Abdul Karim Bangura, a professor of Research Methodology at Howard University, Washington D.C., the United States of America, is unarguably one of Africa’s most educated and sought-after scholars in the Diaspora. He holds doctoral degrees in five different disciplines – Linguistics, Sociology, Political Economy, Computer Science and Mathematics. In addition, he is a polyglot with proficiency in twelve African languages and six European languages. He has authored about 66 books and contributed more than 550 scholarly articles in academic journals across the globe. He was in Lagos last week to deliver this year’s Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC) public lecture entitled The democratic project and the human condition across the Africa continent. He raised a lot of issues that could help to bridge the yawning gap between the poor and the rich nations. In the courtyard of the University of Lagos Conference Centre he spoke with Olayinka Oyegbile (Deputy Editor) and Edozie Udeze. Excerpts:
How do you describe the African condition?
The African condition, I usually say, is a mixed bag; it is a mixed picture. On one hand, we cannot dismiss the fact that for a continent that is relatively young, that is 50 years old, we need to give ourselves some credit.
For a continent that has come this far, there must be some good things happening. But it is good for people to develop it further and build on the good things. But sometimes it is very easy to ignore the great things that have happened because we live in the world where we tend to have our ideological leanings. So that’s the good side of it.
The bad side is equally not too bad. It is not because good people are not doing what they are doing. It is only that very few good people would raise their voices when they see bad things happening. In essence, it is to say that it is the sin of commission as opposed to the sin of omission (laughs). Not that people do not really see bad things happening, but how many voices are there to challenge the bad things that happen? Yes, I think that’s where we have problems and we need to address it seriously, and see how we can overcome it. But the bad sometimes outwit the good, and that is what we end up believing, or remembering.
Now, there’s this talk that the dominance of the United States of America as the leading world power will soon come to an end, and China will take over. How do you see Africa in this nexus of power?
The scenario of seeing the decline or declaring that the United States power will soon decline, I think, is a little bit premature. It is always premature because the measurement, or if you like, the yardstick with which we try to describe a hegemonic power decline may be different from that of old hegemonies. What is interesting, however, is that America has made it clear that it is not going to lose its hegemony, and not even very soon.
They intend, and hope too, to enjoy it in the next two to three hundred years. And that means that whoever occupies the White House is going to be and remain at the game of empire building. What does that mean? It means they are going to be more militarily strong, militarily powerful; it is therefore not something they are willing to let go in a hurry.
So the measurement may be wrong. People usually look at economics – that sort of rivalry which you’d say is where China has today become a strong issue and force. Yes, in that regard China has built its economic domain. But to be a dominant power, it is not just economic power, but it is also the ability to influence the world and effect a change four times over. There have been some other measurements people have been using to assess these power indices between America and China. But America would not let go, not that soon.
Then where you also look at the rise of Chinese economic power, one of their major markets, interestingly, is the United States. Which means, also that the US can equally put a check into how fast China rises economically. What I have always said is that African governments should strategise in a way that they negotiate for their people.
What has happened is that there are these very callous ways of some of our governments in which they allow the Chinese to sell the whole chaff to African people. The fact that the Chinese can even have a project or even import or bring their labourers to Africa, that project tells me that African employees, African people, will not even get some of these jobs. Is it good enough for Africa?
But African leaders have to negotiate very well and provide those jobs for the people. This way, you also empower the people. This shows even that China is now playing a major role in African development, in African growth. To me, that’s a welcome one. For the first time, the US is giving loans, talking about infrastructural development in places where they are involved; in Africa specifically, because why, they’ve seen the Chinese do that. You know that has made them to be more competitive. What African leaders should do and say is that we have to protect our people. When the African governments begin to empower their people first, there will be no limit to how this great continent can be and that’s a fact we must face.
The late Kwame Nkrumah noted in his days that where the working class and the peasants meet at a point in African situation, there might be a revolution. Do you foresee that given what you said in your lecture?
Well, the interesting thing is that one of the places the great Kwame Nkrumah, whose dreams many of us are still aspiring to, that some day we will have this continent come to its senses, and realise that it is better off to be united, giving themselves a united front and then working as one unit… You see, we have tried to work as a separate entity or as separate countries all these years, and so it never worked; it has not got us anywhere. Yes the Nkrumah dream will only be realised if we all do what it takes to have a united front.
If the workers will one day rise to have a revolution,? Well it is a little bit apprehensive, only because at the end of the day, you will still need the technocrats, you are still going to need the intelligentsia that will help to direct any development and move it away from the peasantry or the workers. Unfortunately, those who are supposed to be on the vanguard and to help the workers and the peasants, have aligned themselves with those who are the exploiters of the economy and of the people.
It is now difficult. We need to retrain intellectuals to also retrain the minds of those who are supposed to be the technocrats, who are supposed to be the intelligentsia and so on.
In view of the theory of the ‘Tipping Point’ you mentioned in your lecture, can you elaborate on what it means and how it will work in Africa?
This ‘tipping point’ is a mathematical formulation. And what we do is that we look at structures. In every structure there are major points. And like we know in life there are push and pull factors. And the push factor often tends to overwhelm the pull factors. Where it becomes like that and you cannot manage it, what do you do? This is so because you can’t stop or control everything in the universe. It is impossible to do so.
This is just the law of nature, things are going to happen. Yes, they will happen. If you are not cognisance of where you have to put the break, then at that point you discover there is no point of return. That is a philosophical debate. The question then is: Are we experiencing, are we seeing certain natural things happening, compounded by things we cannot control? These are some of man-made effects. But we can try to avert serious disasters in future. This will give us the necessary equilibrium so that we cannot tip over.
This is what we really mean by tipping point. In essence, we can also look at the society and say oh, this country is having too many strikes; this country is having so much poverty. This country is having so many projects, or so many disagreements. Is there a point where the system may eventually tip? I think we need to look at this so that we can develop and then say the possibilities are there that it will not happen. This is where we are if we do not put the necessary mechanisms in place to take care of our people, then we are going to tip over. And we should do well to avoid this.
We see that especially in the area of employment. What we have discovered is that any society where you have high rate of unemployment, it means what? It means there will be more youths who are going to be more galvanised, idle; more restless and do things that are not productive. There is already a group of people who are ready to jump at anything and do anything.
When and how will we have this calamitous outcome? Then one says, okay, do we only create jobs only when they are profitable? What about creating jobs now to save our societies? This is the area where the tipping point comes into play. And we need to do more to avert it.
In the late 70s, the clarion call was that democracy would save Africa. Over the years, almost all countries in Africa have democratic governments in place. Has democracy really improved Africa?
No! No! (raises his voice). Not at all. This is one of the most mysterious things I discovered because if you read what we call pedestrian literature, you think democracy is taking place. Oh, people have more to say in this democratic affair; people have more freedom, people can criticise; they can do this, they can do that. We have to give credit where credit is due. But the fundamental question is that, is there also democracy of the belly – where people have enough to eat; where people have employment and are fully engaged?
What we are discovering is that when we look at these democratic indices, which are developmental issues there is no nexus between the two. Unfortunately, this was what all of us hoped when we had democracy. Africa went through its own problem before the Arab Spring even started. So it was sort of ironical when people said Arab Spring would spread to Africa. African Spring, to me, is what spread to those Arab people. Ours had come and gone since. But this is again how history is conjectured.
However, for me who has been in international peace and conflict resolutions, the issue is that the most disturbing aspect is that there is really no coloration between democratic indices and peace indices. It is so discouraging because one tended to believe that this democracy is really the panacea to cure our illnesses. We should have less conflicts, less headaches, less issues to resolve. Is that not the belief we had in democracy? Today, we have the reverse which does not go too well to solving our issues. It tells us that people are able to compete for elections which is the measurement to judge democracy. But once you get to power, what do you do? That’s the ten million dollar question, as they say.
Julius Nyerere of Tanzania once said it was only homegrown socialism that could help Africa. Looking back today, can we say that the Tanzanian situation justifies that stand?
I think one of the most unfortunate things was that many of us, especially in the academia, have not understood much what Julius Nyerere stood for or said. We were too much in a hurry to dismiss him. Or to say that it did not grow by this economic bound or that Ujama itself did not succeed. Ujama did not fail, because the reality is that it was never allowed to grow, as it was postulated. Again, you could see the overwhelming British influence never to allow it to grow or prosper. This was the major setback. This was so, because the global economy has always been tied to capitalism. And this international capitalism tends to influence a lot. So, no matter what you have as a system, at the end of the day, you still have to work with this system. There is this belief that you have a conflicting ideology that is working against each other.
So, we can also look at Ujama and say okay how did it succeed? We know the linguistic one is the greatest example. Today Kiswahili is very powerful and has given Tanzania the greatest asset as a nation. It has given the nation the highest literate rate which has today spread to more parts of Eastern Africa and still spreading. In these places Kiswahili is being taught and people are catching up. It is amazing really how culture and language can form the core indices for development and growth.
Even in the United States we have courses in Kiswahili simply because they realise that in those major countries the knowledge of this language opens doors. The knowledge of it, like they know, will pay dividends later on. Therefore, they need to have people trained who are fluent in it, that will be negotiating and doing business on their behalf. And this is one of the blessings of what Julius Nyerere started.
Again, Tanzania is one of the few African countries that no military take-over has happened there before, or a civil war. That tells us that there is something indigenous, something very good about Nyerere’s approach to governance or the economic and political ideologies that he propounded.
In other words, if there is one central language, African communities will do better in terms of development and growth?
Yes, check that out. As a matter of fact, African languages are just too powerful. You can see that Europe is now borrowing some of our languages, to grow their vocabularies. They are constantly growing their languages. Even the French do it a lot so that they can keep the French language alive.
It is only we who are falling into this trap. Language is indeed a unifying factor because again if we as Yoruba, Igbo and others come together, you know how strong we can be. Even before the white man came, how did we communicate? This is again the myth they used so that they can further marginalise us. But we need to look at language as a weapon for development, for unity and togetherness.
What those of us in the mathematics and sciences know is that there’s no theory that cannot be taught or understood in any language. It does not have to be only European languages. Even when we talk of quadratic equation or even all other mathematical tools, if you take the Yoruba language system, it is so sophisticated to handle issues there on. But if you do not even know square root, or you cannot even speak or understand the Yoruba language effectively well, how can you do that?
Why don’t we use that language for our students to be the greatest Mathematicians in the world? This is so because we marginalise the Yoruba language and now resort to English. And now we are having great difficulty and we know that tracking these young ones into the sciences is not easy. This is indeed part and parcel of the leader outcome. You do not have exciting people anymore because they cannot relate to their culture or language any more. If you teach the people the counting problem in the language other than their own, soon they will begin to forget it and so on.
You have proposed the Union of African States to be adopted by African leaders. How does that differ from African Union (AU)?
Well, you know the AU is a continuation of Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Up till today it remains the big boys’ club. And at the end of the day it remains a talk shop. I think it is time we moved beyond the talking shop and do things more concrete to move Africa forward. It is time for action and this means you have to have leaders who say in order for us to unite, we need to give up some of our sovereignties. If you like, take this as a marriage relationship. When you marry your wife, even as powerful as the husband may be in African culture, there are things you negotiate with you wife, either you give up some certain rights or realign such to make the marriage work.
So if there is a country that can give up some sovereignty may be because it has some economic powers, they have to do so to help others. But if that is not happening, then we will have lot of problems, because no one will make sacrifices for others. There must be room for genuine love and unity.
If we can come to that we then know that the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages. We see it in the European Union (EU). Now we are learning from EU but we should be teaching them. You can think that the US was one nation before? They began with a few states to what we have today.
You have your feet in both Christianity and Islam. Do you think the clash of religions can tear Africa to pieces?
Religion can never be the end of Africa. One thing, as I tell people, they always point out the case of Nigeria. And I always have to caution people, you don’t need to generalise. Religious problems only happen in a part of Nigeria and not all. Given the size of Nigeria, it is a very small part where religious problems emanate. We still have the majority part of Nigeria living in peace, absolute peace. Here we have Moslems and Christians living peacefully together. Also, we have to be honest that most of the times it is not the average people who get caught up in these things but the leaders for their own hegemonic tendencies. They stake the fires of religious problem for their own selfish end.
And in most parts of Africa, we already know we do not have that sort of problem. I have done a lot of research in most of these places. It does not matter whether we have more Moslems or Christians on the continent. We need to go back to our old ways; the ways Africans used to live their communal lives.
In fact, I remember reading Professor Toyin Falola’s book (A mouth sweeter than salt) where he is so emotional about this issue. There was a time in Ibadan where Christians would pray for Ramadan to come, so that they would eat good night food. And Moslems would pray for Christmas to come so that their parents would buy new shoes and clothes for them. Then Christians would go to Moslem ceremonies and vice versa. This is the kind of thing we really have to work on right now to nip religious violence in the bud. What we have in Nigeria is that discussion is not taking place. People already hold their positions and therefore will not let so. Therefore, leaders have to emerge to take us to paradise. That means we have to be very honest about all these things.
It is not only religion. There is also the problem of ethnicity. There is also economic issue and until these three things are tied together and resolved, and we have serious discussion, we will continue to have problems. I am not worried that religion will tear our societies to pieces. At the end of the day, the African is spiritual; one has to respect that spirituality is bigger than religion.
If we do that, there is nothing wrong in saying that, I am an Igbo, a Christian, but I am also African, and the next person there, a Moslem, is my brother. In Europe, they can be Catholic, they can be Anglican, but in the end, they say I am European and let’s come together as one. I have no problem with these multiplicities of identities so long as we all realise we are one. I think that way it will work out. Those of us who are also interested in those things should not also keep quiet. We need to discuss it in public discussions and fora so that the message can go across. Who wants his son, her daughter or husband to be dying for a senseless thing that will not put food on his table? But again, it comes to education. The more we educate our people, the more we talk about these things to the younger ones, the better we are for it. That’s one of the ways we can go to guarantee peace in Africa and the world. But the triple issues of economy, religion and ethnicity have to be properly addressed and handled for the benefit of all.
