04/06/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm me, Scott.
Scott Horton here, live, noon to two, eastern time, on Liberty Radio Network, Monday through Friday.
I do KPFK on Sunday mornings, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles.
Yesterday was Mohammed Sahimi on the Iran nuclear deal.
You'll want to check the archives if you didn't get a chance to hear it.
Our guest today on the show is our good friend Eric Margulies, who is always so gracious with his time.
I'd say you say yes, you'll come on the show about 99% of the times I ask, Eric, and I sure do appreciate that.
Welcome back.
Thanks, Scott.
I always enjoy being on your show.
It's nice talking to someone who's learned and well-prepared as yourself.
Well, I'm trying.
I did read the article.
Very interesting stuff.
And thank you for knowing everything about everywhere on this planet.
Who do I get to talk to about Nigeria?
Yeah, tryericmargulies.com.
That'll be first stop, and then you can go ahead and quit looking.
Can Buhari rescue Nigeria from itself?
Who is Buhari?
Well, Buhari is actually general.
He's a former general and a former president.
He overthrew the Nigerian government back decades ago, staged a coup.
He was in power for a while.
He said he was going to clean up the awful corruption that was there.
He was a professional general.
He was a man regarded as honest, which is very unusual in Nigeria.
He didn't stay in office very long, but he left office unsullied and untainted by corruption.
He didn't leave office with Mercedes and mansions and Swiss bank accounts.
He was, as far as we know, an honest leader.
He sat all these years watching Nigeria sink into more corruption, and he decided to run for president, and he won.
Now, isn't that interesting?
A military dictator who overthrew the previous government, which, I guess, was not a democratically elected one.
Whoever it was, he overthrew.
But then, with basically total power in his hands, he did a kind of pseudo-George Washington and refused to just make it all about himself, left office willingly.
Is that right?
Or he was overthrown, too, or what?
No, he left office willingly.
That's amazing.
He was very frustrated because making things happen in Nigeria, a giant federal state of 170 million people with, I don't know, 400 different languages and dialects, it's very difficult.
Yeah, no doubt about that.
Yeah, and I don't mean that's amazing for Africa.
I mean, that's amazing for all of humanity.
I mean, that just almost never happens.
So, as far as a politician goes, he sold me on this guy, and now he won a landslide against Goodluck Jonathan.
Is that it?
That's correct.
Goodluck Jonathan came to power in a rigged election.
And he was an amiable chap, but he proved to be a complete zero as a president.
So, Nigerians were fed up.
And this is the first time that a sitting president has been defeated by a challenger in Nigeria's modern history since 1970, 1960.
So, it was a revolution.
He won by over 2 million votes.
The election had all kinds of irregularities, as Nigerian elections usually do.
But by and large, most people considered it a reasonably fair and decent election.
People of Nigeria spoke, and they spoke saying they wanted a tough, competent leader.
Hey, did I ever tell you the story about how the guy that used to own the taxi cab I drove back, well, I don't know, 12, 13 years ago now, wow.
He was a chief of the Yayabo tribe, which I'm sure I'm saying incorrectly there.
And I even met his father, who was the king of the, how do you say it?
Yorubas?
I guess so.
Boy, I got it way wrong then.
Yeah, them.
He was the king, and I met him.
He was sitting in a throne in the living room.
Very nice throne.
I should have taken pictures of it.
Should have gotten one for yourself, King Scott.
Wouldn't that be nice?
No, it was really cool.
All carved out of very fine wood and lion's heads and all these things on it, whatever.
And he was an old, old man in his late 80s, I think, when I met him, his father.
Anyway, yeah, I should try to track him down and talk with him a little bit about this.
And I think he must have, I don't know, is that a Christian tribe or is that how it's divided?
Well, I'm not sure which tribe you're referring to.
It sounds more like it was Muslims from the north, but hard to say.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, his father seemed like a nice guy, and he certainly was salt of the earth kind of guy, you know, jump in front of a bullet for you kind of a guy, really great guy.
Anyway, so that's my little Nigeria story.
There are a lot of Nigerians in Austin and a lot in the cab business, which I used to be in.
And so and they would fight to like really mad all the different tribes and and, you know, anyway, Nigerians, as you say, is a very catch all phrase for a lot of people.
So now you say in the article to how you may have just mentioned it, and I forgot already that the predominantly Christian South actually came out and voted for this guy in great measure, too.
That's how much that they respect him from before, huh?
That's quite that's right.
And that's amazing because there has been, you know, Nigeria is about 50 50 Catholic Christian and Muslim.
South is predominantly Christian.
North is predominantly Muslim.
They were completely different countries until the British amalgamated all of this area to create Nigeria to secure its oil strategic territory.
But and normally the Christians vote for a Christian president like good luck, Jonathan, and the Muslims vote for a Muslim candidate.
But this time, remarkably, a lot of Christians decided to vote with their heads rather than their hearts.
OK, now, so I think I don't know.
I think we'll probably have to pick up the subject of Boko Haram and all of that on the other side of the break.
But in the meantime, could you talk a little bit about the was it the one hundredth of one percent that gets to keep all the oil money through their state power while everybody else goes hungry or what?
How's that work?
Well, Nigeria has been one of the poster child for corruptions and thievery.
The almost all the money that Nigeria has made from its vast oil fields has been stolen.
If people have a lot of trouble pointing to anything that has been built with the proceeds of this oil treasure trove, the ecologically the country is a disaster.
The capital of the former capital, Lagos, is a horror show of traffic congestion and pollution and nothing works very well in Nigeria.
And everything runs on payoffs on this dash in Nigeria.
So the tens of billions of dollars have been stolen and all of the money, nearly all the money has gone into Swiss banks or London property markets.
And, you know, the Nigerians replied, said, well, you know, we are big crooks.
There's no doubt about it.
But so are the people who take our money and hide it away.
They have a point.
Yeah.
Now, you know, there was.
Do you remember that article by Sebastian Younger and Vanity Fair back in 07 about the guys in the Niger Delta who are getting all their oil stolen and they were kidnapping the shell executives, but then letting them go so that they would they basically not brainwash them, but just explain to them how unfairly they were being treated and they would let the guys go and they'd go back to to shell oil saying, man, we're really doing the wrong thing here.
And it was all about, of course, like you're saying, the corrupt and connected get to keep everything and the people whose property actually sits on top of the oil get absolutely nothing.
I was wondering if you know if those guys are even around anymore because they were fighting.
They had bought some rifles with some some black market oil money and they were fighting.
And I wonder whether they even exist anymore now.
I haven't heard from him in a while.
Scott, this is happening in the Niger Delta, which is particularly rich in oil, and it's an area of vast pollution done by the oil companies.
There was a local who raised up a great protest group.
His name was Ken Sarawila, and he was murdered, much like Brazilians who protest about the destruction of the Amazon forest.
These ecological heroes, I call them, was killed.
And that's sort of quieted down a bit.
But I'm sure it's going to come back again because the damage done to the to the Niger River Delta is terrible.
Yeah, man.
And that article by Younger, they had painted little white circles on their arms was supposed to make them bulletproof.
And I was thinking that's really just not going to work.
Well, that takes me back to the 60s of Congo.
Oh, no.
Well, we'll pick that up on the other side of this break.
Eric, in the 60s in the Congo, y'all right after this.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies by way of Skype here.
And we're talking about the free and fair election of the new leader of Nigeria and the last guy stepping down without a fight.
This is nice.
It's not anarcho capitalism, but it's progress.
And and then we're talking about related issues.
Of course, the oil and the wars.
We're about to talk about Boko Haram in a minute.
But you mentioned this in your article, too, about your time in the 1960s in the Congo.
And you just mentioned that when I mentioned these these guys fighting in the Niger Delta back eight years ago now who were painting these little white circles on themselves in the mystical belief that it would make them bulletproof and going up against the American backed Nigerian army that was slaughtering them for resisting the theft of their oil.
So tell us all about it.
What were you doing in the Belgian Congo?
Having a lot of fun?
Scott, it was a wonderful time in the Congo.
It was nominally granted independence by the Belgians, but everybody was fighting over it because it had oil and uranium.
And there were breakaway provinces in the south like Katanga.
And the Belgians were financing all kinds of mercenaries, like the wonderful, colorful characters like Mad Mike Hoare and Colonel Bob Denard, who routed these hundred white mercenaries, routed the whole Congolese army.
There were the Simbos who were backed by the communists.
They were terrible people, a step away from being wild men who painted their bodies and feathers and dog that carried these amulets given to them by witch doctors.
And they believed it would make them invulnerable.
So it was a crazy period.
But one reads now that mercenaries from South Africa, mainly from a unit called Crowbar, which I knew very well because I was with them up along the Limpopo River, hunting ANC, African National Congress units who were attacking farmers.
They are very tough people.
They're back in Nigeria now being employed because the Nigerian army is so useless and ineffective.
Yeah.
Now, about that, I think it's interesting, this Boko Haram group that I read about this, the Boko doesn't mean Western education.
It means deception.
And and then it came to mean Western education because the British, of course, and their sock puppets were always teaching these people that they're supposed to bend over and take it.
And their idea is that, no, actually, we shouldn't.
And those kind of untruths are forbidden around here.
And so I always wonder, how do you fit the words Western education in Boko?
Yeah, I don't think much makes sense about that movement.
And I've given up trying to figure out what they're all about.
To me, they're a bunch of bush bandits.
And they're using, like ISIS in Iraq and Syria, they're using the vocabulary of Islam to sort of weld together the movement to justify their actions.
But what they really are is a very ugly reaction to the corruption and mismanagement, malfeasance that's been going on in Nigeria.
I mean, all the money being stolen from the country and the average Nigerian living on less than $2 a day.
That puts them amongst the poor people in the world.
These people are out attacking, trying to exact revenge on government.
Call them a Nigerian version of of Cambodia's, you know, Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge.
Yeah, well, and so I wonder about how much popular support they could possibly have.
I mean, I've seen it's kind of crazy.
But in Iraq and in Syria, you got some bin Ladenite madmen that end up with, you know, more or less the support of the population because, one, I guess they're fearful.
But also the other guys are worse, they think, that kind of thing.
But on the other hand, you look at a bunch of crazies like this who, as you say, they're way, way, way out of line.
Maybe it'd be easy enough if the military got one good division together, just hunt these guys down and kill them and be done with it then.
Or what?
Well, the military is out of ammo.
They don't have enough guns or vehicles.
A woman stolen by their officers, never provided by the government.
And it's interesting because beside these mercenaries in South Africa, the main fighting force opposing Boko Haram now is the Chadian army.
And that's a whole other fascinating story of remote Chad in the waste of the desert.
A French protectorate equipped with French military equipment and French military advisors has turned out to be the most effective fighting force and is actually holding back Boko Haram while the Nigerian army is running away.
Yeah.
And how many are there in Boko Haram, do you think?
Oh, nobody knows because they won't stand still long enough to do it.
But I think they probably have perhaps maybe five, six, seven thousand people running around in a very large area.
Yeah.
You know, I always wonder, you know, obviously this serves the war party, but I think I read some pretty good journalism, too, that was saying that when America helped the Mujahideen take Libya and then they went and chased the Tuaregs down into Mali in that war we talked about back in 2012, that at some point the Ansar al-Sharia local al-Qaeda affiliates in Libya ended up coming into contact with these Boko Haram guys and giving them new weapons and new training and some shoulder fired RPGs and tactical advice and this kind of thing.
Do you think that's really right?
I think so, yes.
There's militancy and anti-Western militancy spread across Sahara, along the traditional caravan trails.
The fall, when we overthrew the Libyan government, that released very large amounts of arms into the region.
So we are reaping the real win, which we created.
Let me add another point, Scott, if I may.
I wasn't quite clear on General Buhari.
He didn't initially give up office.
He was ousted in another military coup or elbowed out of office, but then he came back into serving in the government later but announced that he was not going to launch any more coups or he didn't want to be president again.
Well, he's changed his mind.
I see.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad we got that point of clarification in there, too.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
Next week.
All right.
Great.
Thanks very much, Eric.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, so that's the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
And he also writes for lourockwell.com and for unz.com.
That's unzunz.com.
We'll be right back.
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