Historicizing the Soft Racism in Campbell’s Pro-Buhari Image Laundering

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Historicizing the Soft Racism in Campbell’s Pro-Buhari Image Laundering

Today's back-page column in the Saturday Tribune features my short take on the Malami/Magu drama and a sumptuous, thought-provoking guest column by Professor Moses Ochonu of Vanderbilt University on Dr. John Campbell's rhetoric on Nigeria. Enjoy:

By Moses E. Ochonu, Guest columnist

Last week, Farooq Kperogi’s Saturday Tribune column compellingly debunked Ambassador John Campbell’s coy defense of President Buhari and his inner circle against credible allegations of corruption. Kperogi demonstrated that, contrary to Campbell’s claims, neither Buhari nor members of his inner circle are free of the stain of corruption.

I do not intend to re-litigate what Kperogi has analyzed persuasively. Instead I’d like to extend his analysis by establishing that there is a historical pattern to Ambassador Campbell’s pro-Buhari treatise, and that the man has a history of using his platform and perch at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) to propagate a pro-Buhari agenda rooted in a deeper discourse tradition.

Take Campbell’s recent claim on Buhari’s austerity and the absence of a credible allegation of corruption against Buhari, for instance. This is a recycling of a claim Campbell made in a CFR video posted to YouTube on June 1, 2015, in which he stated that Buhari “has never been tarred by credible allegations of corruption.”

In the same video, Campbell claims that prior to 2015, Buhari lost elections in questionable circumstances, insinuating that in the previous elections of 2003, 2007, and 2011, Buhari could and should have won. This, of course, betrays Campbell’s ignorance of Nigeria’s recent presidential electoral dynamics, which, prior to 2015, marooned Buhari to his northern Muslim base as an unviable provincial candidate incapable of winning national electoral contests. 

This pro-Buhari disposition has now morphed into pro-regime activism, activating in Campbell an impulse to attack and discredit Buhari’s critics. This, in turn, is grounded in a paternalistic zeal to protect and defend the regime from what he sees as the criticism of traducers.

One thing is discernible in Campbell’s writings on Nigeria: He believes that southern Nigerians are out to get Buhari, the allegedly honest, austere Muslim president. That’s the context in which he made the recent claim that widespread corruption in Buhari’s inner circle “is a widely held trope in Southern Nigeria.” 

 

There is a method and a pattern to Campbell’s proverbial madness.

The former ambassador projects himself as a friend of the Northern ruling class, of which Buhari is the present embodiment, and advances himself as a paternal defender of the North. 

In a March 2015 lecture, he attempted to answer the question of “where did Boko Haram come from?” by repeating the discredited claim that Boko Haram was a Northern protest against bad governance and corruption!

Similarly, in 2014, he signed a letter to then US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, urging her not to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, a move now widely considered ill-advised at best and catastrophic at worst.

At the heart of Campbell’s commentaries on Nigerian affairs then is a pro-regime loyalty that is part of a broader public intellectual profile that purports to protect the North from allegedly unfair Southern Nigerian and international actions and narratives. 

Accordingly, Campbell seeks to delegitimize criticisms of Buhari’s incompetence, corruption, nepotism, and provincialism by ascribing malicious and primordial motives to them. In Campbell’s simplistic terms, a critique of Buhari’s failures is a plot by “Christian” Southern Nigerians and their Western sympathizers to get at the Muslim North through Buhari.

Every opportunity he gets he burnishes this public persona of defender of Buhari and the North. Writing in The Atlantic in June 2011, Campbell and Asch Harwood claimed that then President Goodluck Jonathan’s “outreach to the North has so far been disappointing.” 

They were suggesting that Jonathan had been unfair to the North in appointments, a dangerous rhetoric that stoked the grievances of the North against Jonathan, a Southerner, and exacerbated Nigeria’s regional and religious fissures. What’s more, it was not even factual, given how inclusive Jonathan’s administration was in comparison to Buhari’s clannish and unprecedentedly nepotistic regime.

If Campbell’s hypotheses about Southern Nigerian assault on the North and a Northern president sounds conspiratorial, that’s because it is. Not only are Northerners now fed up with Buhari’s failures and not only are they some of his most vocal critics, the idea that there is a Southern Nigerian trope of Buhari’s corruption and incompetence flies in the face of the mess that Buhari has made of Nigeria, a fact which enjoys pan-Nigerian currency and provenance.

Campbell has always postured as a “friend” of the North, but northerners do not need those who condescendingly defend the current corruption and incompetence, of which they are the primary victims. 

Either Campbell harbors animus against Southern Nigeria or his is an incorrigible impulse to defend a North that can and does defend itself robustly. The last thing the North needs at this time is some foreign “expert” telling them that Buhari, who has failed to protect their lives and treasure, is an honest, austere leader who is being maligned by Southern Nigerians.

What are the historical and ideological antecedents of this pro-Northern pretensions?

For those of us who study Northern Nigerian history for a living, Campbell’s attitude and commentaries reveal and recall the British colonial attitude of patronizingly extolling the "authentic Islamic and African" virtues of northerners while denigrating southerners as troublesome, rabble-rousing radicals who were allegedly corrupted and separated from the restraining influence of African culture by Western education and worldly ambitions. Campbell is still operating in that avuncular colonial racist frame.

In colonial times, Frederick Lugard and other British colonial officials barred Christian missionaries from setting up schools in the Muslim North. They regularly discussed the need to protect northern Muslims from the alleged dangers of unbridled Western education and from the contagion and criticism of the Southern Nigerian intelligentsia. They were determined to protect the North, a region they “loved” because they claimed it had order, authority, and hierarchy.

Their alliance with Northern emirs and aristocrats further intensified this determination to protect the North from both Western modernity and Western-educated Southerners. The effect of that policy and that colonial attitude exists today in the Western educational gap between North and South.

Colonial officials would lash out at Southern Nigerians who criticized the failures and rapaciousness of the Northern aristocratic and political classes. They would in turn venerate the North and its aristocracy. 

This was a paternalistic racism that infantilized Northern Nigerians, making them out to be naïve, impressionable, vulnerable, and contaminable children who should be protected from the influence and attacks of Southern Nigerians. 

Colonialists were not “protecting” Northern Nigerians because they were less racist towards them but because the North’s sharply stratified society was more amenable to their rule than the South.

This is the historical colonial discourse that Ambassador Campbell is resurrecting. Campbell’s pro-North and pro-Buhari pronouncements are the postcolonial iteration of this colonial avuncular racism. 

Today, this project grows out of several impulses. One of them is white liberal guilt and the accompanying desire to protect supposed Muslim victims of an alleged Western and local Christian Islamophobic conspiracy. 

The other motivation is what scholars of Africa call the white savior complex, a phenomenon in which liberal white “experts” feigning sympathy and empathy for Africans are always looking for vulnerable African groups to “save” and “protect” as a do-good, feel-good endeavor to assuage their conscience. 

The third motivation is what is called the soft bigotry of low expectations, a benign, sometimes well-intentioned, racism in which a Western actor considers African interlocutors to be so incapable that he/she believes that it is better to hold them to a lower standard of leadership, ability, and performance than one would impose on a white person or a black person considered “white” in character, skill, and learning.

Campbell’s insistence on defending Buhari’s incompetent and corrupt regime and on ignoring Northerners who have demonstrated the ability to fight their own battles and hold their kinsman president accountable shows clearly that he is operating in this patronizing neocolonial mode.

Ochonu, Professor of African History and Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, can be reached at meoc...@gmail.com 

Malami/Magu Drama Isn’t Worth My Time

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

People have asked for my thoughts on the ongoing drama between Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami and suspended EFCC chairman Ibrahim Magu. My opinion it is isn’t worth anybody’s time.

 When a fundamentally dishonest and morally tainted dissembler like Malami is tormenting a dizzyingly featherbrained fraudster like Magu who pretends to be fighting corruption but who is actually steeped in unimaginable sleaze, why should that bother me? I have no dog in the dog-eat-dog food fight between two dogged scammers.

Anyone who takes a moment to listen to Magu would know that the man has neither the intellectual preparedness nor the moral stamina to understand, much less police, corruption. He is no more than a remote-controllable poodle of his benefactors. He barks only when his remote controllers command him to— and looks away when he’s told to.

 In other words, Magu is a classic metaphoric police dog whose loyalty is only to his handlers. When police dogs are old, unhelpful, or injured, they’re retired and replaced with another one. It is supremely symbolic that all EFCC honchos are, by law, police officers.

 The next EFCC police dog won’t be different from the previous one. So don’t expect Mohammed Umar, the new acting EFCC chairman—or whoever replaces him— to be different from Magu.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

What’s the song and dance about?

One again I’m compelled to preface what I have to say by referencing Man Friday’s relationship to Her Majesty’s English as was quoted by J. M. Coetzee in the preface to his 2003 Nobel Lecture in Literature:

He and His Man

But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was.

— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

It is not an inescapable colonial legacy, but it is the same kind of convenient language utility – utility of language and some of the attendant chest-beating and often unwarranted braggadocio about that kind of aptest scholarship that is the fate of British post-colonial Africa, and the subject matter of this response.

 British post-colonial Africa is a broad sweep  - everyone here and out there is included, although – and there’s lots of evidence of this, that the pomp and circumstantial/utilitarian usefulness of Her Majesty’s lingo is most excruciatingly true of post-colonial Nigeria,  more accurately post-Nobel laureate Soyinka’s distinguished Swedish Academy Award – and the pernicious effects that Nigeria’s premier man of letters as the chosen role-model and inspiration is still exerting on his disciples, followers, imitators, mimic-men and others who dedicate their lives to following in his linguistic footsteps, to the irritation of others and that includes someone as humble and as nondescript as myself, therefore the irritation when condescension wants to ascribe to me  a conscious or unconscious discipleship that I do not aspire to accept - not even as a left-hand compliment – since neither Soyinka nor Achebe has influenced me that much; as Mr Soyinka himself told me in 1979  before he boarded the bus to Arlanda, in Stockholm, when I promised him the Nobel Prize would soon be in his prized possession and he humbly replied, “ I also have my favourites” ( for the prize )  - just as my favourites are many – and that’s why I cringe at the thought of anyone unnecessarily  being “complicatingly Soyinka-like” and of course, in that case, would much prefer the ”soothingly Achebeic”.

From, the pantheon of English Literature – and this is between me and my conscience, there are a great many other candidates to choose from and personally, deserting Orwell, I should prefer to wrest someone as uncomplicatedly and uncompromisingly straightforward and  as simple as Bertrand Russell who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950,  I guess mostly for the genre known as autobiography to which Wole Soyinka and Toyin Falola are no later, strangers. As to  simplicity of style and diction, Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy  which I read in both my first and final year philosophy class, speaks for itself, to the extent that even a twelve-year-old Swede who has English as a foreign language can read and understand everything he says there – whereas if an over-ambitious  Soyinka disciple with or without a philosophical brain or some big grammar persona of the baga-baga tribe were to cover the same subject matter then the whole thing  (Russell’s The Problems of  Philosophy)  would be irretrievably made more deliberately complicated by their own personal – oh so personal big grammar  by the time they were through with their latest attempt at making Her Majesty’s English and themselves Great Again  - in the eyes of both their intellectual minions and superiors.

Good conscience, simplicity and depth of thought come together in this sentence from Oga Olusegun Obasanjo, my Egba brother and pastor who said,

 “God will never forgive me if I support Atiku for President”

That was some direct, uncomplicated straight talk.

I have not distributed my time unwisely (as in an exam where time flies fast before you’ve got to 2^nd of the five points you have in mind.)  The above preamble is to this one simple thing that I want to point out, and it’s from the very first paragraph  of Moses Ochonu’s “Historicizing the Soft Racism in Campbell’s Pro-Buhari Image Laundering” – I have read no further than the first paragraph  and what he says there really stabbed me in the eye. I don’t need to read further to emphasise the point I’m making if the drift that follows is subordinated to Ochonu’s opening paragraph.

First of all, Kperogi did not in any way whatsoever “debunk” what Ambassador John Campbell said, therefore any praise-singing verses that Kperogi “compellingly debunked” that which was not debunkable or debunked, is mere wishful thinking is superfluous, unnecessary, untrue, and unsubstantiated.

Ambassador John Campbell merely issued a simple statement of fact:

“Nigerian Media’s Unsubstantiated Claims that U.S. Agencies Investigating Corruption by Buhari's Inner Circle”

 In simple, straightforward English Ambassador John Campbell informs us that the Department of State or the Department of Justice does not usually say that there is an investigation underway, and in this case has certainly not done so.

He adds, very cautiously, that,

“President Muhammadu Buhari appears to have little personal interest in money, lives simply, and is rarely accused of personal corruption. But that his inner circle is corrupt is a widely held trope in southern Nigeria. The upper reaches of his administration is almost entirely made up of Muslims from the north, often with personal connections to the president. In a country where it is commonly believed that half of the population is Christian and half is Muslim, the overwhelmingly Muslim character of the Buhari government encourages those opposed to the president, especially among Christians in the south, to believe that his inner circle is corrupt.”

This is what Messer Kperogi and Ochonu want to make a song and dance about, in another futile round or merry-go-round, no doubt trying to make another mountain out of their molehill – in fulfilment of what Baba Kadiri told me, that Kperogi is fond or trying to make chickens our of chicken feathers. Cheers!

Seal: Crazy

 To be continued

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Continued:

I am also reacting to the same document by Ambassador Campbell that I read – and read between the lines.

I still haven’t read beyond Ochonu’s first paragraph which is a response to Ambassador Campbell’s notice, but will do so after I post this.

I don’t know whether or not Messrs Kperogi & Ochonu’s concerted  two-pronged attack (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) is part of a general disenchantment with the Trump administration’s handling of the race issue in the United States and by extension what the paranoid  Kperogi & Ochonu intuit as a similar racist approach to the politics of corruption in President Trump’s  “shithole countries”, as the USA’s often crude, vulgar, foul-mouthed, hussy-grabbing President has thought fit to contemptuously refer to countries of the  African Continent and Diasporas.

In that case, it could be payback time from some of Africa’s irate intelligentsia and understandably  others among the disenchanted would like to join in given the slightest reason for doing so.  Otherwise, how can it be, that a simple statement simply made is no longer the truth, but has to be complicated, distorted, disparaged, and then attacked, abused, and accused ( of racism)?

 How can it be that a seasoned diplomat like Ambassador John Campbell points at a truth, a generally held, common perception and the brothers Kperogi & Ochonu should unwisely choose to diagnose it as “RACISM”?

Mind you I don’t refer Kp & Oc  as “ Bonnie & Clyde“, nor should we refer to them as The Brothers Karamazov  featuring the fictional return of Jesus, which should normally presage the end of all unrighteousness/ corruption and  a return to the normalcy that was the Garden of Eden. Ambassador John Campbell merely restated what is common knowledge in Nigeria and diaspora and for giving the innocent until proven guilty the benefit of the doubt he is now being tarred and feathered a “racist”.

But if Ambassador Campbell were to say just 1% of what the also, foul-mouthed Kperogi and his abysmally ignorant, geriatric vermin have said about President Buhari and many, many other prominent Nigerians, then, God forbid, the aforementioned Ambassador would have been roundly accused of “racism”.

So, there are things that Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka can say  what the heck they like about Nigerians and corruption without being accused of racism, but when an American diplomat says he doesn’t know, it’s a free for all to call him a racist?

In deference to diplomatic protocol even a former Swedish or Ghanaian or Danish Ambassador to Nigeria will not in any official capacity come out to openly state that such and such stinks of corruption. It would cause some offence. It could even be a violation of good manners or diplomatic hypocrisy.

 Please examine Ambassador Campbell’s statement once more and kindly point out whatever racism you think is on display there. Here is what he wrote:

Pointblank News is reporting that the U.S. Departments of State and Justice are investigating Sabiu 'Tunde' Yusuf, Sarki Abba, Mamman Daura, Ismaila Isa Funtua, and his son Abubakar Funtua for money laundering in the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. Most are members of Buhari's inner circle. Pointblank cites a figure of $800 million used to purchase real estate in the UK and the Gulf states.

The U.S. investigation, according to Pointblank News, is being conducted in cooperation with the United Kingdom through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty and the United Arab Emirates through the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which levies reporting requirements on, among others, foreign entities in which U.S. tax payers hold substantial ownership shares.

But there should be no rush to judgement. It is rare for the Department of State or the Department of Justice to say that there is an investigation underway, and neither has done so publicly. Reporting by Pointblank News has been questioned in the past. On the other hand, Sabiu 'Tunde' Yusuf is known to be very rich, and Nigerian money laundering in the Gulf and the United Kingdom is an old song. President Muhammadu Buhari appears to have little personal interest in money, lives simply, and is rarely accused of personal corruption. But that his inner circle is corrupt is a widely held trope in southern Nigeria. The upper reaches of his administration is almost entirely made up of Muslims from the north, often with personal connections to the president. In a country where it is commonly believed that half of the population is Christian and half is Muslim, the overwhelmingly Muslim character of the Buhari government encourages those opposed to the president, especially among Christians in the south, to believe that his inner circle is corrupt.   

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  ( to be continued )

[Okey Iheduru]

Moses:

Good job! This should give Mr. Campbell cause to retrace his ways.

You, however, omitted an important grudge Ambassador Campbell has against "Southern Nigerians." Following the publication of his book, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink (2010/2011) which predicted the implosion of Nigeria by 2015, the Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2011 blacklisted him and denied him visa to Nigeria (see below). He was so enraged that a Nigerian government run by "southern Nigerians" would deny him visa, so much that he flatly turned down an offer by a senior Northern Nigerian intelligence officer to intervene and reverse the visa denial for him. Unfortunately, Campbell was working in cahoots with some Lagos-based "journalists" who were feeding him with jaundiced information about the government at the time. Instructively, he concluded his last telephone conversations with this General with this remark: "They will regret." I know this very well; I was in Abuja at the time.

The story making the rounds in Abuja today is that "they matched his [Campbell's] price"! Given what was unearthed by the US Congressional impeachment committee about Ukraine, Gabon, etc. and Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, Trump's national security adviser, the folks in Abuja may be on to something.

Okey

Nigeria: Why We Denied Campbell Visa - Envoy

22 MAY 2011

Leadership (Abuja)

By Abiodun Oluwarotimi
22 May 2011

Washington, DC — The Nigerian Embassy in Washington DC has denied allegations that it denied a former United States envoy to Nigeria, Ambassador John Campbell, a Visitor's Visa as a result of his negative statements about the Federal Government of Nigeria.

Contrary to the feelings from some quarters, the Nigerian Embassy, through its ambassador, Prof. Adebowale Adefuye, has declared that the embassy did not give the former U.S envoy any negative treatment, stressing that the visa section of the Chancery has stipulated conditions which must be met before any visa could be granted to anybody.

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Nigeria: Ambassador John Campbell

US Ambassadors to Nigeria   (and to other countries) should be sufficiently well-staffed to have a good idea about what’s going on where they are posted.

Just because there is the myth that’s as old as the colonial days and still in circulation, that the Oyibo love the North and hate the South because the South is Christian and their eyes are wide open and can see, just like the Oyibo. Just because of that  we ought not to impute false, petty motives, fake news and other spurious, speculative, unsubstantiated claims when according to Ambassador John Campbell’s own 2012 blog post, “U.S. Government Never Predicted Nigeria Break Up in 2015”

Which does not mean to say that a host of Nigerian and non-Nigerian and un-Nigerian political scientists have not been busty over the years, predicting the precipitate fragmentation and sometimes the imminent peaceful or violent dissolution of the United States of Nigeria along the well-known fault lines of ethnicity, religion, resource allocation, corruption.

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[Moses Ochonu]

Okey, 

Thanks for posting this. I was not aware of this incident of visa denial. Reading his public commentaries, I always thought he had something against the South but I couldn’t put my finder on it. I knew that his eagerness to defend the north and his equal eagerness to criticize southerners probably also had something to do with a personal animus. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 11, 2020, at 8:01 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelberg...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

I think this piece is a finely written collegial support effort.

.Beyond that Campbell is being co -attacked for being friendly to an African president he had chosen to support for quite some time now and motives are being burnished to ridicule his support as patronising.

The same argument can be made against Frederick Forsyth for writing 'Emeka' in honour of the late Ikemba of Nnewi who led the Biafran forces in the Civil War and another volume on Theophilus Danjuma who murdered his commander in chief in cold blood like a mercenary rather than a professional officer in a regular national army.

The charge of aligning with an incompetent backward classed aristocratic North against westernised critical South neglects  the fact that most of the South have their aristocratic classes as well.

The charge of backwardness of  northern Nigeria because of the influence of Islam also flies in the face of the fact that university culture was given to the world (including the West ) by Islamic North Africa with the earliest world universities both in Fez Morocco and Al Azhar in Cairo in the 10 th century followed by Bologna and Oxford ( both in the West) in the 11th century.  

However what Campbell seems to be saying which did not come across effectively is the standard by which Buhari is being judged is that supported by the mostly westernized South ( this does not mean northerners dont support such standards but that they are ambivalent because of their Islamic background. )  Of course Moses Ochonu is one northerner who supports such standards and it is preposterous to suggest Campbell does not understand there are many Moses Ochonus (and  Farooq Kperogis) in northern Nigeria.

Are Moroccan and Egyptian Islamic societies suffering the same problems Moses Ochonu and Farooq Kperogi identify with northern Nigeria?  What accounts for the difference?  Islam?

Has Baba Kadiri on this forum not traced the origins of Boko Haram to bad governance?  Is Baba Kadiri a patronising white neo- colonialist?

Instead on dwelling on casuistry; instead of leaving the ball to kick the leg ;nstead of leaving the message to shoot the messenger have both Moses Ochonu and Farooq Kperogi provided the evidence to demonstrate the corrupt enrichment by the Buhari inner circle? Zilch!  Nada!

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Historicizing the Soft Racism in Campbell’s Pro-Buhari Image Laundering

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