WEEP NOT AFRICA. This is not an exoneration of Western imperialism, and neo-colonial sabotage of many African economies, which is one of the great factors that have crippled African development over the decades. But a critique of the timorous leadership that has not only allowed African to be exploited as a chessboard of global geopolitical wolves, but also collaborated in the enterprise of wrecking Africa. However, the real answers to African problems comes back, again and again, to corruption and misrule. Western officials, including the countless “missions” of IMF and World Bank to African countries, argue that Africa simply needs to behave itself better, to allow market forces to operate without interference by corrupt rulers…(But) Western governments enforced draconian budget policies on Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. The IMF and World Bank virtually ran the economic policies of the debt-ridden continent, recommending regimens of budgetary belt tightening known technically as structural adjustment programs. These programs had little scientific merit and produced even fewer results. By the start of the twenty-first century, Africa was poorer than during the 1960s, when the IMF and World Bank arrived on the African scene, with disease, population growth and environmental degradation spiralling out of control. When it comes to charges of bad governance, the West should be a bit more circumspect. Little surpasses the Western world in the cruelty and depredations that it has long imposed on Africa. Three centuries of slave trade, from around 1500 to early 1800s, were followed by a century of brutal colonial rule. Far from lifting Africa economically, the colonial era left Africa bereft of educated citizens and leaders, basic infrastructure, and public health facilities. The borders of the newly independent states followed the arbitrary lines of the former empires, dividing ethnic groups, ecosystems, watersheds, and resource deposits in arbitrary ways. As soon as the colonial period ended, Africa became a pawn in the cold war. Western cold warriors, and operatives in the CIA and counterpart agencies in Europe opposed African leaders who preached nationalism, sought aid from the Western union, or demanded better terms on Western investments in African minerals and energy deposits.. and so on. Why does Africa recycle underdevelopment and Africanize global poverty? The 2005 World Development Indicators indicate that global poverty is being Africanized. That is to say, world poverty is moving southwards, and is being consolidated in Africa south of the Saharan. While other regions are experiencing growth in their GDPs, and other development indicators, Africa seems to be plunging into the nether-region of underdevelopment and despair. Why has Africa consistently failed to engineer an escape from poverty? Why is Africa a cauldron of conflict, wars and death? Why is Africa entertaining a forlorn, dysfunctional, and conflict-ridden conglomeration of failed states in her geopolity? Why does Africa sustain the last frontiers of hunger, ignorance and disease? And why has she failed woefully to contrive a roadmap to a more prosperous existence for her teeming population? These questions have been ancient, and yet so new. Although the echoes and attempted responses to these questions have spanned both modern sociological history, and contemporary economic theory, it clamours with persistence and urgency in our time. Even though the African predicament has attended so many ideological debates of economic, socio-political, philosophical, and sociological nature, the situation is still deplorable without an end in sight. Although many of the attempts and blueprints fashioned for its resolution have been interdisciplinary endeavours, the African predicament seems to have defied solution. The reaction to the “poverty question” in Africa has been diverse, various and varied. Some of the analysis, and postulations have been insightfully erudite; some others eccentrically theoretic; and some others stinking with prefabricated prejudices of racist and pseudo-scientific hue. From the arrant and dialectical racism of Hegelian Afro-phobic anthropology through to historical disquisition of the imperialistic and neo-colonial power subterfuge. Africa has always been on the surgical table of disquisition. Although, there exists no credible mono-factoral explanation to the African predicament, the calculus of Africa’s pain may not be solely due to the tectonic formation, or geographic accidents, which constructed the map of Africa in the shape of a huge, geographic question mark. Her persistent state of dysfunction may be a hangover of its colonial history, but bad leadership essays daily to make colonialism a lame excuse and a wooden apology for the grotesque incompetence of visionless leadership. But wait a second: Could Africans be really justified today, in accusing colonialism for their state of underdevelopment, after about over four decades of independence? Granted that colonial exploitation made many African nations a conglomeration of federated grievances; and that neo-colonial exploitative power-play propped up Kleptocratic dictators and underwrote their oppressive indiscretions against their own peoples; how could a country like Nigeria, that has earned over $400 billion from her oil resources since its discovery in 1956, fritter this wealth in conspicuous thievery, squander mania, etc., justifiably turn around to accuse colonialism for her poverty? How could Mugabe’s Zimbabwe validly accuse colonialism for the self-inflicted ruin he has brought to Zimbabwe due to his sit-tight leadership? Could Mr. Mobutu Sesse Seko accuse colonialism for his thievery, or could Idi Amin accuse colonialism for his vampiric butchery of his own people? South Sudan and Chad are in shame in the shame of war. Mali is a disgrace to unholy act of terrorism. Somalia and Northern Nigeria have become terrorist havens. South Africa is fast disintegrating yet we blame colonialism for our failures and woes. But one of the greatest plagues that have sabotaged Africa’s hopes and rendered her future a fractured fairy dream, is the blight of Kleptocratic and incompetent leadership. Development will not just happen if we get the politics right, but it is an important factor, since it functions as the co-ordinator of all other variables. Credible governance structures will be prudent in managing the other variables towards development. It is only credible governance that would commence rewriting African experience, bearing the past in mind, with the aim of making the future better for Africans and black people everywhere. We are of the belief that if the structures of governance are not fixed, irresponsible governance will continue to scuttle Africa’s dreams and prospects. Somalia has finally imploded as a failed State. The scars of leadership orchestrated devastation still litter Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Northern Uganda and other African forgotten frontiers of conflict. Our stand here is that Africa must get her leadership right, if development is to berth on her shores. Africa is a continent caught in contradictions. This continent that evokes Eden in its pristine simplicity as is evident in her flora and fauna; at the same time echoes the out backs of hell in the senseless poverty, hopeless ignorance and annoying disease that constitute the furniture of daily existence there. Capturing Africa’s magnetic ability to attract perilous opposites, Africa has a genius for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable.9 “Africa-Sub-Saharan Africa at least—has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory”. This was because much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities, drought, war, and the homelessness of war’s refugees. Africa has become the basket case of the planet. But even today, at the very sunrise of 2014, the situation has assumed a hopeless dimension, and has continued to worsen and defy reason. Africans are getting poorer. Over 300 million people live on less than US$1 dollar per day. Life expectancy is 48 years and falling. Twenty-eight million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 40 per cent of children are out of school. In terms of resources and endowments, Africa is blessed with all the resources that make for greatness; human, material and ecological. This continent harbours over 40 per cent of the world’s potential hydro-electric power supply; the bulk of the world’s diamond and chromium; 30 per cent of the Uranium ; 50 per cent of the world’s gold; 90 per cent of its cobalt; 50 per cent of its phosphates; 40 per cent of its Platinum; 7.5 per cent of its coal; 8 per cent of its known petroleum reserves; 12 per cent of its natural gas; 3 per cent of its iron ore; 64 per cent of the world’s Manganese, 13 percent of its copper, vast Bauxite, nickel and lead resources18 and millions upon millions of untilled farmlands. A continent so well endowed has actually no business with poverty. But the ideal is millions of light years shy of the reality. African history has been one sad story ever since. This continent has won most of the negative superlatives available on the human developmental index. She maintains the unenviable position as the least developed section of the globe. Over 98% of her countries bear the inglorious classification of the world known as “Third” She maintains an eminent presence in the courts of Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). In fact, over and above the prejudiced and fabricated hyperboles of Western media, Africa remains a metaphor for poverty and underdevelopment. Today the continent hosts poverty, and is littered with failed states19. Many of these States are in various stages of decay and certain implosion. Security forecast warned that Nigeria is in danger of collapsing within 15 years. Today, we have various terrorist groups, kidnappers, assasins, extorshionists, and armed robbers everywhere in Nigeria. Juxtapose this picture with that of Somalia; a country at the horn of Africa, which is now a certified failed State that has turned into a breeding ground for terrorists and pirates, one then sees a thumbnail portrait of the situation in most of Africa. Zimbabwe is still in the clutch of a self-digesting government that has lost all reasons to be in power. Conflict still engulfs the ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo. Thousands are still massacred daily in Sudan, while Darfur has become a synonym for government sponsored massacre of its own people. Niger Republic still loses thousands of her children and women to death, consequent on the drought that is still ravaging the land. Conducting a universally acceptable election is still a mission impossible for many African nations, as Liberia has most recently evidenced a better electoral practice. Sit-tight leadership and the scheming thereto, is still abundant, in Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, as the Eyadema dynasty is still well emplaced in the politics of Togo, while opponents of Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria is scheming a political coup to accommodate a rogue third term for themselves and their cronies. Socio-economic instability, conflict, HIV/AIDs, despotic democratic caricatures, all join the brew to make Africa a cocktail of poverty and underdevelopment. With all these loads burdening her, Africa cannot but suffer an Instability Syndrome that is immune to every attempt at solution. Poverty is being consolidated at all levels. The hangovers of historical tragedies join modern buccaneering leadership to consolidate the predicament today. And to this end, Africa hosts and continues to churn out the largest number of conflict and disaster induced refugees, and immigrants seeking to emigrate out of the continent due to socio-economic distress, political dislocation and conflict. Africa development must be led and directed by a credible leadership. This is why the leadership and governance structures in Africa needs to be reformed and remodelled, not only to suit the African situation, but also to be a self-regulating mechanism that would stifle the emergence of despotic or Kleptocratic leadership that has till today remained the albatross of Africa’s development. Education of the citizenry across the continent is a condition sine qua non for the rise, sustenance and nourishment of good and responsible governance in Africa. Even so, the more educated our people becomes, the more sophiscated they are in their corruption and greed. At times we wonder, being black is a black heart and mind, a very black soul determined to bring Africans sorrow, tears and blood. This issues from the fact, as I have argued with some of our people in Esan political forums “There can be no responsible governance in Africa, save for among other things, the checks and balances of an enlightened society, which only obtains in an educated modern political set up. This enlightenment is a buffer, which enables the society to engulf and jettison any scheme whether conceptual or actual, which threatens its collective existence or welfare”. To this end, a massive, and functional civic education of the masses of Africa will in the long-term, essay to raise the enlightened environment that will be the waterloo of irresponsible governance. This cannot be done in hunger and starvation, hence agricultural growth and development is the key to proper education because people cannot eat english grammer, philosophies and theories, or drink books and pencils when they are hungry and thirsty. A hungry society is a corrupt society.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 22:01:33 +0000
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