13th August, 2013
By Adebayo Lamikanra
Ebenezer Obadare is never likely to forget the first time we sat down to hold an intellectual discussion because whatever we tried to talk about that morning was swallowed whole by adversity. He had barely sat down across the table from me in the Dean’s office of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, when a gang of vandals masquerading as students burst through the door and demanded that I, in my capacity as Dean, should (no, must), with a few strokes of my pen, change my students’ failed grades to passes as, according to them, too many students had failed and that could not be tolerated so they were using political action to remedy the situation. In spite of what they thought were fearsome threats of intimidation, they had to depart empty handed but left behind the foundation for an unlikely but durable friendship.
Ebenezer became an academic migrant to the West many years ago but makes periodic visits back home and on each visit he brings me at least a couple of books with which he expects me to feed my intellectual appetite. I have been able to augment my library with such books over the years and so highly tuned are his antennae for good books that I look forward eagerly to his every visit.
He came back two weeks ago bearing the usual gifts, this time two books, one about the demography of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the period before the coming of Europeans and the other written by no less a person than the deputy governor of the Central Bank, concerning the emergence of Africa. On the surface, the respective subjects treated in the two books cannot be more dissimilar but, on reflection, they are quite closely related since they have dealt with societies which have got burnt by their disastrous association with the rapacious Western world.
I was immediately fascinated by the book, Emerging Africa, by Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, not just from the point of view of the subject treated but from the point of view of the author. It is not often that such a gigantic figure in the ordering of the Nigerian economy finds the time and inclination to write a 400-page book and so I thought that whatever he had to say was worthy of being listened to with rapt attention. I was also anxious to gauge the intellectual depth of a book written by one of the apparently highly competent technocrats who have been head hunted by successive Nigerian governments to drive their reform and now transformation agenda. As if these were not enough, I also noticed that the book has the ringing endorsement of the incumbent governor of the Central Bank.
It is only in Nigeria that you will find an Islamic scholar and scion of one of the most powerful northern royal families in the country working hand in glove with a committed Christian from the south-east and one whose elitism has nothing to do with the colour of the blood running in his veins but on the quality of his acquaintance with Western education. Perhaps the most compelling reason why this book is so important however is the subject it interrogates. After all, virtually everywhere you turn these days, the resounding refrain is about the emergence of African economies to the extent that confidence in the future of Africa is breaking out like a rash and is spreading with uncommon speed round the world. Clearly Dr. Moghalu with no less than 17 years of experience at the UNO and deputy governor of the Central Bank to boot is one of the best placed persons to examine this phenomenon in depth. The first question I wanted the book to answer was: is Africa really emerging from her backward position to one of comfort and prosperity as suggested by so many commentators including the author? The honest answer to this question even after ploughing through the book is that objective evidence provided in support of this contention is rather weak, consisting mainly as it is, of increased Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and Foreign Direct Investment in some African countries, none of which is of any interest or comfort to the overwhelming majority of Africans trying to cope with the vicissitudes of a marginal existence.
Nigeria’s GDP may be increasing but what is it in terms of providing greater access to health, education, decent housing, security and other such indices of human comfort or happiness? The author spilt a great deal of ink arguing against foreign aid as a means of fruitful Western engagement with Africa but most of the ink was wasted as the argument against foreign aid was won a long time ago just as the argument against Foreign Direct Investment, FDI, will be won sometime in the not distant future. This is because foreign investors, as the author admits, are in Africa strictly for what they can get and will turn tail at the first sign of trouble, taking with them their capital and the accumulated returns on their investment.
How can the continent of Africa, for so long the sick man of the global community, be brought in from the cold? The author of Emerging Africa has rightly, in my opinion, prescribed the cultivation of a new mindset as a means of taking our own destiny in our hands, but what have we been advised to do with this new mindset? Privatise! Invest in the greed of capitalists of all nations. After all, public enterprises are doomed to failure! Not so, Dr. Moghalu, not so.
There was a time when the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria, ECN, a public enterprise provided uninterrupted supply of electricity to the nation and Post and Telegraph, P&T, before it became Nigerian Postal Service, NIPOST, delivered letters safely and on time, not to talk of telegrams which were delivered within 24 hours to all parts of Nigeria from wherever they were sent.
Comparing the privatisation of the Nigerian Telecommunications plc, NITEL, to the coming of telecommunication firms as the author did in his book is an example of warped logic as the success of telecommunication providers has nothing to do with their being private but with technology. Indeed the high tariffs which characterised the early phase of our GSM adventure were due to the market place strategy devised by government in granting their operating licences. They had to recoup the multi-million dollar payments for their operating licences and so in a way it is the good people of Nigeria who have had to pay a heavy price for their access to GSM technology.
Looking outside Africa, it is clear that there are efficient public service institutions providing reliable and even profitable services. A prime example is the Tennessee Valley Authority, TVA, in the USA, the bastion of capitalism where, for 80 years, the TVA has consistently outperformed private utility companies in the provision of electricity and other services over a wide area. It is indeed instructive that one of the main reasons why the TVA was set up by the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal which took the USA out of deep recession was because private utility companies were charging too much for power and worked only in the interest of their owners to the detriment of their customers.
Today, one of the most successful oil companies in the world is Statol, owned by the government and people of Norway. There are other examples but these will suffice especially since, at least in Nigeria, it is difficult to find any of the newly privatised companies making a telling contribution to the nation’s economy. Rather they are all beholden to the government for patronage and will go under should their ties to the universal sponsor of Nigeria’s economy be cut for any reason. These privatised companies including the banks are not providing the power needed for Nigeria’s economic emergence and without this power there can be no emergence.
One can only speculate that the only reason why the privatisation song is on so many lips is that it is part of the agenda of the Western countries which are the model we have been trying so strenuously and unsuccessfully to emulate for so long. Unfortunately, it is clear that our present situation is to the advantage of the West and as long as we keep trying to hang on to their coat tails, we would always be in their slip stream so that the question of our emergence is never likely to arise.
Education for our children is perhaps the surest way of getting us out of the quagmire we are in and this the author has suggested with the strongest emphasis over and over again. There can be no arguing with this but, what is the content of the education that the author wants us to give our children? Going by what he has written, it is desirable to teach our children the nonsensical doctrine of ‘creative design by a Supreme Being’ whilst drumming into them the ‘fact’ we did not evolve from apes. The author needs to be educated about these points.
The theory of evolution is supported by so many proofs that it will take a bout of deliberate ignorance to dismiss it out of hand as the author has done. He also needs to be told that the African origin of man is no longer based on the discovery of a three million-year-old skeleton in Ethiopia and is advised to google ‘Out of Africa theory’ for other proofs. I am appalled that the deputy governor of the Central Bank has not been able to avail himself of the opportunity of finding out such trivial bits of information without being prompted.
He has advocated that we base our future and the much vaunted emergence on the study of the principles of Science and the harnessing of the power of technology. He cannot be faulted for this but it is rather disturbing that he has apparently not bothered to come to any understanding of basic scientific principles. For example and others abound, he thinks that we will get powerful drugs out of grape fruit seeds not because of information published by a rigorously peer reviewed journal but because this item of information was provided by the Guardian newspaper!
The book, Emerging Africa has been written with a great deal of passion by a competent authority but unfortunately it takes more than passion to do justice to the subject addressed. It is wishful thinking that Africa will rise anytime soon if such an impressively educated African as Dr. Moghalu will cite the biblical concoction of the curse of Ham to explain the enslavement of Africa to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately this is what has been ringing in my head since I put down Dr. Moghalu’s book and how I wish for his sake and mine that this was not so!
•Professor Lamikanra, of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, reviewed Moghalu’s book Emerging Africa in THENEWS magazine