Obasanjo, Mugabe and Papua New Guinea
Relations between Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Robert Mugabe, newly elected Chairman of the African Union, have a long history. Both continue to owe Papua New Guinea a big debt which awaits redemption.
In continuation of a core principle in Nigeria’s foreign policy which was first announced by Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa in his speech at the United Nations in 1960, the Murtala Mohammed-Obasanjo regime vigorously supported liberation wars against racial dictatorship by European settlers across Southern Africa. A dramatic illustration of it was the nationalisation of British-owned banks operating in Nigeria and threats of trade embargo against British businesses to twist the arm of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - who had prided herself as a ‘’Lady not for Turning. Nigeria demanded black rule through the ballot box to win majority rule in Zimbabwe.
Obasanjo also pressured Mugabe to postpone reclaiming land from white farmers for TEN YEARS after independence in 1980. White politicians hoped to undermine Mugabe’s popularity during the painful decade of no land grabs. Ignoring Nyerere’s warning, he fell into the trap of taking an IMF loan with its hidden fangs of retrenching civil servants and denying jobs to new graduates from schools and colleges; and lost popular support among trade unions and students.
Mugabe reacted to the prospect of losing elections as the price of accepting IMF Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) by adopted Rousseau’s rule of ‘’forcing (the opposition) to be free’’; plus the dictum that since white farmers used guns to rob Shona and Ndebele of their lands, the same power of the gun can be used to get back land for veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war. Television pictures of bloodied white farmers infuriated the media of the so-called ‘’international community’’.
Australia - a land rooted in genocidal land robbery from black ‘’Aborigines’’ - took the lead in urging the Commonwealth to punish Mugabe; if not raise troops to crush his government and its armed forces. Australia also perpetrated an abysmal racist colonial dictatorship over Papua New Guinea lasting from 1904 to PNG’s independence in 1975. Chinese traders were brought in as retail traders to prevent the growth of a wealthy Papua class.
Australia’s racist denial of economic development to Papuans was evident at independence as 85 per cent of the population lived on subsistence agriculture. As late as 2006 there were only 5 doctors for every 100,000 people; with only 7.3 per cent of Gross National Product spent on health services. In a landscape dominated by mountains which isolate 7 million people who speak 820 different languages, Australia left behind no historic engineering feats similar to Italian roads road construction feats in Eritrea’s railway and road tunnels through mountains.
Trapped in poverty, Papua New Guineans express their frustration through high incidence of violence against women; often accused of witchcraft and either stoned to death or banished to starve in the wilderness. A colonial legacy of racist police brutality and gross violations of human dignity persists long after Australian colonial administrators departed.
In the face of whipped up propaganda against Mugabe, Obasanjo seems to have kept close to Australia’s prime minister to prevent drastic measures by those salivating over prospects for humiliating Mugabe by hauling him to the ICC at The Hague. Obasanjo told a Nigerian television audience that African leaders had appealed to Mugabe not to seize land from white farmers when 1990 dateline arrived. Frightened white farmers in South Africa would reject the release of Nelson Mandela from prison that same year. Obasanjo was exonerating Mugabe against those blaming Mugabe for wasting ten years in not getting back land from white farmers. Both Mugabe and Obasanjo now have an open opportunity to urge Australia to pay reparations for prolonged violations of human and economic rights of indigenous Australians and Papua New Guineans. Papua New Guinea gets its name from a 1545 visit by Ortiz de Retez, a Spanish sea traveller, who noted that the people were identical to black people along the coast of Guinea from Senegal to Cameroun. Tourism pictures currently on the Internet show faces similar to those in Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria and Jola in Gambia. As Africans in the Diaspora they qualify for diplomatic and economic support from the African Union.
In concrete terms Malaysian companies are ruthlessly logging timber from the rainforest of PNG. ExxonMobil started exporting liquefied gas to China, Japan and South Korea. Shell is likely to invest gas production. Nigeria and Mugabe should provide legal expertise to PNG to negotiate favourable terms. The AU push for the UN Security Council to declare violations of human, economic and development rights of indigenous African populations in Australia and PNG as a rumbling volcano waiting to erupt and a threat to global security.
As late as 2006 there were only 5 doctors for every 100,000 people; with only 7.3 per cent of Gross National Product spent on health services. In a landscape dominated by mountains which isolate 7 million people who speak 820 different languages, Australia left behind no historic engineering feats similar to Italian roads road construction feats in Eritrea’s railway and road tunnels through mountains.