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By Owei Lakemfa

The Super Eagles nightmare in Libya and, the World Bank insanely asking Nigerians to endure 15 more years of suffocation and pain, speak to a poverty of ideas.

The lives of the Eagles and officials were endangered when the aircraft carrying them, which was descending at the Benghazi Airport, was suddenly ordered back into the skies. It eventually landed in Al-Abraq, a disused airport. That was the beginning of a nightmare which lasted over 17 hours.

The issue to me is not whether the Libyan authorities were trying to retaliate some alleged infraction when their team played in Nigeria. Rather, it is the kind of mindset the Libyan leadership displayed which considered the lives of the Nigerians dispensable just to make a point or win the points at stake in a football match.

I reflected that such a scenario would not have played out had Mouamar Ghadafi or the Pan Africanist Libyan elites been in power in Libya.

What the Eagles suffered is the failure of our country to defend the basic rights of our Libyan brothers and sisters to human dignity and sovereignty when the West attacked them.

The West was determined to destroy Libya under Ghadafi for various reasons. These included Libya’s insistence that the enormous wealth of the country must be used in the interest of Libyans, including a sustainable high standard of living. Libya was also marked for trying to establish a gold bank for Africa which would de-emphasize the use of the dollar, and most ‘dangerous’ of all, Libya’s determination to establish the United States of Africa Kwame Nkrumah proposed in 1963. The Ghadafi administration was also marked for its support of the right of the Palestinian people to a homeland.

To African elites, like those of Nigeria, the use of Libyan wealth for Libyans in contrast to the looting of the commonwealth, was a danger to their very existence. So, when the West led by the United States over the years, attacked Libya, we kept quiet.

We were generally silent when on April 14, 1986, the US mindlessly bombed Tripoli, killing over 70 people.

We simply watched when our sister African country was falsely accused of bombing the Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland which on December 21, 1988 killed the 259 on board and 11 on ground. This was even after the truth became apparent and the conviction of the two Libyans could not stand scrutiny.

Finally, when the West coupled together Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists, gangsters, Western mercenaries and soldiers from various countries to invade Libya in the name of defending ‘protesters’, Nigeria supported the invasion! Our then Permanent Representative in the United Nations, Ambassador Joy Ogwu voted that Libya be invaded.

So, Libya was from March 19-October 31, 2011, levelled by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, and Ghadafi was summarily shot.

Since then, the various factions of the terrorists who invaded Libya have been in charge. So, I was not surprised the way they treated the Super Eagles which is no different from the way they treat Nigerians in that country. In fact, one of the fallouts of the Libyan invasion was the enslavement of many Nigerians who were sold like commodities or abducted for ransom. Perhaps I should add that as a result of the invasion of Libya, arms ceaselessly flowed into many African countries, especially Nigeria.

Also, the Islamic fundamentalist arm of the Libyan invaders trained the Boko Haram in warfare and infiltrated them back to Nigeria. Libya itself has had four rival governments. Today, the two main rival governments in Libya are the Government of National Stability, GNS, in Tobruk and the Government of National Unity, GNU, in Tripoli. Benghazi, the city the Eagles were scheduled to land has itself been under a third force led by General Khalifa Omar Haftar whose alliance is more to the Tobruk government than that in Tripoli.

So in the first place, by allowing the Eagles fly to Benghazi, the Nigerian government took a risk. Sadly, when our national team was in dire need of diplomatic leadership in Libya, Nigeria had no ambassador. Interestingly, Libya also had no ambassador in Nigeria! The lesson, fellow Nigerians, is that when the home of any African brother is on fire, we should endeavour to put out the fire, not to add petrol as we did in Libya.

The logical thought process we lacked in the Libyan case is what we still display in our dealings with the same USA and its first cousins in Europe. The American International Bank for Reconstruction, IBRD, deceptively renamed the World Bank to give the false impression that we are dealing with the bank of the world, has been putting a lot of pressure on the Nigerian government to further squeeze our hungry populace.

On October 15, 2024 the World Bank Senior Vice President, Indermit Gill, whose organisation, along with its European better half, the International Monetary Fund, IMF, have been running the Nigeria economy for decades, was in Abuja. He came to represent the same hypothesis the World Bank and IMF have advanced for decades: that we should continue the ruinous policies of devaluing the Naira rather than stop its water boarding and, increase the cost of fuel. The two bodies have been asking Nigeria to increase the cost of fuel since it was N20 per litre until today that it is N1,030.

In his satanic verses, the Indian-born Gill did not advocate that Nigeria should return to refining petroleum products. This is what any sensible economist would have advocated given the fact that we are oil-rich and, on the economics of scale, local refinery is the way out. Gill did not advocate sustainable development policies, rather it was the ineffectual prescription of palliatives which is like applying anaesthetics on a patient.

Don’t also forget that our economy has been run for decades by the IMF and World Bank. Apart from their officials coming to directly run our economy, their Nigerian products have also served as Ministers. These include Dr Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, twice, Minister of Finance; Mrs Obiageli Oby-Ezekwesili, former Minister of Solid Minerals, and ex-Education Minister; and Mr Wale Edun, current Finance Minister and Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy, and a graduate of the World Bank Young Professionals Programme. Yet the Nigeria economy gets from bad to worse.

Gill’s main sermon is that Nigerians should endure their unbearable sufferings for another 15 years. The patently silly analysis of the World Bank/IMF is not backed by common sense. Rather, it relies on the loans they inject like morphine into our technocrats who, like dazed zombies, simply regurgitate the inanities of these Western institutions. What we suffer from is poverty of thought, not thought of poverty.