BiAS 7 – The Bible and Politics in Africa
Mahoso, from as far back as 2004-6, the role of ECOWAS has been that
of Judas Iscariot and not that of Solomon in Cote d’ Ivoire. Mahoso
argues that ECOWAS, which is led by Nigeria, was responsible for over-
seeing the Pan-African agenda in all of West Africa. And the same Nige-
ria was chairing the AU in January 2006 when the problems that bedevil
Cote d’ Ivoire today surfaced to the whole world. Therefore, it should
have been easy to integrate the West African agenda with the AU agenda
to bring about a Pan-African solution to the Ivorian impasse. But that
did not happen, primarily because Nigerian President Olusegun
Obasanjo was a pretender.^72 As it finally became clear, there were two
competing camps. There was a real contest between ‘Solomon’ and
‘Judas’; between one who was a real pan-African statesman, pushing for
a pan-African solution and another sell-out who masqueraded as pan-
African.
That is why, for Mahoso, from 2004 to 2006, it was so confusing as to
who exactly was the mediator in Cote d’ Ivoire, for at one time President
Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had become the key mediator. But as the
Mbeki mediation proceeded well, what appeared in the media was ap-
parent competition for leadership between Obasanjo and South African
President Thabo Mbeki. All became clear for Mahoso, ‘when Obasanjo
sold out former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to the Europeans and
North Americans that there was no sovereign Pan-African agenda or
strategy in the Ecowas region’.^73 In a nutshell, Obasanjo and the rest of
Ecowas are consequently not African ‘Solomons’ in Cote d’ Ivoire but
‘Judas Iscariots’, while Mbeki is the bonafide pan-African statesman,
hence an African ‘Solomon’. This, according to Mahoso is the reason
Mbeki’s views were never accepted by neither the UN nor the AU Com-
mission, when he flew into Cote d’ Ivoire soon after the election impasse
(in December 2010) and prepared a report which was well balanced. As
Mahoso claims, instead, Raila Odinga was smuggled into being the chief
‘negotiator’ by the AU Commission with the blessings of the UN so as to
pin down Gbabo, the nationalist leader, the legitimate mother of the
surviving child, as he draws his mandate from the majority of the people
of Cote d’ Ivoire as opposed to Quattara, the whore whose support base
is foreign.
(^72) Mahoso, ‘Quattara’s Nato demands on Cote D’ Ivoire’.
(^73) Mahoso, ‘Quattara’s Nato demands on Cote D’ Ivoire’.