Party sends bill on reparation to National Assembly
From Emmanuel Onwubiko,
Abuja
A LMOST 15 years after the late Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola began a global campaign for the payment of reparation by the western nations to Africa, the African Renaissance Party (ARP) at the weekend sent an "African Reparation Bill" to the National Assembly.
The ARP, which is one of the 30 registered parties in the country, sent copies of the bill to both Senate President Chief Adolphus Wabara and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Bello Masari.
Titled: "African Reparation Bill", the ARP stated that the bill is to acknowledge in Nigeria and the world on behalf of Africans and their descendants, the historical and contemporary injustice wrought by the Atlantic African slave trade, as to its cruelty, brutality, inhumanity and systemic injustice visited upon the African continent and Africans."
In the draft copy of the bill endorsed by the National Chairman of the ARP, Alhaji Yahaya Ndu and made available to The Guardian, the bill also canvassed the creation of a government agency responsible for wagging a world-wide campaign for the payment of reparation to Nigeria.
The party, which did not win any elective position in last year's polls, noted that the bill will refocus Nigeria, Africa and the world on the unfinished business of making the Western Nations to pay reparations for social dislocation, forcible enslavement, looting of treasury and artefacts, destruction and desecration of cities."
The ARP told the National Assembly that it drew its inspiration in sponsoring the bill from the first world conference on reparation at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) in December 1990, sponsored by the late M.K.O. Abiola.
The bill seeks to inspire the creation and setting up of a National Government Agency or Commission that will undertake to:
- delve into the archives to research specific cases of atrocities, illegalities and injustices committed against Africa and Africans for appropriate litigation in Western, international and African courts of law,
- create a legal platform for the programme's actualisation of the goals of the reparations struggle;
- provide further information for actualising the goals of the reparation struggle;
- undertake a comparative analysis of successful reparation claims vis-�-vis that of Africa;
- set up a Reparation Judicial Action Bond to cater for the legal and other attendant costs of the necessary judicial positions;
- demonstrate to Nigerians and the international community that reparations due to African nations are several times the value of the odious foreign debts presently crippling African economies;
- engage patriotic lawyers who can competently and effectively proceed to appropriate courts of law in Nigeria and abroad to institute actions for reparations and vigorously pursue them as appropriate; and
