By Sonnie Ekwowusi
Ostensibly peeved by the refusal of 35 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries including Nigeria, to sign the controversial European Union’s LGBT Agreement, the EU-ACP Treaty, or the Samoa Agreement on November 15, 2023, the European Union issued a significant threat dated November 24, 2023.
According to the threat, which was issued in Brussels on November 24, 2023, any African, Caribbean, or Pacific country failing to sign the LGBT Agreement by January 1, 2024, when the Agreement is scheduled to come into force, will face dire consequences. These consequences include the denial of EU funding, development assistance, and program implementation. Furthermore, the threat specifies that such countries will be treated as pariah nations and may be subject to economic sanctions. They would also be barred from participating in EU-Organization of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS) meetings and activities.
Recall that before the Samoa Agreement, the EU had been applying increasing pressure on African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) Ministers to persuade ACP heads of governments to sign the contentious LGBT Agreement. Several meetings convened for this purpose ended in deadlock as many ACP countries refused to sign the Agreement. Surprisingly, towards the end of October 2023, news emerged that the EU had scheduled November 15, 2023, for the signing of the Agreement in Samoa, a small island country in the central South Pacific Ocean composed of an archipelago of nine islands, four of which are inhabited.
To the surprise of the EU, on November 15, 2023, 35 ACP countries, including Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, Senegal, Liberia, Botswana, Burundi, Jamaica, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, Namibia, Grenada, Eritrea, Malawi, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Antigua and Barbuda, The Commonwealth of the Bahamas, The Central African Republic, The Republic of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, The Kingdom of Eswatini, The Cooperative Republic of Guyana, The Republic of Maldives, Mauritania, The Republic of Nauru, The Republic of Palau, Saint Lucia, The Republic of Kitts and Nevis, The Kingdom of Tonga, The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu, refused to sign the LGBT Agreement.
In fact, on that fateful November 15, 2023, Nigeria not only refused to sign the LGBT Agreement but was conspicuously absent in Samoa on the day of the signing. Frustrated by the refusal of these 35 countries to sign the Agreement and fearing that those who signed might withdraw their support, the EU is now issuing the aforementioned threat dated November 24, 2023. This threat stipulates that countries refusing to sign the Samoa LGBT Agreement would face economic sanctions and lose EU funding and development aid.
The refusal of Nigeria and 34 other African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries to be bullied into signing the LGBT Agreement is praiseworthy. When the history of Africa is rewritten, this courageous act will be remembered with great admiration. By refusing to succumb to the intimidation and coercion of the EU, the 35 ACP countries have sent a strong message to the EU and the entire world that ACP countries have come of age and will no longer bow to international threats, blackmail, or intimidation. I am pleased that Nigeria has called the bluff of the EU’s intimidation, coercion, and threats—a significant victory for Nigeria in refusing to sign the Agreement.
To begin with, LGBT is outlawed in Nigeria by virtue of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014. Therefore, it makes no sense for Nigeria to append her signature to the EU’s LGBT Agreement. If the EU does not want to provide funds or enter into a trade or economic alliance with us simply because we have refused to legalize LGBT, it should go to hell with its funds and trade relationships.
The leaders of ACP countries should reconsider their position. They should stop deluding themselves into believing that Europe and America have their economic interests at heart and are keen on seeing human flourishing and economic prosperity take root in ACP countries. There is no free lunch anywhere. So much fuss about foreign aids and poverty reduction in Africa, yet so much impoverishment of Africans. Africans must understand that the fate of Africa lies in the hands of Africans. Only Africans can truly and really develop Africa, not foreigners. Despite wresting political independence from their erstwhile colonial masters, the economic systems and political policies of most African countries infatuated with foreign aids are still tied to the apron strings of the World Bank and powerful European and multinational organizations.
In his book, “Emerging Africa,” former Central Bank of Nigeria Deputy Governor and presidential aspirant Prof. Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu brilliantly enunciates how foreign aids have underdeveloped Africa and why foreign aids are not the panacea to Africa’s myriad socio-economic and political problems. Prof. Moghalu wonders why African leaders have not woken up to the reality that the so-called billions of dollars doled out to many African countries by their so-called Western development partners “have failed to produce any significant development leaps in Africa, and many aid-dependent African countries are poorer today than they were a half-century ago.” He regrets that foreign aids in Africa have many strings attached to them. “Much of the foreign aids, then, is about giving with the right hand and taking back with the left what is presumed to have been given,” he writes.
The refusal of Nigeria and the other 34 ACP countries to sign the Samoa Agreement will strengthen their national sovereignty. It will erase the wrong impression that the ACP countries are inferior to other European countries. Above all, it will act as a bulwark against the bullying, intimidation, and coercion of ACP countries by the EU. For years, African countries, Nigeria included, have been victims of organized deception, coercion, bullying, blackmail, manipulation, and abuse of power at the United Nations.
For example, under the guise of promoting egregious women’s rights, some United Nations agencies such as the United Nations Population Activities (UNFPA) have overrun Africa with radical, strange ideas that violate the cultural backgrounds and philosophical convictions of the African people. The scramble for Africa, which began in the 1880s and the Berlin Conference of 1884 for the partition of Africa, may have come and gone, but the forms of scramble and partition are still ongoing in Africa today. The enslavement of Africans has not ended either. Open your eyes. The erstwhile colonial masters in Africa have not left; they have merely changed their tactics. Their goal is to pillage the raw materials in Africa and to destroy or reduce the human capital in Africa.
As we mourn the passing of Alfred Henry Kissinger, we can revisit the Kissinger Report of 1974, which explains why America and Europe are underdeveloping Africa. On December 10, 1974, the United States National Security Council promulgated a top-secret document entitled National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), also called The Kissinger Report. It was subtitled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.”
This hitherto classified document was declassified in 1989. It laid out a detailed strategy by which the United States would aggressively promote population control in developing nations to regulate (or have better access to) the natural resources of these countries. In order to protect U.S. commercial interests, NSSM-200 cited a number of factors that could interrupt the smooth flow of materials from lesser-developed countries, as it referred to them, to the United States.
These factors included a large population of anti-imperialist youth, who, according to NSSM-200, must be limited by population control. The document identified 13 nations by name that would be primary targets of U.S.-funded population control efforts. The named countries were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. According to NSSM-200, elements of the implementation of population control programs could include: a) the legalization of abortion; b) financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion, sterilization, and contraception-use rates; c) indoctrination of children; and d) mandatory population control, and coercion in other forms, such as withholding disaster and food aid unless developing countries implement population control programs.
NSSM-200 also specifically declared that the United States was to cover up its population control activities and avoid possible charges of imperialism by recruiting some United Nations agencies, such as the UNFPA, to do its dirty work. Section 30(a) of NSSM-200 states: “Concentration on Key Countries. … Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest-growing developing countries where there is special U.S. political and strategic interest.
Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. Together, they account for 47 percent of the world’s current population increase.” NSSM-200 also states, “No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion…since abortion is still repugnant to the peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and parts of Asia and Oceania, we must mask our desire to legalize abortion by pretending to care about the state of women’s health. We do this by saying that we want to eliminate “unsafe abortion.”
Since 1991, the “developed” nations of the world have spent $4.91 billion trying to reduce the population of Nigeria. In 1991, the population controllers spent about $31 million in Nigeria, but this has increased by a factor of more than 30 to more than half a billion dollars a year. This is because Nigeria is becoming too strong and must be kept weak by suppressing its population. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who did more than anyone else in the history of the world to spread abortion and population control everywhere, said that “If you’re going to curb population, it’s extremely important not to have it done by the dammed Yankees, but by the UN. Because the thing is, then it’s not considered genocide. If the United States goes to the Black man or the yellow man and says slow down your reproduction rate, we’re immediately suspected of having ulterior motives to keep the white man dominant in the world. If you can send in a colorful UN force, you’ve got much better leverage.”
It is evident that the EU’s LGBT agenda in Africa is another form of population control. The paradox lies in the fact that the West, intent on reducing human capital in Africa, is now confronted with a serious demographic disaster. For instance, Europe has transitioned from the peak of its baby boom to the depths of a baby bust. The UK is gradually being populated by Asians, Nigerians, and other immigrants. In fact, it is forecasted that the UK’s population will irreversibly shrink below replacement level by 2030. If the populations of these Western countries are dwindling to their detriment, why advocate for Africa to suffer the same fate?
Therefore, Nigeria and the 34 ACP countries should maintain their resolve not to sign the Agreement. Other ACP countries that signed the Agreement in Samoa on November 15 2023 should retract their respective signatures. The ACP countries should dismiss the EU’s cheap threats and stand firm. Instead of succumbing to EU intimidation, they should assert their sovereignty and break ties with the EU. They are no longer under the tutelage of their former colonial masters.
If the EU decides to cease financial assistance to ACP countries for refusing to sign the LGBT agreement, so be it. What the ACP countries must not do is bow to the EU’s cheap threats and blackmail by signing the LGBT Agreement.
Sonnie Ekwowusi is the Chairman, Human & Constitutional Rights Committee of the African Bar Association
