Onwuchekwa Jemie
Industrialization—the arduous process of transforming a primarily agrarian, handicrafts economy into an economy in which machine manufacture is dominant—is a product of some two centuries of scientific and technological experimentation in Western Europe and America. However, building on Western machinery and know-how, a number of non-Western nations have achieved industrialization in a much shorter time.
Other than Russia which is in Eastern Europe, the most notable of these nations are in Asia. The “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) needed just two decades with special assistance from the United States. Japan, China and India accomplished the same in less than 50 years.
How did they do it? Can Nigeria learn and do likewise, modifying their methods to suit our own place and time in today’s globalised world?
To prevent the European adventurers from doing to Japan what they were doing to India, Japan chased them out and closed its borders (mid-17th century)—only to discover, two centuries later, that the Europeans had galloped far ahead technologically. Only by closing that technological gap could Japan hope to stave off conquest and domination by Europe.
Starting, then, in the mid-19th century, Japan embarked on a frantic program of industrialization, sending its youth to the West to learn all they could, stealing industrial secrets, importing machines, breaking them apart and copying them, thereby transferring and indigenizing the technology—so that by 1904 Japan had attained sufficient industrial parity to defeat Russia, a European giant, on the battlefield.
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In World War II Japanese kamikaze (suicide pilots) flew Japanese-manufactured airplanes. And when US atom bombs leveled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought Japan to its knees in 1945, Japan started all over again, and within 30 years it had regained industrial and technological parity with Europe and America.
This Japanese triumph of intelligence, determination, and cunning is replayed by the Chinese in 1949-1980.
Following a 30-year civil war, China went into seclusion in 1949, protecting itself from Western interference so it could put its house in order. The triumphant Communists, led by Mao Tsetung (Mao Zedung), laid down an Industrial Master Plan to be achieved through a series of five-year development plan periods, with close assistance by Russia, their ideological ally. They imported Russian machines, and understudied Russian engineers and technicians. In short order, they established thousands of medium-sized power generating plants, dozens of iron and steel factories, machine tool and farm equipment manufacturing plants, petro-chemical complexes, and electronics factories. By the early 1960s when they fell out with the Russians, they had transferred, indigenized and mastered the technology sufficiently and could now move ahead without foreign assistance.
By the 1970s China was reaching out, trying to end its self-imposed isolation; and after Mao’s death in 1976, Chinese leaders abandoned the hard communist line and took the once unthinkable “capitalist road” to economic development. Result: by 2000 China had become the world’s largest and cheapest manufacturer of virtually everything except motor vehicles and airplanes. With its low labor costs, precision quality and timely deliveries, China had become the global factory of choice. Those who, like many Nigerian importers, wanted shoddy goods, found them in China; and those who, like the EU and USA, wanted high quality goods, found them in China. And now in 2010, China has overtaken Britain, France, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second largest economy after the USA.
Intelligence, determination, and cunning!
Unlike its two Asian brothers, India did not succeed in avoiding colonization; nevertheless, it deployed its intelligence, determination and cunning throughout the struggle for independence and the decades of industrialization and modernization that followed. Mahatma Gandhi, who led the struggle, was bitterly disappointed by the price India was being asked to pay, namely the partition of its territory into a predominantly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India. Gandhi even boycotted the Independence celebrations, rather spending the time campaigning to prevent the mass exodus of Muslims. In the midst of this, a man who believed he was betraying Hindu interests assassinated him.
The point of the Gandhi story is that his death did not change a thing: like historic Haiti’s Toussaint L’Ouverture, Gandhi had surrounded himself with a tough core of like-minded nationalists; and when he fell, they just kept marching forward, never deviated and never stopped. A double lesson which Africa’s leaders have not yet learned.
India industrialized by inviting foreign investors who brought the machines and technical know-how, and who, by an agreement that India strictly enforced, passed on that know-how to Indian technicians at such speed and with such thoroughness that in approximately five years the technology was learned, the machines could be built from scratch by Indians themselves, and the entire production process could be performed by Indians without foreign assistance. In case you didn’t know, and for those who ridicule the term nowadays, this is what is actually meant by technology transfer and indigenization.
In addition, India surrounded each major manufacture with a satellite system of small and medium-sized factories to feed it with parts and accessories. And then it “reserved” certain goods for exclusive manufacture by the small-scale industries. A comprehensive, top to bottom industrialization program.
We need to get close to these nations, pick apart their success stories, and take what we need to construct our own strategy for rapidly industrializing Nigeria.
