Balewa and Sata: so distant an alphabet

Both leaders fell ill while attending international conferences in Egypt and the other at the United Nations in New York, respectively. Africa’s media and scholars failed to inform other Africans about their ideas; a fault they share with Nigeria’s first and only prime minister who was also his own foreign minister Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa;  […]

Both leaders fell ill while attending international conferences in Egypt and the other at the United Nations in New York, respectively. Africa’s media and scholars failed to inform other Africans about their ideas; a fault they share with Nigeria’s first and only prime minister who was also his own foreign minister Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa;  Patrice Lumumba ( of D.R. Congo) and Thomas Sankara (of Bukina Faso) – who died violent deaths in office.
Balewa, Lumumba and Sankara were Africa’s sacrifices to Cold War politics as the United States and her NATO allies jostled for control of Africa’s resources with the Soviet Union and her allies. Balewa, however, led in foreign policy ideas and institutions he left behind; worth considering as a new Cold War fans conflicts across Africa; and plants Ebola as a landing beacons for foreign armies flying into West Africa.
Balewa’s dictum that colonial boundaries ‘’should be respected, and, in the interest of peace, must remain recognized’’ was pronounced in 1960. It became a law of the Organisation of African Unity at its 1964 summit in Cairo. He probably foresaw the 1958 discovery of oil in the Niger Delta bringing secession to Nigeria. He spoke at the United Nations while Katanga Province in Congo Kinshasa was being supported in a secession war by Belgians; racists in Rhodesia and South Africa to deny its vast mineral resources to Congolese patriots elected to power in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa).
By 1967 when civil war hit Nigeria, this doctrine had a rich number of disciples. Mobutu Sese Seko was recovering from Katanga being crushed. William Tubman feared that Kwame Nkrumah inciting ‘’upcountry’’ peoples to break away from domination by Americo Liberians around the capital, Monrovia. Ankrah in Ghana feared Nigeria influencing militancy among Hausa and other Muslim groups in undeveloped northern region. Ahmadou Ahidjo feared Ibo politicians financing politicians who had voted to leave Nigeria and join Cameroun to return. Emperor Haile Selassie had a brutal grip over Eritreans bleeding for independence from Ethiopia.
The doctrine favoured pragmatism over high moral values. South Sudanese would lose over 4 million people under Arabist Sudanese leaders who degenerated from 1956 (when they saw themselves as the bridge between Arab-dominated states on the Mediterranean coast and tropical Africa), to genocidal religious fanatics in 2000. Neo-racist rule in Liberia remained unchallenged by Balewa.  A 1980 speech by Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, an official in the Ministry of Finance, aroused angry passions among non-Americo Liberians. Coming from a local base in which Aminu Kano’s Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) fought exploitation of the masses of talakawa (poor people) by feudal ruling elites, Balewa failed to rise above his political backers.
Haile Selassie was disastrously slow in learning political lessons from, Katanga Biafra, and even the revolutions against land expropriation by European immigrants in Algeria and neighbouring Kenya. He lacked the courage and vision to dismantle a brutal rule in Ethiopia which starved hundreds of thousands of masses of his subjects not regarded as citizens. There is no evidence that Balewa engaged Tubman and Haile Selassie into merits of enlightened self interest while Africa condemned cruelties of apartheid across Southern Africa. It is not clear if they ever saw film documentaries about lives of victims in these and their own countries.
Critics have blamed the pragmatic doctrine of the inviolability of boarders inherited from colonial rule on the influence of Euro-American leaders who feared a behemoth of an African Union State. Nyerere would later regret being in Balewa’s camp as opposed to Kwame Nkrumah’s model of a union rapidly ratified by a summit of visionary leaders.  Shared exploitation by Africa’s masses was weak without leaders to mobilize their imagination into one country.
Balewa accepted popular agitation for a United Africa.  Boundaries would remain, he argued, ‘’until such times as the peoples concerned decide of their own free will to merge into one unit’’.  There was, however, no plan to train civic warriors for prosecuting the run to united Africa. His next doctrine of ‘’non-interference in the internal affairs of member states’’ probably frowned at raising Pan-African winds of unity.  In 1953, Sir Arthur Richards celebrated his success in sabotaging Nigerian national unity with poisonous ‘’ethnicity’’. In 1968 he (now named Lord Melvin) claimed authorship of Gowon’s creation of 12 States to shatter Nigeria’s 4 regions. The lesson in all this that is African leaders must sweat to yield counter-visions in this new Cold War season of violence; Ebola; sabotage of Africa’s income from raw materials. Africa’s media must break sounds of silence around their minds.