• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

Hate, business and African-style competition

South Africa-attacks

Africa is such a beautiful and blessed continent and Africans its greatest resource. This sounds clichéd but, why are we still poor, unsupportive and dysfunctional?

With the recent xenophobia-fuelled attacks in South Africa and the reprisal attacks in Nigeria on my mind, let’s explore the challenges, common grounds and likely solutions.

Typically, I am usually silent around political issues especially in public writing and on social media. When the war over heated issues are taken to social media, gory videos and unrelated posts are shared to make a point and end up fuelling more hate and violence.

Social media has made it easier than ever to propagate hate. But an eye for an eye leaves us all blind.

Xenophobia isn’t the main issue but misguided youths and misplaced anger and priorities. The same attacks we see on the streets take place diplomatically within industries and even between colleagues in boardrooms. The xenophobia in South Africa and tribalism in Nigeria have similar a cause. It’s the mentality of crabs in a bucket.

Put a crab in a bucket and it will claw and craw its way out.. Put a bunch of crabs in a bucket none will successfully climb out. You can travel and come back and you’ll meet all of them together. When crabs are in a group not one gets to leave; if any try to climb out the others will bring it down; this continues for as long as they are together.

Our ideology and disposition to competition is worrisome. It’s the highest level of dysfunctional thinking, mediocrity and poverty mentality.  This poverty mindset is the common ground of Africans.  It’s our common enemy, alongside corruption.

This strange mentality of crabs in a bucket fuels jealousy, hate and invariably, xenophobia or racism and tribalism in Nigeria where we stereotype people and attack them too. In life and in business, there are systems and people with the crab mentality of “if I can’t have it, neither can you”. This is how Africans deal with competition and their peers. From our kindred, to villages, to cities, and boardrooms we see this mentality.

In the boardroom, our colleagues ideally shouldn’t be a threat, but most people think so and it fuels jealousy and unproductive politics. This is same with bilateral trade and international relations. Poverty, mediocrity and jealousy are the greatest threats of Africa not our fellow African brothers and sisters.

Note that about 10 percent of South Africa’s population owns 90 percent of the country’s wealth, according to the South African Human Rights Commission.  The commission also reported in 2018 that 60 percent of black South Africans live in poverty, while just 1 percent of white South Africans are poor. So the real enemies are not foreigners in the same struggle as them.

Trevoh Noah, the South African comedian says, “When I hear South Africans claiming that other Africans are competing with them on dwindling/scarce resources, I say that our anger and outrage is misplaced.”

He continues “Yours is a complete misplaced anger, prejudice and xenophobia built up out of inferiority complex created by decades of apartheid and oppression. I don’t see fellow African as a competitor but a fellow compatriot who is struggling to feed his family and have some comfort in this short life-time”.

Our common enemy is poverty and the inability to think right. Black on black crime has always been a manifestation of hate. The white slave trader didn’t into the hinterlands to capture slaves, a black man like you and I did. Then the hands of the enslaved were chained, today it’s our minds. Let’s not lose sight of our shared destiny while fighting ourselves  offline and online.

I like to joke that, “the next world war will be started online”. Social media is a powerful invention. It’s a great place to tell the world what you’re thinking before you’ve had a chance to think about it. And that’s the problem. In a previous article I wrote that the African mindset of “I don’t have much because you do” is a witchcraft mentality and the root cause of our problem as Africans.

I think the most effective way to fight xenophobia is lies in applying diplomatic pressures on bilateral relationships. It will push South Africa to put it house in order.

Retaliating with violence affects those that have nothing to do with it. Boycotts of the goods and services of South African businesses in Nigeria is a mirage –neither you nor your wife will unsubscribe from DStv, or stop buying what you can get cheaply at Shoprite or Pep Store.

As a country we don’t have the grit or mental sophistication and discipline as a people to carry out boycotts. The likely solution may be business diplomacy. The US is good at this. In other words isolate the South African nation using trade agreements; fiscal and monetary policy that make it unfavorable for South African businesses to thrive outside their country while encouraging your people to come back home.

No nation is totally self-sufficient; South Africa is not even close. Everyone is in interdependent.  Growth comes from the interdependence.

We can use subliminal business blacklisting, international diplomacy via AU, ECOWAS, UN, and other trade groups like World Economic Summits to get this done.

Whether in our families, businesses or across nations, Healthy competition should be allowed it spurs innovation and progress. We should move from being competitive to complementary. When Competition grows into full-fledge jealousy then that’s backward integration into the cave age. Africans need to be progressive. We need to embrace rather than attack each other. We have to work together to uplift our continent. We must protect each other wherever we find ourselves.

 

Eizu Uwaoma