ADOLF Hitler, an extremely courageous soldier who won all the medals available to men on the German army in the Second World War (WWI), lamented in one of his numerous biographies that Germany lost the war not to superior arms but to superior British Propaganda. In an account entitled "Vienna and the Young Hitler" by Williams A. Jenks, Hitler, later German Fuehrer, 25 years old at the outbreak of WWI in 1914, observed that the Propaganda leaflets dropped on the battlefield by the British air force questioning the wisdom of the war killed the morale of the German army and destroyed its will to fight.

Such is the potency of propaganda. One of the consequences of Germany's defeat owing to the neglect of counter-propaganda in WWI was the loss of its colonial territory in the form of Nigeria's belligerent neighbour, Cameroon, to France and Britain. Similarly, since the unjust October 10, 2002, ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Cameroon is the rightful owner of the Bakassi Peninsula, Nigeria's responses have been such that she might suffer further setbacks in the matter and lose Bakassi completely to Cameroon due to lack of a good counter-propaganda offensive.

The immediate result of the ICJ's ruling was the portrayal of Nigeria as an illegal occupant of Bakassi. In the event of war, therefore, she stands the risk of being condemned by the international community as the aggressor. In other words, Cameroon's Propaganda arsenal was fortified by the ICJ ruling. This fact seems not to have been appreciated by Nigerians officials and publicists who keep harping on the point that Nigeria had a superior legal claim over Bakassi, accusing the ICJ of foul play. They need to be told the international community cannot be moved to sympathy talk less of support by that line of argument. Their expectation is that Nigeria should respect the ICJ's verdict. Consequently, we need to move fast to defeat Cameroon's Propaganda gain through means other than legal disputation. And the most feasible way of achieving this appears to be the politicisation of the matter. This is possible because the aboriginal occupants of Bakassi owe allegiance to Nigeria. As a first step, President Olusegun Obasanjo should order government officials to stop making emotion - laden, discordant, unhelpful statements on Bakassi. Then the traditional chiefs and articulate men and women of the Peninsula should be mobilised to embark on a diplomatic shuttle around the globe.

Their brief shall be to tell the world that Bakassi is not a virgin land but the age-long ancestral territory and habitation of a people owing allegiance to Nigeria. And that while they respect the ICJ's ruling in principle, it will be in line with the spirit and letter of the Universal Declaration of Human and Peoples Rights that the inhabitants of Bakassi be given a say in this matter. The conduct of referendum is a way of doing this so that the affected people can decide where they, and ipso facto, Bakassi lands and territorial waters and resources therein, should belong in terms of sovereignty. In this connection, a strong precedent exists. At the dawn of Nigeria's independence the people of Southern Cameroon were accorded the right to decide via a referendum whether to reunite with Northern Cameroon or become part of Nigeria fully. They opted for a reunion. The point then is this: If Southern Cameroon, which was only a trust territory of Nigeria and not part of its original territory, could be subjected to a referendum on the issue of returning or not to the status quo ante, why should the same treatment not apply to Bakassi which every empirical fact clearly shows belongs to Nigeria.

Furthermore, our Bakassi ambassadors should make it clear that they would, at worst, become a trust territory of the United Nations than be forcefully merged with Cameroon simply because they share nothing in common with that country in terms of lingua franca, school system, culture etc. moreso, their merger with Cameroon harbours genocidal implications for them as that country's leadership, who love Bakassi oil more than Bakassi people, had tried on several occasions in the past to exterminate them using killers squad called the gendarmes. All the foregoing points and other useful ones should be well-articulated in print and audio-visual forms as propaganda tools of the Bakassi ambassadors. And their diplomatic shuttle or petitions should cover the followings: the United Nations, EEC, the African Union (AU), ECOWAS, the Arab League, governments of the permanent and non-permanent members of the UN Security Council, the human rights community and religious organisations in the Western world, the world press and so on.

The possibility of filing a fresh suit with the ICJ by Bakassi People should also be explored by our lawyers. If this is impossible, a well-publicised letter of protest to the ICJ should be written to let the judges therein realise the folly of their ruling and subject them to global odium and opprobrium which they so richly deserve. In addition, a website should be developed to encompass this letter and other relevant information on the Bakassi case. The website, to be done in English, French, Spanish, Arabic etc, more importantly, should contain an international public opinion section where visitors to the site could register a 'yes' or 'no' vote to the ICJ's ruling. They should also be advised to forward a letter of protest in red ink to their home governments or office of the United Nations Secretary General or editors of international newspapers and magazines.

All this is necessary because to quote Hitler in his Mein Kampf: "The function of propaganda is to attract supporters'. Failure to quickly attract supporters and favourable international public opinion to our side in the Bakassi case holds grave consequences. And one possible consequence is the imposition of arms and economic embargoes against us in the event of war with Cameroon over Bakassi as of now when the ICJ's ruling wrongly makes the international community believe we are an illegal occupant of Bakassi and an aggressor nation. As the adage goes. 'a stitch in time saves nine'.

As I dropped my pen, hoping to conclude this piece with the above adage, something within me urged me to sound a note of warning to the Federal Government in handling this thorny Bakassi debacle. I was reminded of a common strand that ran through the concatenation of factors responsible for the fall of three famous empires that, at different times, constituted the dominant powers in the West African sub-region in pre-colonial times. The collapse of the three empires tagged 'Sudanese empires' by history scholars, namely, Ghana, Mali and Songhai, was facilitated by the independence agitations by some of their vassal states, capitalising on the advent of a protracted war between the respective empires and foreign kingdoms. Nigeria is now the dominant power in a post-colonial West Africa. Methinks in a world where strong and economically prosperous nations in the western world are merging their economies into blocs for the greater good of their Peoples, it is desirable that Nigeria should not suffer balkanisation, all things being equal. President Obasanjo shall do well, therefore, to raise the tempo of intelligence activities on centrifugal forces in our country, as we package our propaganda and quietly mobilise for a seemingly inevitable war with Cameroon over Bakassi, lest Nigeria goes the way of the Sudanese empires.

May 2003