{UAH} If Boko are Islamists and looters are investors, the media are surely suckers

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Boko-are-Islamists-and-looters-are-investors/-/434750/2310006/-/e90ihxz/-/index.html

If Boko are Islamists and looters are investors, the media are surely suckers

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By Jenerali Ulimwengu

Posted  Saturday, May 10  2014 at  13:57

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Misnomers abound as we seek to describe people, phenomena and events. For instance, we have been following the heartrending tragedy involving the abduction of some two hundred girls from a Nigerian school.

The thuggish group that abducted these girls, Boko Haram, is invariably described in the media as "Islamist," implying that it has something to do with Islam and that whatever it is doing has some religious connotation. This surprises me no end.

What can be Islamist about these thugs? As Malala Yusuf Zhai rightly said in a recent interview, Islam encourages the faithful to pursue education and to seek it wherever it can be found, all the way to China. It does not stand to reason that anyone speaking or acting in the name of Islam can have as a central plank of their policies the rejection of education.

Now we know that the thug-in-chief of this group has declared openly that the abducted girls will be sold into sexual slavery. And then what, stone them to death for immoral behaviour?

So, why do we keep on calling them by an adjective that is clearly wrong? One reason could be that the thugs themselves would like to be known as Islamic fighters. There have been suggestions that some unscrupulous politicians are using this group to further their ambitions, and that is not anything that would surprise me.

The hand of Al Qaeda is also seen in the financing and arming of Boko Haram, and that is not surprising either. A chapter of Al Qaeda has been very active in the Maghreb and the Sahel, and from there to Nigeria is but a short hop.

As I have suggested elsewhere, countries like Nigeria render themselves especially susceptible to incursions and attacks by irrational hordes of all sorts that thrive and prosper in irrational circumstances. And, I insist, Nigeria is not alone in not making sense. There is so much nonsense on the continent we seem to have become specialists in the matter.

But back to the use of facile adjectives to convey an image or idea we want to communicate. At some stage in our not-so-distant past any leader who made a certain type of noise and uttered a certain type of catch phrase was characterised as "Marxist."

So that we got such disparate and varied Marxists as Mohammed Siad Barre and Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mathieu Kerekou and Marien Ngouabi. Even the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was supposedly Marxist.

Emancipation

Of course there were those who actually studied Marxism and who proclaimed themselves to be its adherents because their study of human history and their rationalistic deductions drew them to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as tools of emancipation.

Others, to be honest, wanted arms to free themselves from colonialism and apartheid, and these arms were being given out by Moscow, Havana and Beijing.

You will be hard-pressed today to find an African Marxist, except in tiny groups of radical students on some campuses. Those who carried that label in the 1970s and 80s have ascended to power — in Maputo, Luanda, Bissau, Windhoek, Harare and Pretoria — and they are too busy "eating" to remember what they used to call themselves.

And this is where we come across another misnomer. In a recent report by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, we are told that important resources — forestry, fisheries — that could have helped the African masses to lift themselves out of poverty are being looted by corrupt African officials and "foreign investors."

I take exception to the use of the word investor in this context because it is clear from the report that these foreigners do not bring anything in except what they need to use to be able to take as much as they can out. Like mining machinery, sawmills and fishing trawlers.

In reality, when they are done with their business in our countries, what they leave behind are gaping holes in the ground where gold used to sit, denuded landscapes where trees stood and depleted coral reefs where fish used to play.

No, these are not in-vestors; they are out-vestors. And I'm neither an Islamist nor a Marxist.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: ulimwengu@jenerali.com

Ocen  Nekyon

Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb contesting the results.

Benjamin Franklin

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