By Anote
Ajeluorou
While the United States may be spearheading the fight
against terrorism and extremism worldwide, one of her civil rights activists of
the Black Panthers Party (BBP), Mrs. Sandra Izsadore, has said that white
America actually taught the rest of the world how to perpetuate terrorism by
their sheer inhumanity to the African-Americans whom she said they murdered in
their thousands for no reason.
Also, Chairman, Human Rights Commission
(HRC), Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, said a lot of civil liberties were being denied
Nigerians by what he described as privatisation whereby they are being made to
pay for the profit margins of a certain few.
Sandra
Izsadore was late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s mentor who reeducated and reoriented the
Afrobeat maestro towards a new
political and musical consciousness that was to define his activism and
emancipation struggles. They spoke in Lagos yesterday at the symposium that opened
Felabration Week, the yearly
activities to celebrate Fela, his music and life.
The
symposium theme was ‘Human Rights as My Property,’ after one of Fela’s popular
tunes, and had Izsadore, Odinkalu, Mrs. Ayo Obe and Mr. Kunle Ajibade as
speakers. Mr. Olasupo Olasore representing former governor of Lagos State, Mr.
Babatunde Fashola as chairman and moderator.
In an
emotional presentation that included horror slide images of white supremacists
hanging blacks on trees and modern-day white police shooting blacks like the
recent Trevor Martins’ case in the U.S., Izsadore said.
“Ku Klux
Klan taught the world terrorism; they murdered my people”.
She
stressed the need for African people to treat history with respect, something
not available to African-Americans whose ancestors were stolen, denied their
rights and shipped away to foreign lands to endure despicable horrors, as
horses were valued above them.
She went on: “We were stolen from Africa and
forced elsewhere. I’m this African who was stolen. I don’t know my ancestors,
my homeland; I was so disappointed when my DNA test showed I’m from northern
Kenya. But you know your history; you know where you’re from. You know your
language. There were the things I told Fela. What I discovered was that a lot
of Africans don’t about these things”.
She said the
Jews have never forgotten what they suffered even if a few millions of them
died, but that Africans have forgotten so soon the millions that died during
the Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
She
lamented: “But what about those who died during the Middle Passage? Millions
died. If the ship’s captain felt that it was profitable, they emptied the
entire human cargoes and collect the insurance. We ought to know our history”.
She chided
Africa for remaining backward just as the entire western world and its modern
civilization depended on the riches prevalent on the African soil. She said it
was her dream that Africans began to live like Saudi Arabia princes.
“The western world is so dependent on Africa.
What goes into making the cell phone is got from here,” she said. They need you;
but people in England, Dubai, America live better than you Africans. The riches
are here. So, I want my people here in Africa to live like Saudi Arabia. But
when you waste your resources, you are destroying your property.”
Izsadore frowned at the ethnic divisions that
perennially plague parts of Africa and said whenever she saw anyone with a
black skin, she feels a certain affinity of kinship to him or her, adding, “I
don’t understand the ethnic divisions so long as I see a black person. We are
one; collectively we can do a lot. I look at Nigeria like that. But it cannot
happen so long there’s greed.”
Odinkalu praised the Kuti family for making
sacrifices on behalf of ordinary Nigerians who have been at the receiving end
of rights denied. Odinkalu seemed to situate the biggest rights denied
Nigerians on the educational plane and said it has bred all manners of
vigilantes that now plague the polity either as Niger Delta militants,
kidnappers in the South East or Boko
Haram in the North East.
According to him: “In reality, some of you
may own human rights, but you cannot enjoy it. Are human rights there for us to
be enjoyed at our will? Do we have state and civic capacity to claim our human
rights? Those who tell you to go to court know that you may not get justice.
We’ve lost faith in the legal system. Nigeria is wholly privatized, with all of
us paying for the profit margins of those running our lives.
“If the poor do not have access to good
education, then you’re breeding a band of vigilantes. In the South South and
South East, they use their education to negotiate for money in militancy and
kidnapping; in the North East, it’s nihilistic. In fact, there are only two
tribes in Nigeria – the haves and haves-not. If human rights is anything to
you, you don’t allow for narrowness.”
Odinkalu also linked human rights with memory
and history that inevitably becomes a person’s identity, adding, “Do we want a
country or tribe? A country of values or vigilance? Let’s have a country with
values.”
Earlier,
Sasore said human rights was something that needs to be protected, but which
can only be attained if the rule of law was allowed to prevail as again the
rule of man.
Ajibade
also said Fela taught Nigerians not to wait for political leaders to give or
‘dash’ them human rights, but to fight for it.
Obe said
there was a need to collectively protect the rights of everyone, as a violation
of one person’s right impinged on the rights of others as well.
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