TERRORISM; What Do We Do In The Face Of Threats?

Boko Haram operatives

By Martin Yeboah

The threat is real and it appears eminent and yet nobody is telling the people of Ghana what to do.

Information available to The Insight indicates that the Nigerian terror group Boko Haram had made a firm decision to target Nigerian interests in Ghana.

These targets include Nigerian diplomatic installations, Churches and financial interests.

The problem is that nobody can say with certainly when such an attack may happen and the exact form it may take.

Indeed in such situations citizens are expected to assist the security agencies to prevent such attacks.

However citizens ought to know what information may be relevant in the fight against terrorism.

One of the questions needing an answer for example is who is a suspicious person?

What are the things to look for in a Boko Haram, terrorist?

In crowded places what items may be suspicious and how do we identify them?

Are there places from where the public should keep away?

It is time the security services began serious public education on the threat of terrorism.

The time is now because it may be too late too soon. 

Editorial

WE SUPPORT THE TUC

The Insight wishes to declare its full support for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) of Ghana in its protest over the react increase in utility tariffs.

Last Tuesday, the TUC gave the government and the Public Utility Regulation Commission (PURC) 10 days to review the tariff increases face mass demonstrations across the country.

We fully identity with the Ultimaiturn and will support for the demonstration if Government and the PURC remain adamant.

The Utility tariff increases are completely unjustifiable and above all the people of Ghana cannot pay.

In our view the issue of Utility tariff increase is not a partisan political one and it ought to be seen as a major national problem.

After all, members of all the political parties will have to pay for the astronomical increases.

We call on all the people of Ghana to join the protest against the utility tariff hike.

The struggle will succeed!

WHO CAN DISAGREE WITH THIS?

Col. Kutu Acheampong

Asks Ekow Mensah

When then Colonel Kutu Acheamong seized power on Tuesday January 13, 1972 he was the darling boy of the left and progressives. He said all the things that needed to be said. However in less than three years Acheampong clearly demonstrated the difference between words and deeds.

General Acheampong’s declared objectives after the coup he led and is being published unedited below as an illustration of the difference between deeds and words. Please read on;

The National Redemption Council aims at a complete and systematic transformation of our peoples into a SELF-RELIANT NATION, unique in its economic, social, cultural, political, technological and all-round development, a united modern nation with a spirit of its own.

To this end, every necessary step must be taken to create a just society based on respect for the dignity of man, equal opportunity for all, equitable distribution of our resources; a society in which Ghanaians are the masters and beneficiaries of the wealth of the nation and in which the free and full development of each is a condition for the free and full development of all.

For this purpose, we must have confidence in our ability to manage our own affairs. We must have pride in our African heritage and a firm conviction that our destiny lies in our own hands.

We are engaged in a mighty struggle. Difficult days lie ahead.

The journey will be long and hard. Many obstacles and difficulties lie along our road, and there are many of us who may not live to see the new society emerge.

But with the active involvement of all Ghanaians and the support of the whole nation we shall overcome all obstacles and difficulties. As a nation we must move like one united army engaged in a war to redeem our nation and ourselves.

We must submit to the necessary discipline and learn the necessary difficulties, we shall not flinch, we shall not retreat; we shall be prepared to die for our nation rather than let it fail.

In this way we can surely redeem our nation and ourselves; remembering all along that with God all things are possible.

GOD BE WITH US ALL

Naturalizing Nigeria: A Strategy for Fighting Corruption

By Okey Ndibe

From the outset, Okonkwo, the tragic protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, comes across as extraordinarily strong, a man who is “well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” and whose “fame rested on solid personal achievements.” Not only does he stand out in his community, he is also a prototype of the imperial character, a man taken with the singularity of his powers. In an important sense, he foreshadows the British authorities lurking around the corner of late 19^th century Umuofia, about to burst upon the lives of a once proud and self-governing people.

 Like the British colonial authorities, Okonkwo is in no hurry to argue with any force weaker than himself – or with weakness of any sort, period. When he encounters weakness, especially weakness symbolized in another individual, his first impulse is to kill it, squelch it, erase it. He is a veritable serial killer, armed with various stratagems for killing his nemeses – the weak. When a man named Osugo contradicts him at a meeting, a hectoring Okonkwo reminds the man that “this meeting is for men.” As Achebe informs us, Okonkwo knew “how to kill a man’s spirit.” During the Week of Peace, a period when the earth goddess mandates the absolute absence of rancor, belligerence and violence from the community in exchange for her bequest of a bountiful harvest, an imperious Okonkwo thoughtlessly beats one of his wives.

 For me, the one thing that’s even more significant than Okonkwo’s untoward exhibition of rude power is his community’s poise, their possession of the ultimate means to chastise the errant hero, their capacity – in other words – to deal with the threat of a man who appears not to know where his moral boundaries lie. When he defames Osugo, Okonkwo is compelled to apologize. When he breaches the Week of Peace, he scandalizes his community and incurs the wrath of the goddess whose priest makes a brusque, chastening visit to Okonkwo to spell out the fines.

 Achebe damningly portrays Okonkwo as a man incapable of thought, a man who reposes too much faith in his physical prowess but puts no store by wisdom. Yet, there are numerous opportunities when the community forces Okonkwo to reckon with the fact that they – to say nothing of their ancestors and gods – are, in the end, more powerful than he. When the strongman foolishly ignores old Ezeudu’s counsel not to have a hand in killing the “doomed lad” called Ikemefuna, it falls to Obierika, Okonkwo’s best friend and an exemplar of the thinking man, to chide the morally repugnant Okonkwo. In a warning that proves prescient, Obierika describes Okonkwo’s participation in the killing of his adoptive son as the kind of act for which “the earth goddess wipes off” an entire family. Okonkwo earns himself a seven-year exile in his maternal home, Mbanta, when his gun discharges accidentally, inadvertently causing the death of a clansman, Ezeudu’s son.

 In all of this, the instruction is that the people of Umuofia are able to rein in Okonkwo, a man who has developed a warped and ethically problematic vision of strength as corresponding to virtue. If he could, Okonkwo would gladly have stipulated that he was the only way and the light. He would have insisted that his community’s will be subordinated to his decrees. But Umuofia does not let him. Instead, the community constantly reclaims the ethical ground that Okonkwo wishes to usurp for sheer power.

 The culmination of this tussle between the community’s sense of propriety and Okonkwo’s faith in violence arrives towards the end of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The men of Umuofia are holding a meeting to decide an appropriate response to the troubling presence of white men who – to paraphrase Obierika – have put a knife to the things that held the community together, gravely threatening Umuofia’s corporate cohesion. The meeting has hardly taken off when the uniformed messengers of the white intruders appear, with instructions to disband the gathering. Okonkwo confronts the haughty messengers, draws his machete and beheads one of them. In responding in this decisive, “manly” way to the provocations of the white presence, Okonkwo hopes to propel his fellows into war. In effect, he wishes to make a demand on the warriors of Umuofia. He wants them to prove themselves to him, to demonstrate that they deserve to be called warriors still. He wants them to illustrate that they have not become effeminate, wilted cowards.  

 The men of Umuofia stoutly reject Okonkwo’s precipitate action. They resist the summons to go to war on Okonkwo’s terms. They have a time-tested, settled protocol they must follow before declaring a war. They won’t let a failure at “thinking,” a man whose genius lies exclusively in acting out violently, to determine the nature and timing of their response to the foreign invaders, however egregious and gratuitous the “white” provocation. Rather than join Okonkwo in battle, the men of Umuofia wonder aloud about his awful act. They do not admire his decision to act alone when communal action was meet and mandated. It is, of course, a moment of mutual incomprehension. Okonkwo misreads his community’s refusal to embrace his violent act as final proof of Umuofia’s decline, its descent into paralysis. Convinced in his misapprehension, he leaves the scene of his final murder to go off and hang himself, no doubt viewing himself as a man utterly betrayed by his fellows, a man who sees no alternative other than a final act of separation: suicide.

 In death, as in life, Okonkwo is a figure of extreme impulsiveness. Left to his devices, he would sooner force his community to bend to his will. If it were up to him, then even the ancestors and gods of Umuofia must redefine themselves according to Okonkwo’s strictures. In present-day Nigeria, a man like him could very well be an imperial president or governor – and proceed to mistake himself for the totality of his community, his interests and values superseding those of the rest of his people. Yet, Achebe’s first novel reveals how the members of the Umuofia community – ancestors, the living, and deities – work in concert to check Okonkwo’s masculinist excesses and to hold him accountable to the community’s ethical precepts.

 The question then arises: What has happened to weaken such faculties of ethical enforcement in contemporary Africa, specifically in the space called Nigeria?

Leader of the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro

Moncada: A call for change in the social and economic order
By Marta Rojas

The assault on the Moncada Garrison on July 26, 1953, and on the smaller Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Garrison in Bayamo, was not planned and carried out solely to overthrow a de facto government which had seized power via a military coup the previous year. It was not a “move aside to make way for me” project, or even seen as a just punishment for interrupting the mandate of a legally elected or constitutional government, even though this was characterized by the misappropriation of public funds and unimaginable acts of corruption at the center of power.

The heroic action led by the young lawyer, Fidel Castro, who at the time belonged to the most radical wing of the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxo) (Cuban People’s Orthodoxy Party), was indeed conceived with a will to reestablish constitutional order, but one consistent with a radical shift in social and economic life in Cuba.

Fidel himself referred to this urgent need during 1953, the year which marked the centenary of the birth of José Martí and the 50th anniversary of the Republic’s tempestuous advent, after defeating 400-plus years of Spanish colonialism.

Hence the first revolutionary law in the Moncada manifesto – among six fundamental ones – to be announced as soon as the Moncada was taken by the revolutionaries in the surprise attack (according to the plan), was to restore genuine sovereignty to Cuba. The 1940 Constitution, treacherously replaced by certain constitutional statutes decreed after the military coup staged by General Fulgencio Batista and other officers in the early hours of March 10, 1952, at Camp Colombia, then headquarters of the Army General Staff and, after the Revolution, the Ciudad Escolar educational complex.

The concept of the Moncada revolutionary program was to immediately reinstate in full the 1940 Constitution, one of the most advanced in the Americas. This was not just a matter of words alone, because its basic articles were formalities, given that the document detailed complementary laws which gave the articles value. Moreover, among the most notable of these was the eradication of the latifundia, an action which did not appear on the agenda of any political party represented in the House of Representatives or Senate of the Republic.

The Moncada program, for which dozens of young people fought and died or were brutally murdered, established as irrevocable initial premises: agrarian reform, comprehensive education reform, and nationalization of the electricity and telephone trusts.

Obviously, the first proposal was basic; the elimination of latifundia or privately owned large estates. The summary of Case No. 37 in the Emergency Court convened as a result of the events of July 26, 1953, recalls for history these laws and other basic aspects of the revolutionary program for which the assailants were fighting.

The land issue, industrialization, housing, unemployment; a definitive battle against the precarious health and education of the people, given the high incidence of illiteracy and other problems, were stated by Doctor Fidel Castro himself as both defendant and prosecutor in the Moncada trial. Obviously, given the dictatorship in place at the time and press censorship immediately after the July 26 assault, the people were unaware of these proposals.

Painting a verbal picture, Fidel condemned the fact that, “In Oriente, the widest province in Cuba, lands owned by the United Fruit and West India companies alone link the northern and southern coasts."

The Moncada assault and the continuous struggle afterward, with the organization of the Granma yacht expedition, the rebel landing and ascent into the Sierra Maestra, and the constitution of the July 26 Rebel Army, were all faithful to the principles of the Moncada social and economic program. None of these heroic steps was ever improvised, nor was it their sole intention to overthrow the dictatorship, although that was a necessary precursor. These were steps designed to fulfill the program. Today we would say, with Fidel, “Revolution means changing everything that must be changed.”

All the fundamental ideas required by a revolutionary government were stated. Fidel’s inspiring trial allegation, History will Absolve Me, a document published and distributed secretly a year later, confirms how nothing fundamental was omitted from the revolutionary program:

Not even the need for merchant ships, or the need to plan tourism as a source of income, for example. In the case of tourism, which might seem to younger generations a recent project, it is worth recalling that as soon as the Revolution triumphed, the Tourism Industry Institute (INIT) was established.

Fidel’s revolutionary program also included promoting agricultural cooperatives and sharing equipment such as tractors and refrigerators; professional management and skills in cultivation and other specifics; as well as workers’ participation in factories, and on the sugar plantations.

All of that required education and culture; hence, after the Agrarian Reform Acts, the educational program was given priority by the Revolution and the people, from adolescents to the most experienced teachers. The Literacy Program continued uninterrupted even during the Bay of Pigs mercenary invasion, accepted with rifles held high by the revolutionary militias before leaving to fight for the decisive victory which underlined the socialist nature of the Revolution.

Boasting of virtues not in evidence

US President Hussein Obama

By Saul Landau

“America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the best of America...” - President George W. Bush, Sept 11, 2001

Our government preaches to the world about America’s special righteousness (brightest beacon for freedom) and inherent virtue. Washington claims to have developed a political system, in which the rule of law actually rules, where rich people get treated just like the poor, and all this takes place under an atmosphere in which human rights receive full respect and democracy gets practiced. Yet, each day, the media also reminds us that the U.S. government holds 166 prisoners in the Guantánamo Naval Base, in Cuba, leased against Cuba’s will under the threat of force. At this base, U.S. troops guard and torture prisoners without charges against them, men without rights to have attorneys, or enjoy any semblance of the rule of law or human rights.

Indeed, the Bush and Cheney White House authorized torture for these prisoners. Bush claimed the 9/11 attack resulted from our being “the brightest beacon for freedom,” but it was U.S. policy then and now that produces enemies. In addition, by behaving so crudely and cruelly in Guantánamo (routine torture), the United States has given the nation and even hypocrisy itself a bad name. But the curse of the U.S.-developed double standards practice doesn’t end there. Obama, in the name of defense, has authorized the use of drones to murder people around the world, a power from some mystical executive authority not made clear in law or Constitution. This practice has multiplied our enemies.

Simultaneously, Obama has procrastinated over a U.S. response to the possibility that Bashar al Assad’s government may have used chemical weapons against his opponents in Syria. Ironically, Washington has yet to even apologize to, much less compensate, Vietnam for the massive amount of the chemical Agent Orange and other no nos dropped on that country during our little war there. According to the Vietnam Red Cross, “as many as three million Vietnamese people have been affected by Agent Orange, including at least 150,000 children born with birth defects.” The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said some “4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 people being killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects. Women had higher rates of miscarriage and stillbirths, as did livestock such as cattle, water buffalo, and pigs.”

Washington promises heavy punishment for Iran if it persists in trying to make a nuclear weapon; yet we retain the largest stockpile of those monsters and stand out as the only country that has ever used them – and against civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One more nuclear nation does add to world peril, but someone should clarify our position before we engage in another war over dubious moral standards.

Our self-promoted electoral system also has recently shown its flaws. It does not demand a vote recount, the Supreme Court decided in Gore v Bush, in the case of the 2000 Florida vote, and state Republicans routinely find ways of erasing potential Democratic voters from the lists of voters.

In 1945, the United States, one should recall, insisted on having war crimes trials after World War II, and indeed, established laws based on those Nuremberg experiences. If you see a war crime you should report it.

Private Bradley Manning did just that when he released the military video of a U.S. helicopter gunship crew whacking civilians on an Iraqi street. Instead of calling him a good citizen if not a downright hero, the government charged Manning and unleashed a vicious attack on him (he could receive a life sentence) for revealing U.S. military secrets (crimes).

Much of the world now does not take seriously the righteous claims made by U.S. officials. When 11 children died in a recent U.S. bombing in Afghanistan a reporter asked whether this was an act of terrorism. The State Department spokesman could not give a coherent answer.
The rhetoric from U.S. officials appears to warn all potentially disobedient nations: “Do as we say, not as we do.”

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” Teddy Roosevelt once advised. But those leaders who followed him in office have often spoken loudly and wielded a bid stick at the same time. U.S. Presidents initiated wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ve triumphed only in the arenas where no one fought back, and done less than perfectly where resistance appeared.

The USA got born as an anti-imperial nation that ironically then built an empire between the Atlantic and Pacific and from there to other parts of the world, where our corporations make large profits and our military bases house troops and weapons of mass destruction.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the boasting and bragging and stationing of imperial outposts in places where we multiply our enemies! Washington could take the lead in calling on all nations to begin destroying nuclear stockpiles and not making more of such weapons. Others might actually follow our lead toward making a safer, more secure world. Or am I dreaming?