JONATHAN AND BRAZILIAN-AMERICAN BARBARIAM

The Jonathan-Buhari vaccine against post- election barbarism is a ‘democracy commodity’ for export, writes Okello Oculi

Brazil’s capital Brazilia is celebrated as a ‘City of imagination’ as planned by Lucio Costa and the architectural genius of Oscar Niemeyer. Its location 1,167 km from Rio de Janeiro is central in the country’s vast territorial expanse.

On 8th January, 2022, the ‘’simplicity’’ and oversized buildings of its Congress, Presidential Palace and Supreme Court (expressing ‘’Monumentalism’’), was desecrated by political barbarians.

Brazil’s ruling class recount gunning down ‘’wild tribes’’ inside mysterious depths of the Amazon Forest.  President Bolsonaro’s championing farmers cutting down hundreds of trees to grow commercial soybeans, while COVID-19 that accompanied them killed hundreds of host tribes, was returning to Brazil’s past of feudal ‘‘primitive accumulation’’ barbarism.

The theme of progressive Brazil contending with primitive impulses went back to slavery against Africans and bonded labour for poor whites bought from British prisons and Europe’s wretched poor. These poor whites bought their freedom by providing labour on coffee farms or mines for a minimum of five years.

In the mid-1770s, American, British, French and German exporters of their industrial products into Brazil, armed their local importers to fight a civil war against patriotic economists and industrialists who wanted to protect the Brazilian market for her industrial take-off.  The sustained supply of weapons for local allies of foreign importers, ensured defeat of the patriots.

Andre Gunder Frank used this example to formulate his notion of ‘’the development of under-development’’. Brazil’s drive to become an industrialized economy and society was blocked and derailed by Euro-American capitalism.

Like racist South Africa, the economy did not need the Afro-Brazilian and poor whites as beneficiaries of high quality education to provide mass skilled workers and as consumers of products of local industries. President Bolsnaro’s indifference to high death rates among Afro-Brazilians from COVID-19 suggested a consideration that their purchasing power was not significant to the country’s industries.

The legacy of foreign “interference’’ in Brazilian politics was repeated in close allies of Donald Trump reported to have urged Bolsanaro to cast doubt in the 2021 elections, and deny the legitimacy of Lula’s victory. His encouraging supporters to camp near a military barrack and call for a military coup, hinted of dark clouds of a civil war.

 The contemptuous opposition to the welfare of destitute African-descendants continues to plague post-slavery Brazilian and American cultures. It is used to manipulate voting choices among racists.

The 2010 census of Brazilia indicated 48.2 per cent Mulato (1,239,887); 42.2 per cent Whites (1,084,468, and 7.7 per cent Blacks (198,072).  An electoral alliance by Mulatoes with Blacks around candidate Lula, may have accounted for the narrow election victory of Lula.

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of ‘’Getting America Back’’ is fueled by claims that non-white immigrants are more in number; and will dominate American politics ‘till Jesus returns’. Echoes of ‘’Black  Lives Matter’’ in American politics was provoked by Trump’s rhetoric, and   opposed, by “the PROUD BOYS’’: violent allies of Trump. If BLM impacted on the politics of neighbouring Colombia, it must have also benefited Lula.

 In 1964, top military officers with active pressure by American intelligence operatives, toppled President Getulio Vargas to prevent the growing influence of the Communist Party. The military conducted a mass slaughter of members and allies of the Communist party.

President Bolsonaro openly praised Donald Trump, earning the title of “Trump in the Tropics’’. His sharing Trump’s denial of the reality of ‘’Climate Change’’ was good for his plan to cut down large numbers of trees in the Amazon to clear huge acres of land for farms by his supporters.

 LULA’s legacy of injecting funds into lives of millions of poor families fanned racist sentiments against Afro-Brazilians.

Racist, ethnic and religious fears of losing elections is lethal to liberal rules of contesting elections according to the rule of law; and the acceptance of the ‘’turn by turn’’ code. Moreover, losers accept reforms conducted by winners to meet interests of those who voted for them.

The Jonathan dictum that his political victory is not worth shedding blood to defend it, stands, in the “international war of ideas’’, against that held by current losers of elections in Brazil and TEA PARTY America. To promote the ritual of elections as a component of ‘’Democracy’’, a political vaccine which blocks spontaneous violence by losers Is critical.

Nyerere avoided this problem by advocating the technology of dialogue in African Familyhood (”Ujamaa”): as opposed to the ‘’Civil War’’ in multi-partyism.

The barbarism in Brazil is of special interest to Africa. Dangers to democratic politics by eruptions from legacies of slavery and oppression have instigated military coups in Ghana, Uganda, Liberia and Ethiopia. The claim that democratic and human development are linear, is currently, severely shaken in Brazil and Trump’s America.

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja

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