Truemors
On
19 December 2006, four months before the end of Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term
as president of Nigeria, 850 movers and shakers gathered in the grand ballroom
of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York to bid him farewell. It was a
chance for the former army general to be among dear
friends, including the sponsors of the evening's celebration and tribute: the
three leading investors in Nigeria’s oil industry, Chevron, Exxon and Shell
Nigeria. Before
Obasanjo’s election in 1999, Chevron-Texaco had provided a jet for his campaign
trip to the United States.
Between courses, Hope
Masters, daughter of the late Leon H Sullivan, the civil rights activist, hailed
Obasanjo as a potential recipient of the Nobel peace prize. The Leon H Sullivan
Foundation has organised crucial summits between private African-American and
African business leaders. Although the former US secretary of state, Colin
Powell, couldn’t make the dinner, he sent a message of friendship to
Obasanjo.
The evening was an
apotheosis for its organiser, Andrew Young, an iconic civil rights figure and
co-founder of the Atlanta-based consultancy and lobbying company GoodWorks
International. According to Laolu Akande, US correspondent of the Nigerian
newspaper The Guardian, GoodWorks “made its fortune from its
relations with Obasanjo”: 40% of its turnover is with Nigeria –
“millions of dollars”, according to The New York Times.
GoodWorks’s operations are
international, which helps conceal its earnings of at least $300,000 a year per
client from image-polishing activities in Nigeria, Angola, Ivory Coast, Benin
and, more recently, Rwanda and Tanzania. It also works for leading US companies
like Chevron, General Electric, Motorola, Monsanto and Coca-Cola, trying to
penetrate African markets or consolidate their position there. It takes 1.5% of
the value of any contracts secured by its clients. Young has built up this
impressive network of links with African Heads of state and US businessmen over
a long career. He is a board member of several of the US top 500 companies and
is described by Forbes magazine as an “apostle of capitalism”
Prexy Nesbitt of Chicago, civil rights veteran and an
architect of the US 1970s campaign against South African apartheid said:
“There’s a class of African Americans who feel no sense of responsibility, no
shame, no ties to the [African] continent, who are incapable of playing any kind
of role. I think we see that with Condoleezza Rice. We see it even
more clearly in some of the other appointments which have been recently made,
like the new assistant secretary of state for Africa, Jendayi Frazer. So we see
African Americans often emerging as functionaries of the system, the gendarmes,
if you will, of the system for the re-colonisation of Africa by both the
corporate and military establishments in the United States”
GoodWorks exploited its
relationship with Obasanjo, whom Young associated with “everything good in
Africa since the 1960s”, to access decision-making circles in Africa. The
journalist Ken Silverstein, an expert on business relations between the US and
Africa, said of GoodWorks’ ethical pretensions: “Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin
[recently said] that GoodWorks has proven that public-purpose capitalism is
possible. If the public she refers to is composed of corrupt African leaders,
their American cronies, and huge international energy conglomerates, she’s
right. But if she was trying to say that GoodWorks is living up to its name when
it comes to fighting African poverty, she couldn’t have been more
wrong.”
GoodWorks’ directors
include two African-Americans who have been US ambassadors to Nigeria: Howard
Jeter and Walter Carrington. The head of its office in the Nigerian
capital Abuja, Sharon Ikeazor, was formerly a lawyer in Royal Dutch Shell’s
Nigerian office. Carlton A Masters,
GoodWorks’s current head and co-founder, is a naturalised US citizen originally
from Jamaica. In June 2005 he married Leon H Sullivan’s daughter at a ceremony
in Abuja. One of the guests was Obasanjo, members of whose entourage joined
Masters to form a company, Sunscope Investments, in Florida.
According to Femi Falana, a
Nigerian lawyer and president of the West African Bar Association: “Andrew Young
has never been interested in these issues. He is just here making money.”
Young is also associated with the Nigerian company Suntrust Oil, which since
2002 has owned one of Nigeria’s most promising leases. As well as being a
GoodWorks executive, Howard Jeter is a board member of the Texas-based company ERHC
Energy, which has been criticised for the way in which it obtained exploration
licences in the joint development zone established by Nigeria and the Republic
of São Tomé and Príncipe.
According to Femi Falana, a
Nigerian lawyer and president of the West African Bar Association: “Andrew Young
has never been interested in issues. He is just here making money.”
Young is also associated with the Nigerian company Suntrust Oil, which since
2002 has owned one of Nigeria’s most promising leases. As well as being a
GoodWorks executive, Jeter is a board member of the Texas-based company ERHC
Energy, which has been criticised for the way in which it obtained exploration
licences in the joint development zone established by Nigeria and the Republic
of São Tomé and Príncipe.
Elections in Nigeria in
April were accompanied by violence and irregularities, and led to the election
of Umaru Yar’Adua, puppet of Obasanjo and a new client of GoodWorks. As Laolu
Akande pointed out, the gala dinner was a chance for Obasanjo and GoodWorks “to
start work on Yar’Adua’s candidature and image. The good spin consisted of
explaining to America that although Yar’Adua had been governor of a province,
Katsina, that had introduced sharia law, he had respected human rights and
prevented the worst: the rise of radical Islamism.”
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