Trump’s Banquet For Africa’s Lilliputians

 By Adekeye Adebajo

The presidents of five West and Central African states – Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Liberia’s Joseph Boakai, Guinea-Bissau’s Umaro Cissoko Embaló, Mauritania’s Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, and Gabon’s Brice Oligui Nguema – recently visited United States (U.S.) president Donald Trump for a bizarre banquet in the White House.

*Trump with the five African leaders who he treated with disrespect ...

These five countries have limited trade with America and represent just 2.3 per cent of Africa’s population, with only Senegal having a population of more than six million people in a continent of 1.5 billion people and 55 nations. Though the presidents of Mauritania, Senegal, and Liberia were democratically elected, the Gabonese leader is a former military putschist who recently won  a controversial 90 per cent electoral victory, while the Bissau-Guinean leader has suspended his Parliament, clamped down harshly on dissent, and postponed elections.

The Nigeria/South Africa Palaver

By Adekeye Adebajo

I was recently visiting Lagos – the city of my birth – when I found myself feeling a sense of déjà vu as I watched South African mobs on television looting and attacking shops owned by Nigerians and other Africans. We have been here before. Nigerians were among those hurt in the horrific xenophobic attacks of 2008 when 62 people – mostly Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, and Malawians – were killed, and 100,000 displaced. More recently, in March 2017, South African vigilantes burned and looted scores of homes and businesses belonging to Nigerians in Rosettenville, Mamelodi, and Atteridgeville in Gauteng province, which they alleged were drug dens and brothels.

Having lived in South Africa for 16 years, one of my biggest frustrations is the failure of so many of its citizens to embrace an African identity and of the government to attract more skilled Africans to its shores in order to create an “America in Africa”. America’s genius has, of course, been its ability to attract the best and brightest from the rest of the world – trained at huge expense by these countries – and to turn them into American citizens or green-card holders.

Kofi Anan: Farewell To An African Peacemaker

By Adekeye Adebajo

Ghana’s Kofi Annan, whose death at the age of 80 was announced on Saturday, was the first black African to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), between 1997 and 2006. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN in 2001, though his most noteworthy mediation was in brokering a settlement in violence-stricken Kenya in 2008, failing in Syria four years later.

*Kofi Anan

During his ten-year tenure as Secretary-General, the Ghanaian diplomat courageously, but perhaps naïvely, championed the cause of “humanitarian intervention.” After a steep decline in the mid-1990s, peacekeeping increased again by 2005 to around 80,000 troops. African countries like Sudan, the Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, and Côte d’Ivoire were the main beneficiaries.