ON August 11, Nigeria lost one of its rarest friends in the person of Walter Carrington. While many diplomats executed their assignments in strict compliance with the tenets of officialdom, Carrington went beyond the lines of duty to indeed befriend Nigeria. As American Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Nigeria during autocratic military regimes, he executed his assignments with a friendly forbearance and dedication to the cause of freedom for the people, and in spite of grievous attempts to liquidate him.
Carrington attended the prestigious Harvard Law School from 1952 to 1955. Thereafter, he enlisted in the United States Army. When he left the Army, he began a private law practice in Boston, Massachusetts, while simultaneously working as Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Years later, Carrington was posted to and served as the US Ambassador to the Republic of Senegal, from 1980 to 1981. In 1993, he got posted to Nigeria, and left Nigeria in 1997. Years after leaving Nigeria, specifically in 2004, the Simmons College in Boston named him the Warburg Professor of International Relations. Perhaps it was Carrington’s credentials as a hater of man’s inhumanity to man that necessitated his 1993 posting to Nigeria. This was a period when military despotism had reached a crescendo in Nigeria and the world was getting increasingly bothered by the threat this posed to the rest of the continent. The self-styled military presidency of General Ibrahim Babangida had annulled the June 12, 1993 presidential election, said to be the fairest in the history of the country. Carrington’s posting was undoubtedly to provide some support to the fledgling army of anti-military rule advocates whose ranks had begun to multiply in the country.
Carrington never perceived himself as a mere ambassador; he acted like a Nigerian who had a stake in, and was committed to, the development of Nigeria. He identified with the democratic potentials of Nigeria and was saddened by the turn of events under military rule. When he saw governance sliding into anarchy in the country which he felt held prospects as the headquarters of blacks in the world, Carrington easily morphed into an activist and dissolved into the nocturnal gatherings of activists who met to rid Nigeria of autocracy. A lot of the democracy activists of this period owed their survival and the achievements made in the course of rising against tyranny to him as he gave them diplomatic cover, alerting them of sinister plans against them by the suceeding Sani Abacha junta many times.
Not only did Carrington demonstrate unique love for Nigeria, he showed filial affection to it. He got married to a Nigerian medical doctor, Arese, and was on account of his untiring affinity to Nigeria named Omowale – our exiled child is back home – by the people of South-West Nigeria. Until his departure from Nigeria and even thereafter, he never failed to identify with the people. It was perhaps in his sworn disagreement with the military’s bid to ride roughshod over the people that Carrington’s love for the Nigerian people was demonstrated most. He stood with the people at this critical period. The then military Head of State, General Abacha, tried all he could to frustrate his interventions. There were many allegations cooked up against him. To spite him and his home government, Abacha renamed Eleke Crescent, the seat of the American Embassy in Lagos, as Louis Farrakhan Crescent.
Abacha named Eleke Crescent after Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, an organisation highly criticised by the US, in retaliation against the decision of the American government to rename a Manhattan street corner opposite the Nigerian UN Mission as Kudirat Abiola Corner. This was after Kudirat, one of the wives of Chief MKO Abiola, the winner of 1993 presidential election, was killed by Abacha’s henchmen. Abacha even got Farrakhan to pay a six-day solidarity visit to him in Nigeria, during which the Nation of Islam leader urged Nigerians to give him three more years so that he could perfect his programme of transition to civil rule. The programme was generally perceived by Nigerians as a gambit by Abacha to transmute into a civilian dictator.
When Abacha bared his fangs against democratic campaigners, with many activists felled by bullets and many others co-opted into supporting tyranny with filthy lucre, Carrington sided with the people. He was committed to fundamental human rights and believed strongly that the emancipation of the people was ripe. It was to Carrington’s credit that, following the return to civil rule in 1999, the crescent in question was later renamed after him in acknowledgment of his indefatigable support for Nigeria’s democratic forces.
In Carrington’s death, Nigeria has lost a great friend who stood by it in trying times. We remember him as one of the citizens of the world who worked with democratic forces in Nigeria to restore civil rule. Adieu Carrington, great friend of Nigeria.
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