Famous last words
As a rookie journalist with Triumph newspapers in 1989, my very first trip out of this country was to have been to Libya. I was to go in the company of a group of Muslim women led by the then wife of the Chief of Army Staff, Major-General Sani Abacha, Hajiya Maryam. The preferred choice […]
As a rookie journalist with Triumph newspapers in 1989, my very first trip out of this country was to have been to Libya. I was to go in the company of a group of Muslim women led by the then wife of the Chief of Army Staff, Major-General Sani Abacha, Hajiya Maryam. The preferred choice for the trip was my well-known senior colleague Hajiya Bilkisu, but at the last minute it was discovered that Bilkisu will not be available for the journey. They still needed a female journalist though, and since a fresh from NYSC recruit like me was totally unknown to them they had to seek the help of my late mentor- colleague Shehu Garba Durbunde to find them a female reporter.
Late Shehu Durbunde and I did not really work together in Triumph. He had left long before I joined the company. But one day he walked into the news room and introduced himself to me as the first editor of the column I was then editing-The Straight Path-and said that he was particularly happy to see that a female was now editing the Friday Islamic page. From then on he became a mentor of sorts to me. He obliged the FOMWAN group with my name and Triumph newspapers’ number and went his way. Exactly a day to the trip Shehu dropped by to ask me how far with the preparations, only to find out that I had no idea what he was talking about. He went to the organisers to ask why and was told that they got too busy and had forgotten to contact me. But yes, they still needed a journalist on the trip.
Shehu rushed back to explain that to me but I had to tell him that I had no international passport. He assured me that if I could get one ready before noon the following day, I could still make the trip because the team will only leave for Lagos at 2pm. I set the ball rolling by going to my then editor Alhaji Garba Shehu with the new development. He gladly obliged me with an official letter to the immigration office in Kano. I did whatever was possible that afternoon but by the following morning it had become obvious to me that the passport couldn’t be ready before noon. I communicated this to the office and it was immediately decided that someone else should go. The only available person with a valid international passport was my senior colleague Kabiru Muhammad (known as Dogon Turanci to some and Chairman to others). Kabiru made it to Libya and came back to particularly disclose how he had to become an emergency court-jester. In a gathering full of women, he had argued, how else could a lone gentleman survive?
As for me, that greatly-facilitated passport came out at 2pm that same day, too late to make it to Libya, but an international passport all the same. To the many who ‘commiserated’ with me on missing that journey, I had missed an opportunity to see Africa’s great wonder. Did I know that every family in Libya had a car? Did I know that everyone had his own home in Libya so no one was another’s tenant? Did I know that Muammar Gaddafi drives himself around Tripoli without a driver, security and escort of any kind? Of course I had never heard any of that before. For some reason, Gaddafi was not one of the leaders I knew very little about even in my university days. That incident marked a turning point though, I began to notice and take interest in everything Libyan.
It was with great joy later that same year that I read about a research commissioned by Gaddafi which sought to prove that William Shakespeare was an Arab. According to the research, centuries ago an Arab man named Sheikh Zibr travelled to Europe and settled somewhere in England. He soon had a son he named William. It was not clear from the research who William’s mother was. But the inability of the English people to pronounce Sheikh Zibr correctly led to the name being changed to Shakespeare. (And anyone with a basic knowledge of phonetics knows that z and b sounds are the voiced equivalents of s and p, which makes the explanation quite plausible). The research also alleged that many of Shakespeare’s works were adaptations from the famous ‘A thousand and one nights’ book. In particular, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was supposed to be a plagiarized version of Laila and Majnoon.
Of course the English literary world rejected this research outright. They couldn’t bear the thought that the greatest English writer of all time was of Arab origins. But the fact still remains that no Englishman before or after the great poet had ever answered the name ‘Shakespeare.’ (In an ironic repeat of history, another high-profile super-achiever has turned out to be just another Arab. American icon Steve Jobs, the man who revolutionised the computer world as founder and CEO of Apple, was actually the son of Abdulfatah Jandali a Syrian student who, along with his American girlfriend, gave him up for adoption at birth.)
The story of Gaddafi’s particular brand of leadership is the stuff African dreams are made of. Imagine having free education at all levels, free medical care, 24-hour electricity and not having to pay for it, having good pipe-borne water right in the middle of the desert with no bills at the end of the month, and a decent job at graduation or a farmland and capital to start an agricultural venture. Then a whooping 40 thousand dollar allowance for when you decide to get married. With all this, you might ask, why were Libyan youths so vehemently against Gaddafi? Indeed it was a teenager who recently claimed to have shot him dead. Why this hatred? The answer to this lies in the generation gap. The so-called Arab spring is a youth revolution.
While Gaddafi’s brand of Islamic socialism made sure all Libyans had access to all necessities of life, he did not subscribe to the glitter and excesses of his capitalist Arab brothers. But this wasn’t what the new generation of Libyans wanted. They hankered after the skyscrapers and the beautiful fountains, the giant shopping malls and other evidences of pop culture prevalent in the Arab and Gulf states and wondered why they couldn’t get them. With our globalised television screens the youth of Libya could see the seeming prosperity in these places and found their towns drab in comparison. It is this discontent in the youths that the rebels, and their American sponsors exploited to get them on to the streets.
To be honest, even I was at first disappointed when photos of Libyan cities began to be shown at the beginning of the crisis. Is this Arab-African Jewel I was told about 22years ago? By now I have been to Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, the UAE, and non- Arab Muslim States like Turkey and Malaysia. And compared to them all Libya looked too austere. In fact when Tripoli fell and the gate of the Bab-al-Azizia was opened for the first time, I couldn’t believe the simplicity and austerity of the building itself. And this was the presidential palace. I immediately recalled the size and splendour of Saddam Hussein’s eight places at the fall of Baghdad eight years ago. The Bab-al-Azizia can only pass for a servants quarters in any of them. Such was Gaddafi’s prudence and self-denial. And it served them well, if only they knew it.
According to John Perkins, American economist and bestselling author of ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit-man’, before the recent NATO war on Libya, its central bank is 100% state-owned. In a recent article he titled ‘Libya: It’s not about oil, it’s about currency and loans’ Perkins disclosed that in the vaults of this bank are 144 tons of Gold. And these facts are from IMF records. He argued that Gaddafi drew the ire of the West, led by the American Empire, when he recently repeated his call to Arabs and Africans to create a new currency that will rival the dollar and Euro. Gaddafi advised that the Gold Dinar should be used as a medium of exchange among Arabs and Africans as well as be the only currency acceptable whenever we trade our oil and other natural resources to the developed world. This was Gaddafi’s latest and apparently greatest sin.
With his demise young Libyans will certainly see a new era. They will get a new Libya full of high-rise buildings, monumental shopping malls, hotels and nightclubs. They will see glittering casinos, discotheques and near-nude tourists all over town. But they will also wake up to a new reality. From now on they’ll have to pay for everything. The food they eat, education, housing, health, transport, and yes- marriages. Truly, Gaddafi is dead but the echo of his last words will remain. ‘Do you know right from wrong?’ he had asked. But they showed little of that when they displayed his body for days and queued up to view and take pictures in morbid fascination. One day soon their joy will turn to sorrow. May Allah forgive and have mercy on his servant Mu’ammar bin Muhammad bin Abdusssalam al Fuhsi al Gaddafi, amin.