Nigerian Roulette
(Page 2 of 2)
November/December 1996
By Marcia Davis, Utne Reader
At the heart of the pro-Nigeria campaign is the Reverend Maurice Dawkins and a small army of U.S. public relations professionals. Dawkins is a onetime Senate candidate in Virginia with ties to the religious right and a registered agent for the Nigerian government. He has worked closely with the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a trade group that represents more than 200 black newspapers with 11 million readers, to get a pro-Abacha viewpoint to American blacks. As Ron Nixon reports in The Nation (May 20, 1996), Dawkins helped organize an Abacha-financed fact-finding mission to Nigeria for NNPA members, who later published favorable editorials and attacked Western media coverage as racist. Many black newspapers recently carried an eight-page insert titled "Nigeria: A Closer Look," with writings from NNPA president Dorothy Leavell, Innis, and Dawkins, who was described as a freelance writer. A full-page ad supporting the Nigerian government that appeared in 110 black newspapers was signed by the Coalition for Fairness in Nigeria, a Dawkins group.
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Dawkins and others are trying to "create doubt" about Nigeria, Mel Foote of the Washington, D.C., advocacy group Constituency for Africa told The Nation. Replied Dawkins: "Everyone has lobbyists. That's the way we do business in this country."
But efforts to win the public relations war appear to be failing. Abacha's release of five political prisoners in June didn't stop a United Nations panel of judicial experts from accusing the regime of major human rights violations in a July report. And despite Dawkins' efforts and visits to Nigeria by prominent figures such as Braun, much of black public opinion also remains opposed to the regime. A majority of Braun's colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus have signed a bill calling for sanctions; the National Black Caucus of State Legislators has declined a Dawkins invitation to Nigeria; and the New York City Council has passed a resolution condemning the regime.
As Nixon notes in The Nation, the NNPA has every right to "call attention to negative images of Africa and its people." But under the influence of Dawkins and the Nigerian government, the group has crossed the line between journalism and public relations, "substituting one myth for another."
A solution to the crisis seems nowhere in sight, but Nigeria's native son and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka argues in his book, The Open Sore of a Continent (Oxford University Press), that Nigerians are "primed for a campaign of comprehensive civil disobedience." This would be a page out of African-Americans' own civil rights history--a history that Robinson and others would argue that Dawkins and his crew seem to have forgotten.
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