GOD BLESS DONALD TRUMP FOR TELLING NIGERIANS (AFRICANS) THE TRUTH

[Salimonu Kadiri]

​Contributing to the discussion on : Gambia, the Foundation of Dictatorship, Tuesday, 28 January 2019, Professor Toyin Falola partly wrote, "To add to the urgency of the situation, we all watch as the White House devastates Nigeria, insulting us, abusing us. NO COLLECTIVE RESPONSE. Trump has threatened to reduce the number of Nigerians who visit the US. NO COLLECTIVE RESPONSE." In his post on this forum, Friday 31 January 2019, titled : Travel Ban and A Sad Day, Professor Falola partly wrote, "To those in the Diaspora, it shows their powerlessness, how the exaggeration of what they do comes into clear focus. …//… All the numbers in the big cities cannot influence policy, how no one is afraid of the PhDs that they parade and the long CVs they build. WE CANNOT EVEN COMPLAIN. WE CANNOT EVEN MOBILIZE PROTESTS." We, self-economic-exiled and intellectual emigrant Nigerians who deceitfully called ourselves Nigerians in Diaspora have been nailed to the history pillar of shamelessness. May God bless President Donald Trump for spanking Nigerian intellectuals with all the books they have authored and asking them to go and fix Nigeria with their big education in a country blessed with abundant natural resources instead of migrating to parasite on the USA's economy. Stay in your country, don't come to the US because we don't need you, as President Trump told Nigerians (Africans) is not an insult or an abuse. It is a fact that Nigeria needs all her intellectual and physical workers at home to fix economic and industrial problems of the country. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump will always slap one with the truth instead of kissing one with lie.

​The New York Times of Saturday, 23 December 2017, reported that President Donald Trump at a meeting of his administration's immigration policy in June 2017, said specifically that Nigerians dwell in huts which they would not want to return to whenever they visit USA. Nigerians, especially those in the US, did not react to President Trump's reported statement, and silence, they say, implies consent. In 2018, President Trump branded Africa as containing shit-hole countries and neither African governments nor hoards of African intellectuals at home and abroad objected to the description. With his challenging statements President Donald Trump got Nigerian intellectual peacocks plumage to fold down. Not done in 2019, President Donald Trump twitted in response to four American women of African descendants and members of the US democratic party who criticized his policy thus, "Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help, you can't leave fast enough." One of the women came to the US as a child with her refugee parents from Somalia, while the rest three were African America. Donald Trump's own grandparents were immigrants from Germany and Scotland. His first wife was an immigrant from Czech Republic while his current third wife migrated from Slovenia. Both European women became US citizens after marrying Donald Trump and they are now more Americans than the Black Americans whose ancestors had been in the US since 16 centuries. This reminds one of the speech delivered by Malcolm X to his fellow Black Americans at Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, on 3 April 1964, titled : THE BALLOT OR THE BULLET. A part of the speech reads, "I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Hunkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet. …//… Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation, you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution, you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American (p.25-26, Malcom X Speaks)." Donald Trump can tell American Blacks to go back to Africa because of the black colour of their skin but African Americans cannot tell him and his family to go back to their ancestral homes in Europe because of their pale skin colour. The USA belongs to the pale-skinned people of Europe.

​During the Democrats presidential primary election campaign in 2008, Hillary Clinton cautioned members not to nominate an unelectable person as a Presidential candidate with tacit reference to Barrack Obama because he was a mixture of a Blackman and a White-woman (so-called biracial in the US), implying that Obama was not a pure American. Although Obama eventually won the nomination and the Presidency, his power was bracketed by white Americans that have always been bracketing the lives of the Black Americans. Look at the case of the Harvard Professor, Henry Louis Gates, who returned to his house in Cambridge in 2009 after a trip. He had a problem with the lock to his front door and tried to force it opened. Some passer-bys who saw him thought he was a burglar and called the Police. When the police led by a Whiteman, Michael Crowley, arrived they were not in doubt that the house belonged to the Blackman, Professor Henry Louis Gates. However, the white corps arrested professor Henry Louis Gates and charged him to court for disorderly conduct for attempting to force himself into his home. President Obama publicly upbraided the Cambridge police for acting stupidly in arresting someone in his house in that manner. White Americans were enraged against Obama and denounced him for attacking police officer and when the heat was getting too much, Obama retreated. Therefore, he invited the police officer, Michael Crowley and professor Henry Louis Gates to the White House for beer!! During Obama's presidency, #BlackLivesMatter became a popular protest hashtag as many Black Americans were being intentionally killed daily by the police. Statistically, 13% of the US population are Blacks, but they constitute 49% of murder victims in the country and 41% of the prison population in the US are Blacks. Although slavery was abolished after the civil war, the 13th amendment exempted prisoners from not being used as slaves. Therefore, American Blacks are always targeted for imprisonment through which the privatised American prison establishments can hire them out as slave labourers to private companies. Yet, on 18 June 2009, the US Senate formerly passed an apology resolution acknowledging the "Fundamental Injustice, Cruelty, Brutality, and Inhumanity of Slavery and the Jim Crow Laws" which Black Americans had been made to suffer. 

​The failure of Nigerians, as observed by Professor Toyin Falola, to respond, complain and protest collectively to the White House devastation of Nigeria, abusing and insulting Nigerians, emanated from the failure of Nigerian immigrants to the USA to understand that the colour of the skin of Black Americans which they share with Nigerians (African) is responsible for their being oppressed. In fact, Nigerians (indeed Black Africans) in the US used to think of American Blacks as being lazy and not ambitious to progress in life. In the 1930s when the USA decided to become imperialistic, it allowed some Africans, mostly Nigerians and Ghanaians, to come to the USA to study in order to use them against the European colonialists in Africa. At the same time American Blacks were not only deprived of educational opportunities in the US but were segregated and prevented from owning properties because of the colour of their skin which they shared with the Nigerian (African) students of the 1930s in the USA. In 1963, when schools in Africa were flooded with the US White Peace Corps teachers, Governor George Wallace of Alabama, was bent on stopping Black American students from entering the State's University, despite the Supreme Court's verdict justifying their rights to study there. On 17 July 1964, Malcolm X, attended the OAU meeting in Cairo and excerpts from his address to the heads of 34 member states in attendance will help to illuminate African colour identity with the US Blacks and shared political and economic fates. He said, "Your Excellencies:

​The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African summit conference as an observer to represent the interests of 22 million African-Americans whose*human rights* are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists. …//… Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America not by choice but only by a cruel accident in history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems. …//… We, in America, are your long-lost brothers and sisters, …. We were taken forcibly in chains from this mother continent and have now spent over 300 years in America, *suffering the most inhuman forms of physical and psychological tortures imaginable.* During the past ten years the entire world has witnessed our men, women and children being attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs, brutally beaten by police clubs and washed down the sewers by high-pressure water hoses that would rip the clothes from our bodies and the flesh from our limbs. And all of these inhuman atrocities have been inflicted upon us by the American governmental authorities, the police themselves, *for no reason other than we (African American) seek the recognition and respect granted other human beings in America.* …//… We have lived for over 300 years in that American den of racist wolves in constant fear of losing life and limb. *RECENTLY, THREE STUDENTS FROM KENYA WERE MISTAKEN FOR AMERICAN NEGROES AND WERE BRUTALLY BEATEN BY NEW YORK POLICE. SHORTLY AFTER THAT, TWO DIPLOMATS FROM UGANDA WERE ALSO BEATEN BY THE NEW YORK POLICE, WHO MISTOOK THEM FOR AMERICAN NEGROES. If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived there for over 300 years. No matter how much independence Africans get here on the mother continent, unless YOU WEAR YOUR NATIONAL DRESS AT ALL TIMES, WHEN YOU VISIT AMERICA, YOU MAY BE MISTAKEN FOR ONE OF US AND SUFFER THE SAME PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMILIATION AND PHYSICAL MUTILATION THAT IS EVERYDAY OCCURRENCE IN OUR LIVES. Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings (p. 72-77, Malcolm X Speaks)." As long as American Blacks are still taxed because of the colour of their skin which they share with us as African descendants, no self-respecting Nigerian (African) should consider it honourable to make a home in USA. Thus, President Donald Trump, is not abusing and insulting Nigerians by asking us to stay in Nigeria and fix it because that is what we should do to earn the respect of the world.

​As a military head of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo befriended the President of United States then, Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), and the Black US Ambassador to the United Nations then, Andrew Young (1977-1979). When Olusegun Obasanjo became civilian President of Nigeria in 1999, he approached his old friends, Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young to help him convince American industrialists to help him develop Nigeria economically and industrially. Carter and Young advised Obasanjo to attract the large group of educated Nigerians of various professions in the US, back to Nigeria to invest their knowledge in developing Nigeria with the abundant natural resources available in the country. They contended that Nigeria had the two greatest capital, intellectual manpower and raw materials. Following their advice, on Saturday, 9 September 2000, at  Atlanta, Georgia, USA, President Olusegun Obasanjo, inaugurated the Nigerian In Diaspora Organisation (NIDO). The organisation was envisioned to harness the tremendous skill, exposure, expertise and knowledgebase of Nigerians resident outside Nigeria with a view to using this as a resource base to promote socio-economic and infra-structural development back in Nigeria. NIDO was to provide a unique platform for intellectuals, technocrats, policy-makers, workers and all Nigerians in Diaspora to present proposals for development to governments at all levels. NIDO, Obasanjo said is a recognised platform for Nigerians in Diaspora to contribute to Macro-Economic Policy Development as well as Infrastructural Development Projects all over Nigeria. By year 2001, NIDO Europe was inaugurated in London. Very soon, twenty years after its first inauguration NIDO is still a vision. Instead of wailing over US visa ban on Nigerians, the Nigerian government should ask all its nationals abroad to return home to share the burden of working together and sharing the joy of benefit of labour in developing Nigeria. While engaged in this developmental labour, our borders should be closed so that nobody should come to us and we should not go to anybody's country. What we cannot produce, we shall not consume. If our country is dirty, let us all clean it together. If there is dignity in being a cleaner abroad, it must be more dignifying to clean our country and moreover, our efforts will be appreciated us. ​https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49831755

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S. Kadiri    

[Chielozona Eze]

I always learn something each time I read your post, Kadiri. I recall when former President Obasanjo made the plea on Nigerians in the diaspora to return and help in nation-building. He is not particularly unique in such pleas. I know that that few other African countries have extended similar gestures toward their compatriots overseas.

I think it is wrong to assume that the best brains of any country in Africa are abroad. For every well-educated Nigerian in the diaspora, there are at least ten, if not more, that are resident in the country. What makes educated diaspora Nigerians appear to be more educated and obviously more productive than their peers in Nigeria is the infrastructure in the West.

No Nigerian in America ever has to think of having a steady power or water supply. No Nigerian academic in America ever has to think of spending three hours on the road making a journey he could have made in thirty minutes, because of terrible roads. And no Nigerian doctor ever has to worry about being abducted and killed just as the wife of Philip Ataga, a Kaduna-based medical doctor had been. And she is not the only one. Basic infrastructure and security belong to the fundamentals of any modern society, and you cannot expect individual academics to provide them regardless of the degree of their love for their native countries.

African governments have to be clear about one thing. You don't beg people to return to their countries of origin. You don’t even beg people to invest in your country: You create conditions that would attract investors. Light a candle in the dark and many edible termites will come to you (my grandmother). If Nigeria could take care of the above conditions, I’m sure not only Nigerians in the diaspora would want to return. Many other educated Africans, including African Americans, would want to invest (time, money, intellect, sweat, etc.) in the country.

It is not necessary for Africans to accuse or blame one another for being racialized in America. Of course, I have no problem with God blessing Trump. After all, he has his prayer warriors. I’m not sure I would praise him for selectively flogging certain African countries in order to appeal to his base.

We need to be tough on ourselves, but we shouldn’t forget to also exhibit some degree of care and understanding. Many Nigerian diasporans aren't happy to be abroad, but I'm sure thousands of doctors in Nigeria would rather choose to emigrate to anywhere than witness their wives and children abducted.

Chielozona

Chielozona Eze

Professor, African Literature and Cultural Studies, Northeastern Illinois University; Extraordinary Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.Fellow - Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze

www.Chielozona.com

My latest book: Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa.

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