The leader of what is officially known as the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is changing tact after decades of a terror campaign against the West, which now accepts him as he pursues his United States of Africa dream. igerian-based commentator, Okello Oculi traces the political evolution of Muammar Gaddafi

A young man wearing the military shirt of a Colonel in the Libyan army overthrew King Idris’s corrupt and hedonistic monarchy in 1969 that was controlled by the British and declared Libya an Arab republic.

Muammar Gaddafi’s nationalism had been fired by the exploits and bravado of another “Colonel” next door in Egypt. That was Gamal Abdel Nasser the founding father of modern Egypt.

Nasser was against European control of Africa, the Arab patch of Western Asia, including Persia (now Iran) and Indonesia. In Gaddafi’s war, Libyan agents would plant bombs inside nightclubs frequented by American soldiers in Germany.

His operatives would steal tapes in which a famous journalist Oranta Fallaci had recorded her long interviews with Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir.

The tapes vanished a few minutes after Fallaci had stepped out of her Paris hotel room to buy a snack across the street. In those days, Libyan security agents would track down and assassinate Libyans living in Europe who were working against Gaddafi’s “Green Revolution”.

In 1988, the agents planted a bomb in a Pan-Am Boeing 747 carrying Americans as it roared over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members.

Gaddafi had announced the arrival of a “Little Country Power” that was determined to show the fangs of a “Big Mind Power.” (Now things have changed. Wikipedia reports that in an interview shown in BBC2 titled The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie on August 31, 2008, Saif al-Gaddafi said that Libya had admitted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing simply to get trade sanctions removed.

He went on to describe the families of the Lockerbie victims as very greedy: “They were asking for more money and more money and more money”).

Back to history, Gaddafi would have the Americans screaming with rage that he was arming insurgents in the swamps and jungles of the Philippines and Indonesia, and poverty-infested Palestinian refugee camps around Israel’s borders.

In West Africa, he would have President Shehu Shagari beating angry drums of rage and panic against Libya’s diplomats who were inciting Muslim youths across the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) countries and the sahelian states.

Gaddafi, like his mentor Gamal Nasser, knew of the angered pride in millions of men and women to whom recent “World History” was murder, rape, humiliation, plunder and ruthless application of the power of science by Europe and America who were crouched, waiting to strike back if only they would have brave leaders. Gaddafi was their kind of leader.

The power of that pool of injured pride was enormous but lay wasted, fermenting yet not rocking the direction of history in the service of justice and human dignity for them.

While Uganda’s Idi Amin expressed the injured pride verbally, Gaddafi combined rhetoric and bombs. Where Idi Amin would broadcast around the world photographs of the British Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, kneeling before him and frightened white businessmen carrying him seated above their heads, in 1986, Libya had a bomb planted in Berlin’s La Belle discotheque. Two people died and more than 40 were injured, most of them Americans.

Where Idi Amin offered the British Queen surplus bile-coated potatoes grown by Uganda’s farmers for famine relief in Britain, Gaddafi exported weapons to the Moro Liberation Movement militants in the Philippines.

Where Nasser’s army attacked Israel, Gaddafi went for the soft vulnerability of the citizens of Israel’s Big Brother, America, in the Lockerbie affair and the French when, in 1989, a Paris-bound UTA flight exploded as it over flew Niger killing 170 people. Gadafi’s rough edges have won him a legion of admirers.

I remember a young American diplomat of Berber origin asserting his African nationalism to me as we sat in Abuja by associating it with Gaddafi’s show of international “rudeness”
Rastafarians in Jamaica call themselves “Rude Boys” to show their rejection of what they see as slavish adoption of Euro-American codes of “civilised behaviour” by their leaders and elites. Gaddafi, my Berber-American friend insisted, was a Berber-Tuareg and therefore a native of Africa.

Second Liberation of Africa

That explained his distancing himself from the fight against Israel. Gaddafi, he intoned, sees his historic mission in leading the “Second Liberation” of Africa by tearing down the myth that only Americans, Europeans and Russians must flex their brutal military, and economic and cultural power this side of heaven.

It was a decidedly romantic portrait of Gaddafi. And yet there are useful hints in this perspective. Gaddafi has since 1986 sought to hang onto his person the symbolism of the big African chief.

He walks into meetings of African leaders with the acted swagger of an Ashanti Chief - the Asantehene. During sessions of summits of the African Union, he wears a studied regal contempt on his face. He seems to have borrowed from the Ganda monarchy the title of “Sabasajja” by paying for wives of African leaders to fly to various meetings in Tripoli.

Recently, he held court with 200 “traditional rulers” drawn from all over Africa, to chart with them the shortest path to his dream of a United States of Africa.

It would appear, in his estimation, Africa’s elected national leaders are too timid and slow to catch up with vast states like Russia, China, the United States and the galloping United States of Europe. Here are echoes of Gaddafi adopting the Euro-American weapon of exploiting anthropological data about Africans to promote foreign policy goals.

It is this power of popular thought, which anthropology has charted for Euro-American adventurers in Africa, which Gaddafi has fought to exploit. Writing on September 2, 2025), a BBC journalist noted his use of women as bodyguards, asserting the role of the Tuareg woman in desert culture.

In recent trips to Paris and Brussels, Gaddafi slept inside a Bedouin tent: pitching it in government owned gardens. It is a gimmick that fires pride in the imagination of youths even in the face of overwhelming power of Euro-America’s urban culture fuelled by science and technology.

The import is that the space for the independent action, uniqueness, ancient pride and wit of the Bedouin must be protected and asserted. Well, it doesn’t go down well with everybody.

President Ronald Reagan could not stomach this Bedouin arrogance. In April 1986 he dropped a bomb near Gaddafi’s tent in a Libyan desert. His 15-month-old adopted daughter Hanna was killed, and two of his sons were injured.

The less visible side of the deal

Some would say that was a turning point for Gaddafl. His adventurism in the international arena had rudely ended under the growl of a cowboy from California. It was probably a rash conclusion. Now European technology drains oil and gas from under Libya’s soil for Europe’s growth.

As a last gesture of power from being the looted country to one that gets what it wants, to mark the 39th year of his rule, Gaddafi signed a deal with Italy in the name of “reparations” for Italian 30 years of crimes as a colonial,, genocidal dictatorship in Libya. Italy will write him a $5bn cheque.

The less visible side of the deal is that Italian firms will benefit enormously from exporting machinery for building infrastructure- including a road that runs along the Mediterranean coast from Egypt to Tunisia.

Gaddafi’s son, Sayf al-Islam, has announced himself as the apostle of new capitalism or “privatisation” in Libya. He apparently sees himself as borrowing from the Chinese the science of swallowing the hook of capitalism hidden inside a whale. Pain comes later after the meat; fat and glitter of “new hotels, office blocks and luxurious shopping malls” have served as cushions to rising inequality. Unlike China, Gaddafi lacked the population and ideological memory to drive an industrial take-off.

Unlike Israel, he lacked the highly educated science-based manpower that Israel’s secret services continued to steal and smuggle across Austria from the former Soviet Union states; from Western Europe and the United States of America.

Like the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, and United Arab Emirates, he has failed to see Africa beyond a commercial frontier into which to throw sacks of petrol-dollars and buy luxury hotels, insurance firms, shares in telecommunications companies and real estate.

A former economic advisor to President Gamal Nasser once told us in an interview in Cairo that Israel’s intelligence operatives discovered that Nasser never intended to invade Israel.

He was bluffing to earn huge oil funds from Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil states and using the money to achieve an industrial take-off for his oil-less country.

Since an industrialised Egypt would be a greater long-term security threat, Israel’s leaders decided to force a war on him. The Six Day War of 1967 was, therefore, Israel’s economic war against Nasser. Its surprise and total success forced a fatal heart attack on Nasser.

Is Gaddafi seeking to avoid the fate of his hero by swallowing the “privatisation” command attack by Tony Blair, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Condoleezza Rice as prophets of post-Cold War capitalism?

Would it, in the name of the Lockerbie and other affairs, stop them from turning around to tie a rope around his neck as they did to Saddam Hussein? Or, is Gaddafi hoping to pull out fangs from Nato’s jaws if bared against his imperial dream as ruler of The United States of Africa? Gaddafi needs a grand narrator to tell his story.

Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Network Project.