Ask Chinese For Fifteen Things  

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

I was mighty pleased to read in the newspapers yesterday that President Bola Tinubu appointed Mr. Joseph Olasunkanmi Tegbe as Director General and Global Liaison for the Nigeria-China Strategic Partnership.  This is meant to actualize [a phrase made popular by June Twelvers] the terms of an agreement reached between Nigeria and China when President Tinubu  attended the 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing earlier in September. Chinese President Xi Jinping had promised 360 billion Yuan, or US $51 billion, to support 30 infrastructure projects to boost connectivity across Africa, and President Tinubu yanked a pledge from Mr. Xi to support Nigeria’s diversification plans, infrastructure development, technology transfer and job creation.

Very mouth-watering, if you ask me. Several Nigerian online sites immediately began calling Mr. Tegbe “Czar of the strategic partnership.” A Czar? Do they know that means? The last real Czar we had in this world, the all-powerful Emperor of the old Russian Empire, was Nicholas II. He didn’t have a good ending because the Bolshevik revolutionaries captured and executed him in July 1918. Why should anyone compare our venerable Mr. Tegbe to Czar Nicholas? Why not find a title instead that is more pleasing to the Chinese, who he will be dealing with? Why not, for example, a Ming Emperor, Sun Yat-sen, a Boy Emperor Henry Pu-yi, or even a Chou en-Lai?

In any case, Mr. Tegbe’s assignment is not to preside over a decadent old empire and to have it chopped away little by little by Mongols, Tatars, Japanese, Portuguese and Brits. His brief is to draw up a strategic plan, in which he will “outline specific deliverables, time lines and key performance indicators for each area of cooperation, and to continuously engage with the Chinese and ensure that all the goals are met and synchronized with our national development goals.”

Personally, I have never been so excited about an announced national development goal in this country like this one. Rather than sit back like many of my countrymen and grumble that Nigeria cannot achieve the Chinese economic miracle in 300 years, not to mention 30 years, I must immediately lend a helping hand to Mr. Tegbe and help him identify key elements that he should include in the strategic plan. I first read about China in our primary school primer. In  the 1970s and 1980s, I read every edition of China Pictorial magazine, which I used to buy at the old Post Office in Sokoto. I can therefore help Mr. Tegbe to identify 15 goals in our strategic cooperation that will enable us to replicate the Chinese miracle here in the heart of Africa.

First of all, ask the Chinese how we can surrender our national governance to the Communist Party of Nigeria. How else can we transform under this rag-tag liberal democratic arrangement, without a developed economic base to underpin it, without a prosperous middle class that values democracy, without a long history of nationhood, with national public institutions steeped in self-service, and with both ruling and opposition political parties that do not know their ideological right from their left?

We need a Mao Zedong that we can deify. Instead of here where social media skits disparage leaders, a Chinese woman once wrote that right from when she was a year old, her parents took her every Saturday to the town’s square, where a huge portrait of Chairman Mao was hung on the wall. She was taught to wave at him and say, “Long live, the Great Helmsman!” Chairman Mao was so well known across the world that his biographer once wrote, “If the entire human race were assembled and Mao’s name is thrown at them, one quarter will bow with veneration; one quarter will grimace with hate; one quarter will receive the name with respect; and the last quarter, the most backward section of the human race, has never heard of him.” Let’s ask the Chinese how they did it.

We need a Marshal Zhu De, the great Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army [PLA] from the 1930s until his death in 1976. With a commander like that, who is Boko Haram, ISWAP, bandit, kidnapper, rustler, IPOB, Yoruba Nation activist or pipeline vandal to terrorise our countryside? We also need a Kuomintang [KMT] to replace PDP as our main opposition party. When the Communists swept into Beijing in 1949 and seized power, KMT led by Marshal Chiang Kai-shek fled across the channel, snatched the small island of Taiwan and established a government there. When PDP was chased out of power in 2015, what did it do? Did it seize Bakassi or any small island in the Bight of Benin, instead of this internal bickering between Wike and Atiku factions?

The plan Mr. Tegbe should draw up must include a request from China for a Kong Qiu, the one Westerners call Confucius. It is not about confusion; we have enough of that here already. Although we have two great and many traditional religions in Nigeria, they have so far fallen short of instilling binding ethics of social discipline and order. Hence the need for Confucian-style ethics which, though non-religious and non-divine, nevertheless made Chinese society remarkably orderly, law-abiding and efficient. Please Mr. Tegbe, include in your plan a request for the Little Red Book, of Quotations from Chairman Mao. It covers nearly all subjects, and Chinese once held them with the reverence of Quranic and Biblical verses.  

Look, we must ask for a blueprint of the Great Wall of China. I read in our primary school textbook that it is the only man-made structure visible from outer space. How did the Chinese build this wall 2,500 years ago, only 2,000 years after Egyptians finished building the Great Pyramids, while three-storey buildings built by our engineers here in Nigeria still collapse every now and then? Since 2000AD we have been building the Great Green Wall of trees across our far northern states to stop desert encroachment. After 24 years, is it visible even from the nearby Sahara Desert, not to mention from outer space?

Honestly, our leaders here can do with a Long March, when Mao and Marshal Zhu Deh led their Communist forces in 1934-36 to retreat 10,000 kilometers on foot into inner China, following attacks by Kuomintang forces. Instead of warming benches and going for years without sponsoring any motion or even tabling a resolution, all our National Assembly members, cabinet ministers and even heads of security agencies should undertake a Long March, on foot, from Seme border to Lake Chad, crossing rivers and ravines. They are even lucky we don’t have mighty rivers such as the Yangtse-kiang and Huang-Ho, only small streams called River Niger and River Benue.

Our next Three-year Rolling Plan should be modelled after the Great Leap Forward, such as the one China did from 1958. Instead of small tinkering with crude oil production figures, palliatives and poverty reduction programs, we should aim to raise food production five times, build ten times as many rail lines, upgrade Alau Dam into a Three Gorges Dam and build a nuclear bomb, lest the Middle East fighting spills over here.

Our strategic plan should also request the blueprint for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Our society sorely needs it. Communist youths called Red Guards stormed the houses of identified counter-revolutionaries, dragged some prominent leaders into the streets and made them to wash toilets; don’t we need the same treatment here for some people?

Soon after Mao died in 1976, Chinese Communist Party purged, then arrested, shamed and tried the Gang of Four, including Mao’s widow Jiang Jing and party top shots Wang Hong-wen, Yao Wen-Yuan and Zhang Chungqiao. They were all described at the time as “conspirators, counter revolutionaries, renegades and bourgeois class elements.” In Nigeria here, when we have a Gang of 100 that we can haul before revolutionary courts for anti-people activities over many decades, we are wasting time trying some people for “anti-party activity.”

We need the blueprint for a Deng Xiaoping. He must be so short that once, when he raised his hand in a Politburo meeting to oppose a measure proposed by Mao, the Chairman said, “Since I cannot see anybody raising his hand, my proposal is unanimously adopted.” Dwarfish Deng was, but he had giant visions; his The Four Modernisations program has transformed China from a poor rural agrarian state into the world’s manufacturing power house and a great center for technological innovation within three short decades.

Our blueprint should include a Hong Kong and Macao. When the British snatched Hong Kong from imperial China in 1898 and forced China to lease it to them to them for 99 years, the Chinese kept quiet, only to regain it in 1997, after the Brits had built it into a shipping and financial power house. The same thing with the Portuguese who seized Macao. Here, instead of giving Bakassi to Cameroun under the so-called Greentree Agreement, we should have given it to China, Japan or India for 99 years and regained it afterwards. Even now we can call in Dubai to take over one of the Lake Chad tumbus islets recaptured from ISWAP and give them a 99-year lease, to turn it into a tech hub.

Mr. Tegbe, how about asking the Chinese for a blueprint of their law prescribing death penalty for corruption? This past weekend alone, EFCC was battling to charge a former governor for alleged N110 billion fraud, another former governor for alleged N27 billion fraud, yet another former governor for receiving $15 million cash in his house from a bureau de change operator, and a former minister for allegedly diverting N33 billion from a dam project to a bureau de change. I bet my last torn naira note that none of these monies will ever be recovered and all the men will ultimately walk the streets scot-free. Is that how to learn from China?

Some people are threatening to do another national protest tomorrow, called #FearlessOctober1. What if Mr. Tegbe includes in his strategic plan a request from the Chinese for a blueprint of the October 1989 Tian An-mien Square, when tanks of the Peoples Liberation Army rolled over the tents of protesters, not minding who was inside them?