Nigeria just celebrated her 64th year of independence, and it was a gloomy day for most Nigerians. This was captured very well in a scathing editorial by the Punch newspaper. The paper recounted the consequences of state capture by a coarse, brutal, rapacious, and counter-developmental political elite—a dramatic increase in poverty levels, illiteracy, banditry, insecurity, collapse of infrastructure and institutions, corruption, and virtually every conceivable public ailment.
In the estimation of many, the country is now a failed or virtually failed state. The arrogantly named “giant of Africa” has now seen that in the things that matter, which make a people great, she has always been a pony.
People are suffering in unprecedented numbers of malnutrition, starvation, malaria, political violence, banditry, and joblessness in this underachieving pony of a state.
In response, many are calling for or actively showing their preference for re-colonisation or a return to white rule.
This has to be understood well.
One, there are those who can afford to emigrate fairly legally, at least. So, they make their way to regions of white rule in the Western strongholds of Europe or North America, etc. This is the highly celebrated “japa”—escape from the bondage of fellow Black rule.
Two, illegal emigration to regions of white rule in spite of its many hazards by poorer but desperate young Africans.
Third, the stay-at-homes, especially the youth, who want a return of white rule to take over their failed governments.
The fate of Nigeria is shared more or less by other sub-Saharan African countries. Recently, I listened to a viral clip by an apparently poor and frustrated South African calling for a return to white rule in her country for broadly similar reasons.
Then also I read about the shocking case of two black women who went scavenging for food in a white man’s farm in the north of South Africa. He killed them and fed their remains to his pigs to conceal his crime. This is cruel and racist, and he and his accomplices must pay for their crime. But we must recognise that these poor black women were driven to extreme poverty and desperation by the failure and insensitivity of black rule in a country that only 30 years ago won a hard-fought victory against white minority rule.
These unfortunate women are not different from those who die on the perilous journey through the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean to Europe or are sold into slavery by Arabs in North Africa.
This is the neo-black problem—which Franz Fanon did not see fully in his conceptualisation of the black problem but which, like the black problem, cannot be escaped by all black Africans and for which recolonisation of any type is not a proper or lasting solution.
In short, the neo-black dilemma may be framed as follows: is it better to live under white rule without political dignity but with basic life-sustaining standards for many?
or to live under black rule with illusory political dignity and without basic life-sustaining standards for the majority?
We must square up to this problem in order to solve it. This begins with intellectual honesty and humility, utmost respect, and responsibility for truth, factuality, and functionality.
Unfortunately, one of the flip sides of the protest politics of the African liberation struggle is the cultivation of a touchy egotistical response to everything real or imaginary, no matter how small, that robs off negatively on our struggle-inflated and hypersensitised egos (a direct consequence of our struggle with a lingering alienation-negativity complex due to colonial racism).
However, as Thomas Sowell writes of the somewhat similar problem of the black redneck culture in the USA, we have to pull away from this irrational path of counter-development and focus on the things that matter.
Again, as Sowell points out, except for a few outliers, politics does not directly make a community rich. And political ‘liberators’ are often an obstacle to the development of their people due to their interest in keeping self-rewarding but developmentally negative or insignificant causes on the front burners of the public sphere and politics.
The path forward for Africa lies in cultivating higher and adequate levels of personal and communal agential integrity as well as full personal responsibility and productivity. Not to mention creativity (including epistemic creativity), productive justice (such as merit and freedom), harmony and reconciliation at local and international levels, and a proper domestication of capitalism and other related values and institutions.
Africa must stop wasting her time on dreams of socialism because it is a system of wealth distribution primarily. Whereas, capitalism is a system of wealth creation primarily, and wealth has to be produced before it can be distributed.
As George Ayittey rightly pointed out, pre-colonial Africa was basically proto-capitalist, I would say, with a penumbra of proto-welfarism. Africa cannot live in an isolated, exotic niche of her own outside global capitalism.
This is the transcolonial view that envisages a new self-created Africa that makes use of utilisable elements of, but also creatively goes beyond the limitations of the pre-colonial order, the colonial deposit, and available global resources to achieve a functional hybrid culture, especially heterosis (a vigorous hybrid that surpasses its parent stocks).
Further, Africa must shun victimology because colonisation is virtually as old as human history and equally universal. And, as morally condemnable as it is, it is one of the means by which knowledge spreads from one society to another (some of the others being commerce, tourism of different types, and evangelisation).
Without overly focussing on victimhood, many Asian former colonies have found ways of integrating helpful Western knowledge and values to create thriving modern states, in spite of local and international obstacles.
Africa must also give up her embarrassing disposition to panhandling and outsourcing solutions.
The task of driving this development lies with African intellectuals and intelligentsia because the saying “the intellect precedes all in humans” can be said to apply aptly to development issues.
Can this class and generation of Africans live up to their historical responsibility? Time will tell, but it can be said that their job has been made easier with the coming of new forms of communication, such as social media, by which worthwhile initiatives can be rapidly incubated and brought to life across borders.
Failure will not bode well for us as it could lead to extinction. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant opines, humans of all the creatures in the world are endowed by nature (God, some like me would say) with reason (including rational will and creativity) as their unique equipment for the mastery of the world and survival. We must exercise our humanity in this regard or be willing to perish.
Joseph C. A. Agbakoba is professor of philosophy at the University of Nigeria.
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