This piece is indeed part of work in progress and is only presented here because of the recent interview of US President Barack Obama in The Atlantic magazine (Jeffery Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, The Atlantic, April 2016 Issue). It is therefore going to be skeletal but its essence is not provisional as the final outcome of the study next year will demonstrate.

In 2001, I called on the leaders of the world’s principal arms-manufacturing states to ban all arms sales/transfers to Africa (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe, 2001: 134-138). This was in response to the rampaging post-(European)conquest genocide and other wars in Africa, begun catastrophically by Nigeria and its British ally when they both perpetrated the Igbo genocide in May 1966-Janaury 1970 with the  murder of 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population. Since the Igbo genocide, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in follow-up genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and in other regions in the Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in multiple wars across virtually all regions of the continent. Besides being co-perpetrator of the Igbo genocide, Britain has also emerged as the lead arms supplier to Africa including its genocide-states, especially Nigeria.

In June 2009, six months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the US, I updated the appeal to the globe’s lead arms-manufacturing countries and noted, as follows: 

US President Obama, his country’s first African-descent head of state, can be assured of a lasting legacy of his presidency by imposing a comprehensive US arms embargo on this continent of his fathers at the cusp of constructing new states of organic sensibilities – away from the terror of the genocide state. Obama should expand this initiative to involve other arms-exporters-to-Africa especially on such forums as the UN security council and the G-8. Arms ban to Africa should be internationally mandatory and enforceable (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011: 193).

Seven years and three months into his 2-term presidency which ends nine months away in January 2017, Obama gives the interview to The Atlantic. It is on his foreign policy during the period. This is a wide-ranging survey but one that hardly focuses on any subject on Africa except the 2011 US-British-French invasion of Libya, itself discussed, instead, within the overarching parameters of Middle East/Arab/islamic affairs. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime is overthrown during the course of the invasion, Gaddafi is murdered as well as some members of his family in addition to some influential officials of his regime, most Libyan cities and infrastructure (irrefutable landmark achievements of the Gaddafi years in office) are spectacularly smashed up, and Libya is subsequently, today, an ‘ISIS haven’ (as The Atlantic interviewer Jeffery Goldberg terms it), largely controlled by groupings within the islamist jihadist international conglomeration – part of who Gaddafi was at war with prior to the West Trio invasion and murder.

In the interview, Obama describes the aftermath of the Libya invasion as a “mess”, a ‘s*** show’, blames the British and French leaders (David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy respectively) who he co-led the invasion for this resultant ‘ISIS haven – that he [Obama] has [latterly] targeted with air strikes’ but, curiously, absolves himself from the débâcle. For Obama, Cameron’s and Sarkozy’s roles in the campaign are those of ‘free riders’ who obviously cherish the perceived political capital that such invasions bring from enthusiastic sectors of domestic political opinion but are often less thoughtful of the consequences that such devastating acts of violence have on the ground or region of the world of perpetration, as they await eagerly for the invasion next time!

So, on Libya, after the troika-invasion, Obama recalls with barely disguised criticism, Cameron and Sarkozy just moved on… Cameron loses interest on this phase of the crisis/emergency, the ‘follow-up’, as he is ‘distracted by other things’ whilst Sarkozy appears more interested to ‘trumpet the flights he [is] taking in the [invasion’s] air campaign’ even though, Obama is keen to emphasise, ‘we [the US] had wiped out all [Libyan] air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure [for the invasion]’.

Raft of ironies...