tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74463573105283620652024-03-13T10:30:05.422-07:00Africa In Mind: A Contrarian's DiaryThe title says it all. Might there be a contrary standpoint? Nearly always in life, there is. One only hopes that it is not merely contrary but insightful. That, of course, is for the reader to judge.That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-3719005097885302812014-11-12T19:33:00.001-08:002014-11-12T19:33:14.753-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">GOD DON’T LOVE AFRICA
AND AFRICANS!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I hate to break it to
you, my fellow Africans—continental and diasporic—the world over. I am now convinced beyond all doubt that God
has no place in His\Her\Its heart for that segment of humanity called black
and, especially, its sub-segment that is resident in the continent of
Africa. I make the case for this claim
in what follows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">But, first, a
clarification. When I speak of God in
this discussion, I refer solely to the supreme being of the two alien religious
traditions that now dominate Africa and have so contorted Africans and warped
our sensibilities that the two religions now constitute the origin and limits
of what most Africans consider their world, its processes, their morality,
their understanding of their world and how they think they ought to be in
it. This is the God to whom they
sacrifice themselves and all that pertain to them, their spaces, their ways
through life, and what happens to them after their death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It is in their
unceasing devotion to this God in expectation of significant improvements in
their lives here and now that we find the best evidence that, if God exists,
God must be playing the cruelest joke on pious, devout, God-intoxicated
Africans.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I chose my words
carefully. Yes, Africans are
God-intoxicated. Want evidence? Where do I even begin?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Let’s take Africa’s
rulers, for one instance. For, as it is
said, the fish rots from the head. I
once listened on the radio to the late Ghanaian president, an eminent professor
of law no less before he acceded to the presidency, proudly affirm, in response
to complaints by some of his citizens that he had turned the presidential
palace into a prayer camp something along the following lines: Yes, it is true. If I had my way, I would turn all of Ghana
into a prayer camp. Why is it important
that he was an academic before he became president? Either he did not understand the significance
of the secular nature of Ghanaian state, constitutionally speaking, or he did
not take it seriously. For had he taken
it seriously, some respect for his nonbelieving citizens would have inclined
him not to share with the world such private desires. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ultimately, he joined
the lineage of African heads of state who have made themselves disciples, yes,
disciples, of a Nigerian evangelist.
Their discipleship was demonstrated, in part, by their going to spend
nights at his church. The list includes
Frederick Chiluba, Bingu wa Mutharika, and the latter’s successor, Joyce Banda,
late last year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To show his godliness
and piety, the Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, went to debase his
office—he is at perfect liberty to abase himself, in his person—by kneeling in
full view of the world before another Nigerian man of God, again with
absolutely no thought for what that would mean for his nonbelieving citizens in
the context of a country whose constitution proclaims its secularism. In this case, too, the president is an
ex-academic, a fishery biologist, no less.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When the government of
Jaafar el-Nimeiri in the old Sudan felt its grip on power waning as a result of
popular protest, it quickly discovered how lucrative state-sponsored Muslim
piety was and proceeded to impose Sharia law on the people of the country. And Omer el-Beshir could not find it in him
to let up a bit on his religious intoxication to make the separation of South
Sudan more onerous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Meanwhile, in Nigeria,
since 1977 when the northern segment of the ruling class decided to force
Sharia into the Nigerian Constitution, that part of the country has not known
peace for any length of time. It got
worse when a state governor from the region, who stands accused of marrying
underage girls into his harem, thought he needed to impress God; he made the
Sharia the law of his state, in clear contravention of elements of the Nigerian
constitution. He quickly set about
burnishing his credentials for paradise by having a few limbs hacked off a
handful of unfortunate citizens trapped in his state. Others in the region quickly followed suit. As is usually the case in such situations,
new guardians of the faith have emerged who insist that the state-inflected
piety is not deep or genuine enough.
They have been busy killing, maiming, and rendering hundreds of
thousands of innocent Nigerians refugees in their own country.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ordinary people, too,
are not left out of this intoxication spree.
If the constraints of office do not allow our inebriated leaders to go
the whole hog, the rot that they embody festers in the extreme in their
constituents. So God-intoxicated are
some African parents that they are willing to starve their own children to
death on account of ridding them of their witchery powers. There was the case of Nigerian parents who
drove a nail into their own child’s skull because their church had picked out
the poor child as a witch. So widespread
is the scourge of visiting unspeakable violence on children that there are now
non-governmental outfits in Nigeria and Ghana dedicated to the cause of taking
children in that would otherwise have been eliminated or severely abused by
their parents and guardians because the Holy Spirit had outed them as witches
or some other malevolent spirits. Our
intellectuals, among other duties that they perform, go on interminably about
the intrinsic religiosity of the African, how religion pervades the very air
that we breathe in every nook and cranny of the continent. I doubt that any continent comes anywhere
close to Africa in the multitudes of spirits that inhabit it and the
preponderance of them are evil! God must
have released all of the legion of the fallen spirits from heaven on condition
that they all relocate to Africa and other places mostly populated by black
folk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This intoxication
extends to Islamic ruling parties in countries that have recently overthrown
dictatorships. Such parties mistake
electoral victories, however slim, for mandates to impose what they are
convinced is God’s word on their long-suffering peoples, whether the latter
were open to this course or not.
Imposing God’s word meant rolling back, in God’s name, the gains that
had been made by women in such countries where women’s right to equality with
men is concerned. This has meant
widespread sexual harassment for women in the countries concerned, suppression
of heterodox views and, on occasion, violence against those who are held to
have crossed God’s lines in their behaviour or their thought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In other countries,
God-intoxicated rulers enact laws criminalizing homosexuality. They thereby ensure an open season on the
most vulnerable sections of their citizenry and make it impossible for their
homosexual compatriots to have any reasonable expectations of equal citizenship
in the lands of their births. In those
situations, the law-makers and the religious leaders drink the same strong
stuff for shared chalice that makes them absolutely incapable of common
consideration for the sheer humanity of those they are so quick to demonize,
regardless of what they think of the behaviour of their fellow citizens.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">No cause will be served
by my multiplying instances of God intoxication all across Africa. I hope that the preceding sections show the
reach of the scourge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">God is not supposed to
be moved by good works. At least, so say
the protestant Christian denominations.
The Catholic Church and Islam may appear to suggest that good works
might augment one’s eligibility for entry into paradise. But not even they say that our piety and
demonstrations of our commitment to God while we are on earth alone will
do. In all, to think of all our
activities in God’s name as capable of impressing and enhancing our standing
with God is, if I am not mistaken, adjudged blasphemous. To think that they do is to hint at God
taking bribes to bestow rewards on us mortals.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Even I know enough of
God-talk not to assume that Africans stand to gain any favours because of our
God intoxication. Yet, even granting
this, one must be astonished at the distance between Africans’ prostrate
position in the world and Africans’ much-vaunted love of God. In other words, however one looks at it, the
showers of blessing that are supposed to attend the lives of those who worship
God are nowhere in evidence in Africa.
Worse still, the sheer beneficence that is supposed to attend the earthly
being of God’s children is not a feature of the African world. Not even the sheer having of life and
sustaining it show any hint of divine munificence: Africans routinely have the
shortest life expectancies on planet earth!
I am suggesting that it is not even given to Africans to hang around
long on God’s earth. Our babies die in
their infancy. Our adolescents die in
large numbers before full adulthood. Our
adults move on in what would be middle age in better-circumstanced
societies. Few Africans ever enjoy the
privileges of old age spent in relative comfort. Certainly, some might see all this as
instances of God showing love by calling us early to heavenly bliss. I beg to differ.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I cannot hold God
responsible for our predicament. I have
no interest in turning this into a discussion of the perennial issues of
theodicy. All I am saying is that one
cannot look at Africa and say with honesty and candor that human life there
manifests anything that resembles love for the creatures that inhabit that
space. This is why I came to the
conclusion, sadly but firmly, that God cannot be said to love Africans. This judgment is without prejudice to God’s
relationship with other segments of humanity.
I speak only from my exploration of and familiarity with the African
situation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Here are a few other
dimensions to support my case. It is now
common place to talk about the global dimensions of slavery. Slavery is widely distributed across the
globe and we can only talk about different adaptations of the practice. This is increasingly becoming the accepted
wisdom on the phenomenon. I beg to
differ. The European Slave Trade,
otherwise known as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the slavery that it
spawned in the New World, specifically in the United States, has no peer in
human history: it was <u>racialised</u> and its victims were turned into <u>chattel</u>,
<u>things</u>, with no more quality attached to them than the farm implements
and animals that they were lumped with in the accounts of their owners. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I start with slavery
and the Euro-American slave trade because it inaugurated the place of Africa and
Africans in the global imaginary that continues to structure the world’s view
of Africa, Africans, and African phenomena.
At the heart of it is the fundamental denial of the humanity of the
African. Given the global distribution
of slavery and slave trade, how did Africans become the victims of a sui
generis one the impact of which continues to burden Africans with a need always
to push back against the denial of our common membership of the human community
along with everyone else? What kind of
love, God’s or any other, selected us for this unprecedented type of slavery? Everyone else suffered the ravages of some
kind of slavery or the other; only we got saddled with the burden of <u>chattel</u>
slavery. This demands attention, if not
explanation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">When Christianity came
back to Africa in the nineteenth century, especially in West Africa, it was
with a promise to help Africans become whole again after the ravages of the
European slave trade. Helping Africans
to become whole was seen as a way to expiate Christianity’s guilt in having
helped to construct the slavery house of horror. This period did not last long and the
Africans who had thought that Christianity would be their vehicle to ensuring a
better future for their continent spent the rest of that fateful century
battling new colonial and Christian overlords who were determined to hold
Africa down and back. The progress that
could have been made through freewheeling theological discourse—after all,
God’s mind is not simple to know—was stymied.
Is it any accident that our contemporary Christianity does not evince
the robust theological debates, discourses, and controversies that enable
Christianity to remain dynamic and, most important of all, acutely aware of the
insufficiency of the tools with which we mortals, perforce, seek to know and
disseminate God’s word?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Unfortunately, in
today’s Africa, our high priests have turned blasphemy into liturgy and they
now lay claim to powers that are beyond the ken of ordinary humanity: <u>the
gift of infallibility</u>. And
infallible they must be when they insist that they know what God wants and who
will or will not be saved on the Day of Judgment. It does not much matter whether they are
Christians or Muslims. A Nigerian
Cardinal is so sure that God speaks through him, but not his Pope, when he
commends the Nigerian government for criminalizing homosexuality. It does not occur to His Eminence to share
the humility of the Pope, the only member of the Catholic Church vested with the
gift of infallibility and then only with respect to certain matters of
doctrine, not on who deserves to be called ‘sinner’ and therefore unworthy of
God’s grace. Intoxication will do that
to you.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The case of the African
branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion is much worse. It would have been funny were it not so
tragic. It would be presumptuous of me
to suggest that the prelates of the Anglican Communion in Africa do not know
the history of their doctrine or that of the faith tradition and its institutional
form—the Church—of which theirs is a mere denomination. That they routinely ignore this history and
its doctrinal vortex is bad enough. That
they would turn their office into infallible commissions and invest their
pronouncements with what often sounds like God’s own must make us wonder how
they could continue to claim fidelity to their calling or their faith or even
to the author of their faith: the Christ.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To begin with, there is
only one historical reason that we have more than one church today in the
world: controversy and divergence over the meaning of God’s word and who ought
to have magisterial control over its meaning and its dissemination. There was this monk named Martin Luther who
insisted that the orthodoxy into which he had been socialized and the rightness
of which he was sworn to in his ministry was untenable. The Reformation ended the unicity of the
Church in the Western section of Christendom.
I refrain from commenting on the ever fractious history of Christianity
from its very inception. There is a
reason why non-Catholics belong to a huge pool of denominations called
‘Protestants’. What bears emphasis is
that the cleavages in the Church have always turned on contestations over the
meaning of the word of God.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The case of
non-Anglican churches in Africa—Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists,
etc.—within the protestant fold is a bit more tragic. Their origins lie in specific reactions to
orthodoxies. As usual, their African
editions either do not know this or cannot be bothered to take their genealogies
seriously. We know that if the Roman
pope would just have allowed the English monarch to do as he wished with his
women, there would not have been a Church of England to start with. But even as the closest to the Roman Catholics
among protestant denominations, the Anglican Church has not lacked fundamental
contestations over the meaning of the word of God. These contestations are particularly poignant
for their impact on our experience as black or African peoples in the last half
a millennium since we have been imbricated in the web of post-Reformation
Christianity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">For almost 400 years,
the Church—Catholic and Protestant—provided theological justification for the
traffic in Africans that later wisdom has called a crime against humanity. Their parsons not only blessed the slave
ships; they served as unrepentant chaplains on the ships and on the
plantations. They worked assiduously to
steel the slaves in quietism and obedience to evil concocted and practiced by
their owners to the eternal shame of those priests and their lineages. Just as it was hypocritical then for those
vicars to preach the equality of all humans before God as God’s children while,
simultaneously, actively cooperating in the subversion of the humanity of some
of God’s children, so it is now for our cardinals and primates who are actively
conniving at the subjugation and brutalization of another group of God’s
children in our own day. And just as
Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, in our day, have had to
distance themselves from and apologise for the theological expostulations of
their forebears now exposed for what they are—special pleading on behalf of
power—so do I envisage future descendants of our present-day vicars-to-power
disowning the wisdom of their parents that seems so obvious today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I do not expect
God-intoxicated prelates, alfas, and imams, to realize how arrogant their
pronouncements are and how their inebriation makes them unaware of how
ungodlike their behavior is. Worse
still, African protestants are too God-intoxicated to recall that the
phenomenon of African-instituted churches was precisely the result of Africans
refusing to concede that there is only one way to be ‘Church’ and that when all
is said and done, each one of us, as believers, is struggling to make sense of
the word of God and that any human being arrogating to him or herself the
ultimate capacity to decipher God’s word in the flesh is the chief of fools and
blasphemers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Again, there is no
surprise there: inebriation makes a fool of the wisest among us while it
lasts. The Anglican Communion in Nigeria
may wish to reacquaint itself with the wisdom of Henry Venn, Ajayi Crowther,
and James Johnson. As things stand at
the moment, they seem to be more in the cast of those who drummed Crowther out
of office for his reluctance to play God when it came to the sinner status of
his African converts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">May I remind our
Churchmen that the lack of the gift of humility led the Church to sanctify
slavery and, later, Apartheid in South Africa.
I have no doubt that when the intoxication shall have passed—remember,
the Church back then, too, was high on God, claiming to be doing God’s bidding
in blessing slave ships and concocting theological justifications for slavery
and oppression—future inheritors of the faith would be busy apologizing for the
moral bankruptcy of their forebears. In
the same way, the Church in Africa today will, in future, be held in the same
contempt that we now bestow on the previous Churches that connived at the
subjugation of common humanity in their respective domains. History is yet to provide us with an example
of the exaltation of those who helped in the cause of the degradation of our
humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In sum, I am arguing
that it is an index of the absence of love that I am talking about that <u>none</u>,
repeat <u>none</u>, of the progressive life-affirming tendencies of Islam and
Christianity of the last century found its way to Africa. All the while that Latin America was
inventing Liberation Theology and turning the Church into the scourge of
oppressive regimes in much of South and Central America, the African Church—Catholic
and Protestant—remained firmly ensconced in the corridors of secular
power. Our Imams are no different. Pseudo-orthodoxies reigned and still do. Caliphate Islam allied to Palace Christianity
ensure that in the post-independence period, the two world religions have
educated Africans to abjection, ministered to the powers that be, and abetted
unspeakable evils all across the continent.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">How could a people who
are beneficiaries of God’s love be cast in theological deserts with no oasis of
liberation in the vicinity? What they
got instead are snake-oil salesmen and women who are peddling salvation bottled
in mindless drivel, stacked on bookshelves, and oozing from their pulpits and
minarets. How badly have we transgressed
to deserve this earthly damnation?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Our continent is now
hostage to intellectuals for whom the life of the mind is a sin. Talk of God-intoxication! They have surrendered all to God. Unfortunately, only people who are
God-intoxicated would think that submission to God means vacation of that which
theists of all stripes insist is God’s peculiar gift to us among all of God’s
creation: the gift of Reason. Our scientists
seem to have given up on discovering the underlying principles of all that
exists in ways parallel to how our religious leaders have abandoned theology,
the science of deciphering the Reason of God!
We are training generations of Africans who will not merely stagnate in
comparison with the rest of humankind but are actually regressing by leaps and
bounds.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Where’s the love that
our belonging to God promises? Where
shall we get a break? When shall we get
a break? Who shall give us a break? Maybe if we would break free from our
addiction to God, we might begin to mimic the lives of those marked by God’s
love: good lives led in decent environments, with great hope for the future,
love for all of God’s creation, and respect for their being in their
singularity and complexity. That, I
submit, will be the best demonstration of love, God’s or whoever else’s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Published in <a href="http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/90438">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/90438</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-85950811159809887802014-11-12T19:32:00.001-08:002014-11-12T19:32:38.557-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<u>AFRICA’S MENDICANT
RULERS AND THEIR INTELLECTUAL ENABLERS</u><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
There is no nice
way of stating an ugly truth. As at this
writing, the entire continent of Africa, from Cape to Cairo and all points in-between,
is under the rule of mendicants enabled by a coterie of intellectuals who are
either in profound denial or otherwise think there is something inevitable
about Africa’s begging ways in world affairs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
When the idea of
this piece first occurred to me about four years ago, I thought that being
beggars was a recent development brought about by the devastating consequences
of military and one- party misrule combined with ill-timed, not well
thought-out, and poorly implemented Structural Adjustment Programmes of the
eighties of the last century. Then, to
my utter shock and chagrin, I found that since independence, Africa has, for
the most part, been a continent of beggars led by mendicant rulers and
intellectual enablers who have already reconciled themselves to the fact of
Africa’s permanent position at the bottom rung of the human ladder. Maybe if we studied more the writings of our
philosophers and other thinkers, we would have a better sense of the
continuities, especially the unfortunate ones, in our history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Here is an
example. In an address delivered to the
4<sup>th</sup> Summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity held in
Kinshasa on 12<sup>th</sup> September, 1967, Obafemi Awolowo, one of Africa’s
foremost uncelebrated philosophers, told his colleagues: “Today, Africa is a Continent of COMPETING
BEGGAR NATIONS. We vie with one another
for favours from our former colonial masters; and we deliberately fall over one
another to invite neocolonialists to come to our different territories to
preside over our economic fortunes.” [<u>Voice of Courage: Selected Speeches of
Chief Obafemi Awolowo</u>, vol. 1 (Akure: Fagbamigbe Publishers, 1981), p. 29]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Awolowo was quite
alert to the danger that habituation to begging posed to the realization of the
“unexceptionable and admirable aims” of the Organisation then to harness “‘the
natural and human resources of our Continent, for the total advancement of our
peoples in all spheres of human endeavour’, and of uniting all the African
States to the end that the welfare and well-being of all our peoples can be
assured.” He added that the “freedom,
equality, justice and dignity for our people impel us to [a] course of action”
designed to secure the stated aims.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
It is obvious
that, as at the time he spoke, Awolowo did not think that what he observed was
going to become a way of life almost half a century after his address. He probably was convinced that his fellow
leaders knew better than to turn what, a scant seven years after the greatest
number of African countries got independence, must have been a pragmatic
necessity into a way of life. He also
was convinced that Africa had the wherewithal to turn around, over time, the
ugly situation that he had described with such pith. One principal resource he knew was essential
if the lofty aims of the OAU were to be attained were intellectuals who would
beat the path out of the thicket of ignorance, disease, and hunger that
threatened Africa’s populations.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Lending credence
to our interpretation is his warning: “We may continue and indeed we will be
right to continue to use the power and influence which sovereignty confers, as
well as the tactics and manoeuvres which international diplomacy legitimatises,
to extract more and more alms from our benefactors. But the inherent evil remains—and it remains
with us and with no one else: unless a
beggar shakes off and irrevocably turns his back on, his begging habit, he will
forever remain a beggar. For, the more
he begs the more he develops the beggar characteristics of lack of initiative,
courage, drive and self-reliance” (p. 30).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Awolowo was not
alone in thinking that Africa had the requisite mix of visionary leaders and
intellectual cadres who would quickly work to exorcise the “inherent evil” of
begging and proceed to exploit Africa’s resources to restore the dignity of
Africans both at home in the continent and in its global Diaspora. How wrong we were!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Unfortunately, few
post-independence rulers were visionary and even fewer were those with any
appreciable intellectual heft. And even
those with any intellectual heft happened to have ruled countries with limited
or no human and material resources. Rare
were those who matched their intellectual heft with visionary prowess. For the rest, we had leaders with mediocre
intellectual endowments which, by itself, would be bad enough. When this is combined with the fact that
rather than being visionaries, many of them were blinder than bats, or could
barely envision heights higher than what they had accepted as their
divinely-ordained prostrate position, it is easy to see how inexplicable it was
that we ever expected great deeds from them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Begging became a
way of life. African leaders did exactly
what Awolowo warned against: they reconciled themselves to being the
self-appointed beggars to the world using “the power and influence sovereignty
confers, as well as the tactics and manoeuvres of international diplomacy” to
extract more alms from benefactors whom they played against one another. While they thought they were securing
advantages, they were busy driving the continent into the ground and themselves
into permanent abjection among the world’s peoples. It did not matter whether they sat atop
one-party states or were military rulers.
They, one and all, never thought that Africa could create
self-sustaining economies that could, in turn, make the continent a choice
place for humanity to want to come to and lead full lives.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The
intellectuals? The dominant ranks of
African intellectuals in the post-independence period could not, or were not
willing to, wean themselves from their intellectual fathers in the erstwhile
metropolitan centres where and in the ways of which they were schooled. They never thought to dismantle the structure
they inherited from colonialism and, in symbiosis with Africa’s mendicant
rulers, quickly settled into their beggar status vis-à-vis their former
colonial masters. They were content to
depend on handouts to run their research and their institutions. They never thought they were good enough
until they were recognized in the metropole.
They did not see anything wrong with making the rounds of the
Foundations and other quasi-governmental sponsors in their colonizers’
countries to fund their research, support their journals, and generally provide
them with a reason for living and working.
Fundamentally, they did not talk amongst themselves, or with one
another, either within their own countries or within the continent. Like their political counterparts, they were
all too happy to extract more alms by playing one side of the donor community
against the other.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
The continent is
littered with wreckages of theories, blueprints, and other intellectual
artifacts donated by competing alms givers without any regard for the
continent’s needs or what would allow its peoples to recover their
dignity. Whoever bought us lunch got to
tweak our minds. For some time in the
eighties of the last century, African intellectuals were busy globetrotting
thanks to sponsorship of the Unification Church.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Forty-five years
after his routine speech, Awolowo’s worst fears have become reality. We have been begging so long that we now have
leaders and intellectuals who are convinced that Africa cannot exploit her own
resources for her own ends: it has to farm it out to others; those others, at
the present time, being the Chinese. And
African intellectuals are proud to have the Chinese as a counterweight to the
meddlesome ways of that other category of alms-givers: so-called
Westerners. We have no trouble accepting
aid from countries that used to be our co-residents of the misery avenue of the
global village, including South Korea and India. We now have the apotheosis of this
regrettable trend in the opening, at the 2012 Summit of the African Union—the
successor outfit to the OAU where Awolowo issued his dire warning—in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, of a brand new headquarters for the organisation built for it,
from conception to the interior furnishings, by our Chinese benefactors. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
What more fitting
monument to the shamelessness of our rulers and intellectuals who run the AU
Commission than the fact that the meeting place where our current crop of
leaders would meet for a long time to come to plot Africa’s future is the
physical embodiment of alms!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
I am sure that my
fellow intellectuals who run the AU bureaucracy and the rulers who continually
meet in Addis Ababa in their spanking new headquarters are busy congratulating
themselves and thanking their stars for their new cozy digs. I hate to rain on their parade. But beggars in new alms-inflected digs are
still beggars. And therein lies Africa’s
shame in fulfilling Awolowo’s dire prophecy.
We can do better.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Published in </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> <a href="http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/90438">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/90438</a></o:p><br />
<br />
and<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/154708-africa-begging-continent-olufemi-taiwo.html">http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/154708-africa-begging-continent-olufemi-taiwo.html</a></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-86891397301222465352014-11-12T19:31:00.000-08:002014-11-12T19:31:58.171-08:00<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
THE AFRICAN UNION AND MORAL ABDICATION<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
African leaders want respect from the International
Criminal Court and the United Nations Security Council to take them
seriously. The lack of both is why the recent
extraordinary summit of the heads of state of the African Union gave for asking
that the Hague-based International Criminal Court spare President Uhuru
Kenyatta of Kenya the indignity of being tried for crimes against humanity by
it. They went on to accuse the
International Criminal Court of being a tool of Western imperialism and of
carrying out a witch-hunt against African heads of state, and so on. Their demands are that the Kenyatta trial be
stopped and delayed till he is out of office, five years down the road; and no
African president should be tried by the court as long as he or she is in
office.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
Some Africans might see reason with the African leaders
but there are many Africans like me who disagree vehemently with their
position. What just transpired at their
meeting in Addis Ababa is a moral abdication.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
The charge that the ICC is the centerpiece of a Western
plot is laughable. Did Western countries
coerce or trick 34 African countries into ratifying the protocols that
established the Court? Where were they
when Kenya repeatedly, till as late as this year, <u>asked</u> the ICC to take
over the prosecution of those accused of masterminding the post-election mayhem
in 2008? Kenya insisted that she did not
have the means to prosecute those suspected of sponsoring the carnage. Meanwhile, having been indicted before the
elections, both the president and his deputy, William Ruto, promised to
cooperate fully with the court, even if they won the election. They did not hint then that they would use
their elective to subvert the course of justice.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
The last point is important and it is why I consider the
latest demands from Africa’s leaders dangerous and embarrassing. The summit did not question the validity or
legitimacy of the charges brought against all the leaders indicted by the
court. Neither Kenyatta nor Ruto has
said that the charges against him were bogus or political in nature. Côte d’Ivoire’s ex-president, Laurent Gbagbo,
had to be forced out of office by French forces <u>after</u> a dithering
African Union would not insist that the results of legitimate elections be
respected by one of its members.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
Given that the legality of the charges is not questioned,
it means that what irks Africa’s leaders is that being in the dock does not
bode well for their image and their sense of their own importance. In short, they don’t look good in the
dock! They think that it is disrespectful to make
them answer to grievous charges of doing horrific injury to humanity in their
citizens. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
The Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, takes the
cake with his demand that African leaders enjoy immunity from prosecution as
long as they are in office. This should
not surprise anyone in the know since the immunity clause in the Nigerian
constitution has been used to shield rapacious office holders from being held
accountable for their misdeeds. And, of
course, should the world concur, it would enable more African crooks to run for
office for no other reason than to escape prosecution for criminal acts as used
to happen not too long ago in Russia.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
The irony is lost on our rulers that they are demanding
the world’s respect while they disrespect their citizens. What respect do African leaders have for the
more than 1,000 Kenyans who perished in the post-election violence? Or for the tens of thousands that have fallen
victim to Omer el-Beshir’s goons and killer squads in Darfur? Or the 3,000 or more Ivoirian citizens that
perished when Gbagbo elected to defy the expressed will of the plurality of
Ivoirian voters?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
African leaders and their intellectual enablers in the
cozy confines of their Chinese-donated palatial headquarters in Addis Ababa
think nothing of justice, forget respect, for the lowliest Africans killed,
maimed, or displaced by the acts charged under the indictments the prosecution
of which they are shameless enough to ask the world to delay. A people who worked so hard to force the
world to recognize the crime against humanity perpetrated against their
forebears should not deign to be seen making light of any similar allegations
against its own ranks. When it does, it
is an act of moral abdication.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
That African leaders were more agitated by a concern
with respect the same week that saw 350 or more Africans lose their lives at
sea fleeing their homeland, in this instance, Eritrea, with no public thought
given to that tragedy, is the best evidence that we have that African leaders
deserve no respect. They should get
none. Uhuru Kenyatta, a scion of
patriots some of whom have recently forced the perpetrators of unspeakable
violence against them to own up, must pay it forward. This is the only path to true respect. African leaders should earn it.</div>
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Published in <a href="http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/89685">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/89685</a></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-28996390026078125332013-07-18T18:22:00.000-07:002013-07-18T18:22:20.256-07:00PROGRESS AND DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Kenyan elections have come and gone. Although the losing presidential candidate challenged
the outcome of the elections in the Supreme Court of Kenya, prayed the court to
order a re-rerun, and failed. He decided
to abide by the outcome while promising to pursue his protest in alternative
ways that would not threaten the peace of the country. Ordinarily this should not call for
comment. Challenging election results is
not uncommon in jurisdictions that found the legitimacy of government on the
consent of the governed expressed through the instrumentality of the vote. That this mode of choosing governors is not
yet routine in Kenya and many other African countries is one reason that the
recently concluded elections attract notice.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Of greater significance is the sharp contrast between what
happened this time and the aftermath of the last time Kenyans went to the
polls. More than 1,000 deaths, hundreds
of thousands maimed and displaced and widespread destruction of property, were
what greeted the outcome of the last Kenyan elections in late 2007 and early
2008. Then, as now, the same candidate,
Raila Oginga Odinga, lost out in the presidential polls. The last time, mayhem broke out and this time,
it has not. That it has not is part of
what calls for comment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The absence of a resort to violence is a signal feature of
the slow but steady progress that African countries have been making in the
last twenty plus years when it comes to the installation of liberal democratic
regimes in the continent. It is
necessary that we acknowledge, if not celebrate, this progress or, at least,
chart it so that we have a benchmark for when there occur any regress.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In the specific Kenyan case, back in 2008, the opposition
was convinced that the legal system was a farce; the Supreme Court was packed
with cronies of the immediate past dictator of the country; and the part that
the instrument of his misrule was the same part that had had victory awarded to
it in the disputed elections. In case
anyone thought that this perception was limited to the opposition, it is
noteworthy that the parliament that was elected in that same election
eventually invited the international community to intervene to try those
suspected of master-minding the post-election violence at the International
Criminal Court at The Hague. Their
reasoning: Kenya did not have the political and judicial wherewithal to
investigate and bring to book those who had sponsored the violence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Since the 2007 election, a number of Kenyan politicians,
including both the president-elect and his running mate, have been indicted by
the International Criminal Court and their trial is pending. Regardless of the sham accusation being leveled
against the ICC for interference in Kenyan internal affairs, the effort to call
to account those who caused mayhem makes the reign of impunity less attractive
for African leaders in their conduct of public affairs in their countries. Simultaneously, it kindles in ordinary people
the expectation that offenders against human dignity and rights would no longer
go free.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Next, the Supreme Court of Kenya was reconstituted as were
the rest of the higher courts. They were
all subject to significant reforms towards ensuring that the judiciary stopped
being an arm of the executive in all but name only. Finally, a new constitution was written and
adopted in a referendum that made the phrase, ‘We the people’, ring true for
most of the adult population of Kenya for the very first time in her post-independence
history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Does anyone want to suggest that the Kenyan people were not
taking any notice of these seminal, salubrious developments? There is no more eloquent testimony of the
heed that ordinary Kenyans pay to the altered political and legal landscapes
than their willingness to, at least, allow their newly-minted impartial
arbiters to do their work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
To grow the trust of African citizens in the institutions
that govern their lives is the ultimate challenge that African countries have
faced since colonialism ended and they received what was, at best, flag
independence, and lack of practice at developing the requisite temperament for
the practice of representative government.
It is only now that, having lived and suffered under and held back by
myriad forms of misrule—one-party autocracies, military dictatorships,
misbegotten radical regimes—that cared nothing for the consent of the governed,
Africans are more committed than ever before to ensuring that they only live
under governments that they themselves have chartered with their votes, freely
cast.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
This is why I believe that the Kenyan elections merit
comment. More important, still, Kenya is
an exemplar of a trend that is discernible across the African continent. In 2008, the winner of the presidential
election in Ghana won by a whisker. The
losing candidate decided that four years was not too long to wait to unseat the
winning party. Before new elections were
held last December, the incumbent president died in office. He was routinely succeeded by his vice
president who went on to win the presidential election for the ruling
part. The losing candidate had issues
with the outcome: he headed to court.
There was no hint of any resort to self-help. In Zambia, in 2011, the incumbent president
lost in his re-election bid. He
routinely conceded defeat, lamenting: “we just did not reach the electorate
this time around.” Might I add that his
running mate, the current vice president of Zambia, is a white Zambian? Lastly, the people of Senegal in 2012 demonstrated
the power of the ballot by throwing out of office an incumbent who manipulated
the constitution and his handpicked Constitutional Court to declare himself
eligible for an unconstitutional third term.
The Senegalese people thought differently. In all the above cases, the usual expectation
in the American media of descent into chaos was denied. Africa is finally on the move,
democratically, that is.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
There is no more evidence of the unacceptability of
extra-constitutional rule in the continent than in the refusal of the African
Union and the regional grouping, Economic Community of West African States
[ECOWAS], to accept military coups in Mali and Guinea Bissau,
respectively. I conclude that we need to
acknowledge the progress towards the entrenchment of liberal democratic
tradition of organizing political life in the continent. I cannot wait for that day when elections in
Kenya and other countries would have become so ordinary that analysis like this
one would become superfluous.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-74331803981594220992013-05-20T17:37:00.001-07:002014-11-08T07:49:29.583-08:00<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">TIME TO RETIRE THE AFRICA PROGRESS
PANEL<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The latest,
2013, edition of the Africa Progress Report has just been released by the
Africa Progress Panel whose membership includes Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s
former president, and is headed by Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of
the United Nations. Intense media
attention has focused on the report’s lament that Africa has been receiving raw
deals in negotiations with foreign investors doing business in the continent,
especially in the mining sector.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Annan and
the other members of the panel contend that “Africa can better manage its vast
natural resource wealth to improve the lives of the region’s people by setting
out bold national agendas for strengthening transparency and
accountability.” Here is the question
that anyone who is keen to see Africa free from the trinity of ignorance,
hunger, and disease should ask is: if Africa can, why is Africa not doing so?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This is a question
that the press release [<a href="http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/index.php?cID=959">http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/index.php?cID=959</a>] does
not bring up, much less address. What it
contains, instead, are platitudinous calls on “African governments” to “improve
their governance and strengthen national capacity to manage extractive
industries as part of a broader economic and developmental strategy.” Additionally, the panel urged that “African
governments should put transparency and accountability at the heart of natural
resource policies, secure a fair share of natural resource revenue for their
citizens, and spread the benefits of this revenue via equitable public
spending.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">No doubt,
this would not be the first time that these exhortations have been offered to
African leaders. They are mere
platitudes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Why do
Africans and their leaders need a panel of eminent persons to know that they <u>should</u>
be doing what any people and their leaders should do, as a matter of course, in
the administration of their countries’ affairs: own their resources, exploit
them for their collective welfare and the common good while ensuring an
equitable distribution for all their citizens?
This is what happens in other continents. I do not see the disparate countries of Asia
evince a common desire of a similar nature.
Nor do we have similar exhortations directed at South American
countries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The very
existence of the Africa Progress Panel [<a href="http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/en/">http://www.africaprogresspanel.org/en/</a>] and its operation represent such a
curious anomaly. From the preceding
platitudes, the release segued into another familiar refrain of African life
and thought: begging. There are appeals
to outsiders to please have mercy on good Africans and not rob blind them when
they can. Okay, they did not quite put
it that way. They only asked that the
international community put in place mechanisms to help Africa stem the tide of
tax evasion and avoidance by foreign operators in Africa and for international
business to please “follow best practices on transparency, help build national
capacity, procure more products and services locally, and raise standards in
all areas of corporate accountability and responsibility.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In this
appeal to, this begging of, the international community to do for us what we
should be doing for ourselves is to be found the ultimate cause of Africa’s
failure to march in tandem with the rest of the world in more than half a
century of independence in most of the continent’s countries.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What was the
panel thinking? As we say in Yorùbá, if
you don’t take advantage of a fool when one is available, when do you think a
wise person would let you? Corporations
are not the Salvation Army. They are
capitalist contraptions and profit-making is their primary reason for
existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I hate to be
personal but neither Bono nor Sir Bob Geldof, a member of the Africa Progress
Panel, would retain their respective money managers were the latter to
consistently report diminishing returns on the investments of our dear
advocates of aid to Africa. That is, one
does not have to go the whole distance with Milton Friedman but I don’t think
that South Korea, with only three natural resources—iron ore, tungsten, and
seafood—became a global economic power by begging General Motors to play
nice. Nor have I found any record of
South Korea sharing her agency with Euro-American celebrities or taking her cue
from panels like the Commission for Africa struck by Tony Blair while he was
the British Prime Minister.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is almost
as if we Africans are afraid of agency, of owning our resources, our continent,
and being responsible for their fate. We
must be the only people who are happy to invite others to exploit our resources
on our behalf and pay us a fraction—however big it may look—of the earnings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To go back
to my initial question: if Africa can better manage its vast natural resource
wealth to improve the lives of its people, why is it not doing so? Why does it, with such distinguished leaders
as constitute the African component of the APP, not come up with a more solid
diagnosis for these repeated failures?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I
respectfully disagree with the claim that Africa can. For if it can, there is no evidence of it in
any part of the continent. We need a period of isolation from our “friends” in
the international community, especially the aid industry, the perpetual
commissions, panels, and the like, who all now cannot think of Africa except as
a place of need where donors and other do-gooders are perpetually relevant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Africa deserves
the rotten deals it gets. I can only
hope that the deals get more rotten in the years ahead. Agency is a very dangerous thing to
exercise. We have not taken our agency
seriously since colonialism short-circuited its expression when it aborted the
transition to modernity that Africans, under their own</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">steam, were executing in
the early part of the 19<sup>th</sup> century once slavery and the
trans-Atlantic slave trade ended.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
re-assumption of agency at the present time requires us to exhibit a different
attitude to our history that is nowhere evident in our current situation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">One of the
most egregious instances of Africa cooperating in its own abasement reported by
the APP involves “five deals between 2010 and 2012, which cost the Democratic
Republic of the Congo over US$1.3 billion in revenues through the
undervaluation of assets and sale to foreign investors.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Who is to
blame? The people who got the juicy
deals? I think not. Unless, of course, we believe that the
Congolese negotiators were victims of armed robbery or minors who were
unconscionably dispossessed of their resources, we must conclude that they were
fools who, as is usual, have been parted from their money. As bad as this sounds, what is worse is the possibility
that the Congolese negotiators knew what they were doing and were convinced
that what they got was the best they could get or was pretty much what they
think their resources were worth. And
that exactly is what the Congolese government has said in its push-back against
the panel’s charge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I ask: what
is new? The rain of unequal exchanges,
[apologies to Samir Amin], did not start beating Africans only yesterday. We did not only recently start making bad
deals. That Nigerians are eager to spend
their patrimony on Dubai kitsch is only the most recent equivalent of age-old
lack of self-respect that has been a part of our history beginning with the
trans-Atlantic slave trade. Back then we
traded whole human beings in their prime or on the cusp of it for half-drunk
bottles of whiskey, beads, and similar kitsch.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">A genuine
recovery of our agency and the self-respect that goes with it can only come
from our asking and answering the following questions: </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->why are we so
cheap? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Why are we so eager to
sell ourselves for nothing? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Why does it come so
easily to us to invite others to tell our story on our behalf and then complain
that they tell it so poorly? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><!--[endif]-->Why are we content to
have others exploit our resources and give us chump change at the end? </div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; text-indent: -0.25in;">Why does it come so
easily to us to barter our resources for other people’s kitsch, be those colour
televisions, smartphones, or automobiles?</span></div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When we
shall have answered these questions, we shall have made outfits like the Africa
Progress Panel irrelevant. A big bonus:
Africans would never have to endure another visit from Bono, Geldof, Jeffrey
Sachs, or Paul Collier. The last time I
looked, no Argentinian children were lining up to thank any of these men. Africa, end your shame! Only you can do it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Published in <a href="https://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=165556">https://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=165556</a></span></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7446357310528362065.post-55179805725219872382013-05-04T17:23:00.000-07:002013-05-04T17:23:09.990-07:00A CONTRARIAN’S DIARY<br />
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<br /></div>
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I have always been a contrarian. From as far back as I can remember in my
conscious life, the opposite standpoint has always been my default stance. It did not matter whether the context was a
family discussion or a meeting or just ordinary conversations with friends and
associates. In my younger days, I often
was the ‘<u>abenugan</u>’ in many contexts and, in fairness, given my basic
impatient nature, too many times, I knew what was wrong with a position and
voiced it before I permitted myself to appreciate what was right about it. It requires no deep imagination to see that
it was not a position that endeared me to many nor was it one that enabled me
to make positive impressions on people at first meetings. Those with whom I have been priviledged to
have relations that survived my often brusque introductions to them have, over
the years, found me worthy of their friendship which means living with my
contrarian proclivities.</div>
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Have I always known that I was a contrarian? Absolutely no! Had I known that, I surely would have had a
less unhappy pubescence and early adulthood.
Only with the approach of middle age and the never-ceasing self-doubt
that is one of the hallmarks of a contrarian have I been able to come to an
awareness of, and be at peace with, being a denizen of the contrarian
community.</div>
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Needless to say, I cannot say that I became a contrarian
because I knew what being a contrarian is or how to become one. This is one situation where lived experience
led back to a concern with definitions; where the deed was enacted before it
was formulated in words.</div>
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Being at peace with always or most often being opposite,
fully aware of being in error on not a few occasions while being cognizant that
today’s wisdom might turn out to be next year’s folly, I propose to write a
column in which, my editors permitting, I share with my readers my opposite
takes on events, ideas, processes, practices, institutions, and
personalities. As should be obvious by
now, this column does not proceed from a need to be provocative. If what it offers is ever provocative, it is
not so by design. I call it as I see it
and, given the preceding rendering of who I am, it is to be expected that it
would often end up dancing to the beat of a different drummer.</div>
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I am fully aware that ours is not a society that is very
kind to heterodoxy or one that celebrates difference. If you often and unwaveringly oppose accepted
wisdom in our society, your associates—family, friends, coworkers, students—never
fail to remind you that the one whose head is used to crack the coconut never
gets to partake of it; that no one is an island; that the occasional opposition
is okay, and so on. Yet, we all know
that there is no instance in history where a society, culture, or civilization
has moved forward with widespread conformity.
Humanity has progressed thanks largely to its meager supply of
never-say-die oppositionists. </div>
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No, I do not seek to don the mantle of a
world-changer. But if what I write in
these pages forces even a handful of readers to become aware that more than one
road leads to the town square and be desirous of exploring those alternate
routes, my purpose shall have been served.
If in the process I lead my readers to some cul de sacs, I offer my
apologies in advance; but that will be par for the course. I can only hope that that does not happen too
often and when it does, dear readers, you can be sure that it is not part of
the plan.</div>
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For the rest, I look forward to a feast of ideas to
which my readers are expected to contribute even as they partake of what is on
offer.</div>
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<br /></div>
That It May Be Well With Our Worldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03466770097723323656noreply@blogger.com1