Africans: Africa’s Greatest Barrier

Published on 3rd October 2011

Africa's answers lie in Africa's people Photo courtesy
Until and unless we Africans become assertive with decisive leadership on how to rule ourselves and manage our resources, we shall continue to blame foreign powers of exploitation and fueling our conflicts. The barrier to our development is intrinsic not so much external.

Most African apologists proffer a dark picture of Africa  to gain sympathy. At multinational organizational assemblies, our diplomats are often depict the continent as very poor and unable to absolve itself from the clutches of economic decadence. Such views are outdated orthodoxy. We had better blame ourselves. While I do not suppress my condemnation of the centuries of Western occupation and now ill-strategized Sino-centric embrace, our politicians and scholars have contributed to the sympathetic and retrogressive state in which we find ourselves today.

Most IMF, WHO, WFP, World Bank, and UN Security reports describe Africa as plagued by poverty, corruption, malnutrition, hunger, pandemics, bad governance and a history of Western occupation that  was characteristic of slavery and resource drain. While these descriptions aren’t false, it is time we gave up on sympathy winning descriptions and move on as a continent determined to compete globally and reduce these challenges. Africa is not an exceptional place where only these limitations and/or challenges exist. Almost all the great and emerging powers experienced a form of colonialism but they have moved on progressively.

The USA fought a war of Independence from British occupation; so did the Chinese who had more than one foreign power. The duo  have enviously progressed with China becoming the second largest economy, second to the USA.

Our overt acceptance of this stagnated posture renders any development initiative baseless and at the mercy of the West and now Asia. We ought to brace up and move on. Our continuous perception of our continent as the ‘Heart of Darkness’ remote controlled by Western and/or Asian dictates only renders us more vulnerable. We must be assertive and face our future without any appeal to sympathy.

We [Africans] are accelerating our demise especially in our quest to be more European or Western than the average Westerner is.

I am very skeptical in accepting hook, line and sinker that an Americanized version of the liberal political democracy is best suitable for Africa. While I absolutely believe in rule by and for the people, this version of the neo-liberal order is causing more chaos and instability than what Abraham Lincoln actually meant when he coined democracy. We have evidence of a more stable Africa without the liberal order as propagated by the USA. Right from the pre-colonial and colonial days in British West Africa for example, this tiny region of Africa saw a heightened interest from three great powers namely Great Britain France and Portugal.

Before the coming of the white man and after our wars of conquest that followed the Islamic jihad, Africa was relatively peaceful and had a well structured governance system where the people were ruled by their traditional chiefs who were usually warriors. When the British arrived in West Africa for example, Lord Lugard was much more impressed by the organized traditional system he met in northern Nigeria and resolved to rule Africans through the ‘Indirect Rule system’ where Britain would administer Africans through the traditional chiefs. The French adopted the policy of Assimilation and Association in French West Africa. My argument is that, do you think if these powers had met a messed up or backward system, Britain in particular would have preferred to rule through a third party?  Such was the political order until independence. 

The attainment of independence is virtually the crux of Africa’s governance problems and instability. Not that the granting of independence itself was untimely, but rather the stage that was prepared as to what form of governance would replace the colonial rule was the real problem.

The colonial masters were granting independence by actually allowing native Africans, educated and trained with Western orientations to assume leadership. What would anyone expect? Something different from Western rule? Definitely NO. The young lawyers, Doctors and trade Unionists that had been carefully educated overseas adopted a Republican order by having executive Presidents as heads of government. Sadly then, elections a practice copied from the West was adopted in selecting leaders.

These new African leaders became overzealous in agitating for elections  and in barely three decades almost all post independent countries have had civil conflicts that are as a result of a breakdown in governance or badly conducted elections. Our leaders want to be more democratic than America, thus they end up being tyrannical. Our leaders want to cry more than the bereaved by pushing for the reforms without pausing to note their attendant ramifications on sovereign peace and stability.

Claude Ake notes that ‘Poor leadership and structural constraints have turned the high expectations of the independence movement into painful disappointment, forcing many African leaders to rely more on coercion which has deepened their alienation. The coercion and alienation have worsened the prospects of development, leading to yet more alienation and coercion. The tragic consequences of this vicious circle are clear in contemporary Africa: with minor exceptions, physical infrastructures as well as social infrastructures have collapsed. Economies are mired in chronic crisis, poverty has greatly intensified and the people are in revolt.’

Bad governance polices from fellow African leaders have made Africans to yearn for a second independence from the native leadership whose mismanagement of the economy together with political intimidation are making economic stability impossible. When their voices are not heard, they resort to civil revolt usually resulting to war. Can we therefore blame any foreign power for the totalitarian tendencies of our corrupt African leaders? Our elites and politicians are very much aware of the limitations our quest for and practice of the liberal order is having on both political and economic stability yet we continue to blame West without any attempt to break off from it and conceptualize credible alternatives.

Economically, the problem becomes even worse. We often accuse the West and China of economic exploitation especially of our natural resources. Our researchers and politicians are very much aware of the resource rich nature of their countries, and that if democracy is to be relevant and sustainable, it will have to be radically different from the US democracy, but yet no serious or people-centered bilateral deals are negotiated with foreign investors. As researchers and politicians, we need to de-emphasize abstract political rights and stress more on economic rights, because the demand for democracy draws much of its impetus from the prevailing economic conditions. Our leaders are more interested in the fulfillment of their political manifestoes than seeking a people demand driven foreign investment.

Does it make sense that with all our abundant resources, our economies are still heavily dependent on donor funds? We still lack leaders or policy analysts to advice our sovereign governments when entering into bilateral investments and our leaders aren’t decisive on their FDI approach especially in areas of export promotion, opening up of foreign markets for Africa’s products. We as Africans need to realize the need for aid dependency to be drastically reduced, because although it has served useful purposes before, studies have shown that they are not actually targeted at poverty alleviation because of its ‘tied’ nature and to be spent only on goods and services from the donor countries.  Within a four-to-five year term of office, our politicians and economists spend much time in preparing and defending budget spending and reports, with thousands of experts sent to follow their monies thus displacing local expertise and further weakening autonomy and accountability to the electorates.

Moreover, division along sectarian interests is another serious challenge that is inhibiting any cohesive and concerted African approach in solving our problems. The two dominant religious in the world: Christianity and Islam, are not native to Africa, but imported. Before these religions, Africa was religiously stable with nature and at peace with the black man. If anything, it is the spread of these religions especially Islam that saw conquest on the continent. Africa was as religiously blind like the West in the BC period. Civilization and real Christianity started in Africa, because Christ himself was born within African vicinity. Today, our African brothers have become more Christians and Islamic than both the Papacy and Holy city of Mecca. Fanatic Africans will not hesitate to wage war and kill a whole generation of their fellow Africans simply because of a religious crusade and evangelism. In the West, recent studies by Anthony Glendinning et al reveals that religion in the West is losing its social significance, as the modern state has now assumed responsibilities of social moralities which hitherto were traditional church functions, so much so that by the end of the 20th century, Britain and the Netherlands in particular were among secular countries in the West where those who claimed a Christian identity had come to represent only the minority in their countries. Unfortunately in Africa, new Churches are being established every day.

Until and unless we identify ourselves with the once enviable ‘Africanness’ and be assertive in dictating what is best for both our socio-political and economic needs, we shall continue to blame foreign actors for our backwardness and shall remain progressively stagnated. We must learn from the mistakes of our centuries of romance with the West.

By Patrick Brima Kapuwa
Institute of International Studies, Jilin University, China.
Email: [email protected]


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