WIKILEAKS NIGERIA FIRST VICTIM ( CABLE TAPS)
EKPAMIO!!, I DON DIE O!!!
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House Speaker, Dimeji Bankole
In Wikileaks Stunner, Speaker Bankole Opens Up On Bribery of Supreme Court Justices, Aondoakaa’s Corruption, and Ibori’s Influence-Says EFCC "Is Not Worth A Penny===============================================
Ikeazor Akaraiwe
Step aside Sahara Reporters, WikiLeaks is the newest expo in town. And its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, the latest enfant terrible. Just before WikiLeaks broke, we had our own little leak here courtesy the Central Bank Governor about the 25 %-of-total-budget-perfidy against the Nigerian people by our federal legislators. But all that is swept away for now by the world-wide WikiLeaks maelstrom to the delight, I imagine, of our federal legislators. The Age, an Australian newspaper describes Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as "Internet Freedom Fighters" while Time Magazine says WikiLeaks "could become an important journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act." On the flipside, Fox News describes Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" with The Washington Times pointedly calling for his assassination in "the same way as other high-value terrorist targets!" Tongue in cheek, the China government run Beijing Daily suggests that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010 ought to be given to Assange, not Liu while a top coterie of Republican leaders in the U.S. including House minority leader Mitch McConnell, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Chair on Homeland Security Peter King, have all called Julian Assange and his wikiLeaks.org, "terrorist" and "a terrorist organisation" respectively!
WikiLeaks Mission Statement explains this dubious distinction. "Help WikiLeaks Keep Governments Open." Assange himself describes WikiLeaks guiding philosophy as "to radically shift regime behaviour " and to "leave unjust systems" "exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."
WikiLeaks describes itself as "...dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public by providing an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists". It claims to publish "materials of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices."
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award and in June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".
For most of the world though, WikiLeaks shot itself into the front seat of public consciousness with the release of the Afghanistan and the Iraq War Logs but all that was child's play compared to what was to come. On Sunday, November 28 2010, WikiLeaks gave the entire world an intimate insight into the conduct of foreign affairs by the US government and allied institutions and began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain". Many of which affects the Nigerian State and her extremely fragile institutions.
The real trouble and which ought to reverberate for years to come is the weakness of State institutions in Nigeria and the pervasive influence of multinationals over government. First, Shell, then Pfizer. Of course, NNPC spokesperson Levi Ajuonuma misleads no one but himself when he says, "Shell does not control the government of Nigeria and has never controlled absolutely untrue .an attempt to demean the government and we will not stand for that." Shell's Vice-President clearly stated in the leaked cables "that the government of Nigeria has forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries in Nigeria and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries" Shell is thus in good position to influence for better or for worse the nerve centre of Nigeria's economy! And this is the bit we know. How about the bit Wikileaks has not discovered or are yet to release? What if Wikileaks were to leak diplomatic cables from Abuja to Berlin, what are we likely to find out about say, Julius Berger and the institutions of state? And by the way, it is frightening and tells a lot about us as a people that the Shell infiltrators in our key ministries are not foreigners but Nigerians. No wonder Fela called Nigeria Big, Blind Country, BBC! Pfizer's hiring of investigators to look for evidence of corruption against a former Federal Attorney-General and to pass on information discovered to the local media so as to put pressure on him to drop the federal cases against them further underscores our vulnerability as a nation. Clearly, it is standard capitalist practice to investigate and blackmail persons perceived to be standing in the way of business concerns. But with corruption so systemic, the Pfizers and Shells must be getting away quite literarily with the gang-rape of Nigeria.
Nigerians seldom know the true persons of their leaders and Wikileaks revealed the true person of President Jonathan as not as diffident and understated as he likes to appear. The myth that President Jonathan was a passive and helpless observer of the shenanigans surrounding President Yar'Adua's illness and disappearance melt away and we see rather a man eager, willing and ready to take on the mantle of the Presidency in the midst of concerns about the absence of clear authority in Nigeria. And we learn that Yar'Adua's ill-health caused cabinet meetings to become dysfunctional, characterised by yelling and screaming! President Jonathan's brutally honest and refreshingly humble self-assessment, "I was not chosen to be Vice-President because I had good political experience. I did not. There were a lot more qualified people around to be Vice-President, but that does not mean I am not my own man" is not such a bad thing in a leader, there being no one quite as repulsive as a leader with a bloated self-image. That the U.S. sees President Obasanjo as a potential Achilles heel for President Jonathan and advised him to keep Obasanjo at arms' length does not flatter Obasanjo. And there was nothing new about revelations that Professor Iwu's removal was due in part to foreign pressure. Jonathan's ambivalence about whether to run for the Presidency or not is also not news. On the one hand he emphasised his desire to lead for "the next 12 months" and bequeath credible elections and on the other, he indicated that he will consider running "if they want me to run." The US Embassy's conclusion on President Jonathan as seeming "sincere in wanting to leave a lasting legacy of electoral reform" is flattering. Indeed, these exposés do nothing bad to US-Nigeria relations and cannot be compared to their views on Afghanistan's and Russia's leaders as incompetent and corrupt and has strained relations between former allies. It seems obvious that the US wants a stable Nigeria. A failed Somalia endangered western interests. And the Wikileaks leak that the US views Nigeria as a Pakistan in the making and might break-up about 2035 certainly fuels this close monitoring. Pakistan is viewed as a hotbed of Al-Qaeda and Taliban fundamentalism.
The jury is still out on whether Assange, Wikileaks' Editor-in-Chief, has broken any laws but clearly, he is an anti-establishment anarchist and activist. At the age of 16 in 1987, Assange set up a group prophetically called the International Subversives, dedicated to hacking into computer systems.
This audacious 16 year old Australian, with friends, hacked into computers belonging to Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications company as he also did with an Australian University to mention only two! At 21, he was charged to court and pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was convicted but let-off after paying a fine of 2100 Australian dollars (about 300,000 naira). At 22, he started his own Internet Service Provider, one of the first in Australia and at 26, co-invented a software package, which he intended to be a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field.
An alumnus of 6 universities, Assange is known to have studied various courses including Mathematics, Physics, Neuroscience and Philosophy. To me, the question is not whether Assange has endangered the national security of the US as much as his source of information. The question which ought to trouble the Americans is, who are these persons with access to classified information who hate the US so much as are willing to release tons and tons of classified material to this International Subversive?
For Nigeria, the Wikileaks exposé is welcome. We stand at the threshold of revolution in the midst of the unimaginable suffering in the midst of plenty and anything that shakes our power elite out of their bourgeoisie comprador complacency is welcome. The imperative of passing the Freedom of Information Act in Nigeria is the major lesson from Wikileaks. To borrow the well-worn, trite platitude, 'Nature abhors vacuum' and so, Wikileaks and Sahara Reporters are the price governments which abridge the free flow of information have to pay. Freedom of information is like opening up wounds to the fresh air of scrutiny. They heal faster. President Obasanjo undermined his laudable anti-corruption agenda by failing to sign the Freedom of Information Bill as passed by the last National Assembly into law in the dying days of his administration, leading to its lapse and start-all-over!
LILIACFIRE HAMMER: FACTS & NO FAVOURS
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