Between the past and the future
Social development was in ascent across Africa,
when Europe and Arabia declared it fair game, and began a brutal
campaign, sanctioned by state and religion, to subjugate it. The
imperialists knew that leadership manifests in society through
institutions and went on to scrupulously undermine all existing social
structures in order to prevent the development of any form of
self-assured leadership, which could mobilise the local populations and
challenge the status quo. They poisoned the leadership gene pool, and
groomed a new subservient gentry, which has come to dominate the
political landscape.
The colonial social systems handed down at
Independence, were designed to evolve a debased leadership, alienated
from its own people, and beholden to the foreign powers that inspired
and installed it. 50 years after Independence, social institutions
across the continent are so degraded that the emergence of responsible,
institutionalised leadership appears unlikely for at least another
generation. It appears the imperialists have succeeded marvellously at
both colonising the African mind and appropriating Africa’s natural
resources.
Modern African states were at their inception,
little more than production camps, with the supporting evacuation
infrastructure. They were designed, primarily to serve the economic
interests of those who first conceived of them, and waged genocidal
wars to force them into existence. The invaders seized the most
valuable economic assets, and successive regimes have since not made
any serious attempt to find tangible connections between the imperial
impulse and the natural aspirations of ordinary African people. There
appears to be a permanent divide between the government and the people.
For these reasons, most of our governments lack political or moral
legitimacy, and require the most odious regimes of corruption to
sustain them.
Today, our children in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the
Niger Delta, Congo, and similar resource-rich places, have limited
access to education or healthcare. They starve, have their limbs
amputated, their mothers raped and their fathers dehumanised so that
the global elites can wear gold trinkets, use mobile phones, fuel their
SUVs, build nuclear reactors, go on safaris, drink designer coffee, and
eat gourmet chocolate. It may not be unfair to speculate on how many
African limbs have been chopped off so that the innocent Belgian child
can be guaranteed a dignified existence, or that some benighted bride
somewhere can wear her diamonds.
The failure of African nation-states is a
manifestation of the failure of the evolving international political
economy, which created them in the first place. Moreover, it is a
manifestation of the failure of the global leadership that system has
engendered. The recent financial meltdown is another bracing reminder
that the political economy itself is as flawed as the financial system
it has enabled. The inherent contradictions have only just been brought
painfully home to some of its most ardent beneficiaries and defenders.
Africans and other denizens of the so-called third world have been
bearing the brunt of the system for the past 500 years.
In clarifying the dysfunction of modern African
states, it is important to recall the established truism that whoever
controls the economy, controls the politics. It is politically
untenable that the most powerful economic institutions operating in any
territory have little interest there, beyond profit making. The
multinational businesses and the multilateral financial institutions
that control economic activities across our continent are so detached
from the realities of ordinary people that it is manifestly impossible
to evolve the kind of leadership that can be held accountable at the
grassroots.
These organisations do not have the kind of
symbiotic ties that bind Detroit, or Silicon Valley to the people and
the government of the United States. They do not have the same
political allegiances that bind the fortunes of Shell or TotalfinaElf
to that of Europe. They can only pretend to be, to African countries,
what Hyundai has been to South Korea or more recently what Huawei has
been to China.
Like most globalisation dummies sold to us, the
idea of a stateless multinational is a specious lie. The world has
entrenched an unfair system of international relations that shamelessly
exploits the poorest people. Even if it does so with the wilful
complicity of African elites, an international system that likes to
call itself civilised and equitable, and moralises shamelessly to
“rogue” states, cannot absolve itself of its own culpability in this
unremitting injustice.
We need to facilitate the development of our own home grown
multinationals. We need to do this as a matter of urgency, by
redirecting all our resources towards empowering our people
economically and politically. One good thing about the subsisting
political economy is that it compels us to dig in and solve our own
problems. We must begin to engage, with more confidence, the damage
done to our continent by the imperialist misadventure. We must also
reflect with contrition, on our own shameful complicity, in the
execution of the most heinous crimes against our own people. We must
participate more aggressively in the control and ownership of
productive economic activities across the continent. We must urgently
empower our selves and our local communities to take control of the
politics and the economy of this continent, which we call our own.
