For as long as we refuse to sit down and grow a viable African economy, we will continue to have our heads shaved. We love to go to the west to learn a very valuable lesson: stupidity does not deserve stardom.
Now, I do not understand the intricate and complex contents of the subject of economics. For instance, I always thought that the law of demand and supply means that when I stretch out my paws to demand the housekeeping money, it must be supplied. I demand, he supplies. What then is this thing that I’m hearing about the conditions being right?
I mean what other conditions do I need apart from the triggering circumstances such as empty food bins, a number of rumbling stomachs in the house, and the dog going around whining the irritation out of everyone? The dog has become something of an expert at rousing people’s suspicions, prompting the neighbours to ask: what was wrong with your dog yesterday? I heard it crying throughout the day. Mostly, the paws I hold out in demand have never come back to me empty without a little something, but I found out not long ago that it is not necessarily for the sake of the people in the house; it is to keep the dog quiet.
When I was young and made an economically unreasonable demand of my parents, I often got the reply in this rather curt question: ‘Do you think money grows on trees?’ I have since found out that it is every parent’s God-given anthem. Back then, however, it usually made sense largely because I had never seen a tree sprouting money and so, I understood it to mean that I was being denied; and also that I had pushed the parents into the exasperation zone and I was therefore just one word away from being cremated. Just one word more, and… It thus always kept me quiet for I had no answer. But the present breed of children appears to have come down to earth with the answer to that question in their left hand. A little girl said to her mother in reply to that question: ‘If money does not grow on trees, how come banks have so many branches?’
With this question permanently hanging over children’s heads, they soon learn to school their demands to wait for the day they find out just what money does grow on. Such a day soon comes when they find it. It is called getting a job. Birds do it, humans do it also. As soon as a baby bird is old enough, the mother bird pushes it out of the nest to fend for itself, mostly because she’s tired of hunting for the food, chewing it into bits and dropping it into the waiting throat of the wee one. When humans do it, it is generally for the same reason: the fathers are tired of hunting for the money, breaking it into bits and dropping them into the bottomless pit of their teenagers’ pockets. A teenager I know once complained that his father was fond of paying his allowance in large denominations which he often found hard to break. Taxis never have change. Couldn’t his father pay him in smaller denominations? I did not record the father’s reply to that intelligent question.
In the human realm, therefore, fathers are generally the ones who push the young ones into the world economic market. A highly educated father was said to have enrolled his school-going son in the bricklaying profession ‘for a spell’ so he would know what earning money felt like. The son has never forgiven his father, though remains grateful to him for introducing him early into the activities of the economic community, helping him learn early how not to watch the grass grow under his feet.
Now, that was not the problem of my grandmother. She never gave the grass as much as a breathing room while she was alive. She was constantly on the move because she believed that there were two ways to make money: beg, steal or borrow being variations of the same theme and one was as good as the other; or work. She chose to give us children the example of work as a way for us to understand how to make our money grow. To this day, I have looked suspiciously at both work and borrowing/stealing/begging and have preferred to make my money grow by putting it to work.
Sadly, my money is not growing because most businesses today find themselves in an ever upward-growing struggle with the government’s catalogue of inefficiencies: inconstant policies, shortage of electricity, water, peace… So, conditions for creating wealth are simply not there! And so, poverty is becoming contagious because debts are piling up. Worse, I read the other day that the unemployment figure is growing something thick in the country.
Believe me, learning that the various governments under whose care I have innocently existed over the years had incurred a lot of debts in my name has given me horrific nightmares to say the least, and one prayer; thank God my grandmother is no longer around to hear this. And those of you who still have grandmothers to hear this, well, the best thing is not to translate this news to them. Anyway, most governments I know go about laying aside the little nest egg that will not only take them through many rainy days but also ensure their independence so that they don’t go a borrowing and a sorrowing, because he who goes a borrowing goes a stealing. Indeed, the borrower has just one prayer on his lips on waking: forgive us this day our daily debts, just as we probably forgive those who’re debtors against us.
Our governments do not do that. What they do instead is to perennially go a blowing, and when the needs are on them something thick, they have simply dusted their begging bowl and gone looking for the Paris Club or the IMF, on my and on your behalf. And, listen to this while I tell you, I hear that all that lolly they are said to have borrowed over those years have not even been spent here according to the dictates of their wise hearts. But the lenders have told them how the money must be spent in the lenders’ nations even before they have reached home. Their duty has been just to come home and tell you and me about the loan. A real economic mess, no?
I have always maintained that Nigeria, like other African countries, is running an economic system it does not understand. It is a player in a field that is completely foreign to it. The truth is that the modern economic system evolved while we were busy building the thatches on our huts across the breadth of the continent and paying our helpers for their services by returning the compliment. By the time we looked up, the law of supply and demand had been invented to replace communal sharing, and goods and service sectors had also been invented to replace good names. In place of cowries, people had also discovered the use of money.
So, from trade by barter in the early centuries, Africa was catapulted straight into the market economy of the twentieth century. This is why, in the world economy, we look like new recruits in the army who have no idea of what lies ahead. We have no idea that the first thing they do in the army is shave the recruit’s head. For as long as we refuse to sit down and grow a viable African economy, we will continue to have our heads shaved. We love to go to the west to learn a very valuable lesson: stupidity does not deserve stardom. Now, please don’t ask me what that means.
