AFRICAN PROJECTS FOR PEACE AND LOVE INITIATIVES Speech at Goshen, Indiana, on January 19, 2008 By Rev. Titus K. Oyeyemi (Founding President, CEO) THE NEED FOR THE GIFT OF GOOD LEADERSHIP IN AFRICA Good evening, brethren, friends, ladies and gentlemen, and all my heavenly Father’s children. As I put my hands to the keyboard these early morning hours, it struck me that I should make a devotion the beginning of this speech. The song that came to me as I typed therefore is “We Are Gathering Together unto the Lord.” I would invite us to sing that song together to enjoy our fellowship together as God’s Children in Goshen, Indiana, and as God’s Children from Africa. (Please see the words of the song on the attached sheet.) Yes! We have gathered together unto the Lord, to praise him, to thank him, and to offer our service to him. This is the essence of our coming to you this cold January evening in Year 2008 in Goshen. We are gathered together to thank God for what he has done for African Projects/Foundations for Peace and Love Initiatives in the last five years. We are gathered together to sing praises onto the Holy Name of the Lord. We are gathered together to kick off the 5th Anniversary of African Projects for Peace and Love Initiatives. And we also are gathered to pledge our support for the work that the Lord has bestowed upon us – Promoting Africa, the Future Land of Peace. Eleven-and-a-half-years ago, on August 13, 1996, the Lord shared a vision with me couched in these words – Africa, the Future Land of Peace. Since then, the vision has passed through many phases: Conception, Birthing, Designing, Developing, Creating Awareness, Positioning and Establishing of necessary administrative structures and infrastructures. The journey has been long and difficult, but at the same time, encouraging and enriching. The journey had taken me many times to Nigeria and to several places in the United States: New York, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Oklahoma, Portland, Georgia, Illinois, and Indiana, to mention a few. The journey has also taken me to several schools: Oral Roberts University, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, University of Notre Dame, Eastern Mennonite University, Bluffton University, Ashland University, to mention a few. The journey has also placed me at the feet of great teachers: Dr. Roy Hayden, Dr. Mark Roberts, Dr. Lederle, Dr. Breckenridge, Dr. Ted Koontz, Dr. Daniel Schipani, Dr. Willard Swartley, Dr. Perry Yoder, Dr. J.R. Burkholder, Dr. Joe Bock, and a host of others. I have also been privileged to meet and work with great people like Dr. David Shank, Dean Johnson, Dan and Vera Shenk, Alice and Willard Roth, and Chaplain Clair and Carole Anne Hochstetler. Clair has been my personal friend and mentor for the past six years; he now chairs the APPLI Board of Directors. Alice and Dan also have joined the board. Many of my former AMBS classmates are probably in this gathering tonight too numerous for me to mention by name. I acknowledge also the presence of many of my acquaintances from Goshen College, many of whom have been working with me since 2002. I thank you all for coming. I have pursued the promotion of the vision of Africa, the Future Land of Peace vigorously in the past 11 years, employing various initiatives, concepts, academia, spirituality, structured education for peace and socio-cultural adjustments programs, as well as various administrative structures. In the area of academia I used my 2004 AMBS Master Thesis/Monograph titled Equipping the New African Peacebuilders to design and develop the concepts of a proactive grassroots peacebuilding in Africa. That monograph, with its 40-course curriculum, formed the basis for our structured education for peace and socio- cultural adjustments programs for proactive grassroots peacebuilding in Africa. Currently I am working on my doctoral dissertation through the University of Phoenix Online with the title “The Need to Introduce Peacebuilding Curriculum as a Mainstream Subject in Secondary Schools” in Nigeria. I decided to engage in this research to support our 52-lesson Youth Peace and Nation Building Curriculum which we are currently negotiating with the Lagos State Government. As a precursor to the introduction of the Youth Peace and Nation Building Curriculum we have been training secondary-school teachers assigned to us from several education districts and zones across the country, using the platform of our Youth Peace Alliance Clubs at co-curricular level in the secondary schools. My personal experience, encounters, and knowledge of communal violence in Nigeria and other countries of Africa have placed me in a position to contribute to numerous peacebuilding efforts in Africa. The extensive academic work, training and research studies that I have done in the past 11 years have provided me the appropriate pedagogical tools to teach peacebuilding in Africa. My practical working experience on the ground in Nigeria has taught me which peacebuilding initiatives are effective or ineffective. With all these qualifications on my side, I have been able to conceptualize, design, develop and implement several effective peacebuilding initiatives in Nigeria. For a peacebuilding initiative to be effective in the African context it must include several attributes. Let us look at some of those attributes. 1.        Proactive versus Intervention (or Post-Conflict Peacebuilding): Intervention is like a narrow Band-Aid approach aimed at keeping conflict from festering. Unfortunately, nearly all intervention or post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives address only the symptoms and not the root causes of conflict in Africa. Proactive Peacebuilding—as conceived, designed, developed and practiced—seeks to equip and train in advance of or anticipation of conflict, violence or war occurring. In addition to being preventative, proactive peacebuilding seeks ways and means to make every stakeholder contribute something tangible to peacebuilding in their own community context. 2.        Grassroots versus Summit Peacemaking: John Paul Lederach and Scott Appleby had noted the tendencies, especially from international NGOs and donors, to ignore the contributions of the grassroots mid-level actors in peacebuilding. The grassroots deserves empowerment to resist the leaders from dragging them into conflicts that they little understand. In many parts of Africa, young people are engaged in militarism for wars older than their age. For example, the war is Sudan is more than 30 years old and some 15-year-olds are now the active combatants. Many young Africans cannot explain the reason for the war they are fighting, except that they got paid or provided with liquor and women, and just kill and harass the people. At APPLI, we are mobilizing the grassroots and mid-level actors in our endeavor to build peace in Africa. 3.        Community versus Institutional Ownership: When Christianity was introduced to Africa, only the fruit was brought by the missionaries. Because the seeds and the trees that produced the fruit were considered institutional patented and property rights, they were left behind or hidden to Africans. Africans have the fruit, but they don’t know how to plant the seeds or grow the trees. In some sense, this is the situation with many foreign or internationally based peacebuilding intervention initiatives introduced to Africa. At APPLI we’re expecting the communities to take primary ownership of our various peacebuilding initiatives, because in our opinion, violence in Africa is a community issue, not an institutional issue. 4.        Culturally Ecological versus Individualistic Behavioral Modification: The best of all peacebuilding initiatives I have studied so far are targeted at behavioral modification but, as such, are too individualistic in their approach. Violence is a community issue in Africa. For a peacebuilding initiative to be effective in the African context, it must recognize cultural issues and treat the violence as an ecological problem. Peacebuilding in Africa must go beyond behavioral modification and become character molding. In general, peacebuilding initiatives cannot be globally universal; they can only be culturally universal. 5.        Sacralization and Instrumentalization: Peacebuilding intervention initiatives are a means to an end and must be adequately rewarded for behavioral modification; proactive peacebuilding should not instrumentalize or sacralize any sector of the community. For peacebuilding to be effective in Africa, serious efforts must be made to modify, reduce or remove all known instruments of imperialism or their abuses. I recalled that in a paper which I presented at the Peace and Justice Conference at Goshen College in October 2005 I said the instruments of those imperial empires included slavery, colonization, tribalism, language dichotomy, the colonial police system, dictatorship and militarism. 6.        Peacebuilding Is the Mother of All Education: Until peacebuilding is accorded its rightful place as the mother of all education and the source of nourishment to all live endeavors, our world may not enjoy lasting peace, Africa inclusive. Scripture teaches us to seek and pursue peace, but unfortunately much of humanity pursues violence instead. These days, the advocacy should be para pacem si pacem, not para pacem si bellum. In addition to our Structured Education for Peace and Socio-Cultural Adjustment Programs, APPLI is using several channels and concepts to promote grassroots peacebuilding and ethnoreligious harmony in Nigeria. One such channel is our 20-year Long Tomorrow for Peacebuilding being pursued through our Youth Peace and Nation Building Clubs, for which we have also designed appropriate Peacebuilding curriculums, as follows: 9 years membership in the African Children of Peace Clubs (children ages 5-12 years) 6 years of membership in Youth Peace Alliance Clubs (teenagers 13-19 years) 4 years of membership in KAIROS Peace and Love Clubs (young undergraduates) 1-year membership in the New Peace Legacy Clubs (recent graduates receiving alternative service credit for Nigerian national service in similar fashion to conscientious objectors in the United States) In order to involve the larger communities in our peacebuilding programs, we have designed the following Community and Nation Building Clubs and institutional apparatuses:         The KAYERO Peace and Love Clubs, targeted at religious institutions, such as churches and mosques         The City Peace Clubs, targeted at socio-cultural communities, city and towns, state government parastatals, local government councils, and traditional councils         The Mayoral Institute of Peace for community leaders to provide peacebuilding education for community peace and nation-building programs for elected government officials and traditional rulers, such as kings and emirs         The Intercessors for Peace and events such as Peace and Ethnoreligious Harmony Day         The TimeOn KAIROS Peace Academy, which is the overall educational arm of our organization As you can see from the above presentation, APPLI is pursuing a quiet, silent, but effective revolution. We are conceptualizing, we are designing, we are developing, we are mobilizing, we are positioning and we are establishing effective peacebuilding structures. Our major challenge is how APPLI will survive the "childhood constraints" and grow toward a healthy maturity. While I was at AMBS, I called the attention of my audience one day to what I described as "Ancestral Fire," explaining that violence in Africa has its taproots in unresolved ancestral conflicts and hatred. While ancestral conflicts certainly deserve their share of the blame, I have since realized that the lack of good modern leadership is what is responsible for most of the post-independence violence in Africa. Having pity on the victims of violence in Africa is not enough (you will recall that I continually express my opposition to pity politics), but a bold step that could empower the ordinary citizen against the tendency to condone bad leadership or the aspiration to become a bad leader. The most unfortunate part of the story of violence in Africa is that many of the leaders were trained and educated overseas, they have received Western Education, they have lived in the United States of America and Europe, yet they cannot provide exemplary leadership in their countries. They just don’t care. In the sense of Maslow, many African leaders are “impersonators of humanity.” Any leader who did not care for his/her own people is the worst of all criminals. Democracy is young and strange in Africa. The leaders do not realize that democracy needs peace, love and justice for it to survive. Had they knew this, they would have cared for their own people. No African leader in the last 60 years has worried about the amount of innocent blood they have shed to get, remain, or retain power. Their hands are full of the blood of the innocent and they seem to be ignorant of that fact. Democracy is powerless in the hands of the African citizens because "neither the public service nor the public at large is specially equipped to confront statesmen (leaders) with their wrong-doing." In Africa, the vote does not count, it is the one who counts the vote that matters. APPLI is pursuing a quiet, silent but effective revolution. We are conceptualizing, we are designing, we are developing, we are mobilizing, we are positioning and we are establishing effective peacebuilding structures.  Our major challenge is how APPLI will survive the "childhood constraints." Since the beginning of this year, my wife and I have been praying and fasting at different times, praying that God will give Africa the gift of good leadership. We plan to make this prayer the theme of our 5th anniversary throughout 2008. We plan to carry the banner of this prayer everywhere we can. You have helped us start this tonight, and the flag will begin to fly other places as well in both the U.S. and Nigeria. We are a real people. You have met us, you have known us. Our children have gone to college in your community. We want to count on you to give us assistance in whatever ways you can. We need prayer support, we need learning and teaching resources, we need mobility, we need a campus for our peace academy. We are asking a real people to come to our aid. Together we can make Africa peaceful. May God bless you as you prayerfully consider assisting us in this work! MAY THE LEGACY OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE DISAPPEAR ON EARTH! MAY THE LEGACY OF PEACE AND LOVE COME IN ITS PLACE! THANK YOU. SHALOM. PEACE. KAYERO! Rev. Titus K. Oyeyemi and Fehintola O. Oyeyemi Goshen, Indiana (January 19, 2008).