As the Nigerian crisis increases and more students face the wrath of the regime, little help from Africa or the West appears forthcoming. Gaye Davis reports
WHEN the telephone rang in Austin Abada’s sparsely furnished Cape Town flat this week, it heralded news as familiar as it was terrible. Abada, a Nigerian student leader seeking asylum in South Africa after fleeing his country as a wanted man last month, learned of yet another crackdown by state security forces at his alma mater, Nigeria’s Benin University.
“I was told that two students had been shot dead after a student protest,” he said. “The student movement is presenting the only real challenge to [General Sani Abacha’s] regime at present and the government wants to crush it at all costs.”
Abada (26) has a photograph of himself showing scars from beatings he received at the hands of Nigerian security forces during the 11 months he spent detained without trial. Compatriots of his in the Campaign for Student Liberties, the organisation he helped found in response to “the state’s assault on the student movement”, were in hiding this week to avoid similar fates.
Registered for an economics degree at the University of Cape Town, Abada’s future lies in the hands of the Department of Home Affairs. He has applied for political asylum. A temporary permit has allowed him to take up a scholarship sponsored by a German church organisation. But if his application for asylum is rejected, he faces deportation and criminal charges.
“I am supposed to be on trial back home for armed robbery, arson and incitement,” Abada told the Mail & Guardian. “A conviction for armed robbery carries the death sentence. It is the way things are made to look legal.”
His uncertainty about his future is overshadowed, however, by his frustration at the apparent inability of South Africa and the international community as a whole to turn the diplomatic screws on Abacha’s regime.
“We have lost faith in various governments and are relying on non-governmental organisations to assist our people back home in finding their way out of their predicament. The West is doing nothing — because it gets cheap oil from Nigeria. The other African countries don’t want to act because of the patronage they have received from Nigeria.
“The solution to our problems does not lie with foreign intervention as such, but in complementary actions that assist the pro- democracy movements in Nigeria. They need moral and logistical support. It is true the pro-democracy opposition is fragmented. The problem has always been one of lack of trust and no mutually agreed strategy. But the groups are more united than they have ever been.
‘The Nigerian crisis is a very serious one. We are saying something can be done by nations acting in concert and imposing sanctions, especially on oil.”
Representatives of exiled Nigerian opposition groupings based in South Africa, Europe and the United States, will be attending a three- day meeting in Johannesburg this weekend, according to the African National Congress’s international affairs department head, Yusuf Salojee.
Organised by the South African-Nigerian Democratic Support Group launched in response to the executions in November last year of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists, the meeting was “an attempt to bring Nigerian opposition groups together and strategise a way forward”, Salojee said.
South African MPs and members of the ANC-South African Communist Party-Cosatu alliance would also take part. “Right now things are in limbo. We are very sensitive to the issue of human rights abuses in Nigeria, but in terms of taking action we need to be sensitive to the thinking of other African countries.”
The Southern African Development Community was reluctant to take a stand, and the Organisation for African Unity was “not moving” on the issue, Salojee said. Plans for an ANC delegation to visit Nigeria had not been shelved, but “members would need visas issued by the existing Nigerian authorities who want us to come with a very clear agenda and to say who we want to meet”, he said.
The South African government’s lack of action on the Nigerian issue is dictated largely by its concerns about the feelings of its African neighbours.
No other African country was prepared to back President Nelson Mandela’s calls for sanctions against the Nigerian junta. Diplomatically, South Africa found itself out on a limb.
Abada laments the fact that the government’s expressed commitment to human rights appears to be held in thrall by the baser, economically driven concerns of its fellow African countries. Until efforts to create a united African position on Nigeria bear fruit, however, he must wait, and hope — and brace himself for inevitable bad tidings from his homeland.