“Have you heard the news? News! News!! News!!!” So sang Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican Reggae superstar in a 1975 hit single entitled The News.
In that song he detailed his humiliation in Nigeria, a country he had visited for some arranged performances, only to be seized by police and bundled in detention on trumped up charges of dishonouring a contractual agreement with some Nigerian business mogul.
It will be good to know what eventually became of that case, those who contrived to void the musician’s tour of Nigeria and the benefit they ultimately reaped from their action.
But that is not the news in this piece. Today’s news has to do with the importation of materiel. A newspaper reported that Nigeria tried to buy some Chinook helicopters from Israel but was blocked by the United States, the manufacturers of the transport chopper.
In days, another newspaper countered the original story, claiming that America had not blocked any Nigerian attempt to import any military hardware from anywhere. The argument has gone viral on the Internet. As is to be expected, experts, with whom this nation is over-blessed, are jumping over each other with disquisitions on the truth or otherwise of the story.
This, to put it baldly, is utterly shameful for the simple reason that it exposes the crass inability of Nigerians to keep their eye on the ball. Nigeria, if it hadn’t taken the wrong turn to progress and development, will not care a jot who offered to sell it arms or who pretended to possess the ability to prevent it from acquiring arms.
Nigeria should, by now, have a surfeit of self-designed and home-made arms and weapons systems essential for the prosecution of wars, participation in peacekeeping operations and degradation and defeat of terrorist activities, without game-changing contribution from the outside world.
But, what is the state of play? Just as Nigeria has refused to refine its own oil, a patriotic and economically sound move that would have removed at least three-quarters from the pump price of petroleum products, so has it also thwarted all efforts to make itself a force to be reckoned with in armaments.
The result is that those with whom we started hunting rodents have since graduated to ensnaring reptiles, while our educated folks are busy hairsplitting on whether or not we are able or unable to trade in the international arms market. It happened in front of my eyes when India was mocked even here in Nigeria as a country of MSc and PhD holders with nothing to show for it.
Well, India now has the Bomb. And India routinely deploys space probes to investigate outer space. India is today the first place of choice for wealthy and not-so-wealthy Nigerians whose loved ones must receive expert medical attention for conditions ranging from headache through the dislocated waist to the diseased heart.
South Africa, if confronted with military emergency today will not desperately go shopping around the world for Chinook or other helicopters. They have their own Rooivalk, a latest generation attack helicopter designed and manufactured by Denel Aviation of South Africa.
The beast comes fitted with Mokopa ZT-6 anti-tank missiles! Indeed, South Africa is accomplished in all aspects of ballistics, so that, to all intents and purposes, it can adequately defend itself and also embark on offensive action without having to go cap-in-hand, shopping around for the lethal ingenuity of other nations. What does Nigeria produce? This one no be say na ‘go come’.
The Kaduna-based Defence Industries Corporation (DICON) was established by an Act of Parliament in 1964, “primarily to produce small Arms and Ammunition for the use of the Nigerian Army and other Security agencies. The Corporation also uses its excess capacity to produce machinery spare parts for industries and other products for civilian use.”
Fifty years later, DICON has hardly progressed beyond producing the Aftomat Kalashnikova 1947 or AK47, a Russian- designed assault rifle whose vintage forms part of its name, and which weapon Awka blacksmiths were churning out with effortless ease during the civil war! Nigeria’s problem, if truth be told, is that it has never occurred to anyone that “Okeke, as a woman’s name, tingles the ear!” During Biafra, it was amply demonstrated that the manufacture and deployment of sophisticated weaponry was not beyond the ken of Nigerians, and the Black race in general.
This was General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu in 1986: “In the three years of the war necessity gave birth to invention. During those three years of heroic bound, we leapt across the great chasm that separates knowledge from know-how.
We built rockets, and we designed and built our own delivery systems. We guided our rockets. We guided them far; we guided them accurately. For three years, blockaded without hope of import, we maintained all our vehicles.
The state extracted and refined petrol, individuals refined petrol in their back gardens. We built and maintained our airports, maintained them under heavy bombardment. Despite the heavy bombardment, we recovered so quickly after each raid that we were able to maintain the record for the busiest airport on the continent of Africa.
We spoke to the world through telecommunication system engineered by local ingenuity; the world heard us and spoke back to us! We built armored cars and tanks. We modified aircraft from trainer to fighters, from passenger aircraft to bombers. In the three years of freedom we had broken the technological barrier.
In the three years we became the most civilized, the most technologically advanced black people on earth. We spurn nylon yarn; we developed new seeds for food and medicines…” We cut off our nose. That is tragic enough. But the greater tragedy lies in our inability to understand that our nose-less visage does nothing other than spite our face.
• Iloegbunam ([email protected]) is a commentator on national issues.
Published in New Telegraph of Thursday Oct 02, 2014