PATRICE Lumumba, a postal worker, was 34 years when he won election as Prime Minister to lead the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC to its June 30, 1960 independence. He made a powerful speech at the independence celebrations denouncing the barbaric colonisation of the DRC which led to the massacre of 15 million Congolese. The departing Belgian colonialists regarded the speech as an insult and decided that Lumumba must die. The British and Americans thought Lumumba was speaking like a communist and must, therefore, be eliminated. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower then ordered Lumumba’s assassination.

The Belgians set the events in motion by sending in troops to strengthen a secessionist movement in the Katanga Province while the Americans bought over the DRC Army Chief of Staff, Mobutu Seseseko, to engineer a mutiny. Within weeks of independence, the country was in turmoil. Lumumba was in a dilemma: he could ask for assistance from the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, but he would be branded a communist; so he turned to the United Nations, UN, whom he assumed was a neutral body. He was to realise that the UN is a body susceptible to manipulations by powerful countries.

Lumumba did not learn from the Korean experience when the UN on June 25, 1950 passed its Resolution 82 which, basically, empowered the US and its allies to invade Korea under its banner. Today, 70 years later, the foreign troops who invaded Korea in the name of the UN are still in that divided country, except that now, they fly the American flag. On Lumumba’s invitation, UN troops came to the DRC. They included troops from some African countries, notably Nigeria, whose Chief of Army Staff was British Major General Forster!

When the UN troops arrived, they placed Lumumba, the democratically elected Prime Minister under house arrest. Rather than watch his country taken over by colonialists and their lackeys, he escaped and headed for his stronghold of Stanleyville to establish a new government and put up resistance. Taking advantage of his enormous popularity, he stopped at towns and villages along the way, mobilising the masses.

Unfortunately, this left a trail which the bloodhounds of the American, Belgian and British secret services picked and sent rebel soldiers after him. He was eventually captured. What do you do with a man who had the mandate of his people to lead? Put him on trial? If so, on what charges; for being a patriot?

Since Western leaders had decided that Lumumba should be murdered, they tried to find a way of executing him without their hands dripping with the blood of the innocent. They embarked on a ridiculous and childish plot. They flew him and his two comrades, Joseph Okito, Senator representing the Kasai Province and First Vice President of the Senate, and Maurice Mpolo, Minister of Youths and Sports, into the rebel enclave of Katanga and handed them to the rebel forces led by Moise Tshombe. They were tortured on the way from the airport, then the convoy turned off into a forest, where they were tied to trees and shot.

The firing squad was led by Belgian officers. The man who supervised the murders, chopped up the bodies and then dissolve them in acid, was Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete. In 2000, 39 years after these sordid events, he told the AFP about that January 17, 1961 day: “We started by getting drunk, to have the courage. We dismembered the corpse (of Lumumba) the hardest bit was cutting it up.” Soete said he took two teeth of the famous African leader as souvenir. That same year on the ARD German TV channel, he showed Lumumba’s teeth.

After Soete’s death, his daughter in 2016 granted a newspaper interview during which she displayed a tooth of Lumumba she had inherited from her father. This June, Lumumba’s daughter, Juliana, 64, petitioned the Belgian King Philippe condemning the “vile statements made in Belgium about holding some of his remains” and complained that: “The remains of Patrice Emery Lumumba are being used on the one hand as trophies by some of your fellow citizens, and on the other as funeral possessions sequestered by your kingdom’s judiciary.” Pointing out that her legendary father was a “hero without a grave” she demanded the return of his remains “to the land of his ancestors”.

On September 10, 2020, a Belgian court ruled that Lumumba’s remains should be returned to his family. This formalised the decision by the Belgian Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office that his remains could be given back to his family. This is a victory not only to the African peoples, but the entire human race whose species committed such unspeakable crimes.

Cuba learnt from the Lumumba experience. It had been invaded from April 17-19, 1961. But aware that the Americans were planning a larger and more determined invasion, the Cubans did not waste their time seeking UN intervention or troops, they appealed directly to the Soviet Union which sent missiles to the country as a deterrent. The Americans, led by an inexperienced President John Kennedy, were furious. Havana is 510 kilometres from Florida and the missiles could easily be turned at it.

Kennedy threatened an attack that could trigger a Third World War, and staked his reputation and Presidency on the removal of the missiles from Cuba. The Soviets decided to give him a face-saving solution: the missiles would be removed on two conditions. First, America must undertake never to invade Cuba again. Secondly, that America must remove its missiles on the Turkish border with the Soviet Union. Kennedy agreed. That was how the Cuban ‘Missile Crisis’ was resolved. None of the parties thought highly of a UN intervention. It was a win-win situation; all sides got what they wanted. Until today, America has not invaded Cuba again.

Since the debacle in Congo, the UN has continued to carry out its peace keeping missions, including in Rwanda where in 1994, it ordered its troops back to the barracks to watch, or allow the genocide take place. UN troops are today in Western Sahara under the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, MINURSO, where it is watching the Moroccan occupiers detain, torture and massacre the indigenous Saharawi.

The UN has also been used to perpetrate crimes across the universe. For instance, it was used as cover in the criminal Western invasion and decimation of Iraq based on information it knew were lies. The UN was also used as cover in the invasion and devastation of Libya, including the cowardly execution of its President, Mouamar Ghadaffi.

The UN has been of tremendous benefit to humanity, setting up life-saving agencies like UNICEF and UNHR, but its peace-keeping missions need some teeth.

Why do universities around the world require the donning of academic gowns that look like the Danshiki, Babariga, or Kosankosa of Africans? The modern university originated in Africa with its inception in 859 AD at Fez, Morocco, by Fathima, a Muslim woman, and it continues today as the oldest university in the world named in 1965,  University of Al Quaraouiyine. This was followed in 989 AD in present-day Mali by the Mosque of Sankore or Timbuctoo which doubled as a higher learning centre or Madrasa still known as the University of Sankore or Timbuctoo.

By comparison, the first university in Europe is the University of Bologna which started in 1088 AD and was indirectly modelled after the University of Sankore by being situated in a Cathedral institution or church with the aim of training priests in the study of the entire universe by the Catholic church that still calls itself the universal church, hence the Italian title, universitas or university (whole universe) – a term that was also used to describe global business establishments.

Some scholars misunderstand this term and therefore suggest that the multiversity is a better term for the university because there are different kinds of universities with different disciplines, epistemologies, methodologies and theories but they are mistaken because all those studies and methods relate to the one and only universe. Europeans are also mistaken when they assume that Eurocentrism or ethnocentrism is the only valid or universal epistemology, given that Afrocentricity is more valid by placing Africa at the centre of studies about Africa without assuming that all studies of the entire universe must be centred on Africa – Afrocentrism.

The classical African system of education in ancient Kemet or Egypt obviously paved the way for the modern study of the entire universe by establishing a similar body of knowledge at the Royal Temples and libraries built by the multi-genius polymath, Imhotep, with writing and learning in all fields – Medicine, Architecture, Philosophy, Astronomy, Algebra, Chemistry, Athletics, Politics, Religion, etc. according to Cheikh Anta Diopin Civilization or Barbarism and according to George James in Stolen Legacy: The African Origin of Greek Philosophy.

The ancient Greek philosophers were all known to have studied in ancient Egypt for dozens of years and Europeans had a 16th century saying based on the writings of Pliney the Elder (23-79 AD) that testified to this view of Africa as a mysterious place: ‘Africa Always Brings Us Something New’. According to Derrida, Plato earlier quoted his teacher, Socrates, as saying that Africans invented writing as a kind of medicine for healing the sick with a warning that patients should be careful not to take an overdose lest the Pharmakon or cure becomes a poison. Aristotle was known to have written nothing until he accompanied his student, Alexander the Great, to invade Egypt and loot the library at Alexandria before he published over 40 books in a few years, most of the contents being found in papyri of the Egyptian Mystery School that dated thousands of years before there was any culture known as Greek.

Europeans tried to hide the fact that even the Greeks regarded the African philosophy as offensive and therefore executed Socrates, sold Plato into slavery and exiled Aristotle for teaching foreign ideas. Europeans mounted a propaganda that only Europe had a literate culture while other cultures had oral traditions. Hegel and Levi-Straus claimed that literacy was what made Europeans superior to all other cultures. Habermas claimed that African cultures were ‘pre-civilisational or pre-literate’ in terms of his Theory of Communicative Action. The only pre-thing that African culture is can be said to be pre-European.

The African-born philosopher, Jacques Derrida, challenged such notions of white supremacy by reminding everyone that writing was not invented by Europeans but by Africans and that when human beings evolved in Africa and then migrated to the rest of the world 200,000 years later, they took writing with them by giving names to themselves, which is an indication that every culture engages in writing in general, or aspects Of Grammatology. Edward Said agreed that the idea of Orientalism as a condescending reference to the East by the West is mistaken because the huge contributions to universal knowledge from Orient cannot be denied by the Occident.

The difficulty for Africans is that hundreds of years of being denied universal education while being enslaved and colonised by Europeans have resulted in underdevelopment. The modern university is therefore assumed to have been introduced by Europeans to Africa as part of the civilising process of colonisation. But Walter Rodney warns that the colonisation of Africa was designed to mis-educate Africans and to underdevelop Africa to facilitate European exploitation given that after hundreds of years of domination, the colonisers failed to educate a sizeable number of university graduates to lead the development of Africa. It took the initiative of pioneers like Edward Blyden who rose from survivors of slavery to acquire universal knowledge and return to Africa to teach that indigenous African knowledge was not inferior to Eurocentrism.

Similar figures like Aggrey, Du Bois, and Garvey inspired the great Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik of Africa, to venture across the Atlantic in search of the Golden Fleece of knowledge for service to our people. On his return, he published Renascent Africa and set up newspaper chains with which he trained young journalists to become public intellectuals while he sponsored or inspired the education of the Argonauts like Kwame Nkrumah, K. O. Mbadiwe, Nwafor Orizu, Mbonu Ojike, and many more who confessed that they were inspired by Zik of Africa to go abroad for their advanced learning in order to be equipped for the struggle for the restoration of independence.

The European colonisers believed that Africa was not ripe for universities, as if we were some kind of bananas. It took a lot of pressure from the Zik Group of Newspapers to persuade them to set up Colleges of the University of London in Ibadan and Accra with very few opportunities for the increasing population of students desiring higher learning. As soon as the colonisers allowed self-rule, Azikiwe took the initiative to build the first indigenous full-fledged land-grant university in Nigeria in 1955 and he called it The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, with the motto: To Restore the Dignity of Man. It was modelled after US universities and became the very first to offer courses in Business Administration and Electrical Engineering, as opposed to emphasis on the European Classics at the University College, Ibadan, which became autonomous only in 1963.

The Northern and Western Region governments followed the example of Azikiwe by building what became Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, while the Federal Government built the University of Lagos to meet the yearning for universal learning across the country. The University of Nigeria soon set up branches in Calabar (now the University of Calabar) and the Aba Campus for Nigerian Languages while the Enugu Campus hosts the Faculties of Law, Medicine and Business Administration. Other independent African countries also quickly established their own universities or upgraded university colleges such as the ones in Makerere in Uganda, Nairobi in Kenya, or Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone to serve as full universities.

The apartheid regime in South Africa continued with the Bantustan education policy that reserved poorly funded institutions for the African majority until the emergence of majority rule under Nelson Mandela before many of the polytechnics were upgraded to universities. Yet the African National Congress government of the new South Africa continued to increase tuition fees, forcing students to launch a campaign saying that Fees Must Fall, Rhodes Must Fall, and the universities must be decolonised in line with the teachings of progressive intellectuals led by Fanon in Algeria in the 1950s-1960s, by Steve Biko in the 1970s, and by Walter Rodney at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of the West Indies in the 1960s-1970s.

The universities in Africa today remain thoroughly colonialist in orientation. The French universities in parts of Africa remain tied to the intellectual colonialism of France despite the heroic theoretical efforts of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, and by Mudimbe. One aspect of colonialism that remains is the domination of university administration and the professoriate by men trained in the colonial education system with little or no room for women at the top, according to CODESRIA which builds a network of African universities and links them up with Africa Diaspora scholars for mutual benefits.

When some women are appointed as Vice Chancellors they operated with the assumption that they must support oppressive patriarchy against progressives in order to retain their positions. Hopefully, the recent appointments of the first female VCs at the University of Calabar and at Imo State University would not be seen as a mandate for the repression of progressive intellectuals on the campuses. Instead, Madam VC should be supported to advance decolonisation by, for example, endowing a prize for the best doctoral dissertation written entirely in indigenous languages in any field. No country has ever industrialised by relying on the languages of colonisers.

The Murtala/Obasanjo administration introduced tuition-free university education in Nigeria but the emergence of state universities (started by Jim Nwobodo with Anambra State University of Technology in 1979 quickly followed by Sam Mbakwe in Imo State in 1980, both under the party leadership of Azikiwe, and then by Ambrose Ali in Bendel State under the leadership of Awolowo) and private universities forced university administrators to roll back the tuition-free programmes even in federal universities today as ASUU laments.

The universities across Africa should adopt this policy of publicly funded education to make education at all levels tuition-free the way that ancient Africans exemplified when there were no fees charged by the Royal Temples of Imhotep nor by the University of Sankore, contrary to the austerity conditionalities imposed by IMF loans. Education funding should be raised to 26% of the GDP for this purpose or raised even higher as Azikiwe did in Eastern Region in the 1950s which persuaded Awolowo to launch free primary school education in the Western Region to catch up with the East, he said. Cuba offers a better model of free education at all levels today.

The decolonisation of education effort should be advanced by challenging researchers to wean themselves from Eurocentric theories, epistemologies or methodologies, and develop original ideas based on African indigenous systems of knowledge as pioneered by African creative writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aido, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Mariama Ba, Sembene Ousmane, Buchi Emecheta, and by social scientists such as Kwame Nkrumah, Eskor Toyo, Samir Amin, Ifi Amadiume, Ruth First, Bade Onimode, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru  Nzegwu, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Arthur Nwankwo, Ola Oni, Bala Usman, Mahmoud Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Bagele Chilisa, and Akpan Ekpo, and also by scientists like Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Chike Obi, Edwin and Bene Madunagu, Phillip Emeagwali, Abdul Bangura, to name but a few.

African intellectuals should be supported with generous funding for research from the governments and the private sectors across Africa the way it is done around the world. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation should redirect the Africa Leadership Prize away from corrupt politicians and share the prize money to scholars in different fields across African universities to encourage more innovation in the pursuit of knowledge of the entire universe. The universities should establish outreach to artisans, market women, farmers and artists to learn from the ingenuity of our people and share the fruits of systematic study more widely.

•Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. He is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System and of Counter-Colonial Criminology, Editor-In-Chief of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of Africana Sociologies.

By Chinedu Asadu

In just three months, the political career of Adams Oshiomhole has suffered a huge setback. Some political experts believe his career might have been reduced to rubble by no other person than the former Edo state governor himself.

Not so long after the court of appeal affirmed his sack as the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), he has been dislodged in Edo where he governed from 2008 to 2016.

The tussle with Godwin Obaseki whom he helped into power is one of his greatest undoing as he has not just lost political relevance in his stronghold but suffered a heavy blow. After he fell out with Obaseki, the APC executive committee in his ward in Etsako west local government suspended him. The APC chairmen in the 18 local government areas of the state also passed a vote of no confidence on him, accusing him of working against the party interest.

Although Oshiomhole appeared to have dismissed the suspension as a child’s play, it would later cost him his position as the national chairman of the party as a high court in Abuja suspended him on that basis.

Danlami Senchi, a judge, had ruled in March that it was wrong of the APC to have kept Oshiomhole as chairman after he was suspended by his state chapter of the party. The final attempt to get him back into the party’s hierarchy failed in June after the appellate court ruled there was no justifiable basis for an appeal against the court ruling suspending him.

In the heat of the crisis, the national working committee of the APC was dissolved and his loyalists lost control of the party.

While it appeared as if Obaseki was losing grounds ahead of the governorship election, considering how popular the APC had been in the state, Oshiomhole relocated to Benin where he became the face of the APC governorship campaign, with Osagie Ize-Iyamu as a spectator in his own game.

His authority as a two-term governor and a former national chairman was not in doubt. Some people had, in fact, likened him to the “almighty” Bola Tinubu who has remained powerful in Lagos despite leaving office as governor in 2007.

To all the ears that cared to listen, Oshiomhole boasted of how the APC will defeat Obaseki in the election and even apologised for “selling him” to Edo people as the best fit for governor in 2016.

But Obaseki who wanted to beat the master in his own game appealed to the people as the “Edo No be Lagos” mantra resonated among the electorate.

In the closing days of his campaign, Obaseki boasted to his supporters in Oredo local government which eventually gave him 43,498 votes, the highest in the election, that having dealt with Oshiomhole at the national level of APC, the next target was to bury him politically.

“This election is a contest with Oshiomhole. We have dealt with him at the national level, we will bury him politically in this election,” he had said.

Well, the elections are now over and it has become clear that the voters trounced godfatherism. So, what’s next for Oshiomhole? Reconcile with Obaseki to regain relevance in the state’s political stage, like the average Nigerian politician, or return to the labour union as the comrade he used to be?

TheCable

By Yushau A. Shuaib

It is baffling and hard to believe that the Nigerian Army under the current leadership of Lt. General Tukur Buratai would recruit the service of publicists for dark propaganda, rather than public relations to protect its image.

Just recently, the Army’s publicists shot a movie titled “Fatal Arrogance” that portrays the leadership and members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), popularly known as a Shi’ite group, as terrorists.

In their desperate execution of this plan, the publicists hired a veteran Nollywood Actor, Pete Edochie; a popular actress, Destiny Etiko, and a movie producer, Anosike Kingsley Orji, all Christians and Igbos, to portray Northern Muslims and by extension Islamic religion, in a bad light in the movie.

In the movie, Edochie is featured in a role wearing an Islamic outfit that makes him resemble Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, leader of the IMN, who has been in detention since December 2015, after the altercation that his followers had with Nigerian soldiers. Over 348 people were killed in that incident, and the follow-up aggression having the army lay siege to the IMN headquarters, with the bodies of the dead secretly buried by the army in a mass grave.

The behind-the-scenes clip from the movie, which was shot in Igboland rather than a Northern city, is already generating a lot of controversies.

A popular Kannywood actor who was lured into taking part in the movie, Mallam Yakubu Mohammed, has regretted his appearance in it due to what has turned out as the film’s bad intent.

He said, “I never knew some of the scenes in the film will be portrayed in that manner… It was a film that showed the clash between Nigerian Army and Islamic brotherhood in Zaria, and many members of the group were killed. When I read the script, I saw nothing castigating Islam in it, but you know (a) script can change at some point, that was what happened.

“…There is a place that every Muslim, if he sees it, must be concerned. There is a photo of Mr. Pete Edochie walking around in a Muslim dress, with a bottle of beer in his hand and with a girl. I really regret appearing in that movie.”

Also, according to Mohammed, “I have told the producer to remove all my scenes in the movie, that I am ready to pay for damages, which is what the rule says.”

The Islamic Movement in Nigeria has equally petitioned the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, and the National Film and Video Censors Board, over the movie.

The spokesperson of the Movement, Ibrahim Musa, in accusing the Nigerian Army of furthering its campaign of aggression against the group through the sponsorship of the movie, stated that, “If film producers are not careful, some disgruntled elements in governance will make them side with the oppressors against the oppressed, as the film “Fatal Arrogance”, is meant to achieve.

“Genocide is involved here; any move to justify the brutal and inhuman Zaria genocide of December 2015 is an affront (to) the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

“Evidently, for every Nigerian, these clips are meant to disparage the peaceful movement and portray it to the world as a violent armed movement.”

One of the promoters of the distasteful movie against the Islamic group is Terrence Kuanum, a Christian from Benue who authored a book with a similar title, “Fatal Arrogance”, in defence of the Nigerian Army against the Shi’ite. The book is apparently the inspiration behind this film.

I was also once a victim of the same Terrence Kuanum, who parades himself as General Buratai’s publicist. He had falsely accused me of being a patron of terrorist groups, in his distorted and apparently suborned response to my “Memo to President Buhari on the Service Chiefs”, which was widely published in the Nigerian print media.

In his deliberate attempt to incite the military and victims of terrorism against me, on the basis of untrue accusations, Terrence compromised the websites of highly credible, as well as notoriously incredible, media platforms, by planting his offensive article there, mostly without the knowledge of the publishers and editors of some of these platforms. Subsequently, about 15 of these media organisations had to delete the highly libellous content from their websites, while offering profound apologies for the infiltration of their systems that allowed that to happen.

In his over 3,000-word defamatory piece, revelling in insidiously deceitful claims, Mr. Terrence labelled me a Boko Haram supporter, an ISWAP propagandist and that I was on the payroll of terrorists.

Given how defamatory and harmful the allegations in the very lengthy article were, I officially reported this to security agencies, including the Nigeria Police, the State Security Service (SSS) and the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). Till date, none of the agencies has taken any action to interrogate the writer on the very grievous allegations that sought to impugn my professional integrity and cast me as a threat to national security. The security services seem to be afraid to invite the author of “Fatal Arrogance” for questioning because of his godfathers in the Nigerian Army.

Apart from moving about freely, Terrence Kuanum has exhibited the ‘fatal arrogance’ of being untouchable, not only by launching his book in Abuja, but also shooting the movie based on the book in Enugu, to the bewilderment of a sane society.

Terrence Kuanum’s odious activities revolve around his membership of an obscure ‘Global Amnesty International Network’, Television Nigeria (TVN) and other shadowy groups that support the leadership of the Nigerian Army.

The painful irony of this publicity attempt gone awry is the fact that the Nigerian military has an enviable reputation of professionalism, gallantry, resilience, and straightforwardness that do not require propaganda to push for a positive social narrative.

It is only the leadership of an institution that appears to have something ugly it needs to cover up that engages charlatans in an effort at dark propaganda, rather than more astute and professional public relations organisations. It goes without much contemplation to know that this very poorly thought-through and ‘Fatal Arrogance’ will backfire very badly on the image and reputation of an institution that should otherwise be encouraged for its potentials, and the work it is doing to keep Nigeria safe.

▪︎ Shuaib, author of “An Encounter with the Spymaster” and “Crisis Communication Strategies”, sent this via WhatsApp