Olufemi Adefemiwa
It is very natural to spurn with deep emotional resentment each time one feels his/her national pride and identity are being challenged by the now penchant subjugation of our sovereignty to foreign governments and so painfully also to Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs. It comes in various guises and shades. If it’s not been blatantly exhibited, it is been surreptitiously introduced. Irrespective of the mode, the shape or the guise, the fallout is a forced trade-off of our sovereignty. One is bound to wonder if we are a vassal state with some pre-colonial-type treaty. At time also, the propensity to call our sovereignty into question and brings to the fore if all we have is a de-facto suzerainty. If after 58 years of independence and we still can not establish a way to protect and perfect our relationships with foreign powers, then we are collectively bathing as a nation in a dangerous era in global politics mucky waters. If we still have to wait for the approval and nodding of foreign powers in almost all of our day-to-day internal social, economic and political mechanisms, it is felt with a soulish connection that the sanctity of our national flag as a federal republic is nothing but a Flag-and-Anthem Independence where everything but the flag and the anthem remained the same. We have been made or and have made ourselves as victims of irregular international absurdities and have suffered both minor and major indignities. Such to us at everyday, every season, a new normal. Then if it were so, we are in a political labyrinth the exactitude of which is inexplicable. Perhaps however if the Spirit of the late Africanist Nkwame Nkrumah would post-humously remind us that we are a mendacious sovereign nation otherwise called neocolonialism.
In a condensed approach , Sovereignty can be described as
“The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power by which an independent state is governed and from which all specific political powers are derived; the intentional independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without foreign interference”.(Wikipedia)
It it a shame how we daily subject ourselves,our institutions to such an indignity as to kowtow to foreign powers to literally run our elections, our institutions,our lives for us. They do not only run but train INEC officials, equip and fund INEC offices and programs. The EU Representative, the United Kingdom High Commissioner and the United States Ambassador must certify our local State’s elections. Our media, the government as well as the opposition must rely by quoting copiously and referencing religiously the approval or otherwise to authenticate their stories.
Are they really substantially better?
Do we remember the USA Presidential Election of 2000 and the eventual resolution ? Do we remember Al Gore and G. W. Bush and the votes they garnered in Miami Dade County and the eventual political right wing judgement of the US Supreme Court? How many “International Observers” were sent to them to resolve the imbroglio then? Do we know the gerrymandering being perpetrated in the electoral units in the USA perpetually ? Do we remember Watergate and how President Nixon ordered the bugging and break-in by five men of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters In the early ’70s? What about the Russian intervention in the US last Presidential Election and the alleged support for then GOP Candidate Donald Trump?
We periodically wait for Transparency International to reel out not only political figures but grossly inaccurate analysis of how we are performing on a global scale of human rights, death sentence, corruption and many more. Have they ever told us how the US , UK and others obtain forced confessions even if it means taking them to third countries for torture?
Then our Distinguished Senator Ben Murray-Bruce will stand in the court of the NASS bragging how he was going to call foreign missions to alert them about happenings in our National Assembly! Then the ridiculous and ludicrous PDP letter to the EU, UK and US governments to intervene in State of Osun gubernatorial election!
A remote community in Abia State will invite America and the United Nations to a border dispute with her neighbor….a community perhaps even alien to Google Map!
We are daily being dictated to on how to spend our recovered stolen money by those who are accomplices, those that had helped our looters, the thieves to warehouse their loots in secret accounts in their enclaves!
We are denied the sales of most needed weapon systems because of an alleged violation of human rights whereas in Iraq , in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Libya, worse atrocities were committed and their soldiers were not subject to both local and international restrictions and laws!
International relations, international cooperation are established norms by which nations and international institutions interrelate, interconnect in a structurally recognizable pattern . There is no contention about such healthy rapprochement. What is unhealthy, demeaning, insulting is the mendacious justification of subjugation by rationalization.
It must be stopped by nobody but us. We have worn the cap of neocolonialism for too long.
God bless Nigeria.
(C) femi adefemiwa, 2018
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