United States not our friend

By Oladele Osunbote

I wish to urge President Umaru Yar’Adua to be very careful with the United States of America. If he must deal with the US, it must be at arm’s length. Being in this attitude should not be seen as an act of cowardice, but a measure of wisdom. He cannot be too close to the US. This tact is now expedient in order to protect our sovereignty. The fact that the US is the biggest buyer of the Nigerian crude oil is not enough for the president to open all doors for the US. I must insist that the powers of nations are dependent on the volume or number of secrets they can tactically prevent from the prying eyes of political and industrial espionage. Foreign diplomacy seems to be inseparable from international trade but it is possible for the Yar’Adua government to draw the thick red line which must not be crossed.

Obasanjo government of yesterday went too far with the United States. At one point, I thought that the US had recolonised Nigeria. Obasanjo government signed a military pact with the United States and at the time that was done, the intelligent Nigerians protested. Obasanjo would not be a respecter of public opinion, and he was the wisest man on earth. Today, one has seen how great his wisdom was. Some less intelligent generation said that he brought the US military because he wanted to prevent military coup. If there was to be any real military coup, the presence of the US military personnel would not prevent it. The Nigerian military institution has graduated to become highly disciplined and moralised. The Nigerian military is willingly and consciously accepted the supremacy and legitimacy of the civil political power. Any pact with the US which gives it such involvement and relevance with our military institution is unintelligent, rash, reckless, untenable and unacceptable. Every nation in the world has the hidden powers but as we know it, Obasanjo did so much to expose the nation almost to the point of treason. Obasanjo govenrment went so ridiculously low to the point of running Nigeria like a state in the US. Many projects which received his signature were American concepts. It is dangerous for President Yar’Adua to allow this to continue.

Nigeria does not need any partnership with the US in combating all the crimes which occur within the borders of Nigeria. The performances of the NDLA and EFCC are better than the way the US is fighting these crimes because most of these crimes have their root and origin in the US. America cannot teach us how to fight corruption. There is terrible corruption in the US too and this evil was exported to other countries by the United States. There are terrible violence in the US more than any nation. There are about one million gang criminals in the US and during 2005 alone about ten thousand Americans were murdered by gang groups in Los-Angeles alone. Money laundering is more in the US more than any nation. America is the home of dangerous drugs. Racism is still in the US and AIDS started from the US and all America’s unholy efforts to restrict the origin of AIDS to Africa have been thwarted. Very soon, Africa will present a great statesmen who will teach his US how to manage another greater power is about to take over from it but since it is a spiritual matter people cannot see it for now. From the days of the wars in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia to the present wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, the antecedents of the US have portrayed it as a terrorist nation. Any nation which mistakingly get too close to the US will regret in the end. America is busy looking for the spoils of war. When the US causes a conflict, it will again be invited to preside on the round-table conference for peace.

During 2006, about forty billion dollars of Iraq money was expended on spurious projects by the influential US personalities. The Inquiry on the scandal has not produced any answer to the many questions raised. The US went to Iraq to steal, plunder, maim, and to destroy the land. The whole world knows the face and character of America. US arms, bombs, and treachery are regularly sold to the world. In the recent times, more than thirty billion dollars or arms, bombs, have been sold through the back door to the Middle-East, particularly Israel, Somalia, Sudan and other places. The peoples who purchased the arms were free to go ahead and decimate their populations. The arms smugglers that were arrested were not prosecuted because they were working for the US. America is fighting terrorism and is searching for terrorists everyday but I know that terrorism shall end whenever the US stop being a terrorist.

America should be asked and be forced to swear to the oath of peace in the world by other world powers. The world is fortunate that not only the US alone is having the nuclear bombs and also not the NATO nations alone. There is peace because other great nations outside the NATO countries are having greater nuclear capability and can explode within the shortest notice. The US manufactures the space related weapons because in June, 2006, conference on disarmament, the US claimed that its military and commercial satellites were under threats from other countries. Its war machines and submarines are strategically positioned round the whole world. Neither Israel nor the Palestine, and neither the Talibans nor Misbolla is the terrorist.

The US is the terrorist. Its CIA is involved as secret violence against the innocent people by way of horrendition and other methods. In 1976, the US destroyed the Alende socialist project in Chile and sponsored the coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet, the murderer who ruled Chile for seventeen years during which over three thousand innocent citizens of Chile were murdered. Pinochet died at 93 in 2006 and was buried without state honour. During the Nigerian civil war, July 1967 to January 15, 1970, the US supported the disintegration of Nigeria. But the USSR supported Nigeria. President Putin of Russia said at the international Diplomatic Negotiation of 10 February, 2007, that the US had crossed the national borders in terms of war, economics, and humanitarian efforts in the way which was encouraging arms race in the world, and therefore, nations were aspiring to acquire atomic weapons.

Osunbote, a public analyst, lives in Ibadan.