WAR BY OTHER MEANS

Ambassadors, it is said, are honest people sent to tell lies about their countries. Lannon Walker, out‑going American Ambassador to Nigeria, at least gives you that impression. In his paper at the recent Abuja international Conference on Nigeria beyond 1992 and his recent interview with the Citizen magazine (24 May 1992), Walker argued passionately, if fruitlessly, that the IMF and the World Bank are virtuous institutions which are out to help countries in trouble with their finances. Walker further suggested that our problem in Nigeria is that we have not been faithful enough to the IMF World Bank guidelines and that the earlier we did so the better for us. In fact he concluded his Abuja paper by insisting that it was the only option we have; there is, in Walker's unsolicited advice, no other one. Lannon Walker, being the good ambassador he was, exonerated his country from its vicious crimes and insolently ignored the hideous and horrid conditions that we here in Nigeria and other fellow victims of US controlled World Bank are going through. He insisted with a striking impunity that the World Bank has nothing to do with it, much less his country. He wi11 not listen to Nigerians, many of whom believe that they found themselves in this grim circumstances precisely because their leaders have been more faithful to the IMF and the World Bank than to their subjects. He will certainly deny that the World Bank has been the greatest beneficiary of the August 1985 coup. He will also dismiss as baseless insinuations the speculation that the coup itself was at the behest of World Bank with his country playing the role it knew best how. While Walker was busy doing his job here, John Pilger, a prominent journalist with British independent Television (ITV) as if in answer to him, was doing his. Pilger carried out a remarkably thorough investigation on the devastating consequence of the debt problem and the vicious role of the World Bank, IMF, the western governments and the unrepentant CIA. Pilger aptly titled this documentary War by other means. It is a war, he said which you do not see on the TV screens because it is waged by more sophisticated means and its principal weapon is debt. The casualties of this war include half‑million children that die every year, more than twice the number that died in the recently concluded Gulf war. It is a war which makes mockery of the western humanitarian gestures such, as western aid, and the spectacular Live Aid show in 1985. As Pilger found out, the very poor for whom the Live Aid was staged paid the western countries that same year twice as much in terms of debt serv­icing. The 12m pounds  raised through comic relief in Britain last year for the poor, had returned the same day to the same Britain. In fact this 12m pounds  is what the poor countries of the world pay to British financial institutions daily. Pilger had no difficulty con­ceding the fact that it is the poor that finance the rich and not vice versa. The details Pilger came up with are revealing, frightening, astonishing and wicked. This vicious war could be said to have started in earnest by 1944 when Roosevelt, the President of the U.S.A. and a well known Freemason established the World Bank. America came to acquire the largest share and to therefore provide the president and the statute establishing the bank secured immunity from legal prosecution for its officials. Thus from its inception, the bank was prepared to operate extra legally. It seems its objective was not simply to make money by hook or crook but also to keep poor developing nations permanently poor. In the last decade for example, Pilger found out that the bank made an average of 12 billion dollars monthly. But during the same period debtor countries have become 60% more in debt than they had been in 1982. Dr. Susan George, interviewed by Pilger, was right, very right, when she said that in the 80's the bank "made a killing". The anti‑slavery society, a human right group, were both apt and just when they declared debt a contemporary form of slavery. This is dearly demonstrated in the Philippine where 44% of the national budget goes to foreign banks to service loans while only 3% of the budget goes to health services. The larger portion of this debt was what dictator Ferdinand Marcos borrowed and kept away in his foreign accounts. It could not come as a surprise that one Filipino child dies every hour due to the lack of adequate medical attention. All these in inspite of the fact that the average Filipino, along with his wife and children labour for nearly 20 hour a day. Indeed for many people these hours are spent by human beings hopping from one load of rubbish to the other like vultures scavenging for anything edible. The scenes of abject poverty and utter hopelessness, which Pilger caught, were highly disturbing to any person with conscience. The very manner and the circumstances under which these  loans are secured are suspicious, to say the least. The case of the 22.6 billion dollar Nuclear power station in Philippines, which has not and perhaps will not produce a single watt of electricity, says it all. The loan was secured and the project started in early 70's without a proper study regarding Philippines power requirement, position of the site, safety, etc. In 1977 the Carter administration stopped the project after well over a billion dollar had already been spent. Then William Casey, then head of Export-Import bank and later director of the CIA gave money to Westing House the contractors, to proceed with the project. In 1986 the project had not produced single watt and on investigation the Aquino government discovered several irregularities and consequently took Westing House to court where it was found guilty and arranged to settle out of court, agreeing to pay Philippines some 100 million dollars. By some dramatic turn of events Aquino government later paid 400 million to make the project work. The project, Pilger told us, has not yet worked and may never work and yet the poor Filipinos still have to pay for the power that never was. Aquino herself echoed this frustration when she said, in an address to the US Congress in 1986, that with 26 billion dollar foreign debt, 2 billion out of her country’s total 4 billion dollar export earnings "must pay interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people have never seen". Yet the World Bank and the IMF keep telling the poor nations to cut government spending, increase export, privatize ‑ or you don't get another loan. Without another loan the IMF and the World Bank will connive to suffocate the fragile economy until the nation is on its knees. The New World Order is clearly that poor nations must not just remain poor, but must be made poorer so that the rich nations could grow richer. Insolently the World Bank and IMF held a conference in Bangkok last year, ostensibly "to find ways of eradicating poverty all over the third world". Thailand was said to have been purposely chosen to host the conference because it was an economic model for the third world. Pilger showed us how 500 poor families living in squalor in the vicinity of the five star hotel had been hurriedly evacuated to another slum and walls erected to shield them because they constituted an eyesore to the delegates. The delegates themselves flew in first class and had their chefs flown directly from Paris. The IMF alone, Pilger told us, spends 45 million dollars annually for such trips around the globe. Indeed, "war and debt are the same", one of Pilger's guest in the documentary said, the difference is in the occupation of territory, but no one needs to occupy a territory today. At the end, Pilger raised some solemn questions: "why should children die slowly through the burden of debt? Why do British high street banks receive 1.6 billion pounds as tax relief on loans given to poor countries when this amount could immunize 400 million children against preventable diseases? Why should the lives of ordinary people be controlled by a few who are themselves unaccountable, and whose decisions and judgments are dictated by the belief that economics is  meant not to serve people but some kind of holy writ which require some regular offer, even blood sacrifice to a god called the bottom line? The debt of all these nations represent only 5% of the loans of the commercial banks. If the debt is cancelled unconditionally, the banks would hardly know the difference. But if it is not cancelled the scenes of death and squalor will endure and people may take it no more and perhaps the war will no longer be silent. Is that the kind of world we are to give to those children who reach the 21st century?" Lannon Walker or better still his masters should answer these questions. We over here in Nigeria should have more questions to raise and answer. We know that ours is a military regime, which has come to power and remains in power by force of arms. Why did they need to seek our mandate when they wanted to go to the IMF? When the public unanimously rejected the idea of IMF loan why did they insist and went ahead? Are they playing with the intelligence of their subjects? Or is it a show of power and arrogance? What has happened to all the money they have been taking as loans, ostensibly on our behalf and for our benefits? Who gave the mandate and where are the benefits? Throughout the history of this country this is the time we have had the highest debt and yet the most essential services of health, education, transport, etc have been at their lowest ebb, some would say, have collapsed. Are we not entitled to ask? The president was reported to have been wondering why the Nigerian economy has not collapsed. But it has. Someone should tell him to stop wondering. We, against whom this war by other means in waged, know that the economy has collapsed, since we woke up one morning and found that the value of our money is only half of what it was yesterday. And we have since then been waking up unsure of what the value of the currency would be. We certainly know and feel that our economy has collapsed. By Usman Bugaje [ Published in Citizen magazine of June 15, 1992]