not the material expense, but things we treasure that won't survive in a developed society that we preserve in our 'half in-half out' colonial menality.


Industrializing doesn't mean building of nice roads, nice hospitals ect. It's a total and complete social tidal wave that changes everything around us and i wonder, for africans, a people who put tradition over everything else, are we willing to really take this step?
we've had road, we've had hospitals, and we can have more, the question for nigeria isn't the building of things, it's the maintainence. Keeping these things in tact require complete and total social change that i dont think we're willing to take.

for example.


Taxes: My dad brags that in Nigeria, a man is a man. You OWN everything you worked hard for, it belongs to you 100% and if the government wants you to do something as crazy as pay tax on a house, car or land your ancestors gave you you can slap any tax collector coming to insult your property and carry on with your business. Africa is an extremely free society, don't let the western statistics confuse you. in the west, you co-own all your property with the government.

The situation in africa is now this. People are demanding a government they don’t pay money to to assist them in living. Im sorry but if you’re proud that you don’t pay tax on the land around you, why will a government come and build a road for you on it? With who’s money? Don’t say oil either cause you didn’t drill that oil. A company did and quit frankly that money belongs to them 100% the same way your land and money belong to you 100%. Sadly that’s not the case. We have an unfair system where oil companies are dishing out their profits to the government, then using these profits to pay for the lives of people that refuse to pay taxes and follow the law.

If africa wants modern things, africans must pay modern tax. That means on your ancestors lands and so forth, the cost of a greater government is lesser independance.

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Markets: I already typed about this a long time ago. We have a system (the market system) for shopping that was invented in the dawn of african civilization, and we’re trying to use it to conduct modern business. In the old days we were substance farmers as was most of the world. People ate what they grew and sold the excess in small shacks at a designated ‘market’. In the modern world, this is holding us back SEVERLY.

Why has commercial farming failed in africa? Because africans are still growing everything they eat. For what they’re not growing they’re selling extras for chump change. This means every family has at least one food maker. If this is happening, we shouldn’t be suprised that retailers, commercial farms, modern farming, food security, and employment has avaded us. If all the substance farmers in a village made 20 dollars a day at the market, image all of them getting together, forming large commercial farms, and selling the larger produce on a global industrial scale, Then instead of having to hawk for money at a market, receiving a wage that may grant them 5 dollars and hour minimum.

This is how modern farming and commercial farming took off in other countries, at the expense of their own market systems. A modern nigeria cannot have traditional markets. Due to the fact that they are a 13th century institution in 2010, the problems the cause include
-instable and petty income. If you’re selling your ‘left overs’ as a living you’re not going to make enough to live in a modern society.

-population explosions. If too many people are forming too many farms they need more hands to work these farms. Therefore, farmers, whose small substance farms are too poor to employ workers, will have 10s of kids to insure production creating a larger burden on the next generation to feed all these people.

-poor quality control. No government can regulate a traditional market because it’s so informal. The result is people sell whatever they want, whenever they want how ever they want and unstable prices (bargaining). This leads to bootlegging, selling of fake products such as electronics and medicine, and contaminated or unsanitary food.

-Sprawl. Again, markets can’t be regulated, people set up shop whereever and then the rest of the town floods into that area to buy things. The poor also build make shift homes to be near their source of income.  The result is a shanty sprawl. Which is the situation in almost all major african cities. This brings with it disorganization, inadequate living, crime and corruption.

-marginalization of women. These markets consist of two sellers. 1. old men, 2. able bodied women. When kept in the market, women are limited in their ability to expand economically and compete as modern citizens. Nobody has ever gotten rich selling akara and fried yams.


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Traditions: All tribes have traditions that hold back development. The hausa/fulani have to wonder where cronism, oligarchy and neopotism is so rampant in their areas. The answer is that their traditional authority is so powerful in their areas that inorder to be powerful you have to go through it. Social mobility in the north is nearly non existent and feudalism is still the order of the day. All the societies of europe knew to develop they must end their feudal practices and the minute those countries did that, the began developing.

The hausa are not alone. Obas in yoruba land contribute to cronism, decreased social mobility, and corruption. Benin is the most corrupt state in the union and is also the most oriented around a single monarch. The igbo system of NOW having Igwes and Ezes hand out titles as opposed to earning them by specific task has completely corrupted the entire elite class and killed the nobility of the institution it’s self. Every Igbo man is now a chief no matter how dishonorable they are, how little they achieve and how much they’re hated in their community and all they have to do is pay for the title that says otherwise.

Every tribe has traditions that stagnate it’s people. The tradition of marrying girls when they’re young keeps women from reaching their potential. When they should be focusing on their future careers, they’re instead forced to think about marriage, husbands and limit themselves to whatever roof that husband provides. The earlier women marry the less egalitarian the society gender wise and with women being half or more of every population, no development can come from their stagnation.

Gender equality is most prevalent in Igbo society, then Yoruba, and lastly Hausa/Fulani and if i post the GDP of the states of these ppl, they go in that exact order.

Development isn't about the effiecient of our government per say. The most efficient governments to ever reign in nigeria were he ancient and traditional ones and they didn't herald modern societies.


There's a painful parting with the past that EVERY developed society has had to undergo in order to develop.



Japan was a country based on the traditions and reverence of the Samurai. The Samurai was not only a warrior, but a mentality and a way of life that breed a noble and tranquil society of honor and discipline unmatched in other parts of the world. The Samurai was the eqivalent of the ancient titled men of Igbo land. Then, when Japan realized it had to develop, it shed the single most important thing to its people, the Samuari and with it everything it means to be Japanese. Shedding the samurai allowed for the building of a modern army, greater social mobility, greater social equality, social access to learning, greater military power and influence, free suffrage, and greater rights for all japanese. The samurai, to defend all that was Japanese charged and machine guns with swords to met their deaths in vein. machine guns fired on them by the very Japanese people born to honor them.




Turkey was a nation that conquered the known world on the back of Islam. Forever indebted to the faith the was the vanguard for the islamization of the globe and maintain it's place as the guardian of the star and cresent for 800 years. Suddenly, the countries around it had began to surpass Turkey in power and influence, and soon decended on the Ottoman Empire like vultures circling a dying old prey. It took the worlds greatest empire in its time falling for Kamal Atatruk to decide to take the country on the course of modernization. The result Trukey and the Islam it was built on had to go their seperate ways. Today if we proposed this to the northerners there would be mayhem and outrage, but peoples more significant to the islamic cause have done more at the expense of islam. After secularizing Turkey, the Republic was born and now Turkey is a modern powerful state. For development, the Turks challenged their god.

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Most people confuse industrialization with westernization. This is far from reality. In fact, the west too had to kill the culture which raised it in order to reach development and industrialization. The traditional west was know as Christendom, everything, from how you eat to how you slept was based on the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church even owned KINGS. It would shock someone of that era to see that the modern west is the least religious, most secular, atheist, or even anti-religion sector of the globe today. People that think westernization is the same as industrialization fail to realize this. What is valued in the west today was loathed in the west of old. The traiditons that built the west of old, Monarchy, Christianity, Knighthood, and Feudalism, are totally non existent in the west today or hollow shells of what they once were.

The West shed its traditions to the extent of, during the French revolution, the king who was seen as God’s representative on earth had his head cut off and displayed to the public. It was once wrote that upon that minute ‘the french people turned their back on God, and a new France was born’.

The reason i've made this post is because i dont know if africans are willing to make the sacrificies for what they want out of their countries. Im not saying that they should or shouldn't though. Without the market system and title system all of Igbo land will crumble and fade, though from its ruin a more modern society is bound to raise from it. The countries of southern africa are the most developed simply because they tradition was taken from them by force. the countries of the sahel the least developed because colonization hardly touched them. Its a double edged sword and we should slow down before swinging the word 'modernization' around because you haven't calculated the blow back. A modern africa is not the africa we know and love.

In your analysis you have Identified one of the main cultural heritage that drag us back to ancient world. While Africans still prides themselves in the same old primitive cultures, the rest of the world have discarded them and moved on. Once, I described some of our culture as primitive in a wrong (right) place and I nearly got the beaten of my life in Nigeria for daring to insult our way of life. However, a careful thinking and observation, can attest to the fact that they are primitive.

Take for instance, the Emir and Oba systems we have. It is not uncommon to find people that are called servants of the king. But in the real sense, these people are slaves. They do not earn a living or have any independence of making choice about their lives nor aspiration for a better life. It is is more shocking that in the North, servants are inherited. Even the mode of dressing of these our called Traditional Rulers reflect the stone age. Prior to the develop of cloths, all human dress in either leaves or animal skin. But as humans discover clothes they shed those things and embrace the civilization. Africans, however, stuck to the same stuff. Claiming to be the only people with culture. This is no culture. This has been the way of life in the ancient civilization. We are just a living musuem for the amusement of the rest of the world.