THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR: A PROVERB TO AFRICA: WHO IS COMING FOR US?

Few years ago, just as the Syrian Civil War was at its crescendo, I was at an international program on Case Management in Child Protection as a guest of one of our international clients. The organization wanted the inputs of Subject Matter Experts at the level of local contents to a Case Management processes and procedure prepared for Nigeria by foreign experts.

One of the foreign experts would have us believe that locally unattended cases of child abuse can be referred to the international organizations like the United Nations for intervention, presenting this a credible and ultimate solution on which we could anchor our hope and find succour. He said the foregoing with so much confidence and guts that my colleagues from Africa believed him. I did not believe him, and I was blessed with the uneasy responsibility to say so. I opined publicly that I did not agree with him that we should shamelessly allow the fate of the Nigerian or African child to slip out of our hands and hope that the international community would come to our rescue.

In my brief protest presentation, I stated that practitioners must understand international politics, processes and procedure, which govern the intervention of the international community by any name or shape, is strictly governed by the interests (often selfish) of the intervening international organizations and their prominent members. I pointed out that the international community, inspired and driven by their interests, political, social and economic intervened speedily in the civil uprisings in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia (known as Arab Spring) to accelerate the overthrows of the dictators, who found themselves in the eyes of the storms of civil protests to remove them. But the same international community is handicapped to intervene in the case of Syria because of the interests of China and Russia, 2 of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations with veto power. The scores of deaths of children, women and men, breach of all known humanitarian protocols and practices, including the use of chemical weapon have not appeased the powers that be in the United Nations Security Council to change their minds to intervene in the larger interest of the people of Syria and it seems final. I pointed out how the international community looked another way during the Rwandan Civil War, which level of pogrom attained a genocidal magnitude. I pointed out how the international community suffered from self-inflicted coma of United Nations, resulting in its woeful failure to protect the Bosniak men, women, and children in Srebrenica in a war which lasted for of over 3 years, 8 months.

I concluded my thoughts forcefully that the salvation of the African child was in the hands of Africans, who agitate and demand from the same from individuals, private and public institutions and it cannot be delegated to any international organization. I noted the best the international community can do is to set standards of practice, but they have proven to be very poor and toothless when it comes to its enforcement.

When I finished my presentation, our fellow African brothers and sisters called for my head for embarrassing the foreign facilitators with my position. It took the intervention of another international consultant from Japan to rescue me and validate my position.

It is in the light of the foregoing that I view the present Russo-Ukrainian War, which has demonstrated that in the world of international politics all fingers are not equal and there is no working mechanism to stop a powerful nation, particularly a member of the Security Council of the United Nations from casting down the sovereignty of an underdog nation and invade it in broad daylight. The invading nation can predict with almost oracular precision what the reaction of the United Nations and NATO will be and how it (the invading nation) would respond to it. The invading nation knows the parameters of international interventions to include things like economic sanctions. They know that sanctions no matter how harsh does not serve as deterrence but only as measures imposed after a defined aberration, which impact is more on the people, for whom a dictator care less. By the principle of the fear of mutual destruction because of balance of forces, it may be noted that no member of the Security Council of the United Nation will proceed to war with another. Think of it, why is there no conversation on the to suspend Russia from the Security Council of the United Nations? The answer is simple. It is not as serious for the international community as they make it seems. That is why nobody will go for the jugular of Putin.

Here is my thinking, our people must accept as the gospel truth that nobody is coming for us in the battle for good governance in Africa. The international community will not fund our next level of social, political and economic relevance for us through the pockets of donor agencies. All they will do is for us is tokenism, which has become a distraction to the emancipation of our souls from social, economic and political oppression. If you doubt my position on this check out Dambisa Moyo’s classic, ‘Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.’ In fact, good governance may be a threat to the hold the west has on Africa. This is too deep for me to dissect in this piece. I think we should leave it for another day. ?

The first world war jolted the world to the reality that world peace cannot be left in the hands of individual nations. League of Nations was born to promote world peace and curb wars. The presence of League of Nations did not stop Hitler from sparkling the Second World War, which claimed 62 million people, 2.5% of the population of the world, executed the Holocaust and it's gory and unforgettable horror. Though we have not experienced the 3rd World War but the fact that peace has eluded the world and the United Nations, like the League of Nations seems to have lost its bearing is audible to the deaf and visible to the blind.

The question is, do we need a reconstituted United Nations or has peace become a mirage, which is only present in our local and international fora and academic spaces but practically has no place in the world? Selah!