Intellectualismo!

My heart wept when I saw the picture of the Malawian man set ablaze by the angry mob in South Africa on the front page. My first thought was, how can they do this to their fellow brother? All over, Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans and Somalis are being targeted. Due to poverty, rising unemployment and lack of adequate housing foreigners are being hunted down like animals in Alexandria township. Homes and properties destroyed. Many have escaped persecution at home only to be facing murder.

This is not the first time. Immigration related hate crimes have been in existence for over a decade and continue to get more violent. Sporadic violence anywhere in Africa smacks of an unseen hand. According to a BBC radio interview with the president of the Somalian Association in South Africa who has been risking his life to help his countrymen/women, the mob were organized and well armed. Some with AK47s! Till date almost five hundred Somalians have died in xenophobic attacks in SA.

The lackadaisical nature of African rulers and their persistent failure at addressing issues in real time often culminates in death and destruction. Still, why does the failure of leadership blow up in the people’s face? And why don’t the people ever take out their frustrations on the progenators of their predicament? If they can be organized enough to lynch foreigners, why can’t they petition the government for a better quality of life?

As desperation and frustration continues to deprive people of a productive life and drive them out of their countries, xenophobia in Africa and racism outside Africa has left me wondering if African’s will ever have a place they can truly call home. A place where they are not persecuted or discriminated against for their skin color, tribe, or language. All this has taught me is; if you’re going to be killed for leaving your home you might as well stay, fight and die to make it better for your children.

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Meanwhile, I’m holding my breath for when Nigerians will be angry enough to storm the corridors of power to demand redress and renovation.

British Airways cuts the image of a lawless, racist airline. Ironically, its lawlessness begins and ends with its treatment of Nigeria and Nigerians because Nigeria itself is a lawless country run by men who do not care a hoot about what treatment foreigners met out to their subjects. The BA crew involved in the ugly incident of March 27, 2008, where 136 Nigerian passengers were ordered out of the airline’s plane are quoted as telling their victims that nothing would happen. They apparently were speaking from a position of strength given their experience in the past.

They would have recalled the fact that when Spanish immigration officials murdered a Nigerian in a brutal deportation process, it was the mass protest organised by Nigerian human rights organisations –not the actions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – that compelled the government of Spain to even investigate the matter. In fact, at a crowded press briefing on the incident, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spent most of his time and energy listing the sins of the deceased deportee which, in his opinion, justified the high handedness of the Spanish immigration officials. He did not care to chase away the hawk before blaming the chicken.

In Nigeria, BA does just about anything because anything goes in the land. Sometime in 2006, BA was so defiant of the regulatory authorities of the Nigerian aviation industry that for several days, it over-shot its flight frequency on the London-Lagos route despite repeated warnings from the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). The act of lawlessness was only halted when NCAA compelled BA to fly an empty plane back to London. Sometime in the early 1990s, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the late Abdulkadir Ahmed, bought a first class return ticket of BA for a trip to London with members of his family.

On the return leg of the journey, BA downgraded the ticket to economy class without recourse to the august Nigerian traveler whose duty it was at the time to authorise the foreign currency remittance of the racist airline’s loot in Nigeria to Britain. When the CBN governor protested, the explanation from BA was that his ticket was paid in naira and that the airline had to give priority to passengers with foreign currency denominated tickets. Ahmed lost. The CBN governor was so frustrated by the treatment of BA staff that as soon as he returned to Nigeria, he demanded a position paper from the management of Nigeria Airways on how to resuscitate the flagging national flag carrier as a way of calling the bluff of the foreign airline.

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Acres of print articles and blog entries have already been expended on the subject. Following the release of the notorious clip, a lot of I-may-not-like-what-you-say-but-I’ll-defend-to-the-death-your-right-to-say-it speeches have been flying around. Coming from his defenders as well as from Muslims who felt slighted yet ascribed it to one of those things that come with freedom of expression. Call me an anarchist but I won’t defend to the death the right for anyone to disseminate schism. Rather I believe freedom comes with checks and balances. In the first place one would be naive to believe freedom to be absolutely free.

I though Fitna was utter rubbish, lacking in substance and wholly inflammatory. Divorced from context the movie itself was a sardonic farce. It featured selected verses from the Qur’an interposed against horrific scenes of terror and violence. Whatever one would like to think, Mr. Wilders intentions leave little to be desired. He wasn’t merely expressing his freedom of expression. This was a decisive attempt to skew people’s perceptions towards the Qur’an; the Muslims Holy Book. Specifically to reify what the majority or peace-loving, well-meaning intellectuals have struggled to mend; the notion that Islam is synonymous with violence.

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