Elm Smith on Kennedy

“If it had been my call to make, the political legacy of Edward M. Kennedy would have ended at Chappaquiddick… But the words that come to mind for me as I consider his second-chance legacy are the words he used to describe why he had backed Barack Obama for president…Obama, Kennedy said, is a man ‘who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past.’”

Dear friends,

On the link below is a piece by the incomparable Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News, regarding the recent passing of Senator Edward Kennedy. I must say: I couldn't have said it bnetter than Elm has. Enjoy!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/55293337.html
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Sandy Banks on Poverty and Utopia?

"Penny stared at her with raised eyebrows, uncharacteristically silent. Twenty-four years in the projects and she had yet to consider all of its possibilities..."

c Dear friends.

It is easy to understand why luxury is a vice. Yet, its opposite, that is, poverty, can be a vice as well. Moreover, with poverty as a vice, people are often left to being content with their oppression. We witnessed this during the Katrina fiasco where we saw people running out of department stores into the streets, with water up to their hips, holding stolen televisions, as they grinned into TV news cameras. Meanwhile, simultaneously, others who were just as immersed in water as their television-carrying cohorts had several pairs each of expensive sneakers hanging around their necks that they had stolen, gawking the same way into the news cameras (vice). Where were these folks going to plug in the televisions or walk in the sneakers?

In any case, on the link below is a piece written by the exceptional Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks that, although incredibly penned, seems troubling, at least to me, because the alleged vision of what seems to be a community’s future only reveals the fact that they are not a “community” at all (barred windows and doors, and so forth). Rather, many of the people in the story are those who have lived in poverty for generations and appear to have no desire, much less concept, of what it would mean to use their inner and outer powers of energy, physical and mental stamina, concentration, memory, and so many other strengths that will allow them to join in with their fellows and create a loving and prosperous environment in which to live and grow, without needing a great deal of outside aid. Instead, they act as if someone “owes” them something and waiting for a handout (more vice). Still, Sandy, an accomplished and established veteran words the predicament in a way that makes the whole reading experience involving this situation not just palatable, but thought-provoking as well. Enjoy!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jordandowns22-2009aug22,0,7348179.column
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Dr. Ndibe on Real-life African Folklore

"The Igbo have this cautionary tale about the perils of royal hubris. It concerns a man named Eze Onyeagwanam – roughly translated as: 'King let nobody tell me'..."

“Let nobody tell me!”

By Okey Ndibe

The Igbo have this cautionary tale about the perils of royal hubris. It concerns a man named Eze Onyeagwanam – roughly translated as: “King let nobody tell me.” This royal personage is credited with combining disastrous decisions with hectoring pride. If anybody sought to persuade the king against treading some ruinous path, the king screamed: “Don’t tell me!”

In time, the king’s aides learned to keep their counsel to themselves. Even when the king took a manifestly foolish step, his hapless advisors assured him that his action was the paragon of wisdom.

There are different accounts of how the king came to grief. Here’s my favorite: One day, the king set out for the marketplace. He was stark naked, in a drunken revelry. As he strode to his destination, none of his scandalized subjects dared warn him about his flapping manhood. The imperious man stunned onlookers when he finally arrived at the market.

It was one scandal too many for his subjects. Acting swiftly, they deposed the man and led him away to an asylum – where he spent the rest of his days among other deranged habitués.

Lately, I have been thinking about the undeniable connection between Eze Onyeagwanam’s legend and Nigeria’s crop of crass leaders. Nigeria appears cursed, not with one, but a multitude of Eze Onyeagwanams. Morally and ethically naked men and women dominate the country’s public space, but pass themselves off as lavishly dressed.

Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an Abuja stop as part of her 11-day tour to a number of African countries. Even before she arrived in Africa’s most populous – and most grandly disappointing – nation, the American media were speculating that she would speak candidly about Nigeria’s woes, especially corruption and record-setting history of fraudulent elections.

Mrs. Clinton lived up to the billing. At a town hall meeting in Abuja, she spoke in a manner that was uncharacteristically direct for a chief diplomat. “The most immediate source of the disconnect between Nigeria’s wealth and its poverty,” she said, was “a failure of governance at the federal, state and local levels.” In a country where militancy has become the disorder of the day, the American secretary stated that “Lack of transparency and accountability has eroded the legitimacy of the government and contributed to the rise of groups that embrace violence and reject the authority of the state.”

In speaking so directly, Mrs. Clinton gave Nigeria’s rulers (yes, they rule, but don’t know a thing about leading) a taste of what President Barack Obama thinks of them. Obama riled Nigeria’s rulers when he snubbed them and instead visited neighboring Ghana in July.

Mrs. Clinton took a swipe at Mr. Umaru Yar’Adua’s non-record in the fight against corruption. Her verdict on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was unflattering. “The EFCC, which was doing well, has kind of fallen off in the last one year,” she said. “We will like to see it come back to business to be able to partner with us.”

Her dour and – going by the enthusiastic applause she got – accurate portrait of Nigeria elicited the laughable pledge by Yar’Adua to continue combating corruption.

Once Mrs. Clinton left Nigeria, the Eze Onyeagwanam impulse was activated. Officials of Nigeria’s ruling party assured that nothing was amiss in Nigeria. David Mark, who presides over a high-priced but largely sleeping Senate, echoed that sentiment. A man who left a career in the military with amazing wealth, Mr. Mark told reporters that Mrs. Clinton’s take on Nigeria was misconceived. Where she abhorred Nigeria’s wishy-washy elections, the senator argued, “We will decide for ourselves what we want as our democratic system.” And the kind of system “we” have chosen is one where the ruling party captures any states and posts that catch its fancy, regardless of what the voters say!

Mark, a beneficiary of a questionable election, asked with a straight face: “What is the problem with the [Nigerian] electoral system?” For him, Mrs. Clinton’s statement that Nigerians lack a credible register of voters arose from her inadequate education. “That is the sort of thing we get ourselves into when we don’t educate those we ought to,” he bemoaned. Had the US Secretary attended Mr. Mark’s classroom, she would have learned that “This country is a sovereign nation, Nigerians belong to Nigerians and we would decide for ourselves the way we want to move ourselves forward.”

How exactly are Mr. Mark and co moving their nation forward? Here’s a sample. New Inspector General of Police Ogbonnaya Onovo has asked the legislature to empower the police to shoot during elections. Does anybody in her or his wildest imagination foresee the police shooting supporters of the ruling party? Mr. Maurice Iwu, who oversees Nigeria’s infamous brand of elections, recently stated that only the military can conduct credible elections. As I sat down to write, news came that veteran actor and broadcaster, Pete Edochie, had been kidnapped in Anambra.

That’s a portrait of Mr. Mark’s country marching forward into perdition.
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Is Single-Payer Health Insurance “Disruptive”, as President Obama insists?

"Mr. President, considering your response to the suggestion of single-payer health insurance, it was very “disruptive” to scores of millions of individuals, including owners/managers of businesses and other economic, political, and social institutions for a Black man who had a good chance of winning to run for the nation’s highest office, so why did you continue running?"

Is Single Payer Health Insurance “Disruptive”?

President Obama says it is. That brings the question, at least to me: Mr. President, considering your response to the suggestion of single-payer health insurance, it was very “disruptive” to scores of millions of individuals, including owners/managers of businesses and other economic, political, and social institutions, for a Black man who had a good chance of winning to run for the nation’s highest office, so why did you continue running?

Meanwhile, many citizens, especially Republicans, complain about not wanting “too much government”. To be sure, such a protestation is quite dubious, since it is precisely the threat capability of the government’s police and military forces that allow the former to be able to accumulate any measure of wealth in the first place. Moreover, without the aforementioned threat capability of the government’s power how would the wealthy be able to stop others from taking their fortunes?

Finally, at least to me, those who have way more ducats than the rest of us should pay far greater taxes as they relate to percentages of incomes, because they have so much more to lose. Otherwise, the wealthy are being even further subsidized than they already are by their fellow citizens who are of middle class and lower-middle class incomes, since the latter make far less use of airports and other facilities - whether for business or pleasure, that rely so heavily upon government funding. Let’s get real!

G. Djata Bumpus
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Dr. Ndibe on Problems and Solutions for Nigeria

"A permanent solution to the malaise in the delta, as well as the broader breakdown of law and order in the nation, lies in pursuing an agenda of accelerated economic development, the restoration of wholesome values, and humanization of the Nigerian space.,,"

"The real amnesty "

By Okey Ndibe

Last week, a correspondent of Radio France International hunted me down in Toulouse, France, where I was making a short visit to relatives. The reporter sought my opinion about Umaru Yar’Adua’s amnesty for militants in the Niger Delta. Did I think, he asked, that the gesture was going to address the festering violence in Nigeria’s oil-rich hub?

My short answer was no. It doesn’t take the gift of clairvoyance to realize that Yar’Adua’s amnesty, however well meaning, is akin to using paper to cover deep cracks in a wall. Sooner or later – in fact, sooner than later – the cracks will show once again.

Yar’Adua’s amnesty, I told the reporter, does little to fix the underlying causes of the crisis in the Niger Delta. These causes include decades of economic injustice, the ecological devastation of the area, and the shortsighted employment of military power to dispose of legitimate agitation for reparation. Add to the mix the irresponsible recruitment and arming of the area’s jobless thugs by rogue politicians – most of them members of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party – and what emerges is a perfect recipe for social combustion.

A permanent solution to the malaise in the delta, as well as the broader breakdown of law and order in the nation, lies in pursuing an agenda of accelerated economic development, the restoration of wholesome values, and humanization of the Nigerian space. Violence is, in the end, the recourse of desperate, hopeless, or broken people. Sadly, Nigeria has become a factory that mass-produces desperate, hopeless and broken citizens.

Are Yar’Adua and his cohorts doing anything to reverse this trend, to ameliorate the brutish conditions under which Nigerians writhe and seethe? Here again, the answer is no. Are they capable of envisioning a transformed Nigeria? Yet again, no.

There are a few exceptional figures in Nigeria’s public life. For the most part, however, the nation is in the hands of wretched pretenders, flight-by-night mediocrities and contemptible usurpers whose mission is to gorge on the public trough. These men and women are so daft that they hardly realize how perilously close they have brought the nation to the edge of unspeakable disaster.

Yar’Adua is a shadow of the kind of visionary leader that Nigeria needs, and urgently. The man doesn’t come across as understanding the depths of the crisis in which the nation is embroiled.

Far from grasping the nature and scope of the nation’s challenge and the rudiments of social engineering required to turn things around, he has at every turn exacerbated the crisis.

His coddling of the nation’s corrupt league is nothing short of scandalous. It’s still open to debate whether his amnesty to the delta’s militants was a success at any level. But there’s no question that his rule has entailed a bounty of amnesty to those who stole Nigeria to penury over the last ten years.

Under his watch, former occupants of public office who once dreaded the prospect of prosecution by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission have regained their swagger. Confident in Yar’Adua’s harmlessness, men and women who amassed illicit wealth by betraying the public trust have since crawled out of their cocoons. They’ve taken to strutting the stage in obscene pride.

The real beneficiaries of Yar’Adua’s undeclared (but more real) amnesty are his former gubernatorial colleagues lifted into cabinet positions in his regime, despite the existence of massive dossiers of their culpability in money laundering. Other profiteers from Yar’Adua’s amnesty are past and current office holders who have been spared fear of the consequences of corrupt acts. In the current dispensation, few undertakings are as safe and sanction-free as graft and money laundering.

Herein, then, lies Yar’Adua’s albatross. If he wishes to reduce militancy and de-criminalize the Niger Delta, then it behooves him to show a comprehensive distaste for corruption, a crime that acts as manure for the violence and instability in the Niger Delta. You can’t be fraternizing with high-intensity criminals like corrupt ex-governors and be preaching to militants and relatively low-grade criminals to disarm. Disarm for what? To watch in stupefaction as politicians fritter their resources?

Yar’Adua’s policies and his body language do not bespeak a man who wishes to lift a finger in anger at his corrupt fellows. Knowing that about the man, one can confidently aver – as I told my French radio interviewer – that the amnesty plan was dead on arrival.
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