WISH LIST FOR G-7

Category: Monday column Published on Monday, 08 June 2015 04:00 Written by Mahmud Jega mmjega@dailytrust.com 08054102925 (SMS only)


President Muhammadu Buhari is already in Germany for the Summit meeting of G-7, the world’s richest countries.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, who like Buhari is basking in a fresh election victory, told the Nigerian leader to bring with him a “wish list” to the meeting taking place in a castle in southern Germany. This is the speech that President Buhari should read when they call him in:
‘Frau Angela Merkel, Bundeskanzlerin, Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Mr Barack Obama, President of the United States; Monsieur Francois Hollande, Presidente de la Republique Francaise; Mr David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Senor Matteo Renzi, Prime Minister, Repubblica Italiana; Mr Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada; Mr Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister, Nippon-koku; Monsieur Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, good afternoon. As we say in my country, all other protocols observed.

You asked me to come to this meeting with a wish list from the most populous African country. After rebasing, our country also has the largest economy in Africa. I am therefore not going to waste your time and will go straight to my wish list, hoping that you as leaders of G-7 will be
kind enough to grant to us all our wishes before you leave this beautiful German castle.

Our wish number one, dear leaders of G-7, is for you to help us to apprehend our country’s most notorious criminal, a man named Abubakar Shekau who now writes his name as Al-Shekawy. He is imitating the other criminal that you know very well, the one called Al-Baghdadi. In fact, Al-Shekawy recently pledged allegiance to Al-Baghdadi and made himself a citizen of the latter’s Islamic Caliphate after we destroyed his own criminal Caliphate which he tried to establish on our territory. POTUS Mr Obama, I am appealing to you personally to send in the 101st Airborne Division to Sambisa Forest to apprehend him. In case the 101st Airborne is too busy somewhere, please send in the 82nd Airborne Division which can do the job just as well.

The second item on our wish list, dear G-7 leaders, is please help us to rescue the Chibok girls. More than 200 of our innocent schoolgirls have been held by Boko Haram terrorists for more than a year now. It is giving all of us in Nigeria real anguish. POTUS, I am sure you know about these girls because your dear wife Michelle even posted a picture on Facebook calling for their freedom. They are not the only ones because there are thousands of other women and children being held by these terrorists who as I said at my inauguration are as far away from Islam as possible. Even though our army has liberated all the towns and most of the villages occupied by Boko Haram, we have not yet found the girls. Bundeskanzlerin Frau Merkel, I want to appeal personally to you to send in the GSG 9 commandos to free the Chibok girls. We want them to mount an operation like the one they did at Mogadishu airport in 1977 to liberate the passengers of a hijacked Lufthansa plane.
Prime Minister Cameron, I also want to appeal to you directly to please send your Special Air Service [SAS] to help in this rescue operation. They will be very useful over Sambisa Forest which is where we suspect the girls are hidden. I also want you to send the Special Boat Service [SBS] because it is possible the girls are hidden on some remote island in Lake Chad. The lake has been shrinking for 40 years due to global warming that your G-7 industries are causing and it now has thousands of small islands on it.

Our third wish to you, dear G-7 leaders, is to help us to stop the theft of our oil by crooked businessmen from your countries. They come close to our shores in large ships, stay on the high seas and encourage local thieves that we call bunkerers to puncture our pipelines, steal oil, load it into small barges and take it to your people on the high seas. I want to appeal directly to you, Monsieur le Presidente, to give us that plane that you sold to Argentina which they used in the Falklands War. I think it is called Super Etendard, together with its Exocet missile that Argentina used to sink that British ship, HMS Sheffield. I am sorry Mr Cameron, I know this is painful history to you but I am just trying to make my point. We want to use those planes to sink every ship that enters our waters to buy stolen oil.

Our fourth wish, sirs and Frau, is for G-7 to stop putting our country in financial trouble by depressing international oil prices through this thing you call fracking. We are not the only ones suffering; your multinational oil companies are also not happy with this very low oil price. And this fracking that you are doing in Texas and other places, we hear that it can even cause earthquakes. The two earthquakes that they had in Nepal within one month, which cost thousands of lives, were probably caused by fracking in Texas. So we are appealing to POTUS Obama to call those cowboys in Texas to order.

Our fifth wish has to do with debt. You remember that eight years ago my predecessor President Obasanjo took all the money that my country earned from an oil windfall and used it to settle our international debts. Your Western companies and agencies made away with $18 billion but now the debt is piling up again. I therefore wish to plead with you to forgive this debt and allow us to start on a clean slate. What is $6 billion to you, POTUS when just last week I read that your countrymen spend $100 billion a year on dog and cat food?

That brings me to our sixth wish, which is fighting corruption and money laundering. You see dear G-7 leaders, most of the problems that I am complaining to you about were caused by corruption because our political leaders and civil servants as well as crooked businessmen steal a lot of our money and they launder it through your banks and in estate properties in your countries, especially on the French Riviera. Therefore what we are appealing to you to do is, I am going to turn over to you the assets declaration forms of Nigerian public officers. A person is supposed to declare all the property and money he owns throughout the world. I want you to check it and if you see that a person owns some houses, some money or some shares anywhere in your countries that he did not declare in his forms, please help us and seize it so that it can be repatriated to Nigeria like the Abacha loot.

Our wish number seven has to do with the terms of trade. You G-7 people are always telling us that there should be free trade, that trade is the source of the wealth of nations. Our own experience in Africa is that free trade is the source of impoverishment because the terms of trade continue to deteriorate for us year after year. My brother the former president of Ghana Jerry Rawlings said back in 1960 it took three tonnes of Ghanaian cocoa to buy a Canadian-made Caterpillar tractor but it now costs more than 60 tonnes of the same cocoa to buy the same tractor. What kind of thing is that? How can we continue to trade with you like this?

Ok, the last item on our wish list is, you G-7 people should please stop causing trouble all over the Third World in the name of freedom and democracy. The trouble that you caused in Libya, we are the ones that are reaping the whirlwind because Gaddafi’s arsenal ended up in Boko Haram’s hands. In conclusion, POTUS Obama I will like to advise you to pay another visit to Africa, the land of your ancestors before you leave the White House. This is the short wish list that you told me to come along with.’

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