Saturday, December 22, 2012
Lynxxx - Fine Lady ft. Wizkid [Official Video]
1st Video of the Week www.usafricanculturalfestival.com
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
American Gun Play and the Culture of Violence
Every
weekend in the United States some American parents and grandparents from urban,
rural, and suburban areas take their
children and grandchildren out for various family bonding activities such as
ice skating, bowling, roller skating, movies, and video gaming to mention a
few. These events are so enriching and popular that generation of Americans,
immigrants, and visitors have followed suit. Some of these activities like the
movies are guided by certain stipulations such as rating regulations. For examples
young children and teenagers are not allowed to view certain motion pictures.
In places such as bowling parlors there are age appropriate balls to enable
each consumer to develop mastery on how to strike their pins. Most of these
places rent out bowling shoes and skating shoes so that there is not an
avalanche of purchasing these equipment while the kids are in their
developmental stages.
So
instead of advocating common sense gun safety majors that would curtail our gun
play and culture of violence that has transcended economic, ethnic, and
religious prisms we are left with pseudo arguments that make no sense even to
children the ages of the Newtown Connecticut victims. We blame mental disorders
among others as the reasons for gun violence instead of our proclivity with
guns while making sure that mental health and healthcare parity exist on paper
only. But in our rush to label and stigmatize we fail to realize that there are
no higher prevalence of mental health disorders in America when compared to
other countries but indeed what we have more than any other country on earth
within our different strata is the availability of guns and more cheap guns.
Some have
lashed out on the issue of religion in the educational system as the vacuum in
which these mass shootings occur. These hypocrites wobble in the belief that
Americans are any less religious than Europeans, Asian, and any other people on
earth. Jesus Christ and Christianity are put forward as the panacea for a
self-fulfilling prophecy that encourages public policies that are rigged in
corruption and blood to keep the gun industry afloat. Gun clubs and shooting
ranges are allowed to certify National Rifle Association (NRA) programs in these clubs to advocate for mass
ownership of guns without a thought for the victims that pile up when the
safety and security of these guns are compromised. Due to the financial strings
attached to the weaponry industrial complex, there are hardly voices that
inspire gun rentals in clubs and ranges in place of massive gun
ownership/consumption. Instead we become
reactionary when preteens and adolescences murder themselves in Chicago like
flies and when babies are slaughtered in cold-blood at Newtown and various
American cities.
As
Americans we are now in the crossroads of determining whether to become
actually civilized or continue in our barbaric heritages of violence. How can
we wake up in the morning and force our kids to get up to go to school and our
society cannot protect them because of the archaic rights to bear arms? Where
these advocates of the second amendment and their so-called militias blind when
the Patriot Act passed that gave the government various powers that curtailed
our individual liberties? How long are we going to tolerate these senseless
murders and think that racial profiling and stand your ground laws are viable
solutions? During these periods of introspections we need to squarely address
our culture of violence. This should include assessing our national and foreign
policies as it relates to gun play and the culture of violence. Why do we
manufacture and export more guns than any other country in the globe? We should
remember the other angels in Pakistan, Congo, and elsewhere that die due to our
illegal drone attacks and other weaponry as we cry and bury our six and seven
year old angels.
Nnamdi F. Akwada MSW, BA is a Social Justice Activist
Nnamdi F. Akwada MSW, BA is a Social Justice Activist
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Before the Coming African Stampede in Mali
As we await
the so-called mandate/resolution from the United Nations about the future
developments in Mali, Africa needs to ask some critical questions about the
increasing chaos and looming regional wars. How did events in Mali spiral out
of proportion? What remedies have the African governments and organizations
such as the Economic Countries of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African
Union (AU) explored and/or endorsed to seek peace. Whose interests are going to
be served if West, Central, and North African states are embroiled in regional
conflicts that would mirror the situations in the Congo where Central, Eastern,
and Southern African countries have been involved in cyclical violence which
has facilitated the fleecing of large amounts of raw materials from Africa?
The last
time Mali received such prominence in the international arena was way back when
Timbuktu was the citadel of higher education and academics pursuits; when the
Moorish people took their knowledge and Science to enlighten Arabia and Europe;
and when King Mansa Kankan Musa flooded the global market with Malian gold. But
Malians, the link between West and North Africa now finds themselves in the crossroads
of African and global affairs with some sprinkling of religion, globalization, and
geo-terrorism. The Malian government is so weak that is has virtually ceded
major swaps of the country to the Tuareg rebels and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb without evidences of sustained armed struggles.
Instead
what the world has witnessed in the African Sahara desert are subsets of
tactical victories and maneuvers that beg for the answers of the aforesaid
questions. Though Mali the land of the Dogon people and Timbuktu Universities
has being a tinderbox on some occasions with dictatorship, restive segments,
and the much romanticized military coups, the contemporary situation amounts to
drastic escalation. After the onset of the Arab/African awakening in Northern
Africa that crumbled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, few
could have imagined how events in Tripoli the heartland of the self-proclaimed
African and Arab Kings of Kings-Colonel Gadhafi would have affected Bamako.
However,
the fluid situations in Libya were used as the pretext to setup the present
conditions in Mali. When NATO and some Arab states were busy flying drones and
sorties in North Africa, deals were made with large segments of the Tuareg
fighters within the Libyan military to abandon their allegiance to the maverick
Gadhafi and gain save passage to the northern tips of Mali into Western Africa.
Ironically, when these movements were going on the international corporate
media which includes CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, was busy reporting the rape and
killing of poor Libyans by Black African men in Colonel Gadhafi’s army. It was
as though they could only stomach the rape and killings of Libyans by Arab
Africans which happened to be the majority of committed atrocities but did not
get the sensationalized coverage.
But these
melancholy tales with regards to Libya and West Africa is not unique to the
contemporary occurrences in Mali that threatens to spill into regional wars. In
the late 1980’s the current international war criminal and former president of
Liberia Charles McArthur Taylor was hand-selected and mysterious released from
the American jails by the CIA and handed to the authorities in Tripoli. Libya
was supposed to be under United States sanctions without an official diplomatic
relationship. Charles Taylor commenced his training as a guerilla/rebel fighter
in Libya and ended up in the Western African forest before unleashing turmoil
and wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. Before these
interferences in West Africa the Libyans and Gadhafi were already infamous for
their incursions into the Central African republic of Chad.
The Libyan
connections and forays into other African countries have occurred largely due
to the vacuum of leadership and vision within the African continent. Some of
these strategies would have been rebuffed were it not for the impotence of the
various rulers that have come to dominate Africa and the indolence of
organizations like ECOWAS and AU. Our rulers are hesitant to provide concrete
solutions to the problems in Mali which mirrors those in their respective
countries. For example, political structures built to sustain the interest of a
very few, unresponsive governments that pride themselves on going against the
wishes of their people, and using the security apparatus to repress the few
progressive voices in their various countries.
Rather than
offer solutions in Africa to assist regular people, the African Union (AU) and
the other regional groups are used as mechanisms to reward African Dictators
and their cronies with plump official portfolios. Unlike our leaders of yester years
such as Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mr. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Capt.
Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, President Sekou Toure of Guinea, our present-day
rulers are more eager to line their pockets whereas their people suffer and die
needlessly. There are no proposals for regional independent election monitoring
units that would arrest the scourge of electoral irregularities in Africa. Nor
are there efforts to setup regional and African wide courts that would deter
the impunity and corruption within Africa by the African elites, their military
backers, and their foreign enablers.
Consequently,
what we have in Mali are zealous suggestions of war instead of exhaustive attempts
to prevent bloodshed and mass suffering. After the Tuareg rebels were granted
passage from Libya to West Africa by the so-called international community, Malian
military officers that were training by the same international community
planned a coup d'état. Their intervention resulted in more acquisition of the
country by rebels. For Christ sake Capt. Amadou Sanogo of the Malian army and
some of his lieutenants who overthrew President Amadou Toure (who was stepping
down for a new president) just months before the elections was training at the
International Military Education and Training (IMET).
Subsequently,
the quest for the autonomy of the Azawad region morphed into the Al-Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreb with Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Qatari cash infusion. It is worth
noting that these countries are also strong pillars of the so-called
international community and are very friendly with the US and Western Europe.
These are all petroleum exporting countries and there are reports of oil discoveries
in Mali and across the Chadian basin that gives traction to the school of thought
that the international petrochemical industries are pulling the strings behind the
scenes. For instance, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Chad are basically client
states of the international and local petroleum cabals who are plagued by
either massive oil corruption and/or dictatorship.
Ironically,
the Africa Sahel/Sahara that is bracing for war also holds some keys to the
development of solar energies. According to various scientific studies on
global warming and renewable energies, Africa and Europe can be kept afloat for
centuries with such green energies with simultaneous reductions in carbon
emissions. But maybe Africans would come to their senses before embarking on
another avoidable war. As a former member/part of the Mali federation, Senegal
could offer an African path to quelling these stampedes. In spite of the domestic
challenges in Senegal, President Macky Sall could be the conduit to seeking
justice and peaceful resolutions to the international community manufactured
Malian crisis.
Nnamdi
F. Akwada MSW, BA is a Social Justice Activist
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Nelson Mandela- Why I Reactivated My Activism
Although
I grew in Nigeria going against the norm in secondary school where I earned the
reputation as a student leader, my desire to rededicate myself towards activism
did not peak until 2001 just one month before I graduated from University of
Maryland (UMD). I had made the decision to concentrate on my studies when I got
to the Maryland academy due to some negative experiences in my high school
student government at the International Secondary School, Rivers State
University of Science and Technology. At the UMD I joined the African Students
Association (ASA) and was instrumental in setting up our very first website
which was established with my second student (glue) account. When the president
of the ASA who happened to be a Nigerian was forced to relinquish his position
due to misappropriation of our public funds and academic probation, I was
distraught but hung around as an active member to ensure that the organization
was in solid footing.
However, when we elected the first
African American female as the president of the University of Maryland African
Student Association, I worked with the organization for a while before deciding
to concentrate on my studies and employment opportunities. At certain times as
a student I took up full time job positions while enrolled in school as a
fulltime student with upwards of 12credits per semester. Since I did not want
to make the same mistakes I made in high school, I eventually disassociated
myself from the ASA and the larger student body Student Government Association (SGA).
But as the years went by, I was able to relate from a distance with the first
African/Black (Nigerian origin) and minority (in the United States) female SGA
student body president. After Juliana Njoku’s historic elections as the
President of the Executive branch and head of the student body, she was
confronted with several racial hostilities in 1999 that got the campus engulfed
in some publicized tensions.
In those
days, I would see the worried looks of stress on her face. I saw the student
president’s situation as analogous to that of my friend Irabor and mine in high
school. Nonetheless after witnessing the last 3years of the Obama presidency
and the explicit racial currents, I reckon that her situation is parallel to
that of President Barack Obama. Irabor was the president and this writer the vice-president
of the Christian Student Unions (CSU) in secondary school. Both of us were
strong evangelical students within the school body who believed in academic
meritocracy and were tapped to get nominated by the teachers as senior student
prefects in our final year. But our expectations were dashed when we received
our report cards. We found out that our arch rival and the principal of the school,
who hated us dearly because he was Sabbatarian and resented our Pentecostal
influence in school, had won the battle for control by rigging our grades and
essentially failing us. We were devastated and went back to the University
Chaplain for solace as we had done at other times when we were presented with
challenges from the principal.
Ironically,
the university’s pastor could not assist us because he was embroiled in his own
scandals. There were allegations that some of his academic documents from universities
in England and the United States could not stand scrutiny. Our dear chaplain
was also alleged to have sexually assaulted some of the university and high
school female students during his often held deliverance sessions. On some of
our visits to his office on campus I wondered out loud with my friends. Why he
took so long casting out the demons? Why there was a noticeable environment of
privacy? Why he came out with tremendous perspiration after his closed sessions
with the subjects who were alleged to be his victims? How come the ladies in
question always looked irritated and avoided eye contact after their emergence
from the so-called prayers? In the midst of these developments in Nigeria, I
got an epiphany about most organized religions and embraced the notion that
religion is indeed politics. I became conscious of the reality that secrecy,
sycophancy, and corruption were not only in the Catholic Church, the
denomination of my parents but also in my adopted Pentecostal community. These
teenage experiences enabled me to tread carefully when I got into the UMD.
During Juliana Njoku’s tenure at
College Park Maryland as the president of the SGA her situation was mostly complicated
because of the disarray within the black student bodies. Although, she did not
have a solid base and/or reliable allies who could give her the support that
was necessary as the first SGA president of African origin she was able to
maintain her pose. The Ethiopian students were busy breaking away from the ASA
and forming their own campus body. The Black Student Union (BSU) was involved in
shameless heated acrimony with the ASA and rejected the peace efforts of the UMD
Nyumburu Cultural Center staffs. When Ms. Njoku and others received hate mails
we thought that was an aberration but soon witnessed another round of uniform
hatred and distortions after President Nelson Mandela was invited to the
campus. His invitation was a crescendo to the anti-immigrant, anti-African, and
anti-black attitude on campus. Madiba as he is affectionately called was
invited to deliver the Anwar al-Sadat Lecture for Peace on November 14th, of
2001 at the University of Maryland, an annual lecture series named after the
former Egyptian Head of State.
However,
this most sacred moment was nearly upending by the venom of racial intolerance
and pseudo historical analysis on the pages of the Diamondback student
newspaper by some misers of the truth within the student body. The Republican
Student Association led the canard of opinion writers to suppress the truth on campus
by christening President Mandela as a terrorist. These nefarious, insensitive,
and privileged students decided to accuse Mr. Nelson Mandela of being an
extremist without portfolio. I and many others were lost for words and wondered
how one of the best symbols of peace and reconciliation in the history of the
world could be so maligned by few students. I marveled at how in a left leaning
state like Maryland (maybe second only to Massachusetts), people could have so
much irresponsible misrepresentations of facts. Thus my assessment was that if
these east coast chaps would call Mr. Mandela a terrorist then surely they must
realize that President George Washington is not as dignified as the Nobel Peace
prize winner Madiba. The Republican students took to a smear campaign because
most republican presidents are not honorable enough to touch the soles of
Madiba’s feet in a thorough and objective analysis of history.
After
witnessing the speech of President Mandela at the Cole field House and his
uncanny ability to speak truth to power especially on the issue of the original
9-11 attack and his opposition against the impending Iraq war, I was moved to
embrace my activism. In his keynote speech he called out the double speaks,
double talks, and insidious lies that were orchestrated to obfuscate the truth
in the United State and the West at this sold out gathering. Then my analysis
of the situation came full circle when I realized that the conservative and
Republican students had gone ahead to demonize President Mandela because he was
against the misinformation apparatus that would eventually lead us to an
illegal and unjust war against Iraq. Mandela spoke up way before we found out
that Dick Cheney was feeding information to the New York Times through Scooter
Libby and then going on the Meet the Press show with Mr. Tim Russert to cite
the same stories/sources as facts.
Therefore, as contemporary social
justice activists, I and others are able to stand on the shoulders of the Great
Mr. Nelson Mandela and expose the voters’ suppression laws, election fraud, and
misinformation campaign of the Republican Party and Tea Party. We challenge the
mainstream press or corporate media to do more to address the systematic
suppression, fraud, and misinformation that are hallmarks of the conservative
party. The same folks that told us that part of their packs of lies for
invading Iraq included the establishment of a free and fair election are now
writing their names not with the election ink of Iraq but along the hall of
shame annals of dictators and segregationist. Thus the Republican Governor of
Pennsylvania Mr. Tom Corbett is using the same scare tactic as Saddam Hussein. Governor
Rick Scott of Florida and the Secretary of State Scott Gessler of Colorado are the
new George Wallace of our times. How about other luminaries of the 2012
election cheating and stealing class such as Governor John Kasich of Ohio and
his secretary of state Jon Husted who have flagrantly undermined the decisions
of the courts in their unabashed determination to suppress voters and would go
down as comrades of Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Islam Karimov of
Uzbekistan? The chairman of the national Republican Party Reince Priebu knowingly
hired Nathan Sproul the election fraudster of international reckoning and
notoriety.
Like in the President Nelson
Mandela situation at the University of Maryland the Republicans have unleashed their
warfare of obfuscation and retrogression. Instead of expanding their base to include
a broad spectrum of the American public they have hedged their party’s future
on marginalizing all and sundry. On women issues, they are against equal pay
for equal work and women’s rights to control their bodies including in times of
rape and incest. For all immigrants especially Latinos, the Republicans are
espousing electoral intimidation with the pretext of voter identification
fraud, targeted economic sanctions that would starve and cripple families and
ultimately lead to self-deportation. The attack against white men and others
includes downsizing companies with enormous profits, outsourcing jobs, and then
using the proceeds to open hidden accounts in the Carman Islands, Monaco, and
Switzerland. African Americans and students face an unprecedented disenfranchisement
and intimidation exercise that would make apartheid seem like the next step
after a history of police profiling and discriminatory criminal incarcerations.
In
reality these attacks and the misinformation that follow are not exclusive to
these different groups and if the Republican Party is allowed to triumph we are
going to have an economic apartheid state ruled by the 1% for the 1% against
the 47% and/or 99% with more income disparities and indentured labor. If after
spending 27years in trumped up charges in prison President Mandela was
subjected to vitriolic attacks by members of the Republican Party then
President Obama should remain optimistic. Those of us that have lived under
dictatorships and have actually heard martial music on the airways know what
divide and rule and authoritarianism is all about. We know about economic
hardship that befalls the 99% when few plutocrats lie, steal power, and only care
about their privileged friends and country club communities. This is why we are
standing up on the mountain tops and screaming out of our lungs against the
Republican Party and their tycoon tax evading candidate Governor Mitt Romney. Senator
Rick Santorum was on point when he called him the worst republican. Albeit are
the American people going to vote for a job exporter with no moral core just
because he is a white man?
Nnamdi F. Akwada MSW, BA is a Social
Justice Activist
Reference
Saturday, October 27, 2012
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