria, in Africa, in
the world — the work of God has
only begun.
against the West. This was massive. The
reaction in Nigeria was tepid and even
indifferent.
The West moved to repatriate 15,000
instead of the miserable 1000 per month.
CNN traced those repatriated – CNN
comes to Nigeria, to an unsavoury
neighbourhood where they men Pusherman,
Eveke and an army of traffickers – selling
hopes through trafficking human beings.
The pusherman Eveke arranged for them to
go to Auchi the North of Edo State. The
programme now introduced the possibility
that women were or might be abused – Eveke
- knows and tell them – gives them condoms.
The arrangement was that you pay nothing
at the beginning; payment was to be made
in Libya. In my more cynical mood, I would
have doubted several aspects of this
arrangement. The CNN did not find one
female in camp in Libya. Eveke’s
“introduction” of condoms may have been
to sex up the story by CNN.
Thus a customer presumably carried the
money and contraception during the trip.
The Edo Attorney General condemned the
traffic, threatened prosecution and
imprisonment but gratuitously added that
the causes of human trafficking had “deep
cultural roots, which must be exposed and
pulled out”. Really!! Mr. A.G. what could
this possibly mean?
We are told that Victor was responsible
for his mother and three siblings – Victor
was of an indeterminable age anywhere
between 26 and 36 years old. He had, he
claimed, returned to poverty which was
worse than slavery. He hoped to go to Europe
again through Libya
Victor is responsible for mother including a
baby and 3 siblings but have no father. Victor
looks like 30 years old, what was his CV and
what did he do to collect N1.5million plus the
other money that was lost to rescue him?
C
M
Y
K