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At the Beijing
Forum, which I attended last weekend, one of the participants from
England told me that he had been invited to give a talk on what lessons
Africa can learn from China, and wondered what my views were.

What could one say
that hasn’t been said before? The truth is that most of the lessons we
need to learn from China are the same lessons we should have learned
from Malaysia, from Singapore, from South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia or
Lao. They are the same lessons that the Nigerian Economic Summit,
Vision 2010, Vision 2020, Vision 2020:20 and any number of other
development plans produced right here in Nigeria have absorbed; plans
that we beg our governments to implement.

Beg, to little discernible effect. Most of our people, and too many across Africa, remain poor in a richly endowed continent.

I haven’t yet laid
hands on Greg Mills’ book, “Why Africa is Poor: and what Africans can
do about it”, but according to the review, Mills asks why Africa is
poor despite the fact that its people work hard and the continent is
blessed with abundant natural resources. Mills concludes that Africa is
not poor because of bad infrastructure or lack of trade access,
development or technical expertise – or even corruption – but because
our leaders have made the choice that we should be poor.

That is not the
choice made by China’s leaders. Whether it was Mao Zedong who actually
said it, there is no doubt that it was Deng Xiaoping, China’s de facto
leader throughout the 1980s, who set in motion the reforms inspired by
the phrase “To be rich is glorious”.

I’d been thinking
about this decision by our own leaders – that we should be poor – when
I found myself spending 50 minutes waiting to turn left under the
infamous flyover at Ota in Ogun State. The surrounding roads are in
such a terrible condition that the newly-opened flyover has – if
anything, worsened traffic. I thought about it again on my way back,
taking the ‘shake, rattle and roll’ alternative route on state roads.

It baffled me that
anybody in government would dream of making a fuss over the
long-delayed completion and opening of that wretched flyover, let alone
subject the nation to an unseemly struggle to claim credit for it! The
Obasanjo administration had refused to complete it for reasons best
known to itself. Accusations of improving the road to President
Obasanjo’s own front door (Obasanjo Farms lies on the Idiroko road
which starts beneath the flyover) may have been avoided, but perhaps
the ex-president should take a ride in the buses plying those routes,
and hear the salty language in which he is described.

The resulting pain
to countless other road users is surely concrete evidence of the
propensity of our ‘big men’ to measure their height – not by how close
they are to the sky – but by how large the gap is between them and
those below. Unable to achieve healthy growth themselves, they must
hinder others so that they can continue to ‘walk tall’.

The state
government refused to repair the alternative roads, perhaps because
heavy lorries might use and destroy them. But this beggar-my-neighbour
attitude was completely indifferent to the fact that it was the people
in Ogun State who suffered.

The contrast
between that glaring example of a decision that the people should be
poor, and the decision of China’s leaders that their people should be
rich (and didn’t consider provision of a decent road network a special
favour) struck me as the main lesson that Nigeria could learn from
China.

And then to return
home to an even better example: the three-day strike! Labour’s demand
that the agreement on the national minimum wage should be implemented
not only came against the background of the grossly inflated
remuneration of legislators (as well as presidents and governors), but
also coincided with the decision to heap Scylla on Charibdis by piling
obscene presidential pensions onto the riches already enjoyed by former
heads of state.

President Goodluck
Jonathan is reported to have said that a difference of a mere N1,000
(between the N17,000 being paid and the N18,000 being demanded) ought
not to lead to any industrial action “for good people that have been
friendly”. I don’t blame him. Although N1,000 is over 5% of N18,000, it
probably wouldn’t appear as even a fraction of a percentage point on
the presidential take-home pay calculator.

That statement –
which, for sheer inability to understand the lives of ordinary people,
is right up there with Marie-Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” advice to
18th century France’s starving bread-less poor – can hardly be what
labour leaders were referring to when they praised Jonathan for his
‘humility’ after his five-minutes-to-midnight rush to hold talks about
the strike. But if he cannot understand the meaning of N1,000 to a
worker in today’s Nigeria, how is he going to get his head round the
idea that the people of this country might – for their labour and
effort – also want to be rich? Or at least, to climb out of unnecessary
poverty?