By Mahmud Jega

Madam Olukemi Olufunto Adeleke Badenoch, who thinks of herself as British because she lives in Britain, is married to a kilt-wearing Scotsman, sits in the House of Commons, is Leader of the opposition Conservative Party and is busy rubbishing and denigrating her ancestral country in order to “belong” to the new country, could she spare a minute and learn a lesson from the Irish, many of whom are members of the party she allegedly leads? “Follows” is more like it because a leader is supposed to set the standards, rather than bend over backwards to bootlick the values of his supposed followers.

I will recommend to Kemi to read Margaret Mitchell’s all-time classic novel, Gone With The Wind. It was about the Southern American “civilization” of the mid-19th century, built around the affluence of huge cotton plantations, maintained by millions of Black slaves hauled in from across the Atlantic Ocean from West and Central Africa. This “civilization” evaporated with the American Civil War of 1861-65. The book itself was described as “the story of a civilization, a civilization gone with the wind.”

There was this interesting passage about Gerald O’Hara, father of Scarlett O’Hara, the novel’s central character. He owned the sprawling Tara cotton plantation in Georgia State, with hundreds of field and domestic slaves, of which he was very proud. One day he came galloping home on his favourite mare, only to find his beloved daughter, Scarlett sitting on the porch, heartbroken because she did not win the heart of her juvenile love, Ashley Wilkes. Mr. O’Hara was quite unhappy that any mundane thing should upset his daughter. Surveying the huge cotton fields and the extremely rich Southern American landscape which White settlers had snatched from Red Indians, he said to his daughter, “You, who is going to inherit the best land in the world!” Then he quickly added, “After County Meade, in the old country.”

Even though O’Hara himself or his ancestors fled from Ireland in order to escape a famine, and despite the splendor of his new life and his possession of the Tara plantation, he still had the presence of mind to place his ancestral home as the best land in the world. Ten years ago, when I was moving into my new house in Abuja, I surveyed the pleasant surroundings but, borrowing from Mr. O’Hara, I said, “This is the best house in the world! After Magatakarda’s house, in Jega.”

Now, County Meade, in Ireland, was the place that O’Hara fled from prior to the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52, a period of mass starvation and disease that led to one million deaths, forced another one million Irishmen and women to flee to North America, and reduced the country’s population by one quarter. It was principally caused by the potato blight fungus Phytophthora infestans, which destroyed potato crops, the main food of the Irish. This fungus is here in Nigeria; I used to teach about it in Biology classes, even though it was not the immediate cause of Kemi’s flight to the UK. Luckily for the starving Irishmen, the US at the time was very welcoming of [European] immigrants in order to drive out the Red Indians and the hundreds of millions of bison and occupy their land. It even erected a statue on Liberty Island, leading into New York harbor, welcoming immigrants with the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these the homeless, tempest tossed, to me…” When President Donald Trump, who is of German ancestry, takes charge from January next year, he might pull down the Statue of Liberty and possibly throw the Irish back whence they came from.

Madam Kemi, before you embarked on a serial denigration of your ancestral homeland in order to “belong” to the new home, did you sit down to reflect why the Tories, who were thrown out of power in British general elections last July, decided to make you, of all people, to be their old party’s leader? This young, black, first-generation immigrant, inexperienced, talk-before-you think gate crasher into Conservative values, asked to occupy the chair on which Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold McMillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and more recently, Rishi Sunak once sat, with nothing of the charisma or the self-esteem?

Kemi Badenoch’s absolute fascination with the House that the British Built on their small island is understandable, but that is because she has no knowledge at all of the very heavy price that others paid in order for the Brits to build this island. At one time Britain had one quarter of the entire human population under its imperial boot. Hundreds of thousands of ships ferried riches “more than the mind can picture,” to borrow from Old Major’s song in Animal Farm, to Britain from all the countries of the far-flung empire, including Africa, Caribbeans, South America, Asia, Arabia, West Indies and the Pacific Islands. Even IBM computers cannot quantify the wealth that left colonial India, the so-called “Crown Jewel of the British Empire,” and landed on British shores.

Why are so many people around the world not as fascinated as Madam Kemi is with the British homeland? The American Red Indians, Australian Aboriginals, tens of millions of African slaves that were shipped to work in slave plantations, the Kenyans who suffered under the colonial State of Emergency in order to suppress the Mau Mau; the Southern Rhodesians who suffered under Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence [UDI] with British connivance; not to mention South African blacks, who endured five decades of Apartheid rule and centuries of racial discrimination, all do not have Madam Kemi’s fascination with the British Isles.

My recently deceased Mum once told me a story, that during the Second World War in the 1940s, many young men in the village where she grew up were drafted into the colonial British Army and sent off to fight the Japanese in Burma. Many of them never returned. In addition, Native Authority officials went round all the villages, urging farmers to donate groundnuts and other cash crops to assist the British war effort. Hundreds of thousands of tones from our back-breaking labour went to assist in a fight that did not really concern us. Since we have helped the British to escape the clutches of Adolf Hitler, they should please refund to us the cost of our groundnuts and other produce, instead of granting safe haven to our own misguided daughter to insult us from afar. When Northern Nigeria was donating groundnuts to help save the Brits from Hitler, why didn’t they reject it and say it was from Boko Haram territory? Are they sure that it is not the farm produce they looted from our lands that set the stage for Boko Haram and bandits to roam over this place?

Mrs. Badenoch is so grateful because she has risen to a position in an opposition political party, and she feels on top of the world. Is she the first person from the Third World, from Africa or even from Nigeria that ever rose to an exalted position on the world, not just a British, stage? During our early primary school days, we endlessly heard the name of U Thant in the BBC World News, because of the then raging Vietnam War. We got the impression in our young minds that he was the ruler of the world. I later came to realise that this Burmese diplomat was Secretary General of the United Nations. His home country Burma, then under Ne Win, subsequently under the Senior General Shan Shwe and even today under General Min Aung Hlaing, is not the most pleasant of countries but U Thant, prominent that he was, never disowned Burma or said he belonged to Bamar ethnic group, or that he had nothing in common with the Rohingyas of western Burma, most of whom are in exile today in Bangladesh.

The other sons and daughters of the Third World who rose to prominence on the world stage, did they ever denigrate their homelands? When Boutros Boutros-Ghali became Secretary General of the United Nations, did he ever disown Egypt because Muslim Brotherhood militants sometimes exploded bombs in the Sinai? Did Kofi Anan ever disown Ghana because he served a long tenure as UN Secretary General? Did Javier Perez De Cuellar ever lampoon Peru? What about Ban Ki-moon; did he disown his native South Korea for fear that North Korea may one day send a million troops across the DMZ?

Other Nigerians who rose to prominence on the international stage, Adebayo Adedeji as Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa; Emeka Anyaoku as Secretary General of Commonwealth of Nations; Akinwunmi Adesina who is President of the Africa Development Bank; Tijjani Mohamed-Bande who was President of the UN General Assembly; Amina Mohamed who is Deputy Secerary General of the United Nations and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who is Director General of the World Trade Organisation, positions all more exalted than Madam Kemi’s, which one of them lampooned Nigeria in order to “belong” to his/her new circle?

Madam Kemi said she is Yoruba and has nothing in common with Northern Nigeria, the home of Boko Haram. How come she forgot that when she returned to Britain in 1996, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland had raged for 28 years and bombs planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army [IRA] were exploding in British city street corners?

What is Leader of a British opposition party when the son of an African, Barack Obama, rose to become President of the United States? Even though his mother was a lily-White woman from Kansas, did Obama ever disown Kenya, from where his father went to the US as a student? He must have learnt something from his father, who returned home after his studies and did not elope, despite marrying a White woman. Rather than disown his ancestry, President Obama actually flaunted it. In his first week in the White House, he introduced to reporters a pet dog that he just procured. The puppy was mixed breed, so Obama said, “It is a mutt, like me.”

Not only them. When Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, alias Stalin, was General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953, did he ever disown his tiny native Georgia in order to ingratiate himself with Russia, the dominant partner in the Soviet Union? When Josif Broz Tito, who was half Croat and half Slovene, became President of Yugoslavia, did he ever disown his homeland in order to gain acceptance from Serbs, who dominated the country?

Look, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and later rose to become Der Fuehrer, he wasn’t even a German but an Austrian, son of the small Austrian Customs officer Alois Schicklgruber. Did he ever deny Austria in order gain acceptance from aristocratic Prussian Generals and Junkers?

By IfeanyiChukwu Afuba 

 It is a troubling time for institutions when their mandate is compromised, privatised or personalised. The more common means of dominating an institution is making it captive of an ideology. This is often the reason why organisations divert from the heart of their constitutions. For instance, in recognition of Nigeria’s multi religious character, the Nigerian Constitution prohibits adoption of any religion as State religion. Yet, Nigeria is forcibly a member of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

In mid November 2024, Nigeria participated at the Arab – Islamic summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the highest levels, even as Nigeria’s non Arab and non Islamic identity conspicuously stood out. Corruption of Nigeria’s university system is proceeding at fast speed because of misdirected anger over poor pay, this, arising from comparison with emoluments of national assembly members. Even academics scandalised by the commercialised processes of university education today are resigned to the inbuilt extortion of students by lecturers. This false order thrives because a rationalisation psyche is in force in the universities. The United Nations too is at such a crossroads today. Founded to promote the cause of world peace, the UN is today increasingly employed to prosecute ideologies of discrimination and domination.

The UN body under threat of derailing from the organisation’s core mandate is the General Assembly. To be sure, the Security Council is privatised; but it was unapologetically framed as such from the beginning. The concept of veto power is nothing but politics of might is right. But the General Assembly was conceived under the principle of equality of nations. It was created to reflect the nuances of global diversity. By this means, it offers a voice to the voiceless in the global stage. The official UN site www.un.org points out that the GA is the “only UN body with universal representation.” But even this level mechanism can be upset, shifted; and has been manipulated against the State of Israel. In it’s subtle persecution of Israel, the GA presents an example of how democracy, an otherwise healthy system can be a disadvantage in equitable decision – making. 

By it’s 193 membership strength, you would expect a wide, multi and diverse range of subjects to be receiving the GA’s attention. And for broad, dispassionate perspectives to be injected into the consideration of these felt concerns from around the world. But, no, the GA is gradually being reduced to a tribunal interrogating petitions against Israel’s right to exist. Israel’s enemies have since perfected a plot for repetitive accusations against Israel. These similar allegations are lodged with the GA on a somewhat rotatory manner so that the subject of Israel’s atrocities is regularly a talking point at the UN. With so much vehemence and theatrics thrown into it, the setting is created for sentiments to influence deliberations on the complaints.

The siege is escalated by the trick of mass numbers ranged against Israel under umbrella identities in what should be disputes between Israel and a specific member state or observer as in the case of Palestine. Whatever space left for objective examination of the issues is further assailed by the noise effect of unceasing petitions. This harangue of Israel at the UN has gone on for too long, and aside the injustice against Israel, it comes at the cost of neglect of other world conflicts.

UN Watch Database of November 3, 2024 records that “from 2015 through 2023, the UNGA has adopted 154 resolutions against Israel and 71 against other countries.” The analysis further shows that in 2024 alone, the UNGA passed 17 resolutions on Israel and only 6 resolutions on the rest of the world. Obviously taking a cue from the UNGA, the UN Human Rights Council has also proved it’s own obsession with Israel. UN Watch Database highlights that “from 2006 through 2024, the Council adopted 108 resolutions against Israel, 45 against Syria, 15 against Iran, 10 against Russia and 4 against Venezuela.”

The preponderance of these sessions on Israel is brought about by ideological influence on the question of the Jewish State. This reconceptualisation, as earlier hinted, leads to externalisation of the inherent issues. Consequently, the Israel – Palestine issue changes to Israel, Arab – Islamic conflict, which configuration automatically puts Israel at huge numerical disadvantage. 

And so, the Middle East crisis is probably more of ideological tussle than it is about land. It’s precisely the contrasting values between Judeo – Christian civilisation and Arab – Islamic heritage that pits a swarm of countries against Israel. This is why Iran, a non Arab State with theocratic rulership, is a ringleader of the plot against Israel. It also explains why almost every Arab – Islamic summit is preoccupied with the Israel agenda. Aside the emotional drive that goes with religion, the anti Israel axis also brings economic pressure to bear on it’s campaign. Between them, the Arab – Islamic solidarity controls no less than seventy percent of the world’s oil resources.

This natural endowment was weaponised against Israel and the United States following the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The impact of the oil sanctions gave rise to the American energy crisis. The economic leverage through oil boycott continues to be used to enlist otherwise unwilling countries into opposition against Israel. Then, there is the awful approach of inciting resentment against Israel with propaganda and disinformation.

We see this tactics actively at play in the Gaza war. While we acknowledge Israel’s excesses in the war, the attempt to condition minds against Israel should be deplored. A few observers have wondered at the ease with which even sections of the Western media lapped up Hamas’ narrative of the war, including dizzying casualty figures and the catchphrase of seventy percent of the victims being women and children.

Do mainstream, independent media really doubt that terrorist armies such as Hamas violates international law by infiltrating civilian infrastructure and exploiting non combatants as human shield? In an article in The Telegraph of 16 December, 2024, Zoe Strimpel highlighted how a study by Andrew Fox, a disinformation researcher and former lecturer at Sandhurst, tore to shreds, Hamas’s casualty figures. Using their very own data for investigation, Fox provides insight into the propaganda of mainly civilian victims. “One way they did this was to list men as women. Adults were also registered as children; twenty – somethings as infants. Natural deaths, in the tens of thousands, were included as well. And the nub of it: the lion’s share of deaths in Gaza were those of fighting aged men.”

Aljazeera, the leading megaphone of the conspiracy against Israel, has been unrelenting in it’s one sided coverage of stories involving Israel. The television station which prides itself in the editorial policy of consistent reference to Arab land seized by Israel as “occupied territory”, finds justification in the provision that “international law prohibits the acquisition of land by force.” The same Aljazeera and their collaborators will say nothing about the UN charter which states: “All members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security are not endangered.” And Aljazeera will not update it’s viewers that the “occupied lands” were lost in defeated acts of aggression against Israel.

The first territories were captured in the post independence war of 1948/1949 in which Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt sought to cripple the State of Israel at birth. More territories were captured in the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars against the combined militaries of Syria, Egypt and Jordan. These violations of the UN charter mean nothing to Israel’s detractors; their concern being to extract reward for aggression. And why, does Aljazeera not rail at Turkey over it’s occupation of northern Cyprus? Why is Turkey’s defiance of Security Council Resolutions 541 and 550 acceptable to the enforcers of UN declarations?

The hostility and assault against the State of Israel and the Jewish people has not abated. If anything, it has intensified in the past half a century. In the wake of the Gaza war, Israel has faced the unenviable task of fighting on seven fronts against an amalgam of three States and four terrorist militias. What else does Iran’s sectarian dictatorship do except to howl and plot for Israel’s destruction? On the existential threat faced by Israel, Wikipedia tells us: “There have been explicit or implicit expressions, statements and rhetoric made by individuals, political entities and factions within Arab and Islamic discourse advocating for the elimination of the State of Israel as a political entity. These calls often involve the use of strong language, genocidal threats or declarations aiming at the complete eradication of Israel.”

And yet, it’s this same Israel which ought to receive UN special protection in this climate of identity hysteria that is persistently bullied at the UN!

There seems no doubt anymore that Antonio Guterres, the current UN Secretary General has capitulated to the phalanx of anti Israel mob at the UN. A measure of the UN’s wretched position on the Gaza conflict is to always demand for a ceasefire before calling for release of Israeli hostages.This miserable shying away from unconditional condemnation and reversal of lingering incidents of the October 7, 2023 massacre is a betrayal to the very essence of the world body. We are dealing with a leadership of the UN susceptible to selective history of the Middle East crisis.

In his first reaction to Hamas’s murder spree of October 7, Gutteres had in the same breath of condemning the killings, said the massacre did not occur in a vacuum! Gutteres clearly needs help. With this mindset, he renders himself unfit to drive a resolution process on the subject. With antagonistic fixation on Israel, Gutteres leadership does not seem to have found the time nor sensitivity to address other grave issues demanding urgent action from the UN. Over – concentrated on Israel, the UN watched as Russia annexed Ukrainian Crimea before declaring full war against Ukraine.

The bombardment of Ukrainian cities has continued, with energy infrastructure and other critical supplies the targets of overwhelming firepower. But a partisan UN knows when to look the other way. Iran, Iraq and Turkey jostle to outdo the other in their brutal suppression of Kurdish minorities in their States. And a parochial UN has no problem choosing which independence struggles to disregard.

The UN’s hounding of Israel has been counterproductive. It has only served to heighten consciousness about the interests seeking to impose their worldviews on the rest of us. Israel is not about to disappear. But the UN will get weaker by pandering to divisive forces.