The world is on edge and the only saving grace is the presence of two thinking leaders at both ends of the opposite poles. If one goes by what is churned out by the West, the tendency is to blame Russia currently for threatening world peace. Africans are very gullible, always chewing stuff released per the well-packaged propaganda of the West. One finds this while watching supposedly informed commentators on the TV screen in the many poorly moderated programmes of Nigerian television channels.
Is Vladimir Putin really now the threat to world peace? Why are people’s memories so short? It baffles any watcher of geo-politics the way the world has been teetering toward destruction since 2003. George W. Bush unsettled the immense understanding worked by Bill Clinton, his predecessor as President of the United States of America, for peaceful co-existence. Bush Jnr. defied the United Nations to invade Iraq on trumped-up charges of possessing weapons of mass destruction. He killed the only neutraliser of adherents to the satanic version of Islam known as Al-Qaeda. His unreasoned action helped to rally Saddam Hussein’s sympathisers, who were erstwhile lukewarm to the Middle East crises, to the fold of so-called Islamic fundamentalists. Clinton warned at the onset of the bellicose drums for absolute supremacy that the peace of the world would cave in to instability if Bush carried out his threat. Clinton was prophetic. The Gulf War for Iraq’s oil and the collateral damage to life and property brought untold harm not only to America but to world peace and economy.
George W. Bush and his puppy, Tony Blair, are the present cause of instability in the world. There were a few tame ideological crises before the resurgence of present-day mercantilism and might-is-right championed by Bush. Russia was then licking the wounds of evil capitalism exemplified by the rule of Boris Yeltsin who was backed up to the hilt to destroy his country’s lives and welfare. A once world power became a beggar who could not pay civil servants’ salaries and pension. Meanwhile, a few new oligarchs sprang from the decay to drain the resources of the state and build castles and businesses in Europe and America to the detriment of Russians.
The Warsaw Bloc cracked and the satellites, emboldened by the collapse of Russia, not socialism, took liberties to ask for phantom freedom as if it existed anywhere on earth.
Even during the Cold War years, the American economic activity was more socialised than that of Poland and India that were supposed to be leftist. It is greed and expansionism that are threatening world peace. The current crisis in Ukraine is caused by unwise nouveaux riches who think they could trick America into a fight to help them for selfish political ascendancy. Unfortunately for them, it is an inauspicious period of America’s history. That country now has another thinking leader in Barak Obama. Besides, Americans do not have the stomach for another unplanned hostility, the lessons of Iraq still very fresh.
There was one of the commentators who said he was born at Mushin, Lagos and he is now a casino capitalist without industries. He tried to cook up facts that the period of unipolar capitalism ensured peace after the collapse of Russia. In the classical sense, Russia is no longer a socialist state though the people yearn for that ideology. Putin is a neo-nationalist who is bitter about how some suckers reduced his country to a second-class with all its wealth and manpower resources.
The best-run economy in the world between 1920 and 1980 was the Soviet Union’s. When capitalism crashed and recovered many times during that period, the Soviet withstood all the stress. It was when that poor manager and agent of foreign capital, Mikhail Gorbachev, started to fiddle with the state’s philosophy that the rot set in.
Yeltsin arose with a battery of exploiters to carve up the Soviet Union and bring Russia to its knees. Why won’t Nigerian commentators recognise that it was the unconstitutional overthrow of the Ukrainian president after organised street protests based on no evident violation of the law by the man, that sparked the current crisis in that country.
One politically semi-literate boxer, who has made money from Western rings, thought he should use the streets, like Adolf Hitler, to unsettle the applecart and ride the waves to power. It is not that easy in political calculation. The former leader was once sacked from the streets and the people, in a subsequent election returned him overwhelmingly to power. At the time he was in the political antipodes, his successor soiled her hands with the spoils of power and lost her election.
But the greedy ones misread the Ukrainians and re-enacted more street protests without allowing the man, if really unpopular, to be humiliated at the polls. And you want Russia to watch its territory being holed up by hostile forces? Nigerian commentators are too inexact in their analyses. The Chinese economy is still a command type. The erosion of that cradle-to-grave care by the state is unravelling the polity today there, causing the leadership to change course in its present economic approach because of threats of social and political instability. There is still socialism in China in the face of some bourgeois preferences. There is no country in the world that hands its development to the private sector.
The present technological might of America was planned by Franklyn Roosevelt who saw success in projecting the sciences through state research and development. He was called a communist by those there with frontier mentality. But he brought America from the ashes of untamed free-for-all to life, as against what was represented by Herbert Hoovels free-enterprise debacle. Sixty years later, Clinton, a self-confessed socialist, took that country out of the ruins of Reaganomics to the envy of mankind before it was again plunged into the depths of economic and political Sheol. It is what another socialist, Barak Obama, is trying to correct in his rescue mission to save America from itself.
Nigerian commentators make untruth their forte. Last time Wole Soyinka said Nicolae Caescecue was a Bulgarian president in an article. The man was from Rumania. Fredrick Faseun, his own faux pas, has said Indira Ghandi was the daughter of Mahatma Ghandi. Indira was the daughter of Pandit Nehru. She had no blood relationship with Ghandi. The husband adopted the name of Ghandi to be able to marry Indira because he was from a lower caste. And this is how the new political commentators misinform the Nigerian public.
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