Hartman de Souza - Goans and Nigeria // Local politicians are to blame for Goa’s ‘Nigeria’ crisis

Goans and Nigeria

Were the Goan police and their politician friends and cronies not complicit in the skulduggery?? In fact, most Goans ought to recognize and identify with Nigeria. Like Goa, it is up for grabs and in a freefall towards entropy

Contrary to those tending to paint Nigeria with one colour, I prefer to view it as the third British Colony to win independence; the second being Ghana, and the first of course, India, who with her leaders of that time, constituted an important beacon for Africa – well into the 80s. That changed, unfortunately. In the 90s, not unlike the colonial British, India chose to envision that continent as a resource dying to be exploited. So today, Indian companies are in the forefront of the mining, steel and other infrastructure business in Africa, second only to China, by far the greediest and most rapacious. In Ethiopia, complicit with governments on both sides, Indian companies have displaced thousands of small farmers, turning them into a labour force growing rice and dal to export to India.

Here, our big industry- fuelled governments will gift farmlands to mining, hydroelectric projects, new airports, industrial estates or malls, or whatever makes a few greedy Indian industrialists get to the top end of the Forbes 500... We appease ourselves with optimism.

In a global economy after all, Adivasi communities displaced by high- growth paranoia can easily be carted to labour farms somewhere in Africa – and does it really matter where on that huge continent? Rather than dwell on how Africa sees India – in a gist, a gluttonous trader wearing a suit – it may help to look at how Goans now perceive Africa. Well into the 80s, Goans knew, thanks to thousands of their kin who worked in British and Portuguese colonies on the east coast of the continent that all Africans were not necessarily Nigerian.

In the insidious racism now surfacing, every black skinned person with crinkly hair can be targetted in Goa. Goans would know that a lobby grows, in Goa included, for India to bid to host the FIFA Under- 17 World Cup in 2017. Does it need a Suresh Kalmadi to know this will only make the ‘ infrastructure’ lobby major bucks? What is germane to unpacking Africa for Goan readers, is that Nigeria’s Under- 17 team, playing what sport critics have termed at a “ breathless” pace, have just beaten Sweden 3- 0 in the semifinals of the current edition of the FIFA Under- 17 World Cup currently underway in the UAE. In their first match, they thrashed holders Mexico, 6- 1; and in the quarters beat Uruguay 2- 0.

When India bids to host the Cup in 2017, giving one of the venues to Goa, it will not be to develop the game for our younger people to get them to where Nigeria’s dazzling Under- 17s are, but to make a few people here lots of money. While many succumb to the stereotype that Nigerians are ‘ physical’ and built to bulldoze their way through any defence, consider that country also gave the world Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe; and a clutch of men and women now living in both the US and the UK who write about their country and the world with a freshness and insight that leaves one, like their football, breathless. Nigeria, arguably, also has the most invigorated free press in the Englishspeaking world.

Can we ignore this thanks to a mob of hopped- to- the- gills wannabe warlords battling local goons and politicians over turf rights? Were the Goan police and their politician friends and cronies not complicit in the skulduggery?? In fact, most Goans ought to recognize and identify with Nigeria. Like Goa, it is up for grabs and in a freefall towards entropy, where the only prediction appears to be even more of the so- called solutions that have not worked and will not work because they are premised on the rule that money must make more money and money always wins. Thanks to Nigeria’s fossil fuel reserves, its politicians have taken corruption and nepotism to levels far worse than those of Goa’s elected representatives who had their sticky fingers in the illegal iron ore till.

Not that different from how Goa’s elite families kept the wealth from iron ore within their own small sphere of influence – almost by ‘ divine fiat’ some would say – in Nigeria it was and continues to be the multinational oil corporations who support a crony elite in government with favour and coin on the one hand, and fuel ethnic and tribal discord with the other... read more:

http://www.epaperoheraldo.in/Details.aspx?id=12062&boxid=42122359&uid=&dat=11%2f7%2f2013

Local politicians are to blame for Goa’s ‘Nigeria’ crisis
Even to those who haven’t had the chance to partake of Goa’s famed sunny Decembers marked by excesses of every kind and a moral police in absentia, it is hardly news that highly organised cartels control the contraband and flesh trade in the state. After everything that’s been reported about Russians and Nigerians in Goa, did it really take a blockade of National Highway-17 by a large group of angry, menacing Nigerians protesting the killing of one of their own for authorities to comprehend that the state known best for its beach tourism and rave party circuit is also getting an international reputation for lawlessness..