Nigeria’s 100-year existence hardly calls for celebration considering the plight of Black people in Africa and beyond. Centuries after the abolition of slavery, the race is no nearer political emancipation and ideological conceptualisation.
Yet, Africa’s most populous country and the world’s largest collection of Blacks could not have had a more auspicious beginning. Cobbled from the Northern and Southern Protectorates by Great Britain in January 1914, it took its name from the resource-filled River Niger (or Niger River) courtesy of incumbent Governor-General Sir Frederick Lugard’s future wife, Flora Shaw.
However, progress since independence on October 1, 1960 barely justifies the country’s enormous potential. While President Goodluck Jonathan and a tame executive do their best to excuse the jamboree launched with a presidential dinner on February 4, 2013 in Abuja, the country’s failure to fetch international reckoning disturbs.
Before his December 5, 2013 demise, anti-apartheid hero and South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, rued Nigeria’s prodigal leadership. Black people would be truly free once Nigeria stood up for the continent and Black folks elsewhere, the old man asserted. I couldn’t agree more.
Often called the ‘Giant of Africa’, Nigeria is also Africa’s top producer of crude oil and the world’s fifth-placed supplier. With huge deposits of valuable minerals as well, the expectations are not misplaced. Much of the wealth remains untapped, however, and the petroleum is mainly exported unrefined – an economic situation fuelled by the country’s failure to refine minds through comprehensive education.
After the colonial masters relinquished power, the political class squandered the country’s resources and instituted poverty. Europe may have underdeveloped Africa, as Walter Rodney argued in his famous book, but politicians assisted by a succession of military tyrants have for years sustained the notion of Nigeria as an overseas territory subject to foreign beliefs, culture and commerce.
Students of history who wonder at the relative ease of Portuguese infiltration and British conquest need look no further than qualities common to leaders, past and present: sentimental, discriminatory and domineering. These traits and more greased the chains of slavery and helped the old British Empire avoid its predicted sunset.
The unfavourable channel of trade remains open today, with the commodities simply changing form. In place of pepper, salt, tobacco and other basic products of the bygone era, doctors, lawyers, engineers and managers constantly depart Nigeria’s shores to plug economic gaps in more developed societies.
But race relations run deeper than market forces. Spurred by the Civil Rights movement headed by the late Martin Luther King Jnr in 1960s United States of America, Black ascendancy appeared imminent in the 1990s when Mandela emerged from a 27-year prison term to surmount racial segregation and ensure majority rule. The feat helped Barack Obama break down the colour barrier in the U.S.
Obama inspired Black people worldwide, but America’s 44th president is a finely balanced specimen of Black-and-White. In support of race theories that suggest condescension by Whites and reverence by Blacks, the former surrendered the son of a black Kenyan father and white American mother while the latter claimed him.
In the event, Mr Obama embraced the American will. Flying his homeland’s cause in the course of duty, he managed more than once to spurn Nigeria’s advances, if not its cry for help, until the recent designation of the Boko Haram sect as a terrorist group.
With Mandela’s exit and Obama’s second and conclusive term in the White House winding down, however, Blacks worldwide must determine how best to tread the trail blazed by the pioneering duo. We may begin by examining and addressing tendencies. Why do Black people grandstand and crave domination? Indeed, why do some shun enlightenment for ephemeral pursuits?
These posers appear magnified in the upper echelon of private and public organisations. Government officials trained abroad choose to propound policies certified by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Agriculture and Finance ministers, Akinwunmi Adesina and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, seem adept at laughable schemes involving farmers and the Sovereign Wealth Fund, in particular.
Worse, expatriate CEOs now sprout in conglomerates and reputable companies badly managed by indigenes under the Indigenisation policy of the 1970s. Expatriates from Europe to Asia enjoy better treatment from security agencies and the establishment on account of lighter skin.
What is it with the Black man? He is colourful, to be sure. His languages and traditions attest. And he evinces a wealth of ideas in art and culture. He clings to the past while Europeans managed to overcome the strife and serfdom that attended the early periods through the postulations of experts and practice of leaders.
To ride economic challenges, for example, Britain’s Adam Smith kindled the industrial revolution with his theory of division of labour while Thomas Malthus’ warnings helped prevent population explosion as wealth increased. Americans Peter F. Drucker and Abraham Maslow helped ground management theories.
The continent’s leaders do not help matters. They would stay on for a second term, a third term and yet another while their countries’ economies take repeated battering from poor policy making and implementation. With poor economies and inadequate education, impoverished minds barely trace the thick line between decency and moral compromise.
For instance, the continent would be better off without the African Union building handed out by the Chinese, the rather opportunist backers of political relics Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. The continent could as well do without the memory of Idi Amin, the marshal of Ugandan killing fields, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the imperial terror of the Central African Republic (CAR).
Considering bloody strife in CAR, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, the need for more perceptive leadership cannot be overstated. Add the terror of Islamic fundamentalist sects in North Africa, Mali and Nigeria, and an overwhelmed Africa needs the West to end economic disaster and accommodate refugees in the interim.
Under Obama, the U.S. has stepped up intervention. The United Nations, besides mediating in the perennial North Korea-South Korea, Japan-China and Israel-Palestine conflicts, engages similar muscle.
But only Africa can heal itself. To galvanise folks in the Diaspora, the continent must compete better in international circles. The U.S. raised the bar with the first man on the moon in 1969 and the old Soviet Union leapt after. Mars, at the current rate of technological development and space exploration, looms. Nigeria dawdles; so does Africa.
The bell tolls, and there’s no question for whom. If global warming, ozone layer depletion, an apocalyptic dinosaur-era meteor strike or a combination of natural phenomena causes mankind to mass on a single continent tomorrow, the outcome is predictable: only the fittest would survive. And a second period of slavery is better imagined.
Fagbemi is a staff of The Nation
