Africans must wonder what the
next generation is going to use
to pay off the Chinese, the
Europeans and the Americans.
We are borrowing and spending
on foreign contracts like drunken
sailors and nobody listens to
those that are crying that we are
receding into another colonial
future. It was the chiefs that sold
us into slavery yesterday, it is the
turn of the politicians today.
While accumulating debts and
paying some off with dwindling
resources, they claimed it is for
the future of our children while
blind and selfish liars laugh to
foreign banks.
Our taste for everything that
looks unlike us or not made by
us shows no limit. The politicians
lead and create the consumption
index. In those days Africans
were selling gold in exchange for
mirrors, today we are selling
crude oil and losing highly
trained graduates in exchange
for foreign mega contract and
jobs that have marginally
contributed or improved our
development since
Independence. Until we have
locally serviceable infrastructure
and locally suited graduates to
our problems, our industrial
takeoff and job creation for our
youth will lag behind.
Graduates of our institutions of
learning and culture are the most
vulnerable since they don’t reflect
our thinking or philosophy
towards life. It is perfectly
acceptable for African
universities to compete with
foreign universities in sciences
but our experiments and study
groups do not have to be in the
same laboratories. It does not
have to be the same Bunsen
burners or the same test tubes in
elaborate laboratories built like
those at (MIT) Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. We do
not have to go out of the tropics
to learn about tropical diseases.
Our best example is training
lawyers in local cases, though
they pledge vigorous defense for
criminals.
Indeed universal intensively
trained engineers, doctors and
PhDs are more drawn to foreign
countries, when less suitably
trained can be better locally. The
Russians or the Chinese did not
pride or look up to foreign
universities as the benchmark for
their success but they do steal
foreign ideas and adapt them to
their own. Nobody is asking
Africans to rediscover slice bread
but a Continent that has been
deprived of it intellectual abilities
must meet and reconstruct its
educational system and culture
towards independent goals in
solving its local problem.
Fortunately, the solutions are in
our hands, not in our stars.
Africans have never been short
of men and women of ideas and
philosophies even in this new
century. Some of us were
privileged to have read Fagunwa,
Achebe, Soyinka, Albert Luthuli or
Nkrumah, Zik, Awo, Bello,
Mandela, Nyerere etc. But our
educated scholars would rather
quote Milton, Max, Adams,
Churchill and others whose
philosophies may be
comparatively good but actually
parallel to our indigenous
culture. They propel their
civilization to what it is today, not
ours.
We are not short of thinkers even
amongst our present professors
and politicians. Since power of
the politicians drives our budget
it is skewed to consumption of
others’ products and not to
home grown or made materials
from infancy to finished
products. Watch our politicians
talk, you wonder where their
ideas have been hiding but put
them in charge, they lapse into
self-indulgence chasing foreign
consumer materials creating
foreign jobs while neglecting us.
Let us pick on Sule Sanusi, the
Governor of Central Bank of
Nigeria as an example. One
would not believe this is a man in
charge of foreign exchange
devoted to consumption making
foreign money available to every
Bobo that wants to import
anything. The address or
presentations he makes are
opposite, squarely preaching
production encouragement in
allocation of our foreign currency
but in practice, Central Bank
allocation is for consumption.
Of course he is not the only one,
his comrades in this hypocrisy is
none other than Ngozi Iweala
and Segun Aganga, present and
former ministers of Finance.
Their whole brain, especially the
finance ministers are fabricated
in foreign countries and their
only way to Nigeria’s deliverance
is to take orders from World
Bank and International Monetary
Fund. They are rewarded by all
sorts of prizes, praises and
unreliable rating agencies as they
milk Nigeria for foreign interest.
One would think since Nigeria
has a highly home-educated
President, his advisers would be
biased towards indigenous
solutions to our economic
problems. No, he showed his
complex by relying on a former
Finance Minister that paid off
odious loans and penalties from
a poor African Country to the
richest nations on earth. Mind
you, American and British best
brains do not work for these
international bodies, unless they
have been used, spent and
retired. Indeed, some of their
best brains were beaten in class
by African students in their own
countries.
Since independence if each of
the ministers in African countries
were given a mission and
ordered a failure if they cannot
develop it from infancy or from
farm to finished product, Africa
would be exporting products not
humans, at least to other African
countries if not outside. Take
Nigeria as the leading producer
of cassava, what will it take
Sanusi to convince the President
to institute a program from
farms to supermarket or Iweala
to turn our oil into finished
product or Aganga to turn our
cotton and milk into lace and
table milk, instead of importing
same.
Sule Sanusi made more sense
than the other two even during
his presentation supporting the
removal of oil subsidies. Yet each
of them think the best place to
start is to ask poor people
already saddled with wages
nobody can live on, police check
points and toll gates leading to
higher transportation fare,
soaring food prices and dismal
infrastructure on the shoulders
of the poor to bear the brunt of
oil subsidy removal. Cowards
cannot face their colleagues first,
so they ask poor people for more
sacrifice that does not make as
much dent as bleeders of coffers.
If Sanusi, Iweala and Aganga are
so smart and daring, they could
have demanded sacrifices from
those powerful politicians and
the highest paid civil servants to
slash their privileges than create
foreign contracts. By the time it
reaches the poor folks to
sacrifice the subsidy on oil, at
least they would have been
satisfied that the cabals that
corner the subsidies have
disgorged their loot. Oh no. The
poor must pay first and keep on
paying. They cannot dare those
that sabotage Nigerian refineries
and import took picks, it is the
poor people they can dare.
They blame the attitude of
Nigerians for preferring foreign
products but never accepted the
fact that those Nigerians copy
and follow their tastes. Monkey
see monkey
do. It is easier to say oil subsidy
is not sustainable than to say
foreign monies that is not
printed in Nigeria cannot be
available to frivolous
consumptive tastes. Foreign
reserve is spent as if it is easily
replaceable. When in fact, all they
care about is how much they can
divert into their pockets before it
is exhausted. We are selling
ourselves out.