A courtesy visit to sister publications Mmegi and The Monitor by the Nigerian High Commissioner to Botswana this
week revealed that Botswana can source oil from the West African giant on concessionary terms, writes DOUGLAS TSIAKO
Nigeria can take all of Botswana's cattle, the High Commissioner of Nigeria to Botswana, Charles Cocodia, said when he paid a courtesy call on Dikgang Publishing Company, the publishers of Mmegi and The Monitor newspapers, on Tuesday this week.
Ambassador Cocodia, who was accompanied by his Second Secretary, Ibrahim Yusuf, was received by the Editor of The Monitor, Kagiso Sekokonyane, and the News Editor of both newspapers, Douglas Tsiako, standing in for the Editor of Mmegi, Tshireletso Motlogelwa, who was attending to other matters.
In a convivial but constructive conversation that lasted two hours, the Nigerian ambassador and the two DPC editors covered a wide range of issues, among them education, mining, Botswana's beef industry and the Nigerian oil sector, football, as well as the potential threat of full blown insurrection posed by Boko Haram and its ideological godfathers at Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Cocodia said he had taken the opportunity of a diplomatic symposium in Gaborone recently to state that the decline in the quality of primary and secondary school results in Botswana in recent years should not be a cause for despair."The point is that investment in education takes time to percolate," Ambassador Cocodia said. "It's a long haul, and the funding must never cease."
He was proud to inform the editors of DPC that Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan had recently announced plans to build six new universities. "With more than 70 universities, including 36 state universities, you are talking superlative proportions in Nigeria," he said. "This is a country with 20 million primary schools, mind you."Nigeria took advantage of its first oil boom in the 1970s and invested heavily in tertiary education. While only the federal government and state governments held monopolies to operate universities, individuals, corporate bodies and religious organisations have recently been granted licences to do so but under the tutelage of the National Universities Commission whose major mandate is accreditation, enforcement of uniform standards and determination of admissions capacity.
"I would not be surprised if T. B. Joshua established a university," Cocodia said, referring to the Lagos-based world-famed faith healer of the Synagogue Church of All Nations that attracts thousands of pilgrims seeking cures from incubus visitations, terminal diseases, infertility and other ailments every day of the year.It was also at the height of the Nigerian oil boom that Nigeria hosted Black Africa and the African Diaspora's most expansive - and expensive - festival, FESTAC '77. OPEC had come of age, and Nigeria was asserting its status as a rising giant by means of that unprecedented jamboree that celebrated the "individuality, the antiquity, and the power of the Black and African World".
Understandably, Cocodia looked back on it with pride and longing because FESTAC was both a confluence of and a divergence from early ideas of Negritude and Pan-Africanism among whose outstanding exponents were Frederick Douglass and Kwame Nkrumah. However, the festival was nearly shattered by what amounted to an anti-climax when its co-patrons, Nigerian head of state Olusegun Obasanjo and Senegalese President Leopold Senghor, quarrelled and the latter abdicated his position as co-patron and boycotted the jamboree.
But a distinctly Nigerian epiphany had provided a strong undercurrent that sustained FESTAC '77. The country was in a leap of empathy after the trauma of the Biafran War of 1966-1970 when mainly Igbos led a secession in south-eastern Nigeria and ethnic, economic, cultural and religious tensions burst into a conflagration in which two million civilians died.
With FESTAC '77, the phoenix was rising from the ashes but was evidently unable to remain airborne because similar tensions have today re-appeared in the northeast of the country where the influence of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is evident in the demand for sharia law by Boko Haram, the Jihadist movement that seems to have made attacks on Christians and the bombing of churches the sole purpose of its existence.
Ambassador Cocodia referred to this on his visit to DPC this week, noting that for an organisation that steers clear of cellphones and the Internet in order to avoid detection, Boko Haram is remarkably lithe of movement. While ethnic and religious differences may have made conditions ripe for Boko Haram, the Ambassador added, widespread poverty in the Muslim North of Nigeria was the main factor. He was full of praise for Botswana's "epoch breaking agreement with De Beers to bring aggregation of diamonds to Gaborone and beneficiation to Botswana" and expressed the view that "Marikana might not have happened if such an arrangement existed in South Africa".
Marikana was reference to the wildcat strike at a mine owned by Lonmin in South Africa during which 47 people were killed in an eruption of violence between South African Police Service, Lonmin security and the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers in August last year. Seventy-eight more people were injured in what is considered a watershed in the disparity between rising expectations of ordinary South Africans and their receding fulfilment in the so-called rainbow nation.
Cocodia said the employment opportunities, skills transfer and growth of associated sectors that will come with beneficiation in Botswana - such as banking, insurance, transport and accommodation and leisure - are notable. Even so, he conceded that Marikana was partly due to the extremely skewed distribution of wealth in South Africa that has worsened in the years since the official end of the heresy of apartheid in 1994 and the concentration of political power in an increasingly corrupt government under which a singularly elitist black middle class has developed alongside consolidation of unsurpassed white wealth.
Regarding Botswana's beef industry, there was really no need for the government to go cap in hand to the EU "where you must provide the life history of a cow", the Ambassador said, half in jest. "With a population of 170 million people, Nigeria can take all the cattle in Botswana," he said boldly. In fact, he added, the Botswana Government has approached Nigeria as a potential market for Botswana beef while the Ambassador has discussed prospects of Nigeria selling oil to Botswana on a concessionary basis with the Minister of Trade and Industry, Dorcas Makgato-Malesu.These issues were agenda items during President Ian Khama's state visit to Nigeria in August 2011 and again when President Jonathan visited Botswana in September last year. "You want the top dollar for your beef and we want the top dollar for our oil," he said. "But yes, that's something that can be done."
He took the opportunity to acknowledge stalwarts of the Frontline States, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mwalimu Nyerere of Tanzania and Seretse Khama of Botswana with whom Nigeria, which was fondly referred to as the Distant Frontline, cooperated considerably in the struggle against apartheid. Indeed, in a speech before a luncheon he hosted for Jonathan in Gaborone last year, President Khama commended Nigeria for supporting Botswana, then an economic fledgling living in terror of reprisals by the apartheid regime. "Botswana, and indeed the southern African region, will always be grateful to Nigeria for her invaluable contribution to the liberation of our region," Khama said in September last year.
The visit to DPC ended on a light note when Ambassador Cocodia said he could not understand why anyone would refuse to be honoured. The 'issue' was how Tsiako told him he had demurred upon a chieftainship title being bestowed on him by the editors of the Guardian group of newspapers in Lagos after he had authored an article on what Namibian independence would mean to Botswana and the southern African region.
It was November 1989, a few months before independence was to come to Namibia on 21 March 1990, and the subcontinent was full of excitement that United Nations Resolution 435 was finally coming to fruition after the epic double standards of the so-called Western Contact Group that was made up of Security Council members France, Britain and the United States plus West Germany and Canada.
The immediate meaning of this was the ending of apartheid South Africa's illegal occupation of Botswana's neighbour to the west and the potential for an alternative route to the sea that would reduce reliance on South African ports. Also immediate were prospects for lasting peace in Angola where the Cold War was very hot because Namibia would no longer be available to apartheid South Africa to plan and direct operations into the former Portuguese colony north of it.
The cessation of hostilities also meant that the flow of refugees from both Namibia and Angola into neighbouring countries, particularly Zambia and Botswana, would stop with the proxy war in which Cuban internationalist forces were pitted against apartheid South Africa and its steadfast friends in the West. At any rate, there was obviously no point trying to explain that unlike other titles, chieftainship is pre-ordained by lineage and is not bestowed at will in Botswana. In so far as our Nigerian guests were concerned, we had offended against their hospitality, "African hospitality," the Ambassador said, and Nigerians would not take kindly to that!
In the end, the Nigerian Ambassador to Botswana spent a total of three hours at DPC because a courtesy call on the Managing Director, Titus Mbuya, lasted another hour. The two envoys were in a distinctly expansive mood, little doubt some of it coming from the crowning of the Super Eagles as Champions of the Africa Cup of Nations in Johannesburg nearly two weeks ago. But Cocodia had the grace to acknowledge the gallant fight put up by the Burkina Faso.
It was in such an atmosphere that he remembered with pride that his country had given Botswana its first indigenous African Chief Justice in the person of Akinola Aguda - "a cerebral jurist and lawyer who embraced radicalism" - and that diplomatic relations between Botswana and Nigeria went as far back as 1970 when his country first established its mission in Gaborone.As a parting shot, he related an anecdote in which former president Festus Mogae once told him that if he (Mogae) found himself in trouble on a London street and a black man came to his rescue, it was likely to be a Nigerian!
No comments:
Post a Comment