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Working Towards Self-Sufficiency - Part III
August 29, 2005
By Onochie A. Onuorah
Pages: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04
The economies of the black nation has been hijacked for centuries and it is unconscionable how the IMF and World Bank officials patronizingly lecture black African governments on liberalizing their economies, meanwhile our African leaders are busy parading western shores and skylines for aid and foreign investment. Are they so mentally enslaved that they lack the capacity to see that African economies have always been the most liberal economy? In fact African economies have always been profusely liberal to a fault if you ask me. Which Caucasian nation on earth or any other place in this our galaxy has had an economy so liberal as to allow a black minority of less than five percent of it's demographic population to control over eighty percent of the productive output of their ancestral land? The possibility of such a situation is hard enough to imagine, not even for a second let alone five hundred years and going but for some reason this is not only normal but generally palatable in many black African nations. Our extreme hospitality and infinite capacity to forgive is indeed a maladaptive trait. This trait has allowed the world to betray the African time and time again.
Need I name names? The African market has been wide open to Eurocentric garbage for five centuries and going, what we now call colonies were nothing but direct foreign investments and for these policy officials of the new world order to have the arrogance and audacity to accuse Africans of entertaining an illiberal economy says a lot about what we black Africans are currently up against. Why haven't most of us realized that it is the west that has always depended on Africa for human and material resources and not the other way round? For instance, anyone that has been to the west knows that white folks love sugar and chocolate but guess what, most of their sugar and cocoa imports are from black nations and it is often produced through child labour. Being aware of this and the fact that black Africa has some of the largest reserves of oil, silicon, coltan, uranium, gold, diamond, copper, tin, titanium and even medicinal plants, all of which are the basic materials that western technology and industry is built on; be it silicon for making micro chips, coltan is the most important material used to make cell phones, uranium for making weapons of mass destruction, titanium for making steel and paint, medicinal plants for their multinational pharmaceutical companies, gold for their banks, diamonds to please their women and for drilling fossil fuel which powers their glutted economy that is a sink for approximately seventy percent of the global energy output; hence, with these facts in mind we should be able to realize that we have simply handed out our rights to leverage foreign trade policies and to properly manage and control our resources.
Do our black leaders know that if their ancestral land produces such vital resources it is then required of them to exercise some autonomy and independence in the way they managed these treasures? Why don't they have any vision or courage to develop and sustain their local economies through local investment and socialism as noble Julius Nyerere did? Why is it that for all these years, none of our African(black) leaders of any African(black) nation that is currently in debt could not simply refuse to be coerced into paying a thousand times the money they borrowed from IMF, the World Bank or any other party i.e. Paris Club? And not only should they refused to pay but they should sue the IMF, World Bank and other consortiums involved for genocide because some of these nation accused of owing dubious debts actually budget more for debt servicing than they do for health care and education.
Imagine this, in 1982 so-called sub Saharan Africa, according to O.E.C.D, paid back $950 million (almost a billion), on average, every month for 120 months between 1982-1991 but still was 123 percent more in debt than they were at the beginning of that decade. A country like Nigeria budgets more money for debt servicing than for health care and to say the least, it is baffling to know that every Continental Nigerian pays about ten dollars per capita per day towards servicing their foreign debt. Today black African leaders are soliciting debt relief and foreign aid when by now they should be receiving reparations from western (Jews included) and Arabic nations that have taken excessively from the continent but gave literally nothing but war, famine, disease and pandemonium in return. Why isn't President Mugabe's dream a collective one that should be supported aggressively? Is it not time for us black Africans to boldly present our own sense of justice to a world that deals with us as if we are invisible hence insignificant? We are busy bickering over inconsequential issues like nationalism (which the west disparagingly calls tribalism) when our greatest problem is economics and although Africans are the most diverse group of people - talk about genetic variability - we are much more similar than we are different and our diversity should not be a liability for economic development rather it should be our strength.
Since an incomprehensive understanding of and a tepid attitude towards social science can be considered a maladaptive trait for any given group of people then it is definitely past due time for black Africans to come together with all hands on deck to seriously discuss and elaborate on this discipline with an Afrocentric perspective. Among other issues that should be addressed is: why is capitalism not working for Africans? If this very cogent question were directed to a contemporary scholar in economics he or she would probably prescribe a couple of economic theories about liberal system and how black African governments can promote and establish private-sector led, market oriented economic growth while emphasizing on transparency and accountability in economic decision making. While their generic solutions are modeled on historical western values hence it's efficacy in the west, it is by no means a logical solution to black African nations because for much of the Africans existence on earth, which is over hundred thousand years before all other groups, evolutionary mechanisms have selected communal living as the primary social behaviour of the black African, in other words capitalism is and has never been an African philosophy and thus the solutions to our economic predicaments cannot stem from the very source of these problems.
But most importantly however, the position of conventional economists on this issue is completely flawed because the economics being taught to our youth in the higher institutions is very disturbing to me quite sincerely I should say given that the dire subject of externalities is dealt with in a lukewarm fashion. The corpus of conventional economics deals with perpetual growth that is expected to improve the livelihood of the majority and the economy is treated as an isolated closed system that can dispense with input of matter and energy and therefore is capable of unlimited expansion. Thus, nature is regarded as a sub-sector of a totally isolated system which is the economy. The flow charts in our text books that describe how exchange value circulates from businesses to residences utterly neglects the very life force that can sustain such motion and that is: "NATURE!" Developing economies around the world aspire to attain western levels of production and glut when in reality such aspirations would require three earths because the earth, as it is, simply does not have the regenerative capacity to espouse that level of growth and consumption.
At the dawn of the capitalist age, natural capital was abundant and the labour force marginal. But today the reverse is the case; an explosion of human resources in tandem with a rapidly diminishing natural capital. The environmental cost of unrestrained economic growth far out weighs the benefits and indeed one can ferret-out the following deduction: Capitalism and or globalization makes no kind of ecological sense since the capitalist regards the costs that does not affect his establishment directly, i.e. pollution, as externalities and is more focused on growth than on development and long term sustainability. Our hubris and uncontrolled thirst for more goods and services, most of which are unnecessary, have resulted in the extinction of other species of living organism (including humans) at a pace that exceeds the rate at which they are being discovered; species extinction is estimated at a rate of 50000 a year (ignoring the effects of pollution and introduced alien species). Albeit the global inclusiveness of this very dire situation being sustained by capitalism, this writer's primary concern is the future of black African nations.
For years black Africa has witnessed the intractable, rapaciously destructive capability of capitalism brought about and implemented by multinational cooperation's, the IMF, World Bank and to a large extent by the coerced adoption of these foreign philosophies by black Africans. It should be understood first and foremost that solutions to black Africa's economic instabilities must -and will- stem from black African values and philosophies and not from without. Thus this writer recommends that our leaders make all possible effort to understand fully the problems that encroach their respective polities and a good way to go about it is for them to be constantly surrounded by advisers each of whom are Afrocentric technocrats specialized in a particular field that pertains to history, economics, politics or philosophy because "a problem fully understood is a problem half solved".
Furthermore, African leaders (and people) whom are under the fallacy that a liberal economy coupled with substantial foreign investments would effectuate meaningful economic growth need serious counseling if not schooling. At this point we all need to keep our eyes and minds on our local economies, going trans-national and then subsequently international only when the necessary goods and services in question cannot, by all means, be produced from within our local market. It is no secret that all black African governments are being run externally and what is needed is absolute autonomy over our lands and everything contained therein. It is truly disquieting that white minorities in countries like Namibia, Tanzania, South Africa, control about 70 percent on average of virtually the most arable and fertile lands and for that reason control the economy, despite the fact that these lands were procured illegally. Also the fact that these minorities are relatively recent settlers in these regions where they demographically make up less than 5 percent of the population is sheer cause for embarrassment.
How do we black Africans begin to dialect on the subject pertaining to autonomy, liberation of self and economic development when our economies have been hijacked and derailed for centuries? Black nations do not need foreign aid, loans or structural adjustment programs, what we do need and should demand is absolute autonomy, reparations and an Afrocentric perspective. Now, most people hear the word reparations and assume that is just about financial restitution…well, financial restitution is part of the scheme but it hardly qualifies as an important component because there are things money just cannot compensate for. We expect our reparations to be delivered to all traditional African institutions that were affected by the black holocaust, colonization, foreign trade policies and foreign debt. Reparations will not be a one time monetary transfer from the west to the treasuries of black nations rather it will involve relevant trade laws and long term programs that should include, but not limited to: an acknowledgement of and apology for all the atrocities perpetrated; material and financial aid for the refurbishment of our academic and economic institutions; the return of all artifacts, monuments, sacred objects and artistic creations that were expropriated from the continent, the endorsement of black media wherein our innate beauty can be seen and voices heard, cancellation of foreign debt while simultaneously paying back the monies received from the outlandish interest charged, and off course returning land and property back to the black majority. Note also that it is not only the west that owes African nations reparations; Arab nations too will be held accountable for their role as middle men in the Atlantic slave trade and the black holocaust in North Africa which began in the seventh century A.D and still persists today in Mauritania and Sudan.
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