In this issue:

Mbeki Warns: We Could Be Descended on Too, Like Iraq

Mbeki Refuses To Meet British Foreign Office Emissary Valerie Amos

U.S. AID Gets Nasty with Southern African Development Community Over Zimbabwe

Soros Stooge Aryeh Neier Adds Zimbabwe to List of 'Rogue Nations'

Namibian MPs Call for Bigger Defense Budget, Cite Iraq War

Yoruba Nationalist Group in Nigeria Seeks Secession

On the Eve of Nigerian Elections, Official Line on Murder of Opposition Leader Looks Like Coverup

From Volume 2, Issue Number 15 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published April 14, 2003
Africa News Digest

Mbeki Warns: We Could Be Descended on Too, Like Iraq

Speaking April 7 at the three-day Africa Conference on Elections, Democracy and Governance in Pretoria, South African President Thabo Mbeki asserted, "The prospect facing the people of Iraq should serve as sufficient warning that in future we too might have others descend on us, guns in hand, to force-feed us" with their brand of democracy. The conference was co-sponsored by the African Union and attended by 400 delegates from across Africa. Mbeki said that the Anglo-American powers think democracy can be imported or imposed. We should understand, he said, "that the democratic system ... is both a product of and exists within the context of the evolution of particular societies."

Mbeki said that we tell each other, mimicking the textbooks, that democracy can only be successful if there is a multiparty system, elections are held regularly, there are term limits for the head of state or government, and there are independent electoral commissions and international monitors to observe elections and make judgments as to whether they were free and fair. But repeating these things to each other at conferences may not add "one iota" to advancing democracy in Africa.

"Great Britain," he went on, "does not limit the period during which a person may hold the position of Prime Minister, to say nothing about the hereditary position of Head of State.... I have never heard of international observers verifying whether any British election was free and fair."

The point, he said, is not to abandon the rulebook of democratic "musts," but to determine how the rules shall be translated into practice.

Mbeki recalled that "powerful Western democratic countries" were behind the 1960 coup d'etat "against the first and only democratically elected government in the DR Congo," which "led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the installation of the Mobutu regime, which came to define everything that was wrong in Africa." This "set a precedent for the anti-democratic coups that swept through the continent for decades."

In his complex speech, Mbeki gave the impression that he is grasping for the concept of a republic—in which the leadership orders the polity to ensure the cognitive development of the citizenry—as opposed to a linearly direct "democracy." The speech can be found via www.gov.za/speeches/index.html.

Mbeki Refuses To Meet British Foreign Office Emissary Valerie Amos

The South African Foreign Affairs Ministry "confirmed that Mbeki would not meet with Amos," a baroness, according to the Zimbabwe Mirror April 6. Her Ladyship was in South Africa for an entire week to "nurse frayed relations"—as one newspaper put it—between the two countries over Iraq and Zimbabwe. She met with the Foreign and Defense Ministers. She spoke before the National Press Club in Pretoria, where she insisted that Prime Minister Blair still loved Africa to bits. All of the press said she was to meet with President Mbeki.

On the eve of her arrival, the Sunday Times (Johannesburg) of March 30 reported "a Presidential adviser" saying it was in South Africa's interest to pursue closer ties with France.

U.S. AID Gets Nasty with Southern African Development Community Over Zimbabwe

The U.S. Agency for International Development has gotten nasty with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) over Zimbabwe, but the SADC remains unmoved, according to the April 5 Daily News (Harare). The USAID funds conferences of the SADC—an association of 14 nations—and the American agency now says that its money must not be used to support attendance by representatives of the Zimbabwe government. USAID has gone further, saying that it will not provide money to SADC member states if they continue to invite Zimbabwe to SADC conferences, according to Zimbabwe's Foreign Minister Stan Mudenge. The Daily News reported that a U.S. official in Zimbabwe, who wished not to be named, confirmed the report. At a press conference in Harare, the paper reported, "the SADC countries said they will not accept any funding if Zimbabwe is excluded from SADC conferences."

Soros Stooge Aryeh Neier Adds Zimbabwe to List of 'Rogue Nations'

In an op ed in the April 5 New York Times, Aryeh Neier, the president of the George Soros Open Society Institute, has added Zimbabwe and five other countries to his list of "rogue nations." Neier worried that various "rogue nations" are "seizing the opportunity" of the world being preoccupied with the Iraq war to "get rid of their opposition." In addition to Zimbabwe, he named Belarus ("Europe's sole remaining dictatorship"), Cuba, Vietnam, Thailand, and Egypt. Neier was formerly executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Namibian MPs Call for Bigger Defense Budget, Cite Iraq War

The Iraq war shows they need a bigger defense budget, Namibian Members of Parliament have concluded, according to an article in the April 9 The Namibian. The Namibian Ministry of Defense is suffering a 6% budget cut this year, but some Namibian MPs of the SWAPO Party—the Southwest Africa Peoples Organization that led the Namibian armed struggle for independence—now think this was a mistake.

Deputy Minister of Higher Education Hadino Hishongwa said April 7 that the cut was "going a very wrong way," because the United States was behaving like a "big fish in the high seas, feeding on smaller fish.... We are not going to face the situation [of war] with napkins ... we need appropriate tanks to defend our country." Defense Minister Erkki Nghimtina said, "We need to ... prepare our forces for future challenges of wider magnitude."

Yoruba Nationalist Group in Nigeria Seeks Secession

A Yoruba nationalist group in Nigeria on April 5 published a call for Yoruba secession—on the eve of national elections. The O'odua Republic Front (ORF), wrote, in an editorial-style advertisement in the newspaper Punch, "Events since independence ... have shown beyond doubt that development and fulfilment are impossible for the Yoruba within the Nigeria neo-colonial enclave." It said the Yoruba were being held back by Nigeria's Muslim North, and called on the Yoruba to fly the O'odua flag and wear its symbol, according to Reuters.

ORF spokesman Jubril Ogundimu told Reuters, "This is the beginning of the struggle, and we are willing to go to any lengths to get an independent state of O'odua.... We are willing to negotiate our breakaway, but if that fails and it means war, we are prepared.... We are being cheated, Nigeria is a fraud, that's why we must go our own separate ways."

EIR notes that ORF is positioning itself to stir up major trouble if Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim, is elected President, defeating President Obasanjo, a Yoruba.

Secretary General Adewale Thompson of the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), another Yoruba nationalist group, told Reuters in a recent interview that the YCE had drawn up plans for a Yoruba state, complete with Constitution and national anthem. He said the YCE is backing Obasanjo for re-election in the belief that he will convene a conference of ethnic nationalities on the issue of self-determination.

Other Yoruba nationalist groups are also active, including the O'odua People's Congress, notorious for its murders of northerners living in Yorubaland.

The potential for large-scale ethnic violence and the disintegration of Nigeria is great. Four months after 9/11, it was reported from the North that 70% of baby boys born in a Kano hospital were being named "Osama bin Laden," according to Kareem Kamel of the American University in Cairo. In his paper, "Beyond Miss World: Muslim Protest in Nigeria" (February 2003), Kamel also wrote that in the South, Christian fundamentalist groups funded from the U.S. and U.K., "have grown in power and influence recently. Millions of Nigerians watch the TV program sponsored by Club 700," an American Christian evangelical program.

The three major socio-political elements of Nigeria are the Muslim North, the Yoruba Southwest, and the Igbo East; the latter two are largely Christian. When Igboland attempted to secede to form the Republic of Biafra in 1967, more than 1 million people died in an agonizing, three-year civil war.

On the Eve of Nigerian Elections, Official Line on Murder of Opposition Leader Looks Like Coverup

Nigerian Inspector General of Police Tafa Balogun has told the press that Dr. Marshall Harry—a key leader of the All Africa National Party (ANPP), the chief opposition party in Nigeria—was not politically motivated, but was a case of armed robbery. Balogun presented the suspects to the press, but cut off questions that attempted to test the armed robbery story.

It is widely suspected that Dr. Harry was murdered on the orders of someone in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, but the available evidence is only circumstantial. There has been a long string of politically motivated murders since the military handed over power to an elected government in 1999, including the murder of Justice Minister Bola Ige, killed in his home by a gang in December 2001. Some state governors have their own private militias.

The ANPP, of which Harry was a leader, has Muhammadu Buhari, a former military head of state, as its Presidential candidate. The series of Nigerian national elections runs from April 12 to May 3; the Presidential election will be held on April 19.

The elections are the third attempt since independence in 1960, to transfer power from one civilian government to another. The two earlier attempts ended in military coups.

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