By Adagbo Onoja
It must take extraordinary
faith to talk about 2015 if one is a Nigerian and an African. This is not just
because Nigeria is confronted by a horrific insurgency or because governance
has gone mad again in Nigeria.
It is also because, as those who might have read
or would soon read The Economist‘s
“The World in 2015” would find out, there is basically nothing to cheer in the
section on Africa. Someone may ask why we need to bother about what The Economist said or didn’t say about
Africa.
But that would be missing the point. For, the point is that the winner in
today’s world is the one who has the narrative. We should, therefore, not only
be interested in every platform where narratives are on parade, we should also seek
the capacity and the institutions that deal with narratives. This is more so
that Africa still lacks the voice and the organs through which to articulate
own narratives, internet or no internet.
But in the case of the edition
of The Economist in question, the
tragedy is not so much from the magazine but from the framing of the African
crisis by the Africans. Paired against a frightening piece there by a
non-African titled “The Coming African Debt Crisis” is another piece titled
“The Rise of Africapitalism”.
It is by Tony Elumelu, a face of emergent
capitalism in Nigeria. Underlying the piece is the mentality that seems to say
‘we too will get there’, the ‘Africa Rising’ stuff. But can we just get there
like that without doing what others who made it from our type of circumstance
did?
Elumelu might be right. He has
a fellow traveller in Dambisa Moyo, the activist Zambian economist once
described by the CNN as the ‘poster child’ of the new Afro-optimism industry.
Both speak the language of ‘Africa Rising’ though with slightly different
angles of emphasis.
Who am I to argue that ‘Africa Rising’ discourse isn’t
important in the struggle for a new Africa? Moreover, it’s always great to see
one of ‘us’ being part of the conversation in an edition of The Economist or the CNN but while the
guys behind The Economist or CNN know
about the essential illiberalism of capitalism at this point in history, both
economically and politically, it is doubtful that ‘ours’ appreciate such. So, ‘ours’
ends up prompting us to ask, which Africa are we are talking about? In other
words, their conceptual jump off point almost always becomes part of the
problem.
In an informed reductionism, I would
isolate Nigeria and South as the referents that capture Africa. Nigeria is the
nerve centre you cannot talk of Africa’s progress without taking into
consideration. This is not because of any national pride but simply a
restatement of its irreplaceability. No other country on the continent has that
demographic profile, the sort of demographic stature that enabled China to do
what South Korea, for example, cannot do because it lacks it.
Countries do not
need to have China’s billion plus population or vast territory but it is
difficult for countries to go beyond a certain threshold if they are just 40 –
60 million citizens. So, one should be right in selecting Nigeria as the quantitative model and South Africa as the one that
best tells the African story in History.
But, in both countries, decline
is the story. And with decline comes a continuation of the disturbing heritage
of suffering in Africa. Dambisa Moyo does not think the dominance of stories of
wars, diseases, corruption and poverty in the narrative of Africa is warranted.
We all used to think so and still do, especially the way this went on in the
global media. But we also think that there cannot but be a relationship between
these stories and the reality, especially as they come out of Nigeria and South
Africa today. Interestingly, the stories are no longer in the global media but
in the WWW, especially the ones run by ‘us’.
How would a blogger in
Maiduguri not reflect poverty in, say, northeastern Nigeria where, for five
years on, an insurgency has reigned basically unchallenged? And how would diseases
not follow that? And we are talking of an insurgency in an African super power
state, if there is anything like that. If such a state cannot overwhelm or
quickly but skilfully negotiate an end to an insurgency as threatening as Boko
Haram to its very fabric, then what are we talking about?
Minus Nigeria, Africa stands
with difficulty. That’s the claim above. Yet, here is Nigeria brought down on
its knees by a curious combination of factors, chief among them the quality of
political leadership and the consequential inability of Nigeria to rally the
kind of interests and forces around itself to deal with a threat, irrespective
of who is sponsoring it and for what purposes. The same Nigeria that was able
to do so several decades earlier when faced with a similar threat.
Over two hundred Nigerian girls
forcefully taken away from the country for nearly half a year and there is no
rescue? How can we ever surmount this sort of historical humiliation of a
country of Nigeria’s stature in the 21st century? Add that to a
number of things happening in Nigeria which are beyond anybody’s imagination. It
is exactly the sort of situation the late Professor Claude Ake referred to in
his work, “how politics under-develops Africa”.
Again, the tragedy is that the
story is not qualitatively or fundamentally different across much of Africa. In
both Nigeria and South Africa, patriotic national labour organisations that
anchored the struggle against Structural Adjustment Programme, (SAP) in the
late 1980s have all collapsed. Some people might argue that South Africa has so
much to celebrate between 1994 and 2014.
Such arguments would hold water
substantially. Whatever one may against the ANC, it is still a national
liberation movement in power. South Africa remains a global African statement
on reconciliation and management of cultural diversity. It has a far more
vibrant knowledge industry than most other African countries, with universities
of global reckoning.
The Mandela brand is exclusively it’s as much as Mandela
is a global citizen. South African wines are served even on state ceremonies
across the world. Whatever one may say too, every leader of South Africa since
1994 had the right political education and induction.
Jacob Zuma, the incumbent
president might not have gone to Oxford or the University of London’s School of
Oriental and African Studies but he has tendency grooming for power, his
current low performance rating notwithstanding. Above all, South Africa is the
face of Africa in BRICS, a very crucial achievement. But how far can we talk
about these if the ANC government is enmeshed in corruption as we read in
newspapers and on the internet and if COSATU is crumbling?
Again, the tragedy is that the
kind of solidarity that existed between Nigeria and South Africa at some point
in the recent past doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Under Obasanjo and Thabo
Mbeki, there was a symbolically glowing togetherness between Nigeria and South
Africa and the necessary though subdued sparks when they engaged the G-8, for
example.
It is true that Obasanjo and Mbeki basically worked to give Africa the
unhelpful NEPAD, it is nevertheless true that they were not ideologically ignorant,
perhaps tactically naive that foreign investment could do the job without
asking an important question such as, where has capitalism ever taken roots
without the state?
In other words, they were correct to decide not to attack
globalisation. After all, is it not by globalisation that China undid the past
on such an amazing scale? However, the question Obasanjo and Mbeki didn’t ask
themselves is whether China could have done that if it didn’t have a
structurally intelligent machinery made up of a dedicated core of meritocrats
in control of state power?
But now, even the
Obasanjo-Mbeki level of Nigeria – South Africa interaction isn’t there. Yet,
this is when foreign military intervention in Africa is rising as well as local
insurgencies, all within the context of a so-called ‘War on terror’ framed in a
way that it can assume any shape.
So far, Cote d’Ivoire, Central African
Republic, Mali, Libya and Nigeria have or are experiencing insurgencies. This
is not to talk of DRC and Somalia/Kenya which have permanently been at war. These
cannot just be coincidences. In this regard, we should all aspire to read Professor
Horace Campbell’s oven fresh book titled Global
NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya.
So, we may join others in
welcoming 2015 but only because doing so demonstrates our determination to
survive against all the odds. But this determination must go beyond an ‘Africa
Rising’ stuff. ‘Africa Rising’, a very fascinating discourse is, nevertheless,
but a celebration of consumption, not of manufacturing of a sustainable nature.
Taking to it beyond its limits demonstrates a poor understanding of capitalism.
Yea, (foreign) investors all over the place but it is still up there in the
sky, not down here yet. Still, and apparently intoxicated by ‘Africa Rising’
brew, African political leaders have basically lost the opportunity to convert
the convergence of interests of global powers, particularly ‘China in Africa’
into anything transformative. Aside from the Africa Mining Vision, for
instance, the African agency is still not coming to globalisation with the
negotiating logic that positions it to define the agenda, using its strategic
advantage of being the ‘last frontier’. Rather, the convergence seems entertaining
to us. Welcome 2015!
ONOJA
is at the Global Governance programme at University College London.
No comments:
Post a Comment