It is sad that the idea of White American Saviours was buried in my mind at such a tender age, but now I’ve grown to see that all races are equal. All tribes are equal. A white man can be a terrorist, and a black man can be a racial supremacist. A Fulani man can be a fraudster, and an Igbo man can be a dictator. Anyone can be good. Anyone can be evil. Some of the oil fields polluting the Niger Delta are now owned by billionaires and billionaire ‘militants’ from the Niger Delta. It is therefore wrong to try to distance ourselves from the #NorthIsBleeding protests because we think it is a Northern issue. It is a Nigerian issue. It is a human issue.
THE first time I watched the movie; “Tears of the Sun”, I was very young to get the concept of what was in the film except that the setting was in Africa and American saviours were the ‘Actors’ while African dictators were the ‘Bosses’. It was those days of pirated DVD collections and I remember one of the movies in that particular DVD collection is ‘Blood Diamond,’ set in Sierra Leone, I think. Same ‘American Black-ops Saviours’ kinda stuff. As a child, ‘Blood Diamond’ was my favourite in that collection.
I saw “Tears of the Sun” again recently, and I found it was actually set in Nigeria. Watch ‘Tears of the Sun’ (2003) and watch these Americans predict genocide of Igbos by a Fulani Nigerian Regime. What’s significant about this genocide was that it was led by the military and directed at a mostly Catholic Igbo civilians plundering their villages and towns. The significance of this movie dawned on me.
Something that’s just building up and could befall Nigeria by 2023 had already been predicted in a movie 20 years ago before that, ever before there was this strong Igbo versus Fulani animosity.
The film interestingly did not talk about one of the major causes of the crises in the Niger Delta, which are the oil multinationals. The movie conveniently missed that. The Chevrons, Shells, Exxons, Totals, mining our oil at the expense of those living on the land while promising development. Development that never came for decades now, while the environment is getting destroyed with the air, farmlands and rivers polluted, and fuel prices are still unaffordable. It did not talk about capitalism and the environmental disasters caused by the fossil fuel industry or the need to move to green energy. That’s because Capitalism is yet to work out a plan of how to privatise green energy.
This Fulani versus Igbo animosity (which started gaining echo upon Buhari’s emergence) is just about to reach its climax by 2023. The recent rumblings in the military also show a possible military takeover, and given the crises on ground, a military takeover would be genocidal and/or theocratic. With the present orientation of the military, it is easy to guess which ‘5%’ tribe will be at the receiving end of the genocide or which religion will be used to enforce that theocracy. I have no doubt that it will be the religion that has already found its way into our constitution.
I’m tempted to believe that most Hollywood movies are American propaganda to paint themselves as the White Saviours of the world, but this one movie was not just random propaganda, but a script based on careful intelligence projections and analyses of the future. Just that the White Saviours could not predict that they’d also be in a far-right mess with Trumpism, Covid-19 and environmental disasters. The ‘white saviours’ did not predict that they will have the threat of a Christian theocracy in their own home or threats of a police-led genocide of blacks and other people of colour in their own home.
The film interestingly did not talk about one of the major causes of the crises in the Niger Delta, which are the oil multinationals. The movie conveniently missed that. The Chevrons, Shells, Exxons, Totals, mining our oil at the expense of those living on the land while promising development. Development that never came for decades now, while the environment is getting destroyed with the air, farmlands and rivers polluted, and fuel prices are still unaffordable. It did not talk about capitalism and the environmental disasters caused by the fossil fuel industry or the need to move to green energy. That’s because Capitalism is yet to work out a plan of how to privatise green energy.
Cornflakes for Jihad should have taught us something by now – that these people would literally kill us all (if necessary) for money and power and no amount of preaching and advocacy can change that. Only protesting can change that, and as protesters hit the streets to protest against insecurity, support the protests in whichever way you can.
It is sad that the idea of White American Saviours was buried in my mind at such a tender age, but now I’ve grown to see that all races are equal. All tribes are equal. A white man can be a terrorist, and a black man can be a racial supremacist. A Fulani man can be a fraudster, and an Igbo man can be a dictator. Anyone can be good. Anyone can be evil. Some of the oil fields polluting the Niger Delta are now owned by billionaires and billionaire ‘militants’ from the Niger Delta.
It is therefore wrong to try to distance ourselves from the #NorthIsBleeding protests because we think it is a Northern issue. It is a Nigerian issue. It is a human issue.
We have an opportunity to unite our country against the dictators that have successfully divided and ruled us, and it is in our best interests to take that opportunity before it is too late. The deaths in the North will not be stopped by Tucano jets, or some CIA expatriates. In real life, the American Saviours will not come. The extrajudicial killings by soldiers in the Niger Delta will not be stopped by some Bruce Willis. There is no Bruce Willis or Leonardo DiCaprio in real life. It will be stopped when we, the average people who are the victims of the kidnappings and killings, rise against the sponsors of violence; who are the men in power.
Cornflakes for Jihad should have taught us something by now – that these people would literally kill us all (if necessary) for money and power and no amount of preaching and advocacy can change that. Only protesting can change that, and as protesters hit the streets to protest against insecurity, support the protests in whichever way you can.
The human race is one body. A part of our body is bleeding and we will all feel it whether we like it or not. It is in this context that we can understand that an injury to one is truly an injury to all.
Comrade Ibukun writes from Abuja and can be contacted on 09060277591
