Nduka Uzuakpundu
4 December 2008
opinion
Lagos — It was one of the usually busy days, during which he meets with the top directors of the ministry to take some crucial decisions relating to the country's foreign policy.
At the end of one of such marathon meetings, recently, he walked briskly, with the agility associated with a Wimbledon champion, straight into this office. He opened the fridge, and, in a clear indication that he was, indeed, thirsty, he served himself three glasses of cold water. Thereafter, like the workaholic that he's so proud he is, Chief Ojo Maduekwe sat behind his lap top, beside which were a heap of files, some top Nigerian newspapers - alongside the current editions of The Economist of London, the International Herald Tribune, of New York, The Financial Times, The Observer, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph, all of London. But while he was answering a call - a call that was suspected was from The Presidency, one of his aides - a smartly dressed gentleman of moderate height, with a corporate, low hair-cut, pussy-footed into his office and dropped a memo on his desk. "Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has been appointed the United Nations envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), by Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon," he had written, in a meticulously fine handwriting. But that was not different from the subject of the phone call. A clearly elated Maduekwe said: "This is an interesting piece of information." He was right to the extent that Obasanjo's, yet again, unprophesied second-coming, not even in the biblical new testament gospel of Matthew, to the (DRC), is an enormous plus; for not only does it speak well for the country and the Yar'Adua administration that Nigeria, often as a pointer that she's destined to play a leading, constructive and peaceful role in African affairs, it's, besides, as Maduekwe may have thought - and quite rightly, too - a positive projection of Nigeria's foreign policy in the 21st Century.
Since Obasanjo's appointment, the historian in Maduekwe has recalled that, back in the early '60s, Obasanjo, as a young military officer, was part of the U.N. peace-keeping troops sent to essay a pacification of the dramatis personae and what, at one of the heights of the Cold War era in Africa, was then the infamous Congo crisis. Four decades on, the DRC, one of Africa 's top, five largest countries, with a brimming deposit of minerals of industrial importance, has not known peace. If ex-despot - the late Mobutu Sese Seko - was not siphoning the wealth of the country into his private purse and breaching human rights, with the active connivance of his backers in most of the democratic Western capitals, the DRC (then known as Zaire ) was sliding fast into poverty and underdevelopment, and readying itself for self-destruction.
Today, the DRC, says Maduekwe, is playing host, quite unwillingly, to the Interahamwe - a group of militant Hutu, who were said to have been the hands behind the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were felled. One of the fine points Maduekwe makes of Obasanjo's task of bringing about reconciliation, peace and regional security in the Great Lakes region is this: the crisis in that part of Africa will not melt overnight, as Obasanjo and the rest of the world knows full well. The occasional recrudescence of fire and the attendant humanitarian crisis are functions of a vicious proxy war of attrition that has drawn Kinshasa and Kigali's daggers, via the Interahamwe whom, Rwandan President Paul Kagame dreads, sorely, and the President Joseph Kabila-backed Mia Mia militia as a counter-force to the Laurent Nkunda-led operatives, who allegedly enjoy the blessing of Kigali. Although Maduekwe says that Obasanjo does not pretend to be an alchemist or an African statesman, who possesses the Midas touch, with which to resolve the Great Lakes crisis, any time moment hence, he thinks, no less, that Obasanjo's antecedents in wading into African crises: the morally-justified campaign against Ian Douglas Smith's white-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, say, may see him through. As in those restive days, in the late '70s, he has the backing of the U.N. Security Council and the African Union . And, as is fast becoming one of the brilliant features of Nigeria's foreign policy, Maduekwe points out, that Obasanjo is the second, ex-president of Nigeria to be appointed a peace emissary - after retired General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who was charged, by the world body, with the task of post-war peace making mission in the Mano River Basin.
In all these challenging cases, Maduekwe says, Nigeria - as a leading African democracy and regional power - would never be tired of making some generous sacrifice, whenever necessary, in the interest of global peace. Through such a response to global assignments, Abuja is equally building its profile to justify why it, compellingly, should occupy a permanent, veto-wielding seat in an expanded U.N. Security Council, in an eventual implementation of the reform of that elitist arm of the world body, as suggested by Ban's immediate predecessor - Mr. Kofi Annan.
Still drawing a parallel on Obasanjo, Maduekwe observes, with a tinge of guarded humour, that it appears the great democratic farmer from Ota is competing, in the African peace-making theare, with ex-Mozambican president and good-governance prize winner, Mr. Joachim Chissano, who's trying to make peace between the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A) and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and Mr. Thabo Mbeki, the ex-president of South Africa, who's trying to reconcile President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe with the (Morgan) Tsvangarai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Although Maduekwe also recognises the presence of the great, democratic pea-nut farmer from Atlanta , Georgia - former United States president, Jimmy Carter - in the current spate of peace-making process in Africa , he said, with a convincing show of respect, that his focus was on Obasanjo's contemporaries in the continent. And, rather rhetorically, he asked a Lagos-based journalist, recently: "Which one of the three ex-democratically-elected presidents and peace-makers would breast the peace tape first!" Mbeki, the journalist reasoned, might succeed if Mugabe takes a cue from Nigeria, where the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), had set an African example in a smooth and peaceful transition from one administration to another. The case of the Great Lakes may not be that cheap, in that there's a need to build mutual trust, confidence and amity between Kabila and Kagame: such a process calls, amongst others, for a tidy exercise of a U.N.-A.U. supervised disarmament, Mduekwe offers, of the Interhamwe, in Goma, in the east of the DRC and the Nkunda-skippered band of rascals. It should also embrace the resettlement of both internally-displaced Congolese and Rwandan refugees, in the Lake Kivu region. Kagame should not expect that Rwanda would know peace if the Interahamwe cannot be guaranteed a safe return to Rwanda and Nkunda should not delude himself that he could black-mail Kinshasa to accommodate his power-sharing ambition, given all that the U.N peace-keeping troops (MONUC) already know of him.
The DRC is not Kenya , and even if it were, Nkunda has not tested his popularity at the polls. The other day, soon after meeting with Obasanjo, Nkunda threatened, in the late president Laurent Kabila's fashion, to overrun Kinshasa . Nkunda should think twice: the dynamics of the Great Lakes have, since the past one decade, changed, drastically. Kabila succeeded because the Mobutu regime had already decayed; its soldiers and other security agents were no longer loyal: less prepared to back Mobutu, who had looted the Zairean treasury.
Besides, Maduekwe who believes so much in Carl von Clausewitz, observes that there were no helicopter gun ships during the Kabila days. There are quite a number of them now. Still, he advises Nkunda, who claims to champion the cause of ethnic Tutsi inside the DRC, that MONUC would not stand idly by, as was the Chadian case, in 1982 when, in a clear case of international conspiracy against the Goukhouni Oueddei regime, the international peace-keeping force allowed rebel Hissene Habre and his operatives to take over N'djamena, as he tries to carry out his destabilising plan against a sovereign state. There would have been some measured sympathy for his inordinate ambition were the Kabila administration not a democratically-elected one. Or would he rather end up like the late Dr. Jonas Savimbi of the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA): wasted in the battlefield; his dream to capture state power, via the force of arms, unrealised?
It was nearing 9.25 p.m. that busy day. Thunder and lightning run wild in the overcast sky. A visibly tired Maduekwe took a second, relaxed look at the memo on Obasanjo's appointment. In a fervent supplication, Maduekwe wished that the Supreme Being would rain his fatherly blessing on Obasanjo in his mission in the Great Lakes, so that not only would durable peace be restored to that part of the continent, but, also, for Nigeria - through the great exploits and sacrifice by the ex-president, who's so well beloved of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture - would record, there, a foreign policy achievement. Specifically, it was Maduekwe's fervent desire that the U.N.-brokered demarche would be crowned with Kabila and Kagame becoming not only the greatest of friends, but, as well, the most peaceful of neighbours.
Within the distance, it may be necessary for Obasanjo to fish out the foreign powers, multi-national or trans-national companies and their agents who, allegedly, are fuelling the Great Lakes crisis, because they are profiting, pretty hugely, from the illegal mining of copper, and a certain mineral that is widely used in the mobile phone industry, which the DRC has in quantum. In addition, Obasanjo should probe into the source of the Nkunda-led militia arms. If Obasanjo succeeds, ultimately, in his DRC assignment, it ought to interest Abuja to explore how well it could tap, deeply, into the DRCs ' Silicon Valley ' chest.
Uzuakpundu wrote from Lagos
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