Retired professor of political science and military strategy of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Obasi Igwe has said that Africa’s diplomatic relations with China have been more beneficial than the rest of her relationships in the past with the West.
Prof. Igwe, a scholar of repute said this in his reaction to the brewing trouble in the Balkans between Russia and Ukraine.
While advising the West, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and the U.S to exercise caution and respect existing pacts between Russia and NATO at the end of the Cold War 31 years ago not to advance to the Eats of Europe, he said the end of that crisis would come when the West becomes more accommodating of the interest of those who refuse to be dictated to by them.
As he advocated more relaxed global relations, he blamed the U.S and NATO’s bullying for crises in the world.
Igwe said: “The West and the US are apprehensive of an emerging multipolar world order that would benefit mankind greatly and seem to be determined to wage war against it. It is as simple as that. We must not accept the distorted narrative promoting imperialist aggression against anybody.”
He feared that what NATO is doing about Ukraine has larger implications for global peace and would stretch beyond Russia.
“NATO having surrounded Russia from the Baltic states through Poland, Romania, Turkey, Israel, Iraq, to Afghanistan, it remains only Ukraine to complete the encirclement.
When Russia is destroyed and dismembered, NATO forces would have their sights and weapons set on China, India, Mongolia, Pakistan, etc, while the Indo-Pacific carriers, bombers, submarines, and Australia and Guam-based missiles would hem in from the South.”
Considering what he described as the penchant of the West to target other countries strictly for their personal interest and nothing else, he questioned: “Why won’t Africa seek an alternative to the West? Almost 600 years of relations with the West produced underdevelopment, disease, want, war, deprecation, and subjugation for Africa.
But less than a generation of relations with the Chinese is producing modern roads, railways, seaports, factories, and mutual respect.
If you invite the West to build anything in Africa, they must first overvalue the cost, despatch ‘experts’ to assess its feasibility, conduct a dubious Environmental Impact Assessment, charge heartbreaking fees for all these unfriendly maneuvres, determine how the project will either liberate you or affect their own high priced products, and then decide to either to delay or pronounce it not feasible.
Meanwhile, you are already into loans and high interests on credit facilities that never existed. The result: poverty upon poverty upon poverty, under the ‘democratic’ governments they can trust. Instead of reparations for six centuries of killings and exploitation, Africans are through unsubstantiated loans, cruel interest rates, stolen money transfers, and devalued currencies, actually paying reparations to the West for exploiting us, and thanking them for honouring us with more enslavement.”
He called that “the West and Russia must be persuaded to exchange another written mutually binding guarantees against aggression.
There must be a social and other mass media campaign against the war in Europe.
We must persuade the federal government not to promise to be an ally or friend to any side that is in any way preparing for or waging a war in Europe or elsewhere.
