Africom - President Yar'Adua's Unenviable Burden - Daily Trust

20 December 2007
Posted to the web 20 December 2007

Is'haq Modibbo Kawu

Four weeks ago on this page, I had joined millions of Nigerians to laud the decision of the National Council of States to reject the plan of the United States of America to institute a new military outpost in Africa; the outpost that was titled AFRICOM. I had argued then, that I would have been alarmed were Obasanjo to be in power at the time the idea came to the fore, given his shameless kowtowing to the United States of America. Umaru Yar'Adua, I had believed, naively now, with hindsight, was made of a different stuff, coming, as the propaganda about him had made us believe, from an anti-imperialist background. How foolish we were to have believed such about the man!

Lat week, Malam Umaru Yar'Adua was summoned to Washington, on a so-called state visit, but the true intention of the United States administration was revealed during the photo session which our man, the president, had with George Bush. After rambling through the various issues that he said they had discussed, President Yar'Adua exposed the REAL reason he was summoned out of Abuja, by those who call the shots in today's unipolar world. "We have agreed to cooperate with AFRICOM" came out of our president's mouth, and in that very short sentence, the bubble of his so-called "anti-imperialism" busted like bubble! So in defiance of the resolution of the National Council of States, the overwhelming majority of the African and Nigerian peoples, President Umaru Yar'Adua went to Washington and collapsed on his knees to propitiate the monster of American militarism in Africa, shamelessly and without the mandate of the Nigerian people!

The Americans are past masters of manipulation and this they have shown again with the way that Malam Umaru Yar'Adua was twisted round the small finger of Washington. A few weeks ago, John Negroponte had been sent on a whistle-stop tour of Africa, to sell the idea of colonialism by other means to the African people. It must have been an embarrassing spectacle for the high representative of Washington, to see the "obviously poor and helpless" Africans rejecting emphatically the sugar-coated offer to participate in the re-colonisation of Africa as well as getting African soldiers to be prepared to die in Washington's wars in our continent, the way the Ethiopian Army is presently doing in Somalia. Even a well-known asset of the United States, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who initially offered to host the HQ of AFRICOM, was given the pause by the weight of African rejection of the AFRICOM idea.
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