South Korean President Moon Jae-in presides over a meeting with his senior secretaries at the Presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, May 28, 2018. Source: Yonhap via Reuters
THE President of South Korea is prohibited by law from campaigning on behalf of candidates in domestic elections.
However, the force of Moon Jae-in propelled candidates from the President’s liberal Minjoo (Democratic Party of Korea) to epoch-making levels of political dominance in the June 13 local elections. Timing also played a part in what was the perfect storm for opposition parties.
At nearly 80 per cent, Moon’s approval rates are unprecedented, and it has brought a similarly unprecedented crisis down on the traditionally dominant conservative Liberty Korea Party, as well as the recently formed centre-right Bareun Mirae, with the leaders of bothparties resigning in the aftermath.
Local elections encompass the district, city, and regional level with the national spotlight on the 17 major mayoral and gubernatorial races. Minjoo emerged victorious in 14 of the 17. Other than the conservative heartland of North Gyeongsang province and Daegu city, as well as the island province of Jeju, the Minjoo wave swept all before it.
Minjoo also won 11 of 12 by-elections, moving to 130 seats in the 300-member national assembly, compared to LKP’s 113. With minor leftist parties occupying a further 25-seat block, Minjoo effectively has a legislative majority.
Minjoo’s spoils include the whole of the capital region, Seoul, Gyeonggi, and Incheon, which accounts for half the population of the country. In Seoul, Park Won-soon faced little resistance in securing a third consecutive term, winning 24 of the capital’s 25 districts. In Gyeonggi province, which encircles Seoul, Lee Jae-myung claimed the first liberal victory since 1998, defeating the conservative incumbent by more than 20 per cent.
Members of a conservative civic group attend a protest to support ousted President Park Geun-hye outside a court in Seoul, South Korea, April 6, 2018. Source: Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji
A string of personal scandals did little to slow down the twin forces of party momentum and a reputation for innovative welfare policy that Lee had on his side. The city of Incheon also changed hands from Liberty Korea to Minjoo, completing the latter’s clean sweep in the capital region.
In the liberal stronghold of the south-western Honam region – comprising Gwangju, South and North Jeolla Provinces – there was no pretense of electoral competition as Minjoo won every race with voter shares at least 70 per cent of the total. The ‘swing’ provinces of Chungcheong and Gangwon and their cities all also went blue too.
Having guaranteed success in the rest of the country, all eyes were focused on what would unfold in the traditionally conservative Yeongnam region. Yeongnam is, in political terms, the other half of Korea: the Busan-Ulsan-metro region, along with Daegu and the surrounding Gyeongsang provinces, disproportionately benefited from development projects through the post-war South Korean economic boom due to patron-client vested interests.
This entrenched regionalism meant that liberals winning even a single race would be cause for celebration. Minjoo took the governorship of South Gyeongsang province with the emergence of rising star Kim Kyung-soo, and every city in the region except Daegu.
It is not yet clear if this is the death knell for regional conservatism or whether a more credible conservative party can one day reclaim their territorial base.
Such comprehensive political victories cannot be explained by a single phenomenon, but the most immediate of factors was clearly Moon’s North Korea peace process. By taking an initial hard line and then switching tack when heightened tensions between the US and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea threatened the security of South Korea, Moon won the political capital necessary to pursue diplomacy with Pyongyang.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un leave after their summit at the truce village of Panmunjom, North Korea, in this handout picture provided by the Presidential Blue House on May 26, 2018. Picture taken on May 26, 2018. Source: The Presidential Blue House /Handout via Reuters
In doing so he rendered the conservatives’ most reliable weapon ineffective: a Cold War-style answer to the North Korea problem. Having seen much of their credibility on the economy seep away through the years of disgraced President Park Geun-hye, losing the debate on security meant both pillars of Korean conservatism had vanished.
However, it is in the demise of impeached former President Park where the roots of the current conservative failing lie. The Park administration’s lack of transparency, corruption and indifference to public opinionmeant the conservatives needed a clean break to have any hope of rebuilding public trust.
Instead, the last 18 months have seen half-hearted denouncements of Park administration actions, party splits, crossings of the parliamentary floor, and Hong Joon-pyo at the head of the Liberty Korea Party, a man who has displayed none of the flexibility and humility which the political landscape demanded.
The election was arguably even more disastrous for the fledgling Bareun Mirae party, hastily formed as an awkward marriage of politicians whose previous party alignments were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The party’s struggle to find a political identity meant that their first electoral test ended in disaster. Yoo Seung-min’s resignation as party leader and Ahn Cheol-soo’s embarrassing third-place finish in Seoul leaves the party’s continued existence in doubt.
Conservatives will likely be on the fringes of the political conversation for the foreseeable future. For Conservative Korea, this should be used as an opportunity for a long-term rebuilding project under fresh leadership – something which should have happened a long time ago.
For Moon, the local elections have granted him access to the political instruments necessary to implement his foreign and domestic agendas barely a year into his single five-year term.
The cover-up of the 1MDB affair was taking the country toward autocracy — until the people won the day.
Indonesian officials boarded the luxury yacht 'Equanimity', reportedly worth some $250 million and owned by Jho Low, a former unofficial adviser to the Malaysian fund 1MDB, at Benoa Bay in Bali on February 28, 2018. (RULLY PRASETYO/AFP/Getty Images)
On the first day of 2017, fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, the chief suspect in a $6.5 billion fraud that had split his home country in two, circulated a curious parable to his trusted contacts on Chinese messaging app WeChat: “2016 was the Perfect Storm … and the Captain simply adjusted their sails effortlessly and continued their destined journey….”
It was a remarkably nonchalant message for a man at the center of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation, and who had become a cartoon villain for protestors in the streets of Kuala Lumpur. But as Low bobbed along on his mega-yacht, Equanimity, he had the utmost confidence in his “captain” — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, the man believed to be Low’s partner in defrauding his own country’s public.
When the message was sent, Najib’s reign seemed unassailable. Threatened with ouster two years earlier, the so-called captain — the head of a political alliance that had ruled Malaysia for over six decades — had demonstrated his willingness to burn down Malaysian rule of law and democracy to save himself and his allies.
But today, the former prime minister and his wife are unable to leave the country. The anti-corruption agency investigation has reportedly recommended prosecution and Najib is set to be charged soon after the Eid celebrations finish. Low himself is scuttling between Macau and Taiwan, seeking to cut a deal with the new government in exchange for immunity. His approaches have been flatly rejected.
Malaysia’s institutions proved more resilient than either man had ever imagined, and descent into authoritarianism has been averted – offering a lesson not only to aspiring dictators, but to those in the United States who argue that propping up corrupt leaders is in U.S. interests.
* * *
The party came to an abrupt end thanks to a multibillion-dollar scandal involving Najib and Low’s brainchild: a government investment fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). With a nebulous mandate of promoting economic development through strategic partnerships, the fund entered into a series of huge deals with partners in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi to nominally invest in energy and real estate.
The deals were, however, allegedly a smokescreen for a conspiracy to divert billions to a small cabal of conspirators on both sides of the deals; chief amongst them Najib and Jho Low. Fuelled by debt and with no substantive cash flow from its investments, the fund became a $17 billion black hole, for which Malaysians will pick up the tab for generations.
In 2016, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seized assets worth $2 billion held by Jho Low and his associates in the United States, Switzerland, and United Kingdom These assets included a private jet, mansions in Beverly Hills and London, penthouses in New York, paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, and the rights to movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and Dumb and Dumber To, allegedly purchased using funds siphoned from 1MDB. While the Justice Department named Low as a chief conspirator in the fraud, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was referred to only as ‘Malaysian Official 1’. The DOJ case confirmed earlier headlines that over $1 billion flowed into his personal bank account in Kuala Lumpur.
Yet Low knew that he was safe as long as Najib was in power.
Like many other Malaysians, he couldn’t imagine a world in which Najib, an aristocrat and head of a political alliance that had ruled uninterrupted since independence in 1957, wouldn’t prevail. Even as knowledge of the fraud spread throughout the country, Najib remained confident in his own impunity — and determined to protect himself even if it meant putting a torch to Malaysia’s democracy and rule of law.
When Najib became prime minister in 2009, he projected the image of an energetic modernizer. His tenure coincided with the rise of another youthful reformer, U.S. President Barack Obama, who pledged to strengthen alliances as part of his “pivot to Asia” to counter China’s growing influence. Najib’s team of Western public-relations advisors sculpted his image as a pro-Western pragmatist leading a majority Muslim nation, forming his Global Movement of Moderates initiative to fight extremism.
The two leaders apparently enjoyed a genuinely warm personal relationship, golfing together in Hawaii over Christmas in 2014 during a meeting brokered by a former Obama fundraiser (himself being investigated for receiving millions embezzled from 1MDB).
This friendship was one reason why the Justice Department seizure of assets held by his family and associates blindsided Najib and temporarily upended Malaysia’s foreign policy. Najib’s press secretary accused the United States of imperial overreach, calling the indictment “unnecessary and gratuitous” and tantamount to “domestic political manipulation and interference.” Najib dropped any pretense of domestic reform and began to appeal to his supporters’ basest political sentiments, racial and religious supremacy, directed against Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese population. At a fundraising dinner for his party, he even called on his supporters to be “brave” like Islamic State fighters.
At the same time, he jetted off to China in search of a bailout for 1MDB, which had begun defaulting on its debts. “The stories about 1MDB monkey business and the DOJ indictment caused huge capital flight from Malaysia, leaving a foreign investment vacuum that China saw as an opportunity to further cement its strategic presence” said James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania. China had already been ramping up its investments in Malaysia under Najib’s administration as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Najib inked a number of new deals with Chinese state-owned firms including the construction of a $13 billion high-speed rail line and purchase of 1MDB’s dubiously overvalued power and land assets.
The price of this neighborly “goodwill” was a tacit shift in Malaysia’s foreign policy toward China, and coincided with unprecedented levels of encroachment by Chinese vessels into Malaysian waters in the South China Sea.
“In effect, China took for itself all the benefits and left us with all the liabilities” argues Dennis Ignatius, a former Malaysian ambassador. “If Najib had won the election “we would have become so indebted to China that our independence and territorial integrity would have been seriously compromised.”
As 1MDB publicly unraveled, Najib targeted Malaysian democracy itself.
In 2015, leaked documents first surfaced revealing deposits into his accounts. By this point, Malaysian authorities had been quietly building a case against Najib for some time, and were in the final stages of preparing for his arrest. Najib got wind of their intentions and launched a purge, dismissing Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail and senior officers of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission.
They were replaced with bumbling placemen who would later clear Najib of all charges. Soon after the purge, Kevin Morais, a state prosecutor alleged to be one of the leakers, was kidnapped and found buried in cement in an oil drum outside Kuala Lumpur. His exact role remains mysterious, but his gruesome murder sent shockwaves through the civil service.
As law enforcement in the United States, Singapore, Switzerland, and Luxembourg announced investigations and froze billions in assets allegedly stolen from 1MDB, Najib’s new attorney general, Apandi Ali claimed that they must be mistaken. Letters for legal cooperation went unanswered. There was, apparently, no money missing from 1MDB. Malaysia didn’t want this money back, because to do so would be to admit a crime had been committed.
After his assault on the law, Najib went after the media, introducing and enforcing new laws, including a Trump-inspired ban on fake news, ahead of the May 2018 general election that criminalized dissemination of any story Najib’s ministers deemed as fake. He also furnished himself with powers to effectively declare martial law in the event of an ill-defined “security crisis”.
Finally, he went after the voting system itself, re-delineating an already gerrymandered electoral map in the hopes of eliminating any possible ouster by the ballot box.
As the country drifted toward the general election on May 9, most commentators predicted another grubby win for Najib’s incumbent coalition. “Najib’s campaign strategy relied on a set-piece battle where he thought he’d shaped the battlefield ahead of the election with factors like the gerrymandering, the fake news law and weekday polling” says Ben Sufjan, Director of the Merdeka Center, Malaysia’s leading polling group.
Had Najib won the election, he would have taken the country into unchartered authoritarian territory. He was in so deep that his options were dictatorship, exile, or prosecution. The election would have been the funeral for a Malaysian democracy that was already looking in terminal decline. Yet that evening, Lazarus-like, it would spring back to life.
* * *
As polling day neared, it became increasingly clear that Najib’s usual tricks weren’t working. The long-term power of his party had also brought with it a fatal inertia.
With crowds flocking to opposition campaign gatherings, the government resorted to cynically suppressing voter turnout: polling day was called on a weekday; postal votes didn’t arrive; and a strict deadline of 5 p.m. was called while hundreds still waited in line to vote. In some areas, voters were even rejected because they didn’t meet an arbitrary and newly invented “dress code.”
None of this was enough to save him. Najib believed the complexity of the 1MDB fraud made it incomprehensible to most voters in the key swing seats. Yet he was up against the wily Mahathir Mohamad, a 92-year-old political veteran who boiled it down to “Najib is not a rich man — he steals money,” and scathingly referred to Najib’s loyalists as farmyard animals receiving dedak, or chicken feed, from their master.
1MDB became a lightning rod and an indelible symbol of grand corruption. Najib’s fate was sealed. It was a stunning victory for the opposition coalition.
* * *
The first couple’s downfall was humiliating. After a bungled attempt to fly out the country on a private jet was thwarted, they were effectively under house arrest. Days later, police launched dawn searches of their properties in Kuala Lumpur. Photos, probably taken by police and leaked on social media, showed the shattered pair slouched in armchairs, dressed in their fine silks, as officers broke open a series of safes. In scenes reminiscent of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s downfall, inside was $28 million in cash (in 26 different currencies) and $50 million in luxury items including 284 boxes of designer handbags (Najib’s wife, Rosmah, was infamous for her purchase of a $200,000 Hermès Birkin bag). But unlike the former first couple of the Philippines, Najib and Rosmah weren’t agile enough to get out of Dodge.
Across the border, Low slipped out of Thailand. With the Equanimity now impounded in Bali and his captain under unofficial house arrest, Low’s world has collapsed on him — leading to his recent hints he might flip on his old boss.
The new government quickly reappointed the original 1MDB task force that was disbanded by Najib. With a new and highly cooperative jurisdiction in Malaysia, the full and ugly scale of the 1MDB fraud is likely to be revealed. Mahathir is already talking of revising the country’s deals with China, struck during the era of blatant corruption. Nationalist press in Beijing are warning Mahathir of the price Malaysia will pay “if it fails to adhere to the spirit of the contract”.
* * *
The lessons of 1MDB aren’t confined to Malaysia. In the wake of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, investors flocked to growth markets in Asia and Latin America, where confidence was high and governments flush with money. 1MDB and Brazil’s Petrobras scandal will go down as the two iconic corruption cases that exposed the rot within globalization.
But the brave officers of anti-corruption commissions and citizens at the ballot box ultimately brought down prime ministers and presidents.
In Malaysia’s case, they had a little help from the United States, specifically from a controversial program within the Department of Justice called the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative which continued its civil action even after Najib quashed the domestic 1MDB investigation. The State Department reportedly tried to stifle the DOJ action against Najib. That it failed has been only positive for the reputation of the United States at a time when its image has been badly tarnished worldwide.
While President Donald Trump has talked scathingly of the DOJ’s foreign corruption agenda (and influential figures like donor Eliot Broidy were reportedly in talks with Jho Low to attach a $75 million success fee if he could end the 1MDB investigation), the 1MDB case is a striking instance of how anti-corruption can pay off not only morally, but geopolitically for the United States.
With a fresh administration in Malaysia, the DOJ is now able to repatriate the $2 billion in assets that were seized and help plug the 1MDB debt, stabilizing the new government. After a three-year interlude, they can also resume working with their Malaysian counterparts. In the meantime, the new administration has tugged the country away from the seemingly inevitable gravity of China’s orbit.
Najib’s fall is a reminder that tyrants are not invincible, and that U.S. interests, in the long term, are best served by supporting those fighting for the rule of law, financial transparency, and anti-corruption efforts than by short-term alliances with strongmen.
Some people have come up with the question about what happens to the rest peoples some of whom also fought and died in the effort to free the first Biafra from Nigeria.
by Osita Ebiem-
( June 18, 2018, New York City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Since the last nineteen years, there has been a revival of the quest for the reestablishment of the defunct Republic of Biafra. Between 1967 and 1970 Biafra existed as an independent state apart from Nigeria. The boundaries of the new country were based on the colonially created former Eastern Region of Nigeria. Igbo national people were the dominant ethnic group in the region. But there were many other non-Igbo ethnic or national peoples in the new country. Because of the circumstances that necessitated the independence declaration of the country, it was natural for this Biafra of 1967 to include the dominant Igbo nationals and others who are Igbo neighbours living in the contiguous surrounding lands.
Just like they did in the dysfunctional greater Nigerian country, the European colonialists who created the former Eastern Region had insensitively mixed up all the different national ethnic groups in the region for their governing convenience. Because this hotchpotch arrangement helped to minimize the running cost of the colonial outposts by cutting down on the number of staff and other incidentals it made a sound commercial sense for the non-indigenous Europeans. So, the Europeans maximized profit from their colonial venture while the indigenous peoples suffered from avoidable endemic interethnic internecine conflicts that would frustrate and stunt any form of progress.
As soon as the colonial Europeans left when they granted independence to the natives, the hitherto simmering dormant crisis busted out into uncontrollable flames. Up till now, as I write this piece, since the departure of the Europeans, interethnic and interreligious killings have constantly erupted among the native peoples who were forced by the exigencies of colonialism to exist as citizens of the same country. This is what led to the declaration of Biafran independence from Nigeria in 1967. Islamic dominated Nigeria had embarked on the mission to wipe out the Christian dominant Igbo people from the Earth. Igbo people resisted the genocidal move by declaring an independent state of Biafra from Nigeria.
This is 2018 more than half a century after, the various peoples are still engulfed in an unnecessary progress-arresting and human-lives destroying crisis because the lazy inheritors of this unviable European creation have continued to avoid facing the realities of their so-called Nigerian country. The only sensible solution to the seemingly unending Nigerian crisis is to divide the country along the existing ethnic and religious divides.
However, as we stated earlier, there has been a renewed interest in carving out of Nigeria a new independent Biafra. With the new agitation came the controversy surrounding the authentic identities, territorial boundaries and social and political structures of this new quest. As all will agree, both those involved in the struggle to free Biafra from Nigeria and those watching the developments from any angle, there is no way the Biafra of 2018 will look anything like the Biafra of 1967. Nothing in this world remains static and time, it is said changes everything. Fifty years have passed since 1967 and the truth is that the conditions and circumstances that produced the first Biafra and this new Biafra are not the same.
Therefore the human identities, national boundaries and political and social structures of this new Biafra cannot be the same as those of 1967. Every new generation must fight their own wars and win or lose their own battles on their own terms. Agitating for a new Biafra based on the 1967 identities, boundaries and structures will amount to an intellectual laziness on the part of the agitators and spell the doom of the proposed new country. A new Biafra as agitated for by the Igbo does not and cannot include any non-Igbo ethnic nationals. This position cannot be overemphasized because going against it will be nothing different from the extant Nigerian disaster – the mixing of different incongruent peoples in a country that cannot work. That mistake was made by foreign powers and we rightly blame them for it. But we cannot afford to make the same mistake in the new Biafra. Doing so will be like creating a new Nigeria by another name, Biafra. The same crises that have bedeviled the present Nigeria will also dog such Biafra and destroy it.
Such a disaster can easily be avoided by creating a brand new country by Africans and for Africans based on their own native experiences and anticipations. It will be a country for the first time created by Africans and for their people on their own terms. When this is done, if the new country fails or succeeds, it will be the shame or pride of the creators – Igbo people. There will be none else to blame but the indigenous people themselves. There will not be any foreign input by sheepishly following the moribund foreign concept boundaries of the former Eastern Region of Nigeria. The absurdity of adopting the map of the old Eastern Region as the boundaries of the new Biafra is the fact that almost half of Igbo population and land on the west bank of the Niger were not included in the 1967 Biafra. There are also several Igbo populations and lands that extend beyond what many people today know as traditional Igbo land. No Igbo anywhere should or will be left behind in this new quest to reestablish an independent Igbo state.
These truths and facts serve as fundamentals that need to be clearly defined for all who care to join this Igbo liberation business so that from the onset they will have a clear picture of what they are getting into, what they should and what they should not do. With that said it does not mean that in the process of doing that that we should produce a document that is perfect and immutable. We should aim for a living document that is dynamic and in tandem with the times, events and current circumstances. Since events, circumstances and experiences seem to change very rapidly these days we can keep up by constantly reviewing and updating the contents of the working document to always reflect in real time the prevailing realities which we encounter along the way.
At this moment all those who are involved in this business need to recognize that we are at the cusp of bringing into being a brand new society, country or nation. As such we seem to have been involuntarily positioned by providence to play a special role in the history of Igbo people. We can voluntarily choose to reenact the convoluted grandiose “Zik of Africa” pipe dream by pursuing to build another clay-footed giant in the new Biafra of 2018 and jumble up a mixed bag of incongruent peoples in the name of inclusiveness. If we did this we would have fallen into the same sin we accuse Lugard, Zik and others of. Or we can choose to unashamedly reinvent our ancestral Igbo nation and proudly turn it into a viable, progressive, peaceful, prosperous and manageable modern country that is successful and serve as an inspiration to the rest of the world. Such a modern and ideal Igbo country will attract other people from around the world who would come and proudly take up citizenship in this Igbo country and will be self-propelled to honestly pay patriotic allegiance to their newly adopted country and Igboness.
It will be foolhardy of us who have the luxury of time (relative to the 1967 Biafrans) as it is, to carelessly, even naively adopt the same unworkable one-Nigerian pattern to which we are all witnesses of as a woeful epitome of a futile doomed enterprise.
At this stage (maybe at no time at all) we cannot afford to have anything to be written in stone – unchangeable and final. In the popular saying it is said that only God and fools do not change their minds. 1967 Biafra was the concept and dream of our fathers but the 2018 Biafra must be the concept and dream of the present generation of Igbo people. I personally was a firm believer in one-Biafra that would be made up of both Igbo and their neighbors (an all-inclusive Biafra.) In my simplistic thinking I believed that the so-called south-south or Niger Delta political zone should naturally be a part of the new Biafra because 1967 boundaries included those places. I wrote passionately in favor of such political arrangement in the new Biafra we are founding. I had even used such fanciful phrases like “United States of Biafra” to describe the envisaged new creation of another one-Nigeria only with a different name “Biafra.” But such phrases are thoughtless and full of “beautiful nonsense” as my friend Festus Afamefule would put it. In the last few years after some time of impassioned personal interrogation and honest empirical contemplation I concluded that in the interest of the future generations of our people that we cannot afford to construct a new country for our people whose foundation and modus vivendi is not firmly anchored in our Igboness (in who we are.) For a society to work, the people are expected to have common historical experiences, common cultural practices, common linguistic history and some other things that help to hold a people together. The saying in Igbo is that na izu ka nma na nne ji.
Some people have come up with the question about what happens to the rest peoples some of whom also fought and died in the effort to free the first Biafra from Nigeria. Such people will need to be reminded that these other nations of indigenous peoples are capable of forming their own independent countries without Igbo as a part in their destiny. The populations of most of these ethnic nations run in several millions with so much natural and human resources that can easily sustain and make them successful. It will be stupid for any Igbo to think that they have been placed in the position of the “redemptive saviours” over these peoples who have their own innate redeemers. Everyone or ethnic people that fought under the banner and name of Biafra in 1967 and onwards are also equally entitled to adopt the name as their redemptive symbol of resistance, freedom and independence. Today that is what that name has come to represent for all peoples and persons – a universal symbol of resistance against genocide, injustice, oppression, persecution and domination. Any people or person anywhere in the world can adopt that name as their symbolic avatar in their quest for redemption, liberation, freedom and independence from anything, person or institution.
Perhaps the reason why this confusion has festered is that this movement for a new Biafra has remained like a moving train which stops to pick up all willing passengers without discrimination. Of course, there should be no discrimination against all those who want to get in but the danger we have faced is that most of those who are joining the train (the Biafran train) come with so many wild, dangerous and hideous (sometimes fraudulent) notions. All come with preconceived parochial opinions on what Biafra is or what it should be. And all claim to be the final authorities in the subject. But unfortunately, many of these individualized ideas about Biafra are flawed. Yet this has not stopped these misled individuals from holding very tight to their version of personalized wishful and impractical opinionated Biafranism. Having observed this dangerous trend it has become necessary that the Igbo must get together to reinvent and refocus their own standardized unique and workable Biafranism and anticipated Biafran or Igbo country. It doesn’t matter, when independence is won the new state can stick with Biafra or change its name. The other emerging new countries can also adopt the Biafran name or something else as it suits them. More than one country can go by Biafra just like Sudan and South Sudan.
In the end a more sensible and ideal new Biafra or Igbo state should be aimed toward success. It should be one that while being careful to preserve all the great conservative aspects of Igbo cultural heritage and traditions, is also dynamic – readily embracing change and willingly directing the society to seamlessly transit into newly discovered lights with little or no frictions. If this generation followed their hearts and are willing to do the right things, this new society can work if it is founded on a non-sentimental and well-considered uncompromised realism.
On the contrary if we want to follow the fad and adopt the “pretty boy” posture of the current wave of indiscriminate and unrealistic world dream then we will be headed for trouble. Sadly, it is this prevailing unregulated sentimental liberal ideology that has created the greatest danger that is facing our world today. It is the indiscriminate senseless implementation of this innocent-sounding idea that is threatening to revert all the progress, prosperity and freedoms which the world has thus far enjoyed to the level of the dark ages. This sentimental liberalism if left unchecked will send the world to the darkest abyss, the type that it has never seen before.
To prove the danger inherent in this psychedelic self-defeating indiscriminate all-inclusiveness; apart from the perfect example of the one-Nigerian disaster, the reader can take one hard look at Europe in its current compromised state. With the trend and rate at which Europe is traveling along this uncensored inclusiveness, Europe will be doomed. The only hope that is still open to Europe is that the current generation of Europeans must stand their ground and push back the coming darkness of Islamism. Otherwise, if nothing is done to stave off this wave of absolute evil, in the next few years Europe as we know it will be completely engulfed in a total hopeless darkness of the worst kind.
Exclusive: Debbie Sims Africa, the first freed member of a radical Philadelphia group many say were unjustly imprisoned, talks about reuniting with her son and defends the Move members still locked up: ‘We are peaceful people’
Debbie Sims Africa was 22 when she was sentenced. Her release is seen as a major breakthrough for those imprisoned during the black liberation movement. Photograph: Courtesy of Michael Davis Africa Jr
The first member of a group of black radicals known as the Move Nine who have been incarcerated, they insist unjustly, for almost 40 years for killing a Philadelphia police officer has been released from prison.
Debbie Sims Africa, 61, walked free from Cambridge Springs prison in Pennsylvania on Saturday, having been granted parole. She was 22 when with her co-defendants she was arrested and sentenced to 30 to 100 years for the shooting death of officer James Ramp during a police siege of the group’s communal home on 8 August 1978.
She emerged from the correctional institution to be reunited with her son, Michael Davis Africa Jr, to whom she gave birth in a prison cell in September 1978, a month after her arrest.
“This is huge for us personally,” Sims Africa told the Guardian, speaking from her son’s home in a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia where she will now live.
Davis Africa, 39, who was separated from his mother at less than a week old and has never spent time with her outside prison, said they were coming to terms with being reunited after almost four decades.
“Today I had breakfast with my mother for the first time,” he said. “There’s so much we haven’t done together.”
The release of Debbie Sims Africa is a major breakthrough regarding the ongoing incarceration of large numbers of individuals involved in the black liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s who are now growing old behind bars. At least 25 men and women belonging to Move or the former Black Panther party remain locked up, in some cases almost half a century after their arrests.
Michael Davis Africa Jr on reunited with his mother: ‘There’s so much we haven’t done together.’ Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the Guardian
Sims Africa’s release also addresses one of the most hotly contested criminal justice cases in Philadelphia history. The nine were prosecuted together following a police siege of their headquarters in Powelton Village at the orders of Philadelphia’s notoriously hardline mayor and former police commissioner, Frank Rizzo.
Move, which exists today, regarded itself as a revolutionary movement committed to a healthy life free from oppression or pollution. In the 1970s it was something of a cross between black liberationists and early environmental activists. Its members all take “Africa” as their last name, to signal that they see each other as family.
Hundreds of police officers, organized in Swat teams and armed with machine guns, water cannons, teargas and bulldozers, were involved in the siege, which came at the end of a long standoff with the group relating to complaints about conditions in its premises. Two water cannon and smoke bombs were unleashed. The Move residents took refuge in a basement.
I had to feel my way up the stairs to get out of the basement with my baby in my arms
Sims Africa was eight months pregnant and was carrying her two-year-old daughter, Michelle. “We were being battered with high-powered water and smoke was everywhere,” she said. “I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face and I was choking. I had to feel my way up the stairs to get out of the basement with my baby in my arms.”
Shooting broke out and Ramp was killed by a single bullet. Prosecutors alleged that Move members fired the fatal shot and charged Sims Africa and the other eight with collective responsibility for his death.
Eyewitnesses, however, gave accounts suggesting that the shot may have come from the opposite direction to the basement, raising the possibility that Ramp was accidentally felled, by police fire. After the raid was over, weapons were found within the property. None were in operative condition.
In 1985, Philadelphia authorities carried out an even more controversial and deadly action against the remaining members of Move. A police helicopter dropped an incendiary bomb on to the roof of its then HQ in west Philadelphia, killing six adults including the group’s leader, John Africa, and five of their children.
At Sims Africa’s trial, no evidence was presented that she or the three other women charged alongside her had brandished or handled firearms during the siege. Nor was there any attempt on the part of the prosecution to prove that they had had any role in firing the shot that killed Ramp.
Sims Africa has had an unblemished disciplinary record in prison for the past 25 years. The last claim of misconduct against her dates to 1992.
Her attorneys presented the parole board with a 13-page dossier outlining her work as a mentor to other prisoners and as a dog handler who trains puppies that assist people with physical and cognitive disabilities. The dossier includes testimony from the correctional expert Martin Horn, who reviewed her record and concluded it was “remarkable”.
Philadelphia burn after officials dropped a bomb on the Move house in 1985. Photograph: AP
Horn said Sims Africa had “chosen to be a rule-abiding individual with the ability to be a productive, law-abiding citizen if she is released. I see a record of growing maturity, improved judgment and the assumption of personal responsibility. I do not believe that Debbie Sims is today a threat to the community.”
Sims Africa’s lawyer, Brad Thomson, commended the parole board for “recognizing that she is of exceptional character and well-deserving of parole. This is a storied victory for Debbie and her family, and the Move organization, and we are hoping it will be the first step in getting all the Move Nine out of prison.”
The release of Sims Africa comes less than two months before the 40th anniversary of the siege. Commemorative events are being held in Philadelphia, organised by Move, on 5 and 11 August.
The release of Sims Africa is bittersweet, however. Two of the nine have died in prison – another female inmate, Merle Austin Africa, in March 1998, and Phil Africa in January 2015.
Having to leave them was hard. I was torn up inside because I want to come home but I want them to come with me
Also bittersweet is the fact that Sims Africa went up for parole at exactly the same time, and on exactly the same terms, as the other two remaining Move Nine women – Janine Phillips Africa and Janet Hollaway Africa. They were both denied parole and will have to wait until May 2019 to try again.
Thomson said the disparity in the parole board’s decision was “very surprising”, given that the Philadelphia district attorney’s office that carried out the original trial prosecution had written letters supporting parole for all three. The parole board gave what the lawyer said were “boilerplate justifications” for the denial of Phillips Africa and Hollaway Africa, saying they displayed “lack of remorse”.
Debbie Sims Africa’s husband also remains behind bars. Mike Davis Africa Sr is next up before the parole board, in September. The other Move Nine prisoners are Chuck Sims Africa, Delbert Orr Africa and Eddie Goodman Africa. Debbie Sims Africa with her son after her release from prison. Photograph: Courtesy of Michael Davis Africa Jr
Debbie Sims Africa told the Guardian the remaining prisoners were constantly in her mind and that she planned to devote much of her time campaigning for their release.
“Having to leave them was hard,” she said. “I was torn up inside because of course I want to come home but I want them to come with me. I was in shock when it didn’t happen that way.”
Asked if the two Move women with whom she had shared a cell in Cambridge Springs would be a threat to society if released, she said: “Absolutely not. They would not be a danger as I’m not.
“Nobody from the Move movement has been released from prison and ever committed a crime, going back to 1988. We are peaceful people.”
Once ubiquitous in everything from frozen pizza to coffee creamer to popcorn, artificial trans fats are — as of Monday — banished from U.S. restaurants and grocery stores.
Food-makers have had three years to phase out the ingredient, which the Food and Drug Administration ruled unsafe to eat in 2015. Nutrition researchers and public health advocates long ago found artificial trans fats, a modified form of vegetable oil, raised “bad” cholesterol and contributed to heart disease.
That prompted a wave of voluntary recipe changes at food companies, and trans fat consumption has plummeted over the past decade. But the June 18 deadline marks a final chapter in the U.S. fight against trans fats at a time when other countries are beginning to contemplate a similar change.
“The elimination of artificial trans fat from the food supply represents a historic and long-fought victory for public health,” said Michael F. Jacobson, the former executive director of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, in a statement to mark the occasion. “Ridding the food supply of partially hydrogenated oils will save tens of thousands of lives each year.”
Scientists developed the method for modifying oils in the early 20th century, but food-makers didn’t deploy them until the 1950s and ’60s when they needed ways to lengthen shelf life and improve the texture of processed food products.
But in the early 1990s, research began turning up powerful links between artificial trans fats, cholesterol and heart disease. (Studies have not established a connection between those conditions and the natural trans fats that occur in some animal proteins.)
Artificial trans fats are made in an industrial process that injects hydrogen atoms into molecules of vegetable fat, changing their chemical structure. For reasons scientists don't entirely understand, these altered molecules prompt the body to produce more bad cholesterol — among otherpossible problems.
As the scientific consensus grew, the FDA required food companies to disclose artificial trans fats on product labels in January 2006. Nine years later, the agency ruled that artificial trans fats are not safe in food and set a June 2018 deadline for their removal from the food system.
Food companies cut trans fats 86 percent between 2003 and 2015, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and expended hundreds of thousands of hours tweaking foods from Jell-O to Wheat Thins. Food companies made further reductions between 2015 and 2018, removing 98 percent of trans fats from the food supply, said Brian Kennedy, a GMA spokesman.
But the transformation hasn’t been easy. Some products, such as popcorn and pie crust, proved more stubborn to reinvention. Companies have also complained to FDA that they should be allowed to continue using trans fats in limited circumstances — such as to enhance product flavors or grease industrial baking pans.
FDA agreed in May to give companies one more year to find another ingredient for those purposes. The agency has also said that, while new products can no longer be made with trans fats, they'll give foods already on the shelves some time to cycle out of the market. But food makers and public health advocates agree that artificial trans fats are effectively no more.
“I would have preferred [FDA not give] the one-year extension because manufacturers have had plenty of time to eliminate the use of trans fat,” said Walter Willett, the Harvard University nutrition professor whose research first surfaced the problems with trans fats. “However, these are small enough that we can say that industrial trans fat has been removed from our food supply.”
Willett says that could slash the rates of preliminary death from heart disease, and reduce the incidence of diabetes, dementia and other metabolic diseases. Such declines have been observed in New York City, which banned the use of partially hydrogenated oils in restaurants in 2007, and in Denmark, which became the first country to ban trans fats in 2003.
Public health officials are looking to other countries to take similar steps, particularly in the developing world. In May, the World Health Organization urged countries to eliminate trans fats from their food supplies, citing the risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Several high-income countries have virtually eliminated industrially-produced trans fats through legally imposed limits on the amount that can be contained in packaged food,” the agency said in a statement. “Action is needed in low- and middle-income countries . . . to ensure that the benefits are felt equally around the world.”
The challenge now for regulators and public health advocates will be the ingredients replacing trans fats, Willett said.
Some environmental groups have raised concerns that food companies are reaching for palm oil, which contributes to deforestation.
There has also been concern that food-makers might boost the flavor and texture of newly overhauled products by increasing the fat content overall — although a 2017 report from the Department of Agriculture was the latest of several studies to find that trans fat reductions rarely led to an jump in fat content.
Meera Srinivasan16 JUNE 2018 20:56 IST
Following prolonged struggles for their military-occupied land and for answers about their disappeared relatives, Tamils living in Sri Lanka’s north and east are battling a new demon — debt. Almost every family is crumbling under the weight of mounting loans with steep interest rates.
What began as sporadic complaints from affected borrowers is turning into a widespread mass struggle, going by the string of protests last week, in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar and Vavuniya districts, across the Northern Province. Women’s organisations, NGOs, and civil society networks have mobilised people around the cause, said Charles Vijayarathinam Thavachchiri, who leads a women’s group in Kilinochchi.
Following the end of the civil war in 2009, in the absence of jobs and amidst the many failed attempts of the state and development agencies to promote self-employment in a battered economy, people living in the north and the east turned to readily accessible microfinance. They were unaware of the high interest rates — running to as high as 70% — that were seldom revealed in the fine print. “It became common for people to take a new loan to repay an old one. They soon found themselves in a trap, with five loans, massive interest rates and no way to repay,” Ms. Thavachchiri explained.
The problem became so severe over the last couple of years, with several reports of suicides linked to predatory loans, that the Central Bank decided to intervene. After a study that showed a worryingly high prevalence of indebtedness, the Governor of the apex bank visited the north and, more recently, the east, to meet the affected people. The bank has since been raising awareness through campaigns. The Finance Ministry on its part has allocated LKR 500 million (about ₹212 million) this year for debt relief in the north.
Call for a cap on interest rates
Although belated, the responses have offered some promise to the people, but they also want some immediate and concrete steps to prevent further damage. Underscoring the need for rural credit, they point to alternatives by way of low-interest loans from government banks and a possible cap on interest rates of private lenders.
The protesters at Thursday’s rally too made these demands, echoing their Jaffna counterparts’ petition at a protest in February. Similar agitations were held in Batticaloa in the Eastern Province as well.
Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera told Parliament recently that the government would write off interest amounts on loans less than LKR 1,50,000 (about ₹64,000). He also said new regulations for the microfinance companies would be released later this month.
Nearly 75 members are listed with the Lanka Microfinance Practitio
ners’ Association, a network of microfinance lenders. The association on its website claims to “provide quality financial services to grass-root communities”. With the likely new regulations, the actual terms of these “services” will hopefully be more visible.
Evidently, microcredit, which was once prescribed as a post-war remedy for all economic ills facing the people, has proved to be a disaster. It has chiefly targeted rural women, many of whom are primary breadwinners, and created havoc in their lives.
The war-affected families await the upcoming regulations with eagerness, while hoping for a more substantive job creation programme from the government and a rejuvenated rural economy.
Meera Srinivasan works for The Hindu and is based in Colombo.
Indonesian officials boarded the luxury yacht 'Equanimity', reportedly worth some $250 million and owned by Jho Low, a former unofficial adviser to the Malaysian fund 1MDB, at Benoa Bay in Bali on February 28, 2018. (RULLY PRASETYO/AFP/Getty Images)
Debbie Sims Africa was 22 when she was sentenced. Her release is seen as a major breakthrough for those imprisoned during the black liberation movement. Photograph: Courtesy of Michael Davis Africa Jr
Michael Davis Africa Jr on reunited with his mother: ‘There’s so much we haven’t done together.’ Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the Guardian
Debbie Sims Africa with her son after her release from prison. Photograph: Courtesy of Michael Davis Africa Jr
