AFRICA’S MENDICANT
RULERS AND THEIR INTELLECTUAL ENABLERS
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.
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.
Here is an
example. In an address delivered to the
4th Summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity held in
Kinshasa on 12th 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.” [Voice of Courage: Selected Speeches of
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, vol. 1 (Akure: Fagbamigbe Publishers, 1981), p. 29]
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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