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This Memorandum is the full text of the lecture titled, Mr. Bill Clinton and tlte New World, which was organized by Axis Re”search Agency (ARA) on 29th of September, 1993 at the Nigerian Union of Journalists (N.D.J) Press Centre, Kaduna.

Axis Research Agency, the organizers of the lecture, is a Public Policy Development Think Tank based in Kaduna, Nigeria.

I have two main reasons for deciding to publish the text by this lecture as a memorandum to Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama.

The first reason is that both Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama are today promising, if elected President, to bring about change in America in the same manner Mr. Bill Clinton promised change in 1992. In a sense, the entire lecture is about the need to bring about change in America. This is what is contained in the conclusion of the lecture:

“Changing America, as a human enterprise, sounds like the wild dream of a whiz kid that Mr. Clinton used to be. But Mr. Clinton should be rest assured that there will be no shortage of ideas. He should feel free and be courageous to learn and even copy from other systems of social, economic and political management such as Islam and socialism. The Chinese have opened their hearts and minds and they are achieving spectacular successes. The Americans should do the same in order to be able to preserve the positive gains they have made in all fields of human advancement and also provide the kind of world leadership that is in strict agreement with the need to ensure just peace in the new world.”

My second reason for turning the text of my post-1992 American Presidential Election lecture into a pre-American Presidential Election memorandum to the two leading candidates in the 2008 forthcoming American Presidential Election is the present state of the American economy. The state of the American economy is one of the subjects I briefly treated in the lecture. In fact, this is what I stated also as part of the conclusion of the lecture:

“Mr. Clinton should be able to see beyond the idea of re-inventing government in America. It is the entire spectrum of American life that needs re-inventing. The casino character of the capitalist system has to be abandoned in favour of a system that guarantees some measure .of concrete certainty. The American economy, and by extension the world economy, cannot continue to be operated on the basis of the rules of. the day by day speculative existence of the so-called freemarket. Yes, let the market remain free, but at the same time ensure that it is responsible. And the market can only be responsible if it is regulated. What we have now is a free for all over deregulated confusion all in the name of free enterprise.”

Of course, a lot has happened in the post cold war New World since the lecture was delivered.

On the political front, there is now talk of another cold war between resurgent super power Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, (NATO), which is pushing its areas of operation .to the boarders of Russia after, for the first time in its history, deploying its troops outside the European Theatre to fight in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, since the 9\11 attack on America, there is the hot “war” raging on multiple fronts between the adherents of the new religion of secularism under American leadership and Islam. America has come to the conclusion that the attack was carried out by “Islamic fundamentalists” or “Islamic terrorists’” and has, consequently, declared a global “war” on “Islamic terrorism”; and as the Americans have declared, this war has no rules.

In countries like Nigeria, the dream that Chief Abiola, the winner of the June 12, 1993 Presidential Election, would serve as an agent of progressive political change in that country was completely shattered by the annulment of that election; and this very rich country considered as the heart of Africa has since then been struggling to survive as a viable nation state.

In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) has been in power since the collapse of white apartheid rule in that country.

In the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, the weapon of mass destruction planted and supported for over 30 years by America in that rich African country had since died; and while China is now preoccupied with the task of re-building the country , Western corporate criminal elements under the protection of Corporate Worriers are busy exploiting the riches of the country.

The long running destructive civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone have since ended and the two rich small West African countries are going through the painful paths of societal reconciliation and national economic re-construction.

In the Balkans, Bosnia-Herzegovina is now an independent country and Kosovo has recently become the latest region of the former Yugoslavian state to declare its independence from Serbia.

In Latin America, socialists are winning all the arguments; and except in Mexico where the elections were rigged, all proAmerican ,candidates lost their elections in that region of the World particularly in countries like Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

On the economic front, except for Great Britain and one or two other countries, the countries copstituting the ever expanding European Union has one strong common currency, the Euro and the currency is strongly challenging the dominance of the American dollar, particularly in the oil market.

And more fundamentally, the casino capitalist system has collapsed. The “market fascism” headquarters housing the centres of speculative trading in the wealth of nations known as stock markets situated on Wall Street and such other super glittering structures of the Western World have since turned into monumental toxic waste dumps that are totally dependant on state intervention in order to be able to resume their gambling games in the name of free enterprise.

Those who are opposed to the so-called globlisation of the World economic system have been proved right as the parasitic beneficiaries of this global fraud around the World have now lined up to continue to be spoon-fed by the commanders running the Central Banks and Treasuries of the failed capitalist economies. This is what is now called, “financial socialism”, which is for the benefit of Wall Street scavengers and their co-conspirators else where in the World only.

The gravity of the economic situation in America and other Western countries has forced Western economies to open their doors to sovereign wealth funds from Muslim Middle Eastern countries thereby further exposing the bankruptcy of the afterthought and false reason that America invaded and occupied Iraq for the purpose of overthrowing a dictatorship in that country and spreading democracy in the Middle East. To those in. control of power in America, the reality is, survival first and democracy last. Th.ose in control of sovereign wealth in the Middle East, cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be described as democrats at least from Western liberal democratic sense.

Iran and Zimbabwe have one thing in common. They both have sanction-based economies; and the fact that the majority of the peoples of these countries continue to support their leaders notwithstanding the pains and the intense negative propaganda emanating from Western controlled international media giants, is clear evidence that things cannot be the same in the World again. In other words, since the American war-based economy is in serious crisis (to put it mildly) in spite of the glitters of the hi-tech world while the managers of sanction-based economies of Third World countries have managed to keep their countries on their feet, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the casino capitalist model.

Therefore, it is my hope that Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama will, before or after the Presidential Election, find time to read this Memorandum, which was written exactly fifteen years (15) ago. I, also, wish to bring to their attention that the text of the lecture was published in different forms in my two books, June 12 & the Cultured North: Some Aspects of Nigeria’s Politics in Perspective; and Musing from the Bar: A Lawyer and His Burden published in 2000 and 2005 respectively.

The memorandum:

“Mr. Bill Clinton and the New World

Introduction

On the 4th of November 1992, Americans voted Mr. Bill Clinton as the President of the United States of America. When American voters freely chose Mr. Clinton to be their President, they know fully well what he stands for. He promised change and they voted for change. The American people had two other alternatives - Mr. George Bush and Mr. Ross Perot. They rejected both of them.

Mr. Bill Clinton received his clear mandate to change America in a period of world history when nations, big and small, are going through tremendous social, economic and political changes. The best equipped Think Tanks of the Western World have not succeeded in predicting the events of the last five years. The cold war ended abruptly leaving the cold warriors at a loss as to how to react to the upheavals that followed almost immediately. It is this confusion that led former American President, Mr. George Bush, to think that the world had entered the era of a new world order under American leadership. As James Walsh put it:

.”Bush celebrated the death of communism by proclaiming a new world order. He was right about the new world, but so far there is precious. little order to it.” (Time Magazine, 16th November 1992).

For our purposes here, it will serve no useful purpose arguing that America is not leading the new post-cold-war world. But what kind of world is America leading? What kind of leadership is America providing? And what kind of America is Mr. Bill Clinton leading? We shall attempt to answer these and other questions in this lecture. As we must have realised by now, this lecture is not about the life history of Mr. Clinton. Fortunately

for us, however, Mr. Clinton was Time Magazine’s 1992 Man of the Year and so here we have to be contended with this extract from Lace’ Morrow’s article:

“Americans deserted the predictable steward that they knew, the President who managed Desert Storm steadfastly and precisely. At the end of the cold war, -in a world growing more and more dangerous by the hour, Americans gave the future of the D.S the world’s one remaining superpower, into the hands of the young (46) relatively unknown Governor of a small Southern State, a man with no experience in foreign policy and virtually none in Washington either. They rejected the last President shaped by the moral universe of World War II in favour of a man formed by the sibling jostles and herding of the baby boom and the vastly different historical pageant of the ’60s. The youngest American bomber pilot in the pacific war against Japan will yield power to a Rhodes scholar who avoided the draft because of his principled objections to the war in Vietnam... History may eventually decide that the key to Clinton’s accomplishment (assuming he does well) lay in his temperament - in his buoyancy, optimism and readiness to act, in his enthusiasm for people and his curiosity about their lives. Clinton emerges from the sunnier side of American political character, home of Franklin Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman - as opposed to the sterner, more punitive traditions distilled in their purest form in the mind of Richard Nixon...”

(Time Magazine, 4th January 1993).

This aptly puts the subject of our lecture in proper and, hopefully, objective perspective.

Clinton and America

Mr. Clinton is to America what Mr. Gorbachev was to the former Soviet Union, what Mr. Deng is to China and what Chief Abiola will be to Nigeria. We shall come back to this later. It is sufficient, at this stage, to point out that all the four leaders are, in one way or another, agents of change.

Mr. Clinton made no secret of his intention to pay more attention to domestic issues. This is not surprising because business failures, unmanageable budget deficits, inner city decay, crime etc, have become permanent features of American life and economy. In actual fact, Mr. Clinton inherited an economy that is in deep recession, a society that is deeply divided, a crime situation that has become “a national security issue to most Americans,” a political system that is in dire need of profound charges. It is in these areas that Mr. Clinton will have to provide leadership at the domestic level and I agree with Walter Isaacson that “If Clinton is to fulfill his mandate for change, he will have to be honest about uncomfortable truths and brave in making tough choices.” (Time Magazine, November 16th 1992).

That America is human is the first uncomfortable truth Mr. Clinton will have to be honest about. Like all other countries, America is not immune from inflation, unemployment, corruption, natural disasters, greed of currency and stock~market speculators, business failures, leadership crisis, environmental pollution, racial and ethnic conflicts, military defeats etc.

In the fight to convince Americans that the time for business as usual is over, Mr. Clinton will not have much problem with the likes of the unemployed, wage earners and owners of small businesses. But he will find it tough with the beneficiaries of trickle-down-economics, which are, big business, defence contractors, Wall Street moguls, and bankers. These are the main beneficiaries of 12 years of Republican rule. Mr. Clinton will also find it tough with the military establishment, the political establishment, the intelligence community and the media. In varying degrees, these will constitute organised centres of resistance against change in America.

This is where the Clinton - Gorbachev - Deng comparison becomes relevant. Unlike Mr. Clinton, Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Deng did not need the votes of their countrymen to come to power. So it can be argued that when Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, he did not have the mandate of the people of the former Soviet Union. Similarly, it can be argued that when Mr. Deng set out to reform the socialist system in China, he did not seek for and receive the mandate of the Chinese people.

The same thing cannot be said of Mr. Clinton. But this is not the real issue. The real issue is that in the same manner hard line communists opposed efforts to reform the socialist system in the former Soviet Union and China, hard line conservatives are bent on opposing change, even of a mild nature, in America. Mr. Gorbachev was not as lucky as Mr. Deng.

What is happening in Russia and the other Republics of the former Soviet Union is a direct consequence of the attitude adopted by radicals of the left (represented by communist hard liners) and radicals of the right (represented by Mr. Yelsin). In America, they are all on the right and like in the former Soviet Union, they are determined to hang on to their privileges and acquire new ones.

There is consensus in America that the key to bringing about meaningful change is to drastically reduce American budget deficit. The unresolved issue is how to go about it; and it is here that conservative Democrats found common cause with their Republican counter-parts. In this regard, it is important for Mr. Clinton to remind these conservatives that America and its power elite have not just been living comfortably; America and its power elite have been living in a mind-boggling luxury.

Mr. Clinton’s argument should be that living beyond the level of

comfort is wasteful; in another sense, as the Chinese will argue, it amounts to living beyond what human rights ought to allow. In other words, America and its power elite must be prepared to shed a great deal of weight without lowering their standard of existence as opposed to standard of living.

The sacrifice demanded here from America and its power elite is necessary for two main reasons. In the first place, excess wealth saved from wasteful expenditure on luxuries can be redirected to production thereby creating employment. Secondly, standard of living sacrifice by America and its power elite will also have the desirable effect of raising the standard of existence of millions of other Americans thereby reducing the level of societal discontent. Like all other ordinary citizens elsewhere, what ordinary Americans need is real fairness and

justice and not trickle-down fairness and trickle-down justice.

At the political level, Mr. Clinton will have to convince the American people that they made a historic mistake in 1980 when they rejected” Mr. Jimmy Carter. In 1980, America relapsed into the chronic American delusion of grandeur. American political elite failed to see in Mr. Carter the personification of the good side of American political character uniquely placed to lead America into the early momentous years of the 1980s. Instead, they elected a person who continued to mouth cold war rhetoric at a time when what was needed was proper understanding of the clear signals emerging from the former Soviet Union under the leadership of the reform minded Mr. Gorbachev.

The American economy and political system have to pay a high price for this historic mistake. In addition, profound changes are required in the way the American economy is being operated. Market forces are out of control and greater state intervention is required in order to give the capitalist system, as practiced in America, a human face. Without this, the danger of lawlessness emerging as America’s grundnorm cannot be ruled out.

Indeed, it will amount to living in sheer self-delusion for the high priests of the capitalist system to continue to pretend that capitalism is not facing a grave crisis. Yes, the glitters of the high-tech world are there and everywhere. But deep down, the laws of supply and demand have since ceased to apply as capitalism degenerated into a survival-of-the-fittest lawless market contest.

And unlike communists in China and elsewhere who are searching deep to correct the errors of the socialist system, capitalists prefer to continue celebrating their prematurely declared victory over other models of human economic management, particularly over socialism. Nowadays, the standard order from America to Third World countries is: carry out economic and political reforms before we do business with you. The international Monetary Fund (IMP) and the World Bank are always there to ensure compliance with this order in strict conformity with their out-dated capitalist oriented programmes.

It is a matter of coincidence that Nigeria and its political elite also made a historic mistake in the early 1980s just like their American counter-parts. The civilian political leadership that assumed power in 1979 failed to manage the process of transition from civil rule to democratic rule, which in turned to the collapse of the 2nd Republic in 1983. To protect their privileges, the political elite collaborated with and appeased the military leadership that seized power. As we are all aware, a very powerful section of the civilian political elite is now fully engaged, in league with their military collaborators, in the attempt to halt the match towards genuine democracy following the June 12th 1993 Presidential election won by Chief Abiola.

In the same way America will pay a high price for rejecting Mr. Carter in 1980, which paved the way for 12 years of Republican out-of-touch administration, so will Nigeria pay a high price for mismanaging the democratic transition process between 1979 and 1983, which paved the way for nearly 10 years of military adventurism in the governance of Nigeria. In America, it is Mr. Clinton who will have to make the hard choices and take the tough decisions to prevent the collapse of the tottering capitalist system. In Nigeria, it is Chief Abiola who will have to provide the right leadership in the difficult task of laying the foundation for the reconstruction of the national economy and social system.

Clinton and Africa

Traditionally, America has never considered Africa, or more precisely Africa South of the Sahara (with the exception of South Africa), of much strategic importance. The same thing cannot be said of North African countries that are also members of the powerful Arab League in addition to their membership of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Despite South African internal political situation, America, for economic and strategic considerations, has always maintained a special kind of relationship with that country. The abandonment of Liberia by America provides the latest evidence of the level of American interest in African affairs. When we were much younger, ‘we used to think that one-day Liberia would apply to be an Honorary State of the Union. All that thought is now gone. But with Mr. Clinton as President, we should expect a change of attitude particularly with Chief Abiola’ s election as President in Nigeria and the New South Africa in the offing.

The problems confronting Africa are well known and the causes of the problems are also well known. For our purposes here, it is significant to point out that today; almost all African countries are facing one form of socio-political upheaval or the other. Examples:’ Nigeria has been at a standstill since the military leadership attempted to abort the democratic process by seeking to cancel the June 12, 1993 Presidential election and appointing a now floating interim administration.

In Algeria, there is virtually civil war raging in that country. Quite like in Nigeria, military authorities aborted the democratic process by canceling the second round of parliamentary elections and proscribing the political party that was on the verge of a landslide victory. But unlike in Nigeria, America and the Western world applauded the action of the military. in Algeria because the move was against an Islamic political party (F.I.S). It is on record that France rushed in multi-million dollar financial assistance to the Algerian military government immediately after the decision to abort the democratic process in that country was taken.

In Angola, a pro-Western political party UNIT A, armed with the most modern conventional weapons American military technology can produce felt so confident that it rejected the outcome of a United Nations supervised election. Angolan civil war resumed almost immediately, only this time with greater intensity. Further south, South Africa is on the verge of an about racial war alongside the on-going undeclared civil war between the country’s black majority political parties. In East Africa, Kenya is going through a very difficult transition from one party rule to a multi-party system. In Sudan, one of the longest running civil wars in Africa is still raging and with no end in sight.

In the Horn of Africa, Somalia has, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist as a viable nation state and the United Nations is busy experimenting a new principle of international law in that country. Eritrea has just emerged as an independent country after years of civil war with Ethiopia. In North Africa, secular regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, like in Algeria, are engaged in a bitter struggle for survival with Islamic revolutionaries. The situation in West and Central Africa are the same. Efforts to resolve the Liberian devastating civil war are still going on while Sierra Leone is engaged in its own civil war. In Zaire, there are two governments all claiming legitimacy.

Talking about African problems, the foregoing amount to just scratching the surface. Economically, the debt burden coupled with suffocating corruption has stifled all forms of development. The World Bank has recently admitted the failure of structural adjustment policies it imposed on African and Third World countries. For example: how can a policy of privatisation succeed in a country with. no viable private sector? In the case of Nigeria, this led to the emergence of a new corruption-ridden parasitic fraternity who, having illegally cornered the commanding heights of the national economy, virtually at gunpoint, are now bent on clinging on to power at all cost. What Africa needs are national survival programmes supported from outside and not structural adjustment policies imposed from outside. In any case, in most African countries, viable structures have ceased to exist and so there is nothing to adjust but a lot to reconstruct.

It is our view here that in tackling the enormous African, Third World and other global problems, Mr. Clinton and leaders of other countries cannot solely rely on structures currently in existence and methods currently in operation. There will be need to re-examine, among other things, laws governing relations between nations, laws governing the operation of international organisations and the United Nations Charter itself.

One area. of particular interest to Africa is the issue of leadership. Few African countries are lucky to have leaders who care. Due to varying reasons ranging from neo-colonial influences to sheer love for power for its sake, many African countries are being led by or had leaders who are mere armed con men with divine hallucinations. The issue of leadership is of particular interest to Africa because in many cases, the severe poverty and economic crisis strangulating African countries can be traced directly to the conduct of some African leaders while in office. Many of such leaders exercised supreme power merely for the purpose of satisfying their pleasure-seeking propensities and that of their relations and associates.

In solving African leadership crisis, it is not enough to rely on the capacity of African peoples to develop democratic structures capable of checking the excesses of its leaders. This is where Mr. Clinton and the United Nations come in.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the wealth stolen from Africa and other Third World countries are now stacked in European and American banks and are protected by strict banking regulations. This means, even in a situation where a crooked African leader is thrown out of power by democratic forces, there is no way the wealth of the nation stolen by such a leader can be recovered. In fact, in many instances, such crooked leaders are always received and granted political asylum. For this situation to change, there is need for the’ international community to support the establishment of a new legal regime in the form of a United Nations Convention on Leadership, which should take effect from 1945.

In addition to such other provisions as may be required for the purpose of checking the excesses of crooked leaders, this UN Convention should provide for the following:

1. Duty of member states to prohibit the operation of secret bank accounts by leaders and public functionaries, their relations and associates;

2. Duty of member states to disclose all forms of financial transactions conducted by leaders and public functionaries, their relations and associates;

3. Duty of member states to confiscate and repatriate to the victim countries all monies and other assets stolen by leaders and public functionaries, their families and associates; and

4. The establishment of an International Tribunal to provide the judicial process for the enforcement of the provisions of the Convention and the resolution of whatever disputes that may arise.

For now, Africa should be saying, Repatriation before Reparation to Mr. Clinton. I am sure Chief Abiola will accept this re-ordering of priorities. The international legal system should provide no hiding place for leaders who breached the trust of their peoples.