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Crushed!: Navigating Africa’S Tortuous Quest for Development – Myths and Realities
Crushed!: Navigating Africa’S Tortuous Quest for Development – Myths and Realities
Crushed!: Navigating Africa’S Tortuous Quest for Development – Myths and Realities
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Crushed!: Navigating Africa’S Tortuous Quest for Development – Myths and Realities

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CRUSH-ED is not another whining story about the African experience, even though the title may lead in that direction. The title is really an acronym for the strategies that Africa (the sub-Saharan region in particular), must adopt if it is not to face extinction in the medium to long term. The book presents pungent, and urgent, analysis of the precarious situation that that region of Africa has found itself; a situation foisted not only by the historical facts of slave trade and colonialism (as most texts on the subject are wont to aver), but most importantly the failure of the African states themselves to properly interpret their cultures and how those clash with the ones they are trying to adopt and adapt to.
CRUSH-ED navigates the tortuous terrain, delivering enough kicks in the belly to all stakeholders; chiefly the Africans themselves, the colonisers, the dominant cultures, the superpowers, the politicians, and not least, the author himself! This book should refresh every reader, especially those who are ready to be objective and face some inconvenient truths, about the world... about themselves.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 1, 2011
ISBN9781467891233
Crushed!: Navigating Africa’S Tortuous Quest for Development – Myths and Realities
Author

Tope Fasua

Tope Fasua is an economist, ex-Banker, and finance expert. He is also an entrepreneur and presently pilots a number of initiatives in the SME world. The Race for Capital is his third book. He loves to think and write about contemporary economic and social issues and has carved a niche for himself as one of Africa’s ardent social commentators and bloggers. He currently lives in Abuja, Nigeria

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    Crushed! - Tope Fasua

    © 2013 Tope Fasua. All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

    Published by AuthorHouse 1/28/2013

    ISBN: 978-1-4567-7021-1 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4678-9123-3 (e)

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

    and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

    The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    CONTENTS

    Preface

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: The Victor’s Prerogative

    •   Lack Of Development

    •   Corruption

    •   Coded Accounts

    •   The Adventures Of Fat Mike

    •   419 Nation?

    •   Economic Development – World’s Deadliest Contact Sport

    Chapter 2: Historical Sojourns

    •   In The Beginning Of It All

    •   The Great Leap Forward

    •   Yankee Incursion

    •   Look Who’s Talking

    •   Nigeria Started As A Business

    •   The Brits Stir The Hornet’s Nest

    Chapter 3: Localising The Issues

    •   Race Issues

    •   Abiku Syndrome

    •   African Americans

    •   Classroom Performances

    Chapter 4: Knee-Jerk Reactions

    •   Breaking Up Nigeria

    •   Stooping To Conquer

    •   Changing The Culture

    •   Leadership Vs Followership

    •   Degeneration Of Society

    Chapter 5: Guaranteed… You’ll Never Know The Truth

    •   Despatches From China

    •   The Next Great Scramble

    •   Slave And Neo-Slavery (The Colonial Account Vs The Realities On Ground)

    •   Local Slavery

    •   The Role Of Religion In Nigeria’s Problems

    Chapter 6: Playing The Ostrich

    •   The Great Sardauna

    •   The Great Awo

    •   The Great Zik

    •   Heaping It All On The Ancestors

    •   Nigeria’s Demographic Update – What We’ve Done To Ourselves

    •   South-South Nigeria And Other Minorities– Hope After Neglect

    •   South West Nigeria – Intellectualism On The Chopping Board?

    •   South East Nigeria – A Truly Enigmatic People

    •   Northern Nigeria – History On Their Side?

    •   Demographic Roundup

    Chapter 7: The Crush-Ed Strategy

    •   C IS FOR COURAGE

    •   The Corruption Conundrum

    •   Corruption Re–Examined

    •   Realism, Responsibility And Reasonability

    •   Unity

    •   Strategy

    •   Humility

    •   The Value Of History

    •   Education

    •   Democracy

    Chapter 8: Myth Busters!!!

    •   Sorry, We Don’t Need Your Money – (Finance Examined)

    •   Keep It To Yourself – (Tourism And Culture Examined)

    •   Why Not Queue For The Dole? - Taxation Examined

    •   The Lies Are Coming Off - Riots In London

    •   Gambler’s Paradise – Lottery System Examined

    •   Footballing Nation – Why The Excitement?

    Chapter 9: East/West Pendulum, And Africa

    •   The Return Of The Dragon

    •   Europe In Stew

    •   Usa – Love In A Time Of Cholera

    •   Africa – Bride Or Whore?

    Chapter 10: Between Aids And Aid, Any Difference?

    Chapter 11: Nigeria On Ice – Ehms Work On The Motherland

    •   It Had Been Written

    •   Unlucky Number 13

    •   The Reforms – Breaking The Camel’s Back

    •   Ripened For The Kill

    •   Chavez Reborn?

    •   Subterfuge As A Factor Of Production

    •   Listen To Yourselves

    •   I Think We’ve Met Before

    •   It’s All About The Benjamins, Baby

    •   Crying More Than The Bereaved

    •   Youngblood!

    •   Implications Of The Yar’adua Saga

    •   The Fear Of Fear Itself

    •   Wikileaks On Nigeria

    Chapter 12: How Nigerian Intellectuals Underdeveloped Nigeria

    Chapter 13: Body Of Lies, And Other Booby Traps

    •   September 11 – And They Spoilt My Birthday

    •   The 9/11 Saga In Perspective

    •   Wargames And Blamegames

    •   You Must Read Between The Lines

    Chapter 14: The Art Of War

    Chapter 15: Back To My Roots –A Suggested Development Model For Black Africa

    •   Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You…

    •   Africa Is Still The Last Bastion Of Investment

    •   A Home Grown Development Model

    Chapter 16: Conclusions

    •   As The Black Race Faces Extinction

    Bibliography

    Documentaries And Movies

    About The Author

    DEDICATION

    This book is dedicated to the most important people in my life.

    My wife Dorothy; My children Shania, Joshua and Isabella. You guys mean the world to me. But remember, exceptional love is that which you express to people you don’t know, people you’ll never meet. Exceptional love is what you express to someone or something that could never reciprocate. It’s the type of love you express when you take a huge risk… to make the world a better place.

    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    Many thanks to the Creator of the Universe, or whoever is in charge of this whole confusion known as life, for giving us the opportunity to try and solve a seemingly unsolvable jigsaw puzzle while also allowing us to somehow enjoy ourselves in going through it. Many thanks to Him (someone will ask why I think it’s a man), for giving me the unique opportunity to be able to apply my faculties in trying to make a difference.

    As for His earthly representatives who have made my life most enjoyable, and have contributed immensely to bringing my efforts on this book to fruition, I say thank you.

    I thank my darling wife, Dorothy Fasua, for her understanding in the period I was putting this together. I’ve grown over the years to become an almost ‘friendless’ man, often retreating into my own little world, even in the periods spent with my nuclear family. I thank you guys for understanding.

    I forgot to put the name of the author – me – on the front page, even when I had almost completed the work until my then 9 year old daughter, Shania, saw a rough, printed draft and asked if this was my book. When I affirmed to her it was mine, she went ahead, picked up a pen and wrote my name on the front page, just beneath the title. BY TOPE FASUA, she wrote. I was amazed at my absent-mindedness, and the smartness of today’s children. But I’ve also warned my children that though they may seem smarter than some of us were at their age with all the exposure they have to TV and so on these days, they must develop the culture of reading books, and also become good writers. For there will come a day in the near future, when reading and writing will become rare skills, and the world will reward those who have stuck to the straight and narrow.

    I therefore thank my children once again, for keeping quiet while I typed away, in my sitting room and bedroom, and for helping me carry either some of the research material, or some of the pages as they came out hot from the HP printer.

    Many thanks go to my colleagues who got involved somehow or the other in putting aspects of this book together. Bayo Adeyemi typed the bibliography, assisted by Ijeoma Marchie. The guys at the office – A.D. Bello (now with the oil industry), Gbenga Kuewumi, Yomi Shanu, Chukwuma Agashi, and others who regularly serve as sounding board for my ideas before they go to paper. I just enjoy discussing with ‘my guys’ because they are never cowed into submission and so one comes off those discussions with a sharper mind. Many thanks also to our resident guru, Olumide Bewaji, who has so much upstairs he’d have given Albert Einstein a run for his money, had they lived in the same age. I tap a lot from Olu.

    On the London axis, my former lecturer and now colleague Duncan Hughes (though he may not know this), has shaped my mind over the years since we’ve known. I’ve gained a lot from his sharp wit (a trademark of many great English minds), and I was put on a quest to explore the power of books by him. Some of the books that formed the critical base of this one (e.g. East-West Pendulum), were given to me by Duncan. Many thanks, D.

    And to Bayo Osobe in London, a brother and a friend who encouraged me in those early days when I was just starting my business; I say many thanks, dude. To Syed Ahmed, a loyal and trustworthy friend and colleague if ever there was one, a can-do guy who never sees danger in any situation! Syed is the ‘why not?’ guy who never sees impossibilities. My life has been easier since knowing him and his competence freed up some space for me to put this together. Theresa Ajayi at the London office too. Thanks Theresa; just that I get scared sometimes because I’ve never seen you get angry, or confused or anything but cool, calm and collected. You are a true gem.

    Special thanks to my friend and brother, Moorad Choudhry, a great inspiration, who somehow managed to write over 35 books in almost as many years on earth! Ok Moorad, I know you a bit older than 35 but the feat is still amazing given you are listed as one of the financial gurus in the City of London. Thanks Prof, for the affective humility you exude. And for choosing me as one of your mates…

    I thank anyone who put their money on this too. And especially those who will read the book, believe in the ideas contained therein, refine them, write their own, and most importantly, proceed to BE THE CHANGE THEY WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

    PREFACE

    I once read somewhere that all of us have at least one book in our heads. Most of us die without getting to write that book. And those books that never get written are fantastic books, even though no one will ever read them. They are most often the books about our lives – the pains and confusion of childhood; the peculiarities of our upbringing; the effects of those we grew up with on us, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

    Everyone can go on forever, narrating how and how life has been tough. That exactly is the essence of life, and that is what makes us who we are. Life is not meant to be a bed of roses, or a walk in the park. For those whose lives have been set up to look and feel like a walk in the park, by, say their parents, life is usually exceedingly boring and meaningless. The boredom and meaninglessness then themselves become burdens. That is where the challenges of such a life stem from. And this is often more difficult than normal, because challenges are cloaked as ‘freebies’. If a man is used to being gifted with anything he could ever want straight from childhood, he will never be able to grow and find his own soul. He may think that the availability of all the good things of life makes his life easy, but in fact, the unmerited ‘ease’ is a great challenge to him. He must figure out a way of bursting through despite so much wealth sloshing around him. Where such a person is not able to figure this out, frustration sets in, many times with disastrous consequences.

    But this book is not about my exciting life. Yet tangentially it is. For it is about the accident of my birth in Nigeria, and the fantastic opportunities it offers to make a difference. In this instance too, what masquerades as challenge becomes opportunity. Africa and Nigeria in particular, offers unique vistas for he who is willing, or brave enough, to propose solutions. Many times, what people notice is the opportunity to ‘make money’. But many have made such monies and have lost the quality of their lives in the process. The holy books ask, ‘What shall it profit a man, to gain the whole world and lose his soul?’ Most people confuse this saying with the promise of an everlasting Paradise, and the admonition that people should be religious.

    But I see the statement in terms of how people lose their ‘souls’ here on Earth. In the instance of Africa, the real, ‘soulful’ opportunities are not the ones in which we see money sticking out of every crevice, but the ones that allow us to add real value, to change our societies for the better and make a true impact. The soulful opportunities are those that present life as a plus sum game, where every one of us can actually make progress; at least the majority. For thus far, we have subscribed to the minus-sum scenario, we have thought for too long that one man’s gain is another’s loss. And what has been the result? We have all dragged everybody down into a bottomless hole. Even as I write this I get that sinking feeling again. Poverty, disease, strife and war, despondency, hopelessness, inefficiency, and other ills have become our lot, even as we dwell in that part of the world which the Creator may have designated as paradise on Earth.

    This book looks at the issues from several perspectives. I attempt a historical perspective, looking back to what had happened in the past and trying to extrapolate from that in explaining the morass of the present. I started by sitting down to write an article for Sunday Trust, the Abuja, Nigeria-based, upcoming newspaper that magnanimously gave me an opportunity to express my views every week. Then I realised there was so much up there that could never fit into a few hundred words. I realised I needed a sort of catharsis; I needed to really exhale. So much has been written weekly over my three odd years contributing to Sunday Trust, but so much still needs to be written, this time with less of the editor’s knife hanging on my writing. Hopefully, the publisher won’t hack this to pieces as well.

    So here it is, my first attempt to get out one of the few books that I know is in my head. It is like exorcism. Get it out and be free. But it is not exorcism, for the fact of getting this book out of one’s head does not mean one must stop thinking. Writing makes for further clarity of thought. A wise writer is able to see the mistakes and the wrong assumptions he made in his previous writing. He gets smarter each day as other people, those who know better and those who know less than him, scrutinise and criticise his work. He knows more as he listens to, or reads other opinions on the subjects on which he has written. And thus, a sequel will be born, often times with a totally different title and theme. Writers, who start out trying to empty their minds, often find out to their worst chagrin, that the more they empty their minds, the more new issues struggle for expression.

    I hope to be around to pen a sequel to this work, but more importantly, I hope this book provides shocking insights – enough to jar black Africa, and especially its underachieving big brother, Nigeria, out of its deep slumber. I hope this book sets on the drastic change that we need, not in terms of material issues alone, but firstly and most importantly, in terms of our mode of thinking. I hope this sets in motion a paradigm shift, and validates the thinking of those who have attempted a holistic approach in analysing the African conundrum.

    Over and above everything else, this book is my answer to the ageless question: what is life about? In … in my own little way to push a positive agenda for black people in general, I am responding to a nagging concern: I didn’t ask to be black; I didn’t ask to be Nigerian. But I am ready to make the most of my situation; in fact, to even die trying.

    INTRODUCTION

    This is not another book that whines on end about the past ills that have befallen black Africa. Neither is it another attempt to go cap in hand, asking for reparations from those who we deem have the resources, or those we think have ‘stolen’ from Africa. Rather what is attempted here is a wake-up call; a kick in the belly.

    But the kick goes around generously; to the Africans who need to urgently mature in mind and seriously seize their own destinies in their own hands, and to the ‘wiser’ races who may have taken many an undue advantage in the past. I try to coat the bitter pills with some embellishments and euphemisms. Where the subject of past ills, done to a then ignorant people, is discussed, an attempt is made to discuss what the real issues are. There may sometimes be borderline attempts to justify the ills perpetrated against black Africa, but total pragmatism and largeness of heart is required to lift Africa from the current morass in which it finds itself. The pace is quick, and focus is important, so I move on quickly, extrapolating lessons there from, such as to prevent reoccurrences of these calamities to humanity.

    This is a sociological book. It is a book that examines human nature and the trajectory of human development over time. It is at once a history book, daring to summarise human history in its entirety, as it is a book of contemporary and pragmatic recommendations. To wit, knowledge of modern finance is admixed with some understanding of basic human nature. It is a book that will hopefully be enjoyed and appreciated by the pragmatist, that man or woman who is ready to make the most of his/her circumstance, that man or woman who has absolutely no sense of entitlement, who is ready to fight any day, for the position he/she occupies, who does not believe the world owes him or her, and who is ultimately ready to give everything, repeat everything to make the world a better place, no matter how futile that quest may be.

    Unfortunately black Africans have been adjudged to have a high sense of entitlement, and to be generally more paranoid than depressed. Perhaps it is the fine weather. With summer all year round in most parts of black Africa, who wouldn’t have some weird belief that anybody who upsets the apple cart is sent by the devil and must be squelched? CRUSHED, is therefore an attempt to begin to draw out the black African, to make him realise that the party must end at some point in time. Indeed the continuous romance with poverty and disease, neo-slavery and self-oppression looks like an attempt to continue a party that has since ended – a refusal to acknowledge that the game has changed, that a new song has since been playing and it is therefore important to change dance-steps.

    Yes, most of black Africa is still living in a supposedly glorious, even if dark, past. The world has, largely through the application of wisdom, sometimes subterfuge, and pretty much any tool available, moved on, leaving Africa in a lurch. But it seems the time has come for this sleeping continent to begin to stir.

    Many Africans, in talking about the emancipation of the continent, are quick to point to some glorious past when Egypt was the centre of civilisation. But from all historical records, it appears blacks got little mention in that era’s exploits. Anyhow, is it not better to quit crying over spilt milk and attempt a new approach in another era that has evidently caught black Africa on the back foot? I am a Nigerian, and seem to know a bit about my country’s many circumstances, peculiarities, attributes and absurdities. It would seem that the country (Nigeria) is supposed to be a central player in the attainment of a level of release for black people; it has a large population, it is central, and is relatively rich in natural resources.

    At the very least, even if all of black Africa could overtake Nigeria and surge on towards the golden sunrise, Nigeria still presents a fantastic case study; pungent, hair-raising, annoying and exhilarating at the same time. This is the only country I know, where you could almost touch the hope, the fantastic golden dream that has eluded the whole world, each morning as you wake up.

    CRUSHED! is not about black Africa as a whipping boy, and it is not an attempt to weep to the rest of the world, most of which has gone through its own centuries of serious challenges too. In the colder regions of the world, one wonders how people could have coped when there were no innovations like electricity for warming houses, or even when there were no technologies to build houses or even the techniques to start a fire. People would have died and many would have been sick on end. This could have triggered a resolve in them to be more ingenious and to make the best of whatever they had.

    On the other hand, there are still societies in black Africa today, where people do not need to wear clothes and do not really have to preserve food till the next day. Africa still retains, in the deep rain forests and hills of Nigeria, Cameroon, the Congo area and elsewhere, modern day gardens of Eden (even as the rest of the world has lost its innocence).

    CRUSHED is an acronym for the strategies that I have penned for black Africa to lift itself out of its present state, gradually. I have never travelled to North Africa, or even South Africa as yet, and therefore cannot yet comment on their cultures, therefore I have focused on my immediate constituency, black Africa, for now. More so, the blacks it seems, give the world cause for worry these days, and the situation in many black African states, is rather desperate. Nigeria, my case study, for one, has a huge problem. Its citizens are scattered all over the world in numbers that have reached nuisance level and the entire world is getting irritated. The names Nigeria and black Africa are therefore used interchangeably in this book. Nigeria is my case study, an important, interesting and very rich one at that. As I write this, Nigeria is on a cliff-hanger, hanging on a precipice like never before, wondering what hit it! The great nation seems to always be on a slaughter-slab!

    In a politically correct world, people are not eager to discuss the kind of problems tackled in this book. But they must be discussed one way or the other. Why won’t I give it a go? It is not enjoyable to alight at an airport in London with your innocent children and to be sniffed by dogs looking for drugs. Even your little toddler is frightened as the dogs descend on him. It is not enjoyable to be cordoned off at such places for special attention and scrutiny. It is not a laughing matter to see your kinsmen, ignoring the potentials of their own country, become large scale criminals in other countries. It is not anything to rejoice about when other black people even in Africa treat you and your fellow countrymen, as criminals who are guilty until proven innocent. It is not pleasant when other Africans are afraid of you, when an aura of criminality, stupidity and underachievement follows you.

    Business has been lost because of what some others would term ‘discrimination’. But at times what the world is giving us is feedback; feedback that we could do better; feedback that we are letting them down; feedback that we should wake up and act our age. In that I see tremendous opportunity for Nigeria, and other African countries, to begin to reclaim their position in the comity of nations, firstly by restoring dignity to their own people. The crowding-out effect will be instantaneous, as hope dislodges despair, as education dislodges ignorance, as health replaces disease.

    But we are not where we are simply out of our own making. The world is a dangerously complex place, where the slow is taken advantage of. Nigeria in particular is somewhat slow and retarded, and the world has taken full advantage of this in the past. Therefore, the ‘feedback’ being received from the rest of the world is double-edged. On one hand it is feedback for our underachievement and apparent inanity, but on the other hand, it is mockery; insult added upon injury. For example, African countries get accused of being corrupt, many times by leaders from powerful countries who know the roles played by their own friends and associates in big business and the corporate world. This is hypocrisy at its worst.

    How can those leaders mount a pedestal when they, their predecessors, and perhaps their successors see Africa as a veritable place to sell arms and ammunition produced by their countries; when they also made African countries sign free trade agreements when it was apparent that the primary products from Africa could never stand a chance? How could their economists have asked us in Africa to stop planning and controlling, and to let ‘market forces’ determine the fates of the vast majority of our uneducated people? How could those countries who now love to display the barbarism of Africa on global TV have retained subsidies on agricultural products, the mainstay of Africa, while they dumped even more subsidised finished products, like arms and ammunition, on our sorry continent? How could they turn around to pontificate, when they know the effect of their own strategies of subterfuge on African countries? It could only be mockery.

    Still, through the cynical wickedness of those who know exactly what they are doing to our subcontinent, comes some genuine concern. In the first place, the governments of many of the rich countries do not represent the wishes of their own people. So, some of the ‘feedback’ shown us in Africa is really a wish by those that crave a better world, that we as black Africans should wake up and react in the proper manner, that we should desist from merely whining and passing the buck, that it is not enough to notice the ills that have been perpetrated against us, that reparations alone will not do, that we should stand up and fight, that we should unite, and be strategic, not belligerent! For divided we have fallen, and it is high time to get the rest of the world to stop stomping on our prostrate corpus.

    The C in CRUSHED! stands for the fact that what we need the more is courage; courage on the part of a few people, who will be ready to make a difference if given the chance. Courage is supported by other C’s, namely the reduction of Corruption, and a critical look at how China, erstwhile branded a hopeless situation with a population of 1.4 billion, emerged as the world’s second best economy and perhaps a major world power for the next 100 years.

    And of course, C stands for a … of our cultures.

    R is for being reasonable, being realistic and being responsible. We must set achievable benchmarks, but more importantly, we must define our own racetrack, and run on it. We should not start thinking of reversing or retaliating against the real or perceived oppression we have suffered over time. Africans should also be responsible about what they do to their continent, the land of their fathers. Like they say, if you do not determine where you want to go, other people will determine it for you. Africa’s destiny has never been really defined by Africans in the past. We generally follow instructions, waiting for others to come and light the lamp for us. Responsibility also means we stop shifting blame and responsibility to others. Get Real, Africa! J. Paul Getty said, A man can fail many times, but is only a failure when he blames someone else’.

    U is for Unity. Perhaps this should have come first, but then the acronym that I forged would have looked like gibberish. While the rest of the world unites politically and economically, in order to have a better and more articulate say, and more importantly to keep the money within the family, much of black Africa is still being pulled in different directions in an everlasting dance with myopia and disunity. If successful regions like Europe, with vast, articulate and cogent experience on their side, could think of unity, how much more black Africa, largely an agrarian region, at best primary commodity exporters who have little control over the prices of the products on which they heavily depend? If Europe, which was ravaged by two colossally destructive and horrible wars in just less than a century ago, can be united today in the European Union, why on Earth can Africa not be? There is absolutely no way that the further splintering of any country in Africa could achieve better economies, or efficiency, in the long run.

    The call for further breakup of nations, as is exemplified by a handful of civil wars, or the embers of squashed insurgencies, or the renewed misguided vituperations of young Nigerians using the platform of the internet, is only an expression of mutual disdain. And it is a culture clash. Tribes exist in Africa who believes they are better than any other in the world. My political science teacher called it Ptolemaic Parochialism, after the Philosopher, Ptolemy, whose writings were skewed towards the supremacy of the Greek culture. Oh, how I wish that Africans could begin to do what they require of the rest of the world; that every man should be equal, starting from the tribe next door. Many African societies are awfully blinded by prejudice. The Rwandan Genocide, the Kenyan Clashes, the Liberian, Sierra Leonean Ivorian, Angolan and Nigerian civil wars (which embers still glow bright from time to time), come to mind.

    S is for strategy. They say if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. Terrible things happen in this world and the history of the world could easily be the history of how nations have subjugated other nations in order to exploit them. That is since time immemorial. Even traditional African societies, before they were rendered ineffectual by slave trade and the colonial incursion, had some semblance of strategy. Tribes planned how they would attack, defeat and enslave their neighbours, in an age defined by imperialism. Now, with the colonial contraptions that have become our realities, where tribes have been forcibly cobbled together, the first social casualty was cohesive strategy.

    Meanwhile, we forage in the same world with countries that understand the game of development much better than we do. We are like toddlers, playing a chess game against Gary Kasparov or Anatoly Karpov. From the first pawn we tentatively move, Kasparov could see the next ten steps and the checkmate. On our part, we have absolutely no idea what we are up against. We are cornered presently, but opportunities have emerged for us from time to time, to escape with our ‘King’, who has long been under siege.

    H is for Humility. This is where we emphasise the need for cultural change. Some African countries are more in need of this than others, and Nigeria, our case study is perhaps the worst afflicted with this deficiency. Our illness presents in the form of a terrible cockiness. Underachievers, who should seek ways of working harder, are more concerned with ‘how we look’. To have a better perception, all we need to do is to change our way of life. Even the traditional or national attires of some of African countries are examined, as to whether they come with any delusions. My experiment here was corroborated when I read the book titled ‘East-West Pendulum’, written by Robert Lloyd George, the great-grandson of Sir David Lloyd George, one of Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers.

    But how does a society change its age-long culture? And would this not be misconstrued as a call for Anglicisation of African societies? Well, we have to circumnavigate this problem. This is a call to serious introspection. We can start out by agreeing that no culture is perfect. Definitely, the so-called ‘civilised’ cultures, today, are fraught with absurdities. I will not call for its wholesale adoption. However, change we must.

    Talking about the rise of China, Robert Lloyd George mentioned that that country is where it is today, because its leaders understand the need to be self-effacing. Really, it is a ‘stoop-to-conquer’ world. You cannot afford to preen around like an ostrich, in resplendent vain-gloriousness as your people are wallowing in poverty and disease, and expect that the powers that be will admit you into ‘civilisation’. The attitude displayed by some black African countries in this regard is really appalling, and underlies an inability to self-introspect. This book offers some bitter pills.

    H also encompasses the need to embrace history. Winston Churchill, the great Prime Minister of Great Britain, in typical wicked British humour and dry wit, remarked at different times that ‘it is the prerogative of the victor to rewrite history’, and perhaps more coyly, ‘history will be kind to me, for I will write it!’ This presupposes that one becomes the history that is written about him, except one consciously rewrites such history. It also means that the past, however irrelevant it may seem, still assists us in finding focus and getting our bearings for the present and the future. The total ignorance of our history as a people, the inability to reconstruct our history outside of what the ‘victors’ have written about us (most of which is uncomplimentary, false and designed to demean us and justify their crimes against us), and the inability to enter the realm of positive self-speak; these are the issues that have nailed our minds to the ground as Africans. History becomes the future, paradoxically speaking. When we fix our history, we fix our future.

    H stands for hard work too; hard work in the sense that the African needs to elevate his mind. He must start thinking of new frontiers to break. He must be able to see beyond his nose and plan for his future. He must begin to work towards a better and more technologically advanced tomorrow for his offspring and continent. True, the African is usually physically strong enough to withstand most forms of hard labour but then hard labour does not necessarily translate into hard work. Hard labour is all brawn while hard work is all brains. The black African needs to start taxing his mind and pushing it to explore and exploit areas his ancestors were probably too complacent or fearful to venture into.

    E is for Education. No escape from this. The internet is there for any degree of research. Information has become that neo-factor of production that is almost free. But are African countries taking advantage? Is education improving in Africa? It doesn’t seem so. Robert Lloyd George gives an example in his book about how Deng Xiaoping in 1979 sent 50,000 of the most brilliant Chinese students to American universities to go and understudy the western way of science, economics, psychology and society; all the works. All that while, China was being derided as a backward country. Also, Chinese leaders did not have to kill their local public schools and universities in order to achieve this. In Nigeria, public schools and universities have been callously destroyed, the level of education has fallen dismally, while powerful leaders award themselves licences for private universities and schools. It seems that they will take the privatisation game to any level, and lay their people prostrate.

    But our biggest problem is really with education. For even the ‘educated’ does not know how to use his education to help his society. Locally, our education does not teach us to think outside the box, to challenge status quo and to elevate our thinking to a strategic level in order to breach the many mental barriers erected against our progress in this crazy, strategy-dependent world.

    D is for Democracy. But I don’t canvass the type of democracy you buy off-the-shelf, the type which the USA under George W. Bush was pushing like a drug-dealer hanging at street corners. Democracy does not solve all, and there is truth in the fact that what Africa may be able to cope with, in fact what it may need, is ‘benevolent dictatorship’, as Dambisa Moyo canvassed in her book ‘DEAD AID’. The whole idea is that democracy, as understood by the leaders of many African countries, is exceedingly expensive, and inefficient for decision-making. Nigeria is a colourful example, where the adoption of American-style democracy, with the Federal Government having a House of Representatives and a Senate, leads to so much waste.

    Waste of time and money. Some state governors have had as many as 900 ‘Special Assistants’, and a battery of Personal Assistants. These are apart from ‘Commissioners’, who are in charge of specific sectors like Energy, Education, Transport and what have you. The size of government has therefore become a key challenge along with the fact that everyone sees government as a sure bet in climbing the wealth and social ladder. Democratic politics as practiced in Nigeria is examined, alongside the culture clash that has turned it into a monster – it has become the disease that it purports to cure.

    In between, I offer street-level analysis, anecdotes and stories; some fictional, some real. All for the reader to be able to get ideas about what is on ground and how Africa can extricate itself from this quagmire. I have fearlessly, but carefully approached many social issues which are central to the emancipation of the African people, but which most writers shy away from. Foreigners fear to talk about them for they may be labelled racists. Africans avoid them because those issues may make them seem less important, or less superior than they would like to feel. We fear being pulled down into depression, so like shrewd salesmen, we want to hear the good news only. The bad news is this: a fixation with good news only, often leads to serious delusion, and self-aggrandisement, both serious ailments afflicting black African countries, with perhaps more devastating effects than AIDS, Cancer, and Malaria put together.

    But perhaps most importantly, this book offers an opportunity for rapprochement among all the peoples of the world. I would repeat many times that whatever black Africans have suffered from the West – slavery and colonialism – could still have happened even if we were left on our own. Our stage of development at that time didn’t even allow for efficient dissemination of information. Calamities happened, and still happen among black African societies, without anyone’s intervention. So really, we should let bygones be bygones and seek to unite, come together and engage the world on an intellectual platform. That is black Africa’s only hope.

    As a matter of fact, we do have the latent intellectual capacity with which to engage the world. Too many talented Africans are scattered all over the world, gurus in any field of their choice. But too many of them see Africa as a no-go area, as a place to wake up and curse each morning. It is a paradox, for if we were being teleguided to fail (and I am not alleging at this stage that such is the case), that is exactly the reaction our traducers would have wanted of us. The task seems arduous – changing a people’s mindset, raising awareness of the need to unite – but that is our only way out. For now black Africa is a mere white mouse on a treadmill, in someone’s experimental laboratory.

    It is hoped that whereas the powerful countries of this world are being asked to seek rapprochement with those who were (and still are) oppressed, harassed, browbeaten and deprived, it can also be seen that a few of them want to continue their shenanigans into perpetuity. Indeed, the reality of the situation is probably closer to this: powerful nations are giving publicly with one hand and privately depriving and taking away with the other.. In the final analysis, the relationship between the world’s more powerful nations and Africa is fatally flawed. The provision of aid has generally served only to perpetuate corrupt, and in many cases, cruel regimes. Political interference has similarly had the net effect of maintaining the status quo of corruption and ineptitude.

    I also hope that this book provokes to anger. Not anger to destroy, but anger to build. I hope Africans would be angry enough to get up and start to do things differently. I wish they could start to direct their anger, towards building the society, effecting and implementing positive change, standing on their own feet, and generally acting in a proactive and not the reactive way we’ve always witnessed – rioting and causing damage to public property, complaining about discrimination and so on. Those strategies have not worked in the past, and they won’t work in the future. They present Africans as eternally disadvantaged and hopeless, and the ‘sense of entitlement’ that drives that approach – a sense of being cheated even when one is not – is psychologically damaging.

    For any and every reader around the world, I leave you with these everlasting words from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, which at best summarises all the worries expressed in this book and the way forward:

    ‘BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD’.

    One by one, step by step, brick by brick, stone by stone; if more people started to contribute a little bit more, the world will surely start gravitating towards that so-called state of Utopian paradise the idealists have always imagined it could be.

    This book calls the world to change; to stop institutionalised deceit, to stop oppressing the unaware. For in this information age that we live in, the now ignorant people will one day become aware, and the longer and larger the lies go on and become (because lies necessarily multiply when the liar does not come clean), the bigger the resultant mess will be. Anger will continue to rise as a few young people become aware. And these young people will go to any limits to seek redress. Only and until the internet is censored all over the world, when people are no longer able to get the information that is presently almost freely available on its twenty billion odd pages, can the purveyors of falsehood claim to have won the battle. So I think it is really a losing game for the oppressors and deceivers.

    CHAPTER 1

    THE VICTOR’S PREROGATIVE

    ‘History tells a people where they have been, where they are, and what they are. But most importantly, history tells a people where they still must go, where they still must be’. - Dr John Henrik CLARKE

    It will amount to totalitarianism to say that people should not analyse the problem of Africa’s lack of development except they had all the information to work with. One couldn’t decree that people should not comment on what they know little or nothing about. That would tend towards fascism. However, in attempting to analyse the problems besetting black Africa in its quest for development, the prevailing available literature is mostly a cornucopia of half-baked hypothesis and theories, a reaction to symptoms and not the root causes of Africa’s problems. I take Nigeria as case study; Nigeria being for now a most exceptional basket case, and one important key to the resolution of the problems of black Africa.

    Having said that, can anyone claim to really have all the information before attempting to proffer solutions to any problem; especially one as convoluted, complicated, immemorial and confusing as that of black African countries in the wilderness of underdevelopment? Backtrack to Nigeria… The question is, where do we start analysing from? Many spend so much time and energy haranguing over how slow, or stupid, a certain president is, but for some reason, refuse to take the next rational step of thinking backwards. How did president so and so get into the saddle in the first place? Then how did the one before him get into the saddle? And on and on. According to Sir Winston Churchill, ‘The farther back you look the farther forward you will be able to see.’ Black Africans unfortunately seem to be possessed of deliberate and convenient forgetfulness.

    Is it therefore logical to deliberately abridge our thinking perhaps out of the exigency of time and say ‘Well, we don’t care what happened in the past; all that concerns us is the present’? Can such an arduous task as breaking out of our current state of despondency, and our vicious cycle of inefficiency and underachievement, be conquered in fleeting moments of analysis and buck-passing, or do we have to spend more time researching, analysing and thereby proffering workable solutions to the problems of Africa?

    True, it is impossible for anyone to have the full information, and indeed, there will come a time when we will have to extrapolate information and reason. Yes, many times we have to imagine what must have happened in certain events as to have caused reactions that have been documented in recent history. Mathematically, if we had 1 and 3, and were asked to imagine what happened in the middle, we’ll likely conjecture that the answer is 2. In reality, the answer may not be 2. Anything could have happened, but it makes logical sense to assume a reasonable answer. It doesn’t always pay too, to overanalyse such as to obfuscate reason and befuddle the problem. In most situations, the solution will be achieved if we ‘keep it short and simple’.

    For black Africa however, there is even more need to extrapolate events and situations due to our peculiar dearth of historical documentation. For one reason or another, when we were enslaved and colonised, we had little or no established literacy systems we could genuinely call our own. The black African man it seemed had romanced with mystery for too long. He revelled in ambiguity. He would rather fear and be feared, and was perhaps in the main, unable to imagine a larger society that was conducive to as many people as possible. Our ancestors were unable to separate magic from science, legend from history and fact from myth. One has heard stories of a certain Alaafin Sango, who spat fire from his mouth, and who could command thunder. But the truth was not known, or documented about whether Sango was a fire- spitting Chinese dragon, or whether he bellowed smoke from his lungs, as perhaps the first smoker in Yoruba land.

    To this extent, the attributes of Sango were cloaked in mystery, and we are today clearly unable to disentangle who he really was and what he added to history from what people said he was. Stories about our mythical personalities were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. It was therefore easy for slave masters and colonisers to destroy whatever evidence was on ground to prove we had attained any level of development before the colonisers came. To make matters worse, today’s black African has hardly changed. He still hugs mystery like second nature. Myth, history, science, fact, and magic are heavily cloaked in mystery and he very rarely ventures to tamper with that cloak. He really couldn’t be bothered. He even passes the fears in which he lives from one

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