Beyond the superficial
Years back in training school, I learnt that everything must be questioned – including the reports of journalists. Whose interest are they serving? Where do they point? With imperialism, journalism is the infantry that clears the way for capitalism to railroad with its arsenal. Indeed, when it comes to the shades of truth, journalists are […]
Years back in training school, I learnt that everything must be questioned – including the reports of journalists. Whose interest are they serving? Where do they point? With imperialism, journalism is the infantry that clears the way for capitalism to railroad with its arsenal. Indeed, when it comes to the shades of truth, journalists are free to do as they are told! We are on the scene of an accident/incident, and we are churning away. The world is reading, watching or listening. Opinion are formed based on the effect, forgetting that the reportage leaves out the cause.
Cast your minds back to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. He was a monster, emasculating his people. A threat to global peace annexing Kuwait and providing his enemies the needed reason to sting. Iraq is destroyed without concern for human rights. Iraqi casualties are – collateral damage but every ‘allied’ soldier’s life is counted and made to count. Aggression over – the ‘liberating forces’ beat a hasty retreat except that the oil czars entered. The poor are left to pick up the pieces. Is Iraq liberated? Check the headlines.
Ghadaffi was a bad madman. A dictator who sought to expand the mainland of dictatorship and a sponsor of global terrorism but sanctions, threats and even bombs could not fix him. Suddenly, he ‘repented’ and became a darling of the West. It was all they needed. Ghadaffi is fished out of his hole and killed. Libyans paid the price with its infrastructure and its army decimated. The civilian casualties do not count. Pleas by the NTC for the allies to stay and help stabilise fell on deaf ears. Libya is left to pick up the pieces. Is Libya free? Check the headlines.
Hosni Mubarak was a ‘friend’. God help Egypt. The reportorial train has moved its nozzle on Iran, but Syria happened. A sabbatical to ridicule the closetted walls of North Korea. The conscious efforts that rubished the gains in Cuba where life has frozen since the 1959 revolution. Hugo Chavez is another mad man to be watched. China with its explosive population learnt fast from the fall of the Soviets. But the almighty capitalism with its free enterprise could not save Europe. Greece, one-time world power, has crumbled along with Spain. The Portuguese are trooping back to Angola in droves. Where is the behemoth of America with its $15 trillion debt overhang and the conscious efforts by capital to undermine Obama and wrestle power for ‘freer enterprise?’
Is it a strange coincidence that populist African leaders always have the proverbial lifespan of the tall tree? Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Murtala Mohammed, Thomas Sankara? How did they die with lofty dreams while Mobutu Sese Seko, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier live with stash of cash in Swiss and other banks that will never benefit the countries they ruined? As reporters, we gloat over the events, leaving the sociologists to analyse them when it no longer matters. Roger Tooze’s economic class at City University and to onthology – how do I know that I know what I think I know?
For years, Bretton Woods tried to get China to devalue its currency without success. Today, bad communist China is better than all the so-called developed capitalist economies combined. Cuba is not so lucky fossilised in ruins. Venezuela is under pressure to devalue its revolution and maybe when Chavez is gone. Christine Lagarde tells Nigeria to withdraw subsidy, but went to China to beg for cash bailout for Europe and America!
Obviously, there is some inherent good in political deviance even if behemoth capitalist media with its skewed reportage says everything to the contrary. Nigeria has oil but a weak and blind leadership. It recruits brain-washed and overated ‘experts’ to ruin its people. Who armed Boko Haram? Are they the so-called financiers? No, they are blind agents who would be ruined in the improbable event of a Boko Haram state.
Oil-rich Nigeria is in ruins fighting on all fronts. But parachute experts, whose contact with our society is from the manicured lawns of Transcorp Hilton and its suites; chauffeured around with blazing sirens write annoying reports of El-Dorado and retire as experts to capitalist media. They tell GEJ and co, that Nigeria is a developing economy. But if you live in Reality Avenue and commute in overcrowded rejects of Europe and America, 22 sitting 99 standing in 40 searing heat and entrapped in smoky traffic; knowing you labour for the fat cats of corruption and the Evil Service, for underutilised and overpaid legislature and executive, you have a different take on all these.
Even the pretentious middle class founders of solitary republics where they provide their own electricity, water, vigilante and pave their own road; when government says it subsidises your fuel your answer is bound to be – hell no! When that government says it needs to tax you more to ‘develop your country’, you have a bad feeling of deja-vu.
The last struggle on the streets were not against Goodluck Jonathan or his cabinet of ‘imperialist lackeys’, they were against the poverty of ideas; against unseen forces which predicted the splinter of Nigeria and have smuggled in the munitions to accomplish it. It was against the lack of needed manly courage to stay or sink with the masses to whom power belongs, rather than sail with their enemies. The idiots who provided Boko with the weapons, the training and the support; who say that they are a creation of poverty; who keep silent for primordial ethno-religious sentiments or because they are involved will wake up one morning to rewire the banner – One day the oppressed will have nothing else to eat but their oppressor. My good friend, Johnny Clarke said in a reggae rhythm – how could one man be tough, tougher than the world?