Mr. President, long after you have returned to the White House and forgotten your visit to Ghana, we Nigerians will still be asking ourselves, why Ghana?
You attempted to answer the question before your trip in an interview, noting that Ghana had become the continent’s role model—committed to the rule of law, stability, and accountability. You repeated this point during your visit on Saturday and drew upon the historic role and heritage of Ghana during the era of slave trade and the colonial period.
There was indeed a time when most black migrants were thought to be from Ghana. Thanks to the abundant gold in what was then known as the Gold Coast and the formidable roles of Kwame Nkrumah, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other leading lights of the struggle against colonial rule and racism, Ghana was what your predecessor, George W. Bush, might have called the “nation of Africa.”
But Ghana had its dark periods too, of course. For many years, Ghana was a specter of the sort of tyranny that you described in your address to the country’s parliament. But it’s a different story today; no one can deny that.
Why the fuss then? Mr. President, in Lagos—just a 45-minute flight away from where you were speaking—where I write this, more than a few people thought that you had skillfully underplayed the real reason why you snubbed Nigeria, the world’s most populous black country.
You spoke of good governance, rule of law, and accountability, Mr. President? To be sure, there are those who feel very strongly that coming to Nigeria at a time when President Umaru Yar’Adua’s anti-corruption campaign is unraveling and his government is only paying lip-service to electoral reforms would be sending the wrong signal. I agree completely.
The problem, however, is that Russia and Saudi Arabia, both of which you have visited, are hardly good examples. Even Italy on Silvio Berlusconi’s watch has been something of a moral puzzle, with the prime minister stumbling from scandal to scandal.
In his article in the Nigerian newspaper Thisday, on Friday, Matthew Hassan Kukah remarked, “If elections were an issue for Obama, would he go out of his way to incur the wrath of his fellow countrymen by hugging Hugo Chávez or the King of Saudi Arabia as he did recently? While Chávez had amended the constitution and secured an open-ended tenure, Saudi Arabia’s citizens have neither seen a ballot box or ballot paper in their lives.
The message is simple: “It’s oil, stupid!”
The point, Mr. President, is that quite a number of Nigerians feel that the real reason you bypassed Abuja for Accra is because the intractable violence in the Niger Delta has made Nigeria’s oil supply both unreliable and expensive. To make matters worse, President Yar’Adua remains something of an unknown character, not only to outsiders but even to us, his countrymen. He appears to be a closet socialist, whatever his pretensions. He is more comfortable doing oil deals with Russia’s Gazprom and discussing alternative energy with Iran’s nuclear power agency than dealing with many Western companies.
But Mr. President, there is a certain sense of betrayal in your decision not to visit Nigeria at this time.
Forget the diplomatic-speak about your visit to Ghana being a “visit to Africa” or the fact that your address to the Ghanaian parliament was supposed to be an address to the 750 million people across the continent. The truth is that, perhaps apart from Kenya where your father comes from, no other African nation feels a greater sense of ownership of the Obama brand than Nigeria.
During the U.S. presidential campaign, the degree of Obama-mania that swept the country was incredible. Drivers plastered Obama stickers on their car bumpers, newspapers devoted acres of pages to Obama coverage, and bookshops ran out of copies of Dreams from My Father.
I do not know of any other country where the director general of the stock exchange corralled the banks to raise more than $630,000 in a fundraiser to support your presidential campaign. Your campaign team rejected the funds, but who can ignore that unforgettable Nigerian gesture of support?
It’s a common joke here that we fight other people’s battles but hardly ever enjoy the fruits of peace. Whether in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone—or even in Ghana, where Nigerian charity and entrepreneurship have combined with Ghanaian hard work and honesty to rebuild the country—wherever we thought our help was needed, Nigeria was never slack to show up. When the battle is won, however, Nigeria often ends up with the short end of the stick.
This has nothing to do with you, Mr. President—it’s just our lot as a nation that we never seem to be able to make good use of our opportunities, regardless of the cost of creating them.
But that’s not important now; you have come and gone. Yet, even in the midst of our hair-splitting arguments as to what might have been, your address in Accra resonated with us, as I believe it did in many parts of the continent. You spoke about the countries where “the leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” where the “police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” where the “government skims 20 percent off the top,” and where an inefficient, corrupt ports system makes life hell for business.
We know well these countries. The question is, as some of these nations try to build institutions to hold their leaders to account, will you walk the talk, at least where U.S. companies are involved in the corruption?
I’m sure you know that in Nigeria, for example, a U.S. company, Halliburton, paid a bribe of $180 million to top officials, including three former heads of state for a $6 billion gas plant project. We have been told by Nigerian justice ministry officials, however, that the U.S. Justice Department has refused to help prosecute that matter, despite a mutual legal assistance treaty between our two nations. Why should we believe that your administration is serious about standing as a partner in the fight against corruption in Nigeria—or Africa—if the impression is left to linger that Washington covers up for its criminals when it pleases?
Given your African roots, Mr. President, it’s understandable that every African nation feels they ought to have been the first to host you. Yet, it’s not where you go first or last that counts but how far the United States, on your watch, goes in keeping its promises. At the end of the day, African nations that cannot keep theirs have only themselves to blame.
Azu Ishiekwene has been an investigative reporter, a features writer, a member of the editorial board, and the editor of Punch Titles, Nigeria’s highest selling newspapers. He is currently the executive publications director of Punch and writes a weekly Tuesday column. He is the author of Nuhu Ribadu, a book on Nigeria’s stalled anti-corruption war, the chair of the CNN/MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Award panel, and a member of the board of the World Editors Forum.