Oh boy, oh boy, we surely live in interesting times. It is not only Africa that is in trouble, other parts of the world, particularly Europe and America, are experiencing unique tremors. The human species has never appeared more troubled and tormented by its own foibles and the toxic effluence and side-effects of sheer genius. Has anybody ever heard the song Spirits in a Material World? As President Donald Trump’s Air Force1 glided gracefully into the clouds on Thursday at Stansted Airport on departure from Britain after a historic state visit, one prayed that some astral gliders would not swoop on the plane and forcibly reroute it to an unknown destination.
One had prayed for the day never to arrive when robotic machines infused with artificial intelligence would develop enough initiative and nous to overwhelm and overpower their human masters and take over the affairs of humanity. If it seems like unrealizable Science Fiction please be guided that future reality sometimes begins like unactualizable fiction. Albania, a remote semi-European country just a stone’s throw from Italy but essentially of Balkan provenance, has taken the bull by the horn. A land of heroic warriors and doughty fighters, the Albanians are just peeping out to the outside world after many centuries and epochs of serial entombments by Roman, Ottoman and modern European civilizations. They even survived a nasty spell of communist inquisition under the notoriously savage rule of an Islamic tyrant known as Enver Hoxha who took the country and its people back to the Stone Age only for the country to succumb to a protracted siege of economic anarchy and political turmoil. Corruption and mismanagement of scarce resources became rife.
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It is said that when flies are eating up a madman no one seems to be bothered, it is only when a madman begins to gobble up his tormentors that eyebrows are raised. The Albanians seem to tire of that nonsense. They have decided to place their fate in the hands of non-human or in-human actors. According to a report: “Albania has become the first country in the world to appoint an IA as a minister. The virtual official, named Dijella (“ sun in Albanian”) will oversee public procurement. Ministries will submit their application for tenders, and Dijella will process them and make decisions. Her role? Oversee government contracts, block favouritism & bribery and boost transparency…”
It is a way of arriving at modernity and the impersonal rigours of western bureaucracy by other means. This is how advances in science in the modern world can come to the aid of less developed countries on their own terms as Lee Kuan Yew famously demonstrated in Singapore. Western scientific discoveries come in handy when it comes to inculcating Weberian rigour and rationality in permissive epistemologies. Fred Engels chuckled that economically backward countries can play first violin in Music. The bet is that they didn’t make the violin in the first instance. Oh Dijella, if you are ever persuaded to stray or wander to some shorelines in Africa, you will be lucky if you are not abducted or stolen away in the first instance. This is what the Yoruba people call “Amodemaja” or he who abducts both the hunter and his dog. Welcome to the real McCoy.
