NigeriansTalk

United States’ Sec­re­tary of States Hillary Clin­ton flew into Abuja, the cap­i­tal of Nige­ria, last Tues­day night, August 11th, to spend nearly three days in her 11-day, seven-country tour of the African con­ti­nent. As might be expected, the Niger­ian blo­gos­phere was quite active with com­men­tary regard­ing the details and impli­ca­tions of Clinton’s visit. While Niger­ian jour­nal­ists and blog­gers have dis­agreed both as to the details and the impli­ca­tions, there has been a com­mon lament that the visit was so short and that there has not been a visit yet from our African Amer­i­can pres­i­dent, Barack Obama.

As ini­tially reported by both the BBC and Peter Clottey of the Voice of Amer­ica, Clinton’s itin­er­ary for her visit to Abuja included meet­ings with politi­cians from across the Niger­ian polit­i­cal spec­trum prior to meet­ing Pres­i­dent Yar’Adua. Suleiman M. Bisalla and Aisha Umar of Nigeria’s Daily Trust wrote on Wednes­day, August 12th, that the Niger­ian admin­is­tra­tion took offense at the itin­er­ary which Sec­re­tary Clinton’s staff had put together with­out first con­sult­ing them. Such an arrange­ment does run con­trary to diplo­matic norms, but Sec­re­tary Clinton’s itin­er­ary also man­i­fested her under­stand­ing of the com­plex­ity and dynamism of Nigeria’s multi-ethnic polit­i­cal landscape.

In my own post on Thurs­day morn­ing in Life Cycle Analy­sis, I lamented that Sec­re­tary Clin­ton had too few days allo­cated to Nige­ria for her to absorb the roots of the nation’s polit­i­cal com­plex­ity among the peo­ple in their local envi­ron­ment. As it turned out, how­ever, Clin­ton had not been clois­tered in the com­pany of politi­cians dur­ing her admit­tedly brief visit. Her town hall meet­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Abuja, for exam­ple, was bois­ter­ous and pro­vided an oppor­tu­nity to iden­tify with the hopes and ambi­tions of Nige­ri­ans beyond the grubby doings of her weak and clumsy polit­i­cal leaders.

A full tran­script of Clinton’s town hall was pro­vided late Thurs­day by Sahara Reporters. Sec­re­tary Clin­ton was quite effec­tive in turn­ing cri­tiques of both the Niger­ian admin­is­tra­tion and U.S. for­eign pol­icy to her own advan­tage.
The pres­i­dent of the West Africa Bar Asso­ci­a­tion, Femi Falana, lam­basted the World Bank and the IMF for main­tain­ing the under­de­vel­op­ment of Nige­ria and other mod­ern African nation states. Sec­re­tary Clin­ton man­aged to draw applause from the crowd by merely com­mit­ing to a “redesign of our inter­na­tional finan­cial struc­tures.” She wants Nige­ria to be added to the G-20 but she wants her to cure her cor­rup­tion prob­lems first.

Another high point in Sec­re­tary Clinton’s visit to Nige­ria occurred when she landed an Inter­view with Mo Abudu of Moments with Mo. Here Sec­re­tary Clin­ton returned to the topic of sex roles and the impor­tance of edu­ca­tion for rais­ing the sta­tus of women in Nige­ria and through­out the devel­op­ing world. In my opin­ion, Clin­ton man­aged to pro­vide moral inspi­ra­tion and polit­i­cal moti­va­tion here with­out sound­ing at all condescending.

By and large, Niger­ian blog­gers were favor­ably taken with Sec­re­tary Clin­ton. Imnakoya’s post Hillary in Nige­ria appeared in both African Loft and his own Grandiose Par­lor. Gen­er­ally pos­i­tive in his assess­ment of Sec­re­tary Clin­ton, Imnakoya did hit a more sour note in his remarks about abuses of the pub­lic trust by Nigeria’s politi­cians. Writ­ing in his blog Niger­ian Curios­ity, Solomon­sy­delle chal­lenged the United States Sec­re­tary of State to make up for the “glar­ing omis­sion” of Nige­ria as a des­ti­na­tion for either Barack Obama or other ambas­sadors of good will and coun­sel dur­ing the cur­rent administration.

Dade was par­tic­u­larly impressed by the strong words which Sec­re­tary Clin­ton deliv­ered at her Town Hall meet­ing. His post enti­tled Hillary in Nige­ria fore­warned of strong mes­sages which the Sec­re­tary of State might prove capa­ble of deliv­er­ing, hav­ing demon­strated her inner fire and strength in her out­burst over a mis­trans­lated ques­tion in Kin­shasa on Mon­day. Beauty struck a more stri­dent tone, ask­ing Mrs Clin­ton, how will your visit ben­e­fit Nige­ria? The impli­ca­tion here was that very lit­tle of sub­stance would actu­ally be offered to Nige­ri­ans by the United States dur­ing the course of the visit by our Sec­re­tary of State. Through explor­ing his rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, Mr. Beauty chal­lenged Africans to ques­tion the motives of both the United States and Niger­ian politi­cians as their talks pro­gressed. By link­ing to Bloomberg News, how­ever, he also appears to sur­mise that the entire Africa trip was intended to stim­u­late busi­ness for Amer­i­can min­ing and fos­sil fuel inter­ests. An even stronger state­ment of this alto­gether plau­si­ble view was made by Firoze Manji, writ­ing on Thurs­day, August 6th in Pam­bazuka News. Manji ana­lyzes the focus on eco­nomic devel­op­ment and pro­mo­tion of the inter­ests of U.S. cor­po­ra­tions by Clin­ton in pick­ing coun­tries to visit and issues to raise with African politi­cians. In a more lengthy and gen­er­ally pos­i­tive nar­ra­tive of Clinton’s trip, the ‘Super Size Me’ tour in his Jew­els in the Jun­gle, Bill places it in the con­text of a num­ber of pre­vi­ous trips which Hillary has made to the dark con­ti­nent, mostly accom­pa­nied by her hus­band and for­mer United States pres­i­dent William Jef­fer­son Clinton.