Review of Gaddafi's Gaffes by Nigerian tribune

Nigerian Tribune Review Tuesday, 22 November 2011

TheE slain former Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was a man of many parts. He was also somebody who contradicted himself on a number of sensitive international issues. Anuoluwapo Akande reviews Abla Ungalski’s new book,

To a young mind, Muammar  Gaddafi’s statements could form an everlasting impression on an issue, but the author of Gaddafi’s Gaffes, Abla Ungalski, was lucky to have probed further when Gaddafi actually said that the great writer, Williams Shakespeare, was from Benghazi in Libya, and that his real name was Sheikh Speare.

Ungalski was confused by this, because since the age of 13, he had been an avid follower of Shakespeare’s works, and for someone to say his literary hero was not from Stratford Upon Avon, but Benghazi, was just too much for him to swallow.

The author was, however, happy when his father dismissed Gaddafi’s statement, saying, ‘Don’t let other people’s dream become your nightmare. Gaddafi is a dreamer. He imagined it.”
The statement by Gaddafi about Shakespeare had actually made the author to take special interest in who Gaddafi was, and as a result, he searched everywhere on materials about the former Libyan leader, and the result of the study into the life of his man reveals his many contradictions on different issues.

Another interesting aspect of this man’s life is about his obsessive desire for universal recognition as a brilliant statesman, a political philosopher, a religious expert, social analyst and reformist, as well as the world’s best president.

Gaddafi sought for recognition, which the world vowed not give him, and when persuasions failed, he sought to buy this recognition from Sub-Saharan Africa, which he considered the easiest target, by funding various projects in poor African countries.

The Africans understood him and paid him lip service to attain funds to develop their countries. As years went by, he saw his ambition for global recognition go up in smoke and frustration kept in.
The quotations in the book are from Gaddafi’s speeches, thoughts or his Green Book, which he published in 1975, and the author was able to highlight contradictions, inconsistencies, absurdity and the comic nature of some of his thoughts and declarations.

For example, in  his address to the students of Oxford University on Africa in the 21st century, on May 16, 2007, he says, “I am neither a politician nor a diplomat....,” but two years later, during an Arab League Summit, he declares, “I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the union of Muslims....”

He also once contradicted himself on his tribe. Speaking on a Libyan Television in 2007, Gaddafi says, “Libya is an African country. May Allah help the Arabs and keep them away from us. We don’t want anything to do with them,” and two years later, he says, “Arabs have no hostility or animosity towards Israel. We are cousins and of the same race....”

On the United Nations Security Council membership, Gaddafi says, “This door must be closed; the door to security council membership should be...... No one can force us to join the security council”, but surprisingly, at the same event, which was during the UN General Assembly meeting, he says, “No one can say that the African Union does not deserve a permanent seat.......”

The late maximum ruler also spoke about migration, with Libya being a transit route to Europe. On  this, he says, “At the Libyan border, I recently stopped 1,000 African migrants headed for Europe........ They have the right to do so,” but less than a year later, during an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Gaddafi declares, “There are millions of Africans who want to come in....... We don’t know what will be the reaction of the White and Christian Europeans with the influx of starving and ignorant Africans......... Tomorrow, Europe might no longer be European, and may even be black, we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions....”

These are just few of Colonel Gadaffi’s contradictions. Those who wish to know more about such contradictions can get the book, Gaddafi’s Gaffes, which reveals the mind of a man who could be described as someone who spoke for the moment, not minding what he had said on certain issues earlier, or what he would say in the future.

Development aid: Donor and Beneficiary Fatigue By Abimbola Lagunju

Development aid has become part and parcel of the political and economic geography in many developing countries and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Broadly interpreted, development aid means, a package (mostly financial) that is directed towards development of a nation or a group of people. The premise of international development aid from the point of view of a donor country is that the beneficiaries are either incapable of developing themselves or they do not have the resources to do so or they are unwilling to develop. 

The donor then offers to provide financial, technical, material and human resource assistance to the beneficiaries to develop them according to a template chosen by the donor. This template is not always understood at the beginning by the beneficiaries or those who represent them. When finally understood and this is often too late, the beneficiaries accept their fate, hoping that their gods would come to their aid to save them from whatever agreement they have signed or in the normal case scenario, they will let the developers do whatever they want, while they either watch from a safe distance or just tag along, hoping that it will all end soon and then they can go back to their normal lives.

In the course of the dynamics of the relationship between the donors and their beneficiaries, the initial enthusiasm that greeted the agreement between the developers and their beneficiaries soon fizzles out and frustration sets in on both sides. The term “donor fatigue” was invented by donors and development aid agencies to convey their frustration at the slow pace of change or no change at all in their beneficiary countries and communities, despite their “huge” investments. They do not see the changes they have planned for, and many times, their development plans based on a template from icy climates or air-conditioned conference rooms either gets blown away in the dusty winds of the Sahel or melts without trace in the humid heat of the West African coast.

The beneficiary side also harbors its own disenchantment of development aid. This disenchantment may be rooted in the culture of the peoples of West Africa. When someone decides of his own volition to give to the poor, he does not hang around the poor to tell him what to do with the money. He hopes that his donation will make an impact on the life of the person and does not expect his reward here on earth. If however, the person decides to monitor how his money is spent, he does not relocate himself to the house of his beneficiary and occupy his house and mind with his own vision of life. This is unimaginable in the African way of life. There is a Yoruba saying which says, “When you give a ram with a rope around its neck to someone, you should let go the rope too”. If however, it happens that the benefactor relocates to his beneficiary’s house to monitor the use of his money, the beneficiary will most likely comply zombie-like with the exigencies of his benefactor or will become refractory to assistance. The benefactor is then accused of having a hidden agenda – maybe there is something in his beneficiary’s house that he wants to appropriate. Worse still, if after relocating and occupying the beneficiary’s house, all the promises turn out to be hot air. Altruism of assistance then becomes questionable and a culture of benefactor distrust begins to emerge.

As far as international development aid is concerned in sub-Sahara Africa today, there is a growing distrustful middle class, a cynical political class and a disillusioned rural and urban-ghetto populace. Development aid donors and practitioners are seen as having a hidden agenda and are accused of self-satisfying and self- aggrandizing pseudo-samaritanism. They are seen as the primary beneficiaries of their development aid.

Sometimes, in order to forcefully change the dynamics of the deteriorating relationship, the donors threaten to wield the big stick – the withdrawal of their aid.  The placid, indifferent and bored attitude of their beneficiaries to this threat and in some cases, an outright encouragement of the benefactors by the beneficiaries to wield the big stick and go away with their aid confounds the developers. The benefactors quietly withdraw their threat and stay put. Donors have again coined a phrase and an acronym for this situation – Africa Wins Again or AWA.  In order to alleviate their fatigue burden and justify their continued “reluctant” support of “recalcitrant” beneficiaries, long term or any term impacts are nudged aside and replaced with in-depth “inputs and outputs analysis”, “process emphasis” and “lessons learnt” digressionism.

Rural beneficiary communities in particular, have become disillusioned with little or no impact on the quality of their lives, despite the lofty declarations of donors and aid agencies over the years. These communities equate aid practitioners’ samaritanic declarations to mere intentions for which they have learnt to understand and accept their inability to hold the practitioners accountable. They now tend to compare the “developers” with their irresponsible politicians. They suffer chronic fatigue from unfulfilled promises. They know they are called the “field” in which they are surrogate players. They have learnt to develop thick skin to “participatory approach” and to all other fanciful phrases entreaties. And when they give their reluctant consent to “participate” in an aid project, they have learnt to also have their own hidden agenda.

Better access to information on the politics and economics of development aid has also changed the views of educated people and opinion leaders in beneficiary countries on the short, medium or long term benefits of aid. When entreated or coerced into “collaboration” with a new aid project, the middle class, which is often represented by a fatigued public service functionary in this dynamics sees a déjà-vu experience with no results. He suffers chronic fatigue from multiple seminars, workshops and conferences.  To alleviate the fatigue, he seeks to get a share of the “aid cake” in financial remunerations for services that are his normal primary duties.

The political class sees development aid as a useful thorn in the flesh. They prefer to have the money but not the development template. They imagine unknown hidden agenda in development aid. But they have their own hidden agenda too, and very often this agenda is linked to how to repatriate the aid money back to the country of origin, but into a bank account bearing their own names. They abhor reminders by the developers of the letter of their agreement. They also become fatigued and refractory.

Both donors/agencies and their beneficiaries have reasons for fatigue. No group has the right to claim more fatigue than the other.  If Development Aid as it is practiced today has not delivered the desired results on both sides, then something new has to be put in its place. Maybe it is time to give transparent and equitable trade a chance. But the big question will always remain: will both sides ever be able to overcome their historical mutual distrust?

Multiple Organ Failure – Outsourcing organs to keep a giant alive By Abimbola Lagunju

A patient with a very small head and a disproportionately large body was brought in a convoy to the International Nation-State hospital. He was unconscious. Doctors and nurses rushed to the emergency unit to attend to the new patient. Soon, word went around the hospital that a monster with a tiny head (what the doctors would later name extreme microcephaly) and a very large body had been brought into the hospital. Other nation-state patients in the hospital left their beds to see the monster. Ghana, who was about to be discharged from the hospital after being given a clean bill of health claimed to know the giant. They were once friends.

Ghana said the giant was born in 1914. The head stopped growing a few months after birth, while the body continued its normal growth. As the anomalous proportions became evident over the years, the monster became a laughing stock of everyone, including children, who at any opportunity, anywhere in the world gleefully threw stones at him. Interestingly, despite having several mirrors, the giant never looked at his own face. He did not know the size of his head. His mirrors were placed in such a way to reflect the enormous body only and the sheer size pleased him immensely. In times gone by, he used to call himself the giant of Africa. The giant only saw in sizes. The bigger, the better: Big political parties, big delegations, big agbadas, big cars, large convoys, big wives. Big life. Quality or substance was alien to the giant. He was only obsessed with extra-large sizes of everything.

The patient was rushed to the intensive unit and put on life support system. The doctors soon began a close examination of the patient and ordered for different laboratory investigations. They were all fascinated by the pint-sized head and the Goliath-sized body. The head was x-rayed. The radiologist looked at the x-ray film, cursed in his native language and beckoned to the other doctors to come over to look at the film. They were all shocked. “Not possible!” One senior doctor said. “Must be a mistake. Repeat the process,” another advised. The radiologist took a new x-ray of the head. The result was the same. There was nothing in the head. The head was empty. No blood vessels, no brain tissue. Nothing! The doctors had never seen anything like this before. They ordered for more sophisticated tests on the head – ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, etc. The result was the same. There was nothing in the tiny head! It was empty! How could this man have lived at all?

The heart was also subjected to tests. The doctors were again baffled. The heart was different from any heart they had ever seen – either in clinical practice or as students practicing on mammals. There is no such heart in the animal kingdom. The heart was a piece of rough hollow rock with some liquid that later tested to be crude oil inside it. It had no links with any of the vital organs in the body. No blood vessels. No sign of life. They checked the entire body organs one after the other. The organs had all failed. To the surprise of these doctors, all the laboratory tests to ascertain the causes of failure of the organs came back with the same results irrespective of the organ – corruption, outright theft, nepotism, self-destruction, abuse of office, cannibalism and violence.

Doctors all over the world are known for their indecipherable scribbling and their love for complicated terms and acronyms. The case is not different in the Nation-State Hospital where the monster was on life-support system. The doctors gave new names to the failed organs and tissues in his body and described their causes of failure. As a rule, the hospital assigns names of state agencies and organs of governance to body organs. In the case of this patient, the stomach became the National Assembly; the lungs became the NNPC; PHCN for the eyes; the liver was christened the executive council; the gall bladder became the Police, the large intestine was christened the judiciary, the pancreas became the parastatals and the kidneys christened the water corporation.

The doctors had to decide whether to let the giant die or to try their best to get him back on his large feet. They chose the latter. They had no right to switch off the life support system without the consent of the relatives of the patient.

A United Nations international conference of experts was convened to discuss the unusual case and to decide on the procedures to manage the patient and bring him back to life. All the doctors agreed that the patient would need multiple organ transplants. And not only that, he would also need state of the art immuno-suppressants in order not to reject the transplants.

There was a long debate on which organ to transplant first – brain tissue, heart or other organs. The doctors were fully aware of the virulence of the body organs against each other and the danger they could collectively pose to the survival of the giant.  Finally they all agreed to do a brain transplant. But they were confronted with the problem of the size of the head. How would they fit a normal brain into the small head? Should they relieve the monster of its tiny head and put another one with normal brain in its place. This would be an easier procedure than trying to fit a normal brain into the tiny head. But they considered the problem of recognition and identity. The monster’s relatives and friends would not recognize him if they gave him a new head. They decided to trim a normal brain and fit it into the tiny head. Their reasoning was that half a brain is better than no brain at all.

The doctors began a diligent search for the relatives of the giant to donate some organs in order to keep him alive. When the relatives learnt of this, they all disappeared. No one wanted to donate his brain or any of his organs. But it was all a procedural ruse. The doctors were not really interested in the organs of the relatives. They knew that such organs would be immediately attacked by the other organs and would again end up failing. And there was the problem of hereditary keyed-in failure in the organs of the relatives too. The failed organs have to be outsourced.

Failed local organs have to be removed and replaced very urgently in order for this giant to survive. The police, the judiciary, the parastatals, NNPC, PHCN, the National Assembly and other organs have to be out-sourced in the international market.

But who will donate the brain?