Mandela over Abuja

A friendly female voice from the High Commission of Kenya in Nigeria scanned to me an invitation to an event in the Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton Abuja.  ‘’The African Ambassadors’s Group in Nigeria’’ requested my company ‘’On the Occasion of the 52nd Anniversary of Africa Day & Nelson Mandela International Day. Date: Friday […]

A friendly female voice from the High Commission of Kenya in Nigeria scanned to me an invitation to an event in the Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton Abuja.  ‘’The African Ambassadors’s Group in Nigeria’’ requested my company ‘’On the Occasion of the 52nd Anniversary of Africa Day & Nelson Mandela International Day. Date: Friday 24th July, 2015’’.
The invitation had several intriguing aspects. An Africa Day might be anchored by the African Union office in Abuja. A Mandela event might come from South Africa’s High Commission. As a ‘’Nelson Mandela International Day’’ it should have occurred on 18th July, 2015. That it came from Kenya’s High Commission suggested that it was also meant to hug President Barrack Obama’s historic and concurrent home-coming to Kenya, his fatherland. Diplomats do have their peculiar ways.
The Nelson Mandela International Day officially seeks to ‘’inspire individuals to take action to help change the world for the better, and in doing so build a global movement for good’’. The UN grabbed the symbolic event from a South African decision to mark Mandela’s 90th birthday and associate it with a directive by Mandela that: ‘’it is time for the next generation to continue our struggle against social injustice and for the rights of humanity. It is in your hands’’.
Other fertile imaginations calculated the number of years Mandela spent in the struggle ‘’in the name of Peace, Democracy and Freedom for all’’ and linked it to what Archbishop Desmond Tutu plea to each of us to ‘’do something worthy for someone else on Mandela Day’’. The 67 years Mandela so expended was translated into a plea for each of us to give 67 MINUTES of our time on July 18th to serve our people and fulfil Mandela’s call that ‘’it is time for new hands to lift the burden’’ of making a difference in the lives of others. A more important dimension of Mandela Day is to make it a DAILY responsibility to ‘’opt into humanity’’ by rolling up ‘’our sleeves and play(ing) an active role in building our communities’’.
Nelson Mandela did ‘’free’’ himself from his young marriage to a young and very beautiful Winnie Mandela and the promise of practicing as a lawyer to place his life in the hands of his people’s struggle for human dignity, freedom and economic development. Professor Piero Gleijeses has argued that Fidel Castro in 1975 expressed this principle by sending 76,000 Cuban troops to Angola – not to take something out of Angola – but to defeat troops from racist South Africa bent on re-colonising that country. Castro had acted despite opposition by Mikhail Gorbachev, President  of the Soviet Union, and panic by the Americans who were encouraging South Africa.
The ‘’African Ambassadors’s Group in Nigeria’’ packed Transcorp Hilton’s Congress Hall to standing room only. At the entrance were security personnel suspicious of women as possible couriers of Boko Haram; Al-Shabaab using mayhem in Nigeria to throw blood at Obama’s safari to Kenya and Ethiopia; or ISIS bringing slaughter in  Libya, Tunisia and Sinai to West Africa. Inside the hall, Ambassador of Saharawi Republic and Dean of the African diplomatic group, Oubi Bachir, assured Nigeria of support in her war to defeat terrorism.
Nigeria’s Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, picked on Mandela’s defeat of white rule – described as a ‘’crime against humanity’’ – to urge Africa’s entrepreneurs to ‘’free’’ themselves from parasitic importation of consumer goods and being school prefects of foreign companies.
The spirit of Africa’s unity was expressed by a dance group whose music fused various ethnic exuberances. The audience paid prime attention to cooked food hosted in stands contributed and served out by women from the member countries of the African Union.  My share of “fura-da-nono’’ from Senegal was scraped from the bottom of a tall bowl. It was remarkable that Nigeria’s ‘’tuwo’’ or Kenya’s ‘’ugali’’ -made from various cereals – was a common companion to vegetable and meat stews. Angola’s offer of a chicken cooked in its own blood was truly revolutionary. A pan-Africanism of the stomach would not only have been approved by Mandela but met Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s call for Africa to feed her peoples through the creativity of 60 million unemployed youths in agriculture.
A list of companies offered items to be won in a raffle draw. Airlines of Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa; several banks, the Dangote Group and others offered air tickets to their capitals; and mundane but practical tools like generators and cutlery. Perhaps they harkened to Mandela’s call for a man doing ‘’what he can do for his people and country’’; and rest. 
For an imaginative diplomatic pool, Mandela and Africa Day is a worthy and relevant tradition to launch.