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African Poverty and Global Security

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, Ph.D - 4/7/2005

The world has witnessed a lot of paradigm shifts in the history of its preoccupations. But the trajectory has been the same. From the geocentric conceptual scheme to a Heliocentric one marked by a happy regress to the Copernican Revolution, to the shift from Newtonian Physics to a new Universe of Einsteinian Relativity; From the medieval centralization and absolutization of all epistemic authority in the supernatural, to the Methodic Doubts of the Cartesian epistemology: Humanity seemed not to have learnt a lot in terms of lessons. Its long, chequered history takes perverse pleasure in repeating itself. To this end, mankind is still groping in the dark grottos of irrationality; faithfully replaying, and dangerously repeating history's errors.

Humanity has most embarrassingly failed to learn that no structure of oppression has ever, or would ever for long, withstand the outrage of its ontological dysfunctionality. Walt Whitman's in a moment of poetic inspiration acutely captured this metaphysic: "The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, they shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition". [1] Human beings have failed to realise that only the citadels of liberty and towers of freedom enjoy ontological immunity from decay. We have continued to place the burnt offerings of our idiocy, on the altars of captivity, just like idolaters do, falsely hoping, that the idols of our avarice, would contrive to hearken to our endless pleas and sacrifice. We have continued unceasingly to bend our knees, in subservient genuflection to edifices erected in idolatrous worship of oppression. This may account for our allowance and tolerance of oppressive structures, in the false hope, that once we exclude a greater proportion of human beings from the goodies of existence, we can then assure steady and undisrupted supply of these to the few, who are parasitically placed above the rest of us. Our avaricious myopia believes that we can achieve security, by excluding the poor and powerless. But experience has continued to teach our ignorance, that poverty is the pivot upon which insecurity revolves. The world is less secure, when some members of the global community live in the bondage of poverty and oppression, under any form or shape. This has been the mistake that the empires of history have constantly repeated. And we are very busy today still courting the same mistakes, recreating the scenario as well as the disasters it nurses.

Ancient Rome was bogged down by the exigencies and demands of extending and sustaining its vast empires; all on the back of conquered slaves. The military might of the Imperial Legion was its instrument of policy implementation, through out, its far-flung districts and colonies. The paradigmatic preoccupation throughout this era of its dominance was Rome; her interests and her eternal splendour. Every other consideration, including the pain and silent rumblings of its conquered subjects, took an inglorious second place. But since oppression represents an affront on nature, Roman oppression was destined to implode on its weight. The dynamics surrounding this unitary preoccupation, mutated to give rise to the kind of internal corruption, which ultimately and unfortunately set the process of decadence and fall in motion. Rome decayed from within, while maintaining semblances of external splendour. Imperial debauchery started the fish rotting from its head. The frustrations of the conquered joined the broth; contriving the kind of paradoxical laxity, that aided the process, since no man, people, race, or nation can be hold down forever against his will. 400 years looked like forever. The process took close to 400 years. But Rome fell. And that was a mighty crash, from which she never recovered. She was never meant to recover, because the logic of the empire was built upon the sweats of slavery and oppression. Rome, save for the nostalgia its past glories evoke, took a hike forever, into the history books; never to be reborn.

Britannia pretended to rule from sea to sea; as her pirates scattered abroad, robbing lands, pillaging peoples, annexing coasts, and stealing resources on behalf of "Her Royal Majesty"; the Queen. From the coast of Africa stretching to India and the South Seas, her imperial piratical might held sway, over peoples conquered by force of arms, or tricked into acquiescence. The two world wars opened the eyes of the conquered peoples, to their subjugation. This led to agitations, which saw many of these conscripted federations dashing for self-rule. The sun gradually but surely set on the British Empire, as she became eclipsed by the industrial might of the United States that rose out of the ashes of the 2nd World war. British power, like that of most colonial masters, was built upon thievery and treachery. Her demise as a world power is testament to the fact, that eternal greatness can never be erected on the pillars of exploitative thievery and oppressive treachery.

The United States and Russia were two empires that made no pretences of their ideological incompatibility and platonic hatred of each other. A greater part of their "imperial lives" or lives as empires was spent in plotting the down-fall of each other. They conscripted satellite States to fight proxy wars for them. Vietnam burned, bled, and ate up over 50,000 American lives. Cambodia haemorrhaged. Cuba stood between Kennedy, Khrushchev and a global nuclear annihilation. The world became polarized between ideological insularities of the "Iron curtain" or the "evil empire" on one side, and West on the other. These empires were watered by the blood of the oppressed peoples they deployed as pawns, in their geo-political chessboards. Russia took a bow as an extravagant historical failure, after over 70 years of being propped up by oppression, subjugation and ideological manipulation of peoples. The world was repositioned and left at the mercy of a monolithic superpower; the United States. But this empire deploys soft power and polite oppression, tying most of Africa and the third world to its apron strings, through debts and other non-violent instruments. Though the shape and methodology of subjugation has radically changed; it did nothing to change the fact of oppression in the world today.

Poverty is the most subtle and most violent form of oppression in the world today. Many Third world nations were structural adjusted into inescapable poverty, by the ideology-gravitated pseudo-economics of the World Bank and IMF. The fact of terrorism today has risen to lift the curtains off the oppression of peoples, as the deep brewery of the revulsion that makes terrorism a seductive option. Any man who is frustrated to the point where he feels he has nothing to lose, can as well, elect to die spectacularly, to strike damage and fear in the heart of the object of hate. A man denied of opportunities to live, can as well write his obituary in the brush strokes of terror. Demeaning poverty has the ugly tendency of brewing nihilism. And nihilism is the seedbed of terror.


A New Frontier of Fear

On September 11th 2001, the world graduated into a new frontier of angst. Our saccharine illusions and pretences to security, suffered an irreparable damage. Our prefabricated pre-conceptions were dangerously eroded; as our sensibilities became forcefully weaned of its habituated, perceptual inertia. For long, there was a reinforced entertainment of an immediate possibility of a nuclear catastrophic incineration, which many thought would draw the logical curtains on the cold war. That naivety was exploded forever; as humanity matriculated into a new era of fear.

During the cold war, many position and policy papers were authored with the reckless certainty, which only profound ignorance breeds. Dissertations, forecasts and postulations were based on the assured certainty of a nuclear war ensuing between the two super-powers. The Military-Industrial complex on both sides of the divide smiled to the banks, while the defence budget of both countries towered above every other consideration, even the fact of chilling poverty existing in their backyards and neighbourhoods.

At last, fours years after 9/11, and despite the cognitive dissonance inflicted on the global collective unconscious, by the conscription and confusion of the war on terror, with the war against an "innocent" bad guy, who sat atop one of the biggest oil reserves in the world; the world seems to have woken up to the realisation that the long-term solution to terrorism and global insecurity, lies in tackling the fundamental dynamic, which enables and endorses terrorism. The international community seems to have regained the opportunity, and momentum for a strategic review of the fundamental issues forcefully brought to the fore, by September 11th 2001, terrorist attacks. At the 2005 World Economic Forum, in the Swiss resort town of Davos, we saw poverty not only as an ethical issue taking centre stage, but also being recognized, as the greatest threat to the values we have cause to cherish. The outrage at terrorism; the hunger and thirst for revenge against the symptoms, essays most times to becloud the need for a reassessment of the fundamental structure and operation of the factors, which conduced to the emergence of terrorism. Terrorism in recent has been deployed as an instrument for making a political statement, or refocusing attention on the unaddressed needs, and angers of the purveyors or the cause they champion.


Poverty as a Metaphysic of Terror

With the benefit of hindsight, the world would forever recall that September 11th 2001, was simply a carol of pithy lessons. It exposed the impunity of nihilism. It led the orchestra that sang in exposure of the dialectics of disaster, which the explosive confrontation between the avaricious blueprints of greedy capital, and pauperized powerlessness borne of the wings of religion, exposes human civilization to.

Exploring this connection between the poverty generated by the unholy alliance between corporate capital, empire building and terrorism is beyond the scope of the tasks we set for our present consideration. But the fundamental question, raised by the 9/11, and which till now has not been satisfactorily addressed is: Why did the terrorist attacks in America receive widespread applause across the streets of Islamic nations?

Many are wont to attribute this to America's stand on the Israeli-Palestinian debacle. Some others would equally rope-in America's support for what many in those countries perceive, as a corrupt Saudi royalty, that has made a career of advertising it sickening debauchery, and showing itself off, as a diseased vestige of American greedy interests. These may hold some water. But the fundamental issue remains, that the people are really unhappy with their situation. It boils down to economics. Majority of these countries are harbouring an elitist population of leeches, while the commoners are forced to witness ostentatious flamboyance, against the squalor of their miserable existences.

Facts have continued to canvass an irrefutable construction, that poverty was the by-product of the active promotion of imperial insular egocentrism, by the geo-political and strategic policies of successive Western governments in concert with their Third World lackeys. This poverty, became entrenched in many societies, and essayed to conduce to the manipulative demagoguery of political scoundrels. This is the situation in the Northern States of Nigeria, where Sharia and Islamic fundamentalism, is being actively stoked by the politicians. And this is the same reservoir of social anxiety, tapped into by terror groups like Al Quaeda.

Terrorism is the perverse celebration of ultimate sadism. It is a vampyrean industry driven by fanatical nihilism, and propelled by subconscious cowardice. It is one of most violent expressions of the evil, which the human mind is capable.

The metaphysic under girding terrorism witnesses the horrendous torrent of unarticulated chaos, resident in the core of nihilism. The terrorist is a product of an ideology, which taps into, and makes ample use of his mundane frustrations, to spin the cobwebs of active hatred, fanatical devotion, and a near manic self-abnegation, which breaks down the natural proclivities to self preservation. Getting to this point is not an event. It is a process, which starts with simple frustrations at perceived injustices against one's race, religion, sex or even ideology. This is reinforced by other petty, an even sometimes unrelated pains, and disappointments, like unrequited love, failed classes, inability to win the esteem of friends and loved ones, etc. This bazaar of frustration is most times, associated with insignificance, lack of power and poverty. Situations of extreme poverty ingeniously reinforce these frustrations and create a frustrated mind ready to be exploited by unscrupulous scoundrels armed with zeal and a political agenda.

Some may view terrorists as horrendous cowards, who sow fear and dread, across social paths. This school argues that life is for the brave, and living is for the courageous. To that end, a faint heart would be overwhelmed, and enfeebled by the pressures and challenges of life, that he chooses the state of eternal inertia native to death. But be that as it may, terrorism is ontologically repulsive, whether organized by the state, or massively subscribed to by the citizens, as was the case in Nazi Germany, or perpetrated by a few ideological-crazed nihilists, fighting under the banners of the gods of their imagination, like Al Quaeda. But despite the unflattering metaphysic, poverty and insignificance remains the ultimate brewery of terror.

Among all the factors that support the pedestals of dissensions, none is as potent as the fertile soil, which wide scale and pervasive poverty avails. Wide scale poverty injects a people with the kind of insignificance, which enables fanatical nihilism to germinate and spread in a population. The circumstance of debilitating poverty is a fertile soil for the germination of pervasive nihilism. This flows from the fact that poverty engineers a cornucopia of frustrations, which is the key element that ferments to brew violent reactions. In a charged environment, the manipulative demagoguery of a scoundrel would tap into these frustrations and mould it into a burning hatred of any object, it elects to hold responsible for its misfortune. This is the kind of social raw material that people like Osama bin Laden tap into and commandeer to their advantage.

The greatest weapon in destroying Bin Laden today is to destroy, the soil which feeds his ideologies, with legitimacy in the eyes of his supporters. If we make concerted efforts to fight poverty, Bin Laden and his likes, would ultimately lose their ideological base. Islam as a religion is not allergic to development, as the examples of Saudi Arabia has shown. If the people's lives are conferred with meaning, the terrorist would lose his recruiting ground. This is because; anybody who has a reason to live cannot afford to die. He cannot afford to throw away his life for a cause that is senseless and uncertain. But when people's existences are excluded, pushed to the peripheries, and circumscribed within the perimeters of irrelevance, their life or death makes meaning to no one; the line between life and death becomes dangerously blurred, as to be one and the same. They would grow unable to distinguish between living and dying. Their reason would be floored by the consideration, that their death is a foregone conclusion. And since poverty will finish them off anyway and destroy the lives the have cause to cherish, it would be better to take the martyr's exit, as that would at least confer their hitherto insignificant lives with some significance in the memories of the living.

A person weaned and groomed in a privileged circumstance, would never understand the depth of nihilism that poverty and powerless insignificance could generate in an individual, let alone a group that feels targeted by oppressive forces from without. It takes a genius to rise above the limitations of his social environment, especially, when the situation is frustratingly inclement, to his aspirations. It is almost always an uphill task for a people to get out of oppressive situations, without charismatic demagogues, who are capable of riding the crests waves and tides of the prevailing dissatisfaction, and cornering it to the advantage of the cause, they wish to advance. The 1789 French Revolution as well as the American war of independence is rich in their production of charismatic personalities and heroes, who stoked the fires of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Their sustained assault on the tenets of the inglorious status quo, both in their speeches and actions, rallied and energized the people, to rise and cast off their yokes. People like Patrick Henry come to mind here. This is the same broad cauldron of dissatisfaction that fanatical nihilists ride to the advantage of their narrow plans. Osama bin Laden, has been successfully tapping into this pervasive dissatisfaction existing among Arab and Islamic youths world wide. The operations of the international economic order seem to leave them and their land, at the peripheries, as the beautiful damsel to be raped to satisfy the economic interests of the Superpowers. Many of them are able to relate their situations of powerlessness to the generalized feelings of powerlessness existing in their societies. And once they have a scapegoat for their misfortune, they are moulded into a hateful frenzy that seeks nothing, but the destruction of this scapegoat. This is where terrorism comes to town. And the irony of it all lies, in the fact that terrorism for the United States is martyrdom for Al Qaeda.


Touch Down

Post-September 11th 2001 world forcefully canonized security, as the new goddess of contemporary global socio-economic and geo-political discourse. The reality of terror compels a fresh look into the fundamental factors that conduce to the manufacture and export of terrorism. The global community may be chasing an ephemeral, short-term, strategic, geo-political and socio-economic mirage, if the close down of borders, or tougher visa rules, is the only weapon deployed in this fight against terror. This approach is rendered redundant when one realises that Africa figures scantily in this radar screen.

It is true that almost all terrorists are Muslims. That does not validate any construction that is suggestive in any way, that all Muslims may be terrorists. But be that as it may, Africa has the largest and fastest growing body of Muslims. Nigeria for instance with over 66 million Muslims, is a potential seedbed of Islamic dissensions, as recent events in the 12 northern states of that country points to. With a potentially restive and poverty stricken Islamic population, coupled with a very expansive landmass that can swallow up a million terrorist training camps, as well as public offices and structures susceptible to corruption, Africa offers a very seductive and fecund environment for the germination of terrorist cells. Bin Laden tried that out sometime in the past, enjoying a protected haven in Sudan, and making inroads into Kenya and Tanzania. We are yet to fathom the full depth of the cellular debris, his sojourn in those countries must have left there, or to what extent they have mutated. But the issue lies in the fact, that these terror cells are wont to gain nourishment from the prevailing dissatisfaction environing them. They would desiccate and shrivel out of existence, if the Petri-dish providing them with the social propulsion, dries up. And poverty enables a legion of the social variables that renders terrorism attractive.

In lieu of the foregoing, if terrorism is to be nipped in the bud and prevented from metasizing in Africa, the global community must start by giving high priority to stemming Africa's unrestrained slide into poverty and hopelessness. It is our considered view that a long term victory will never be won against terrorism, until the war against poverty is won. The international economic order seems from all indications to be the most silent, yet the greatest terrorist, the world has ever known. Unless, there is a radical adoption of the option for the poor, we are bound to continue spinning out terrorists, by brewing the broth, upon which its survival depends and gains legitimacy; namely, poverty and insignificance. Davos in 2005 may be a good point of departure in this regard. We tally here to our future discomfiture. If we do not sow the option for the poor today, we must surely reap a harvest of disgruntled and nihilistic terror. A postponement of this decision is simply a postponement of our collective pain.