posted
WHy is this man so into nigeria politics? He was all into that Chicago State BS and here he goes again.
From Thisday news:
Dateline: 03/04/2002 00:09:51
Why North Regrets Investing in Obasanjo - Ali Mazrui From Etim Imisim in Abuja
quote: Kenyan-born and US-based sch He concluded that the North's real problem was not Obasanjo but the global economic arrangement that is driving Nigeria's development, which Obasanjo was helping to impliment. The concept of global village is what is fueling Sharia in Nigeria, he said, noting and forces of globalisation such as privatisation which is driving economic development in Nigeria was not working very well for the North and that this was the reason the North regretted having invested in Obasanjo.
quote:He contended that "There are more muslims in Black Africa than in the Middle East" and that Nigeria has the largest concentration of muslim population in the world, more than any single country in the Arabic world, including Egypt. The North therefore was suspicious of the Western influence which drove globalization and modern econmic development that put the region in a disadvantaged position and pitted it against the non-muslim South.
Kenyan-born and US-based scholar, Professor Ali Mazrui, has attributed the rise of Sharia in Nigeria and the present sour relationship between President Olusegun Obasnajo and the North to the process of globalisation and market forces driving the country's economic processes.
He spoke yesterday in Washington DC and was videoconferenced in Abuja, Harare and Accra. The programme was organised by the Africa Publishing Initiative (API) and sponsored by the World Bank Office of the Publisher and the World Bank/IMF Africa Club in Washington.
Nigerians in Abuja and Washington dominated the discourse; out of five questions asked in the US capital, three came from Nigerians. One came from Professor Jibrin Aminu, the Nigeria's Ambassador in the US and the other from Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian and the Director of the world Bank for Middle East and North African Country Department of the World Bank in Washington. Okonjo-Iweala is a former adviser to Obasanjo.
Mazrui said that Sharia was an agent that was capable of bring discipline into national life in Nigeria but Okonjo-Iweala countered that this tended to be selective. Also, to the implied meaning that Sharia was a force for social mobilisation, aminu said that Nigerian elites had in the past manipulated the populace for selfish purposes. From Abuja, in response to Mazrui's claim that privatisation did not favour the poor in Nigeria, Dr. Oyinlola Olaniyi, the head of the Economic Department of the University of Abuja, said that the programme was inclusive as the local governments were a part of it.
Mazrui wondered whether the North had gained as it hoped it would by backing Obsanjo in the 1999 election. "Was Obasnajo a good politcal investment for the North?" Mazrui asked. He concluded that the North's real problem was not Obasanjo but the global economic arrangement that is driving Nigeria's development, which Obasanjo was helping to impliment. The concept of global village is what is fueling Sharia in Nigeria, he said, noting and forces of globalisation such as privatisation which is driving economic development in Nigeria was not working very well for the North and that this was the reason the North regretted having invested in Obasanjo.
Mazrui observed that the spin off of globalisation and the Structural Adjustment Progra-mme (SAP) imposed on Africa and the country by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were reshaping the political environment in the continent and the country. Specifically, he said that globalisation and SAP were bringing out the primordial instincts in ethnic nationalities in the world, especially in the developing world, incuding Africa and Nigeria. He said the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in September 11 has hastened the process.
He said that the rise of the Sharia in the North was not an indication of the hatred and distrust that the region harboured against the rest of the country, but that it was the natural reaction of a typical muslim population against Western influence.
He contended that "There are more muslims in Black Africa than in the Middle East" and that Nigeria has the largest concentration of muslim population in the world, more than any single country in the Arabic world, including Egypt. The North therefore was suspicious of the Western influence which drove globalization and modern econmic development that put the region in a disadvantaged position and pitted it against the non-muslim South.
He argued that this meant that, with Sharia, the North was on a quest for ethnic identity and that the situation was not peculiar to the region, noting that the both the East and the West were in their own fashions also pursuing the same agenda. he insisted that the East was drifting towards confederation while the West pursued an agenda of ethnic identity.(emphasis, mine)
He said that there were regional differences than class differences in Nigeria. It was his view that Nigerian intellectuals had tried to analyse the federal strucure in the country but had not gone far enough in the exercise to balance the entrepreneural wealth of the South with that of the North.
He noted that the federal character policy was a form of "affirmative" action to redress the inbalance but doubted that
Mazrui said that Westernization through globalisation and SAP had aided the economic development of the South while the North, which was less receptive to Western influence was being left behind.
He analysed Nigeria's polity further saying that when compared to other regions in the country that, in political terms, the North had real "alternative skill" but that "in the case of Chief MKO Abiola, that the North were perhaps clever by half".
He compared the situation in the country to those in Ghana, Sudan and Uganda in Africa and the Chinese and Malay communities in Asia. He said the South of Sudan was beginning to lead in resources although real entrereneural skill resided in the North.
Professor Ali Mazuri lied through his rotten and kola nut tinged teeth when he stated that: "Nigeria has the largest concentration of muslim population in the world." This is a shameless and terrible lie/fraud unbecoming of a scholar of his standing. What about Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India with each having a population of more than 120 million muslims?
Please anyone who has the time should quickly file a strong rebuttal of his false and fruadulent assertion and claim. This should be widely distributed.
I am too busy at the moment. I would have offered to take him up. Please this is very important as his sympathy on the issue is very clear. We must act fast.
___________________ ON Posts: 136 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
The first time I heard about this Ali Mazrui guy was three years ago when I saw a re-run of the series "The Africans," which he hosted on PBS. Since then, Ali Mazrui has become a mouthpiece for Sharia in BiafraNigeria. Considering that Mazrui is from Kenya, why is he not striving to establish Sharia in his own country? Do his people not need to respond to the triple “evil “of imperialism, westernization, and globalization?
And when Mazrui says that "the federal character policy was a form of "affirmative" action to redress the imbalance, why doesn't he go further and tell us what the South did to the North to create the imbalance? Did the South enslave the North – the same way that White America enslaved Black America?
Aside from the obvious falsehood that Mazrui is peddling regarding the number of Muslims in BiafraNigeria and my own concern that the notion of “entrepreneural wealth” is a dubious new parameter upon which to found agitation for affirmative action, for Mazrui to demand that we "balance the entrepreneural wealth of the South with that of the North" is like asking the United States to balance its wealth with that of Bangladesh. That is how different Biafrans (if not all Southerners) are from Northerners.
Why do these imbalances still exist when northerners have controlled the country for as long as they have? Besides, is entrepreneurship a quality that one develops for another? Why doesn’t Mazrui also demand that we balance the intellectual wealth of the South with that of the North? Perhaps he fails to see imbalance in intellectual wealth to be the source of the ancillary imbalance in “entrepreneural wealth” of which he complains.
We need to dissolve BiafraNigeria so that people, including these so-called intellectuals, can stop seeing everything through that BiafraNigerian prism that filters out reason and compels them to think of northern and southern BiafraNigeria as one viable polity.
___________________ No Biafran will be permitted to play Mother Theresa to the Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani, but play Osama Bin Laden to the Igbo or Biafrans! Posts: 1182 | Registered: Mar 2001
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