IMHOTEP: Notes from Trinidad

I am writing this piece from the beautiful Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago where I was invited to attend the Commonwealth Summit of Heads of State and Government (CHOGM) that kicked off last week.

From these islands, which Charles de Gaulle once dismissed as ‘the dust of empires', the Haitian anti-slavery revolutionary Toussaint l'Ouverture was born. Marcus Garvey, the Moses of black emancipation, was born in Jamaica, as was reggae godfather Bob Marley and the eminent statesman Michael Manley.

The father of pan-Africanism, Edward Wilmot Blyden, was born in the Virgin Islands, while Aimé Césaire, father of the African Renaissance, was born in Martinique. Nobel Laureate Sir Arthur Lewis - among the greatest economists of the twentieth century - was born in St. Lucia, as was the poet Derek Walcott.

St. Lucia is also the birthplace of one of Nigeria's great Chief Justices, Sir Darnley Alexander.

Trinidad and Tobago is the birthplace of the remarkable intellectual statesman, Eric Williams. It is also the homeland of the socialist philosopher C. L. R.

James and of Brian Lara, regarded by the cricket world as one of the ablest batsmen of all time.

I love the Caribbean for its heroes - for José Marti -- for Fidel and Che during their Sierra Maestra years, for its rainbows and colours and races.

During the flight from St. Lucia to Piarco International Airport in Port of Spain, from my window seat on the great Boeing 747, I beheld the most breathtaking sunset of my life, as golden sunrays irradiated from defiant mountain peaks, kissing the seductive waves of the ancient Caribbean Sea,

witnessed by silvery clouds in the shape of winged cherubs in prostrate adoration before the Madonna and Child.

Trinidad has not been a disappointment. They came in their glistening jets, the mighty and great and good - in all their pomp and pageantry -- kings, queens, presidents and princes. The summit was well organised and the secretariat did their job with panache, under the benign but firm leadership of Prime Minister Patrick Manning.

The business forum was held, would you believe it, on a luxury cruise ship, The Serenade of the Seas, hired exclusively for that purpose. My presentation on the ‘Global Financial Crisis' was well received. I was also invited to speak at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine, on "The Prospects for Democracy and Development in Nigeria".

My message was a simple one:

that democracy and development are Siamese twins, contrary to the casuistic propaganda by the likes of Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. I tried to explain the puzzle underlying Nigeria's innate potentials for greatness in contrast with its poor performance on most indices of development. I pointed to the painful realities of a divided society and the failure of the power elites to evolve the requisite consensus, which the English political philosopher Sir Ernest Barker underlined as being essential to the emergence of prosperous democracies.

There is also the failure of leadership, the traumas of ritual ethno-religious bloodbaths and the disconnect between the forms of democracy and its spirit. The French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville would probably have found Nigeria as much of a puzzle as he did nineteenth century America.

This year's CHOGM could not have taken place against a background of greater ferment in world economics and international relations. Finding effective solutions to the global financial crisis was a major preoccupation, as were issues such as Climate Change, governance and human rights.

At the sidelines, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had been consulting with colleagues on his planned repeal of the Act of Settlement 1701 that outlaws any Catholic from ever becoming Head of State of Britain and its dominions. The British Monarch is also the Head of State of over a dozen sovereign nations ranging from Australia and Canada to New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, Papua New Guinea and Antigua.

The Commonwealth of Nations may be a victim of its own virtues. The fact that it works on the basis of consensus also means there are no enforcement mechanisms for any decisions reached. A weakened Secretariat cannot marshal the intellectual as well as financial capital to make a real difference to the less affluent members of the family. Unless real change takes place, the Commonwealth is doomed to become a mere ornamental club.

As a patriotic Nigerian, I was disappointed that my country did not feature more prominently in these deliberations. We do not grasp the elementary principle that diplomacy is as much about substance as it is about ceremonial and symbolism. We put out a similarly ridiculous display during the September UN General Assembly in New York.

Our diplomacy, I fear, is in danger of becoming a tale told by an idiot. De profundis ad te Domini, clamavi!