Reading Nigerian newspapers online often requires a huge dose of patience lest you do severe damage to the computer staring you in the face. Doing this alongside an unrelenting assault by those I call Reaganistas in the US requires a greater dose of restraint to avoid jail on grounds of committing grievous bodily harm. While not unmindful of what they say about speaking ill of the dead, I believe we do need a balanced perspective in these times of effusive praise and fawning adulation for Reagan.

I have been confounded by the unbalanced, uncritical and shallow tone of many articles on Reagan in the Nigerian newspapers and frankly stunned by at least two editorials in our more enlightened newspapers. Unlike op-ed articles, newspaper editorials ought to be more reflective, balanced and restrained in their judgment. Not so for the ones I have read.

Reagan has been credited with ending the Cold War; others have attributed as his greatest attributes the fact that he paid little attention to detail, got to work at 9 a.m., took a nap in the afternoon and retired at 5.p.m. He was not an insomniac like Nigeria's president, so the argument went.

To another set, it was the vision thing - a man of few beliefs - low taxes, less government, strong nation, who focused on them all like a beam and regained greatness for his country. And not to be accused of lop-sidedness, some feebly acknowledged that he may have plunged his country to its greatest economic recession in a period of unrivalled expansion and did not care much for African-Americans. Perhaps some of this is true, they may even all contain aspects of truth, but they are not the whole truth about Ronald Reagan's presidency. We may never agree on what the whole truth is, but we should also not let Reaganistas intimidate us into silence. Now, what, in my view, is Mr Reagan's record?

On the Cold War, I am not aware of any definitive documentary evidence that apportioned sole responsibility to Mr Reagan for ending the Cold War. Sure, if symbolism were the sole basis of the collapse of the Soviet Union, soundbite platitudes like Soviet Union is the “evil empire” or “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, might have sufficed, but discerning observers certainly knew that the Soviet Union of the 1980s was a deflated and declining power primarily on account of bad governance.

The fact is that most of what Mr Reagan did, such as the INF Treaty, was more a continuation of Mr Carter's policy rather than a rejection. However, some in the Reagan administration as well as right wing academics deliberately exaggerated the Soviet Union's power in order to get their “Star Wars” and padded contracts for America's military industrial complex. As James Schlesinger, jnr, America's erstwhile Defence Secretary said of Star Wars, “it was nothing but a collection of technical experiments and distant hopes” which Mr Reagan treated “as if it were already a reality.”

Even with this, partisan observers can only argue that Mr Reagan merely accelerated what was, at best, inevitability. As we grapple with the return of the Cold War under someone who thinks of himself as a clone of Mr Reagan, we should ask ourselves if the so called war on terror is not another agenda foisted on the country and the world by actors driven by dogma rather than common sense.

On his “voodoo” economics of low taxes, small government and strong nation, ask David Stockman, who was his Budget Director. In his book, The Triumph of Politics, Stockman had this interesting sentence about Reagan's supply side economics, “If the Securities and Exchange Commission had jurisdiction over the White House, we might all have had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood penitentiary.”

The deficit ballooned from $79 billion to $179 billion in his first year in office alone. He talked often about tax cuts, but eventually raised taxes through excise duties, but no, these were not taxes, they were merely “revenue enhancers”. By the time he left government in 1988, few would agree that American government was smaller than it was when he assumed office in 1980.

But for me as an African, my biggest yardstick for judging Mr Reagan's place in history was his foreign policy. A man not given to moral leadership, strategic thinking or deep introspection, he quickly embraced the false distinction drawn by his UN Ambassador, Jean Kirkpatrick, between “totalitarian” (left wing) and “authoritarian” (right wing) dictatorship, a thesis which soon provided the basis for crushing left wing despots whilst embracing right wing dictators and “constructively” engaging the apartheid government in South Africa became the first test of this thesis.

Soon, Reagan's CIA Director, William J. Casey began his assault on nationalist movements deemed to be close to the Soviet Union by providing financial and military support to their opponents. From Renamo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from the Contras in Nicaragua, who Mr Reagan described as the 'moral equivalents of the American founding fathers', to the Mujaheedin in Afghanistan, Mr Reagan utilized proxy wars to sow the seeds of today's terror around the world in the name of fighting communism.

Even the New York Times mildly opined in its obituary, “The Reagan Doctrine…was to have lasting repercussions in the fight against terrorism”. And, those who want to know about the right wing dictators, who benefited most from Reagan in Africa should ask Liberians about Samuel Doe, the Congolese about Mobutu Sese Seko, the Sudanese about Nimeiry and the Somalians about Siad Barre - four countries which received 80 per cent of US aid to sub-saharan Africa under Reagan.

It is hardly a coincidence that Africa's most virulent and unrelenting post Cold War conflicts have occurred in these four countries. In my view therefore, Reagan failed the test of greatness as far as foreign policy was concerned and he was largely absent without leave in his domestic policies.

I don't begrudge Reaganistas for their efforts at pushing Reagan as a saint, and I have taken the daily assaults on American television with extra-ordinary equanimity - afterall, I am a stranger in this land - but I resent half baked analyses by my own compatriots that fail to advance our knowledge in any way.

Of all the obituaries I have read here on Reagan, allow me to quote at length Professor Thomas Cronin, McHugh Professor of American Institutions. According to him, “Americans evaluate the greatness of a President on criteria that are over and above popularity and re-election. Did Reagan expand opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, gender or income bracket? It is my view that Reagan has not enlarged the equity factor nor the educational opportunities for most Americans”.

On the global scale, he continued, “President Reagan was lacking in moral leadership, an essential quality for greatness. He was too late, too little, and too lame when it came to human rights at home and abroad.”

There is no doubt that Reagan admirers can quote others who hold contrary views and they reserve the right to do that. I might even agree with them that he projected and injected boundless optimism of America's greatness, which affected and infected his people during his time in office, but when it came down to it, Reaganomics left Americans with a deficit that succeeding generations will continue to pay, sowed the seeds of terror through his Reagan Doctrine, promoted irresponsibility and incompetence in government and showed a clear hostility to equality among the races. Now, this may be a harsh judgment but I hope it allows Reaganistas to at least acknowledge that the jury is still out on Reagan's greatness, and we should all await history's judgment on him.

* Dr Fayemi is Senior Visiting Scholar in African Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA.

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