Charles Cobb Jr. and Akwe Amosu
14 February 2003
(Page 4 of 4)
What I really dislike is the reaction of outside countries that are trying to get moral capital out of it. Twenty-five thousand Africans are dying every day from Aids. Thirty million Africans are infected with Aids. People who do not do anything about this - people who do not even help African students who can't pay their school fees - come and demonstrate to the embassy sending a million signatures to us and all that. In the end, why? They are just trying to push their own problems, taking advantage of the situation in Nigeria to try and achieve some sort of moral high ground.
And finally, you must be concerned, both for reasons of geography as well as politics, at the instability in West Africa. Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia and Charles Taylor's role, and so forth. The simple question is, do you think West Africa is unraveling, in some sense?
No. Instability in any part of the world, any part of Africa certainly, all derives from one thing: a dictator unwilling to go. All we have to do is democratize. African people are peaceful.
And I want to point you to one little issue. The Nigerian in a little village near the border with the Benin Republic, the Beninois from Benin in a village near the border of the Nigerian Republic - if these people have been to school, one will be speaking French, the other English, and the acquired mentalities will be Francophone and Anglophone. But suppose they have not been to school? These people do not even know about these boundaries.
The boundary is just a nuisance because they are very likely to be related. I have relatives in the Cameroon, and the same thing with Niger. The same thing with the town of Banki near the border with Nigeria and Cameroon; in this town there is a street where one side is Nigeria and the other side is Cameroon. You can go and see it.
This is all nonsense. It is a question of the elite and the way the African elite interprets education as giving him the right to rule, and once he gets there he doesn't want to leave. And once he is sitting there, everybody will be doing everything they can to get him out of the way.
I think our own people are nice and God-fearing and stable; and so long as they can get good and honest and dedicated leadership there will be no such trouble. I'm not worried about the instability of West Africa.
I don't know what the people who sit in these high-powered think-tanks and talk about us think, but I know our people are ordinary people, they want peace. Instead of sitting in these think-tanks and theorizing about Africa, if they can just help us to remove these dictators it would be very nice.
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