The proposed decision of the British Government to introduce a UK visa bond of 3000 pounds for first time visitors to that country from six countries including Nigeria has understandably generated heated reactions. The Nigerian government has vehemently protested against the idea and threatened to retaliate. Many commentators have described the decision as discriminatory, unjust, racist, hostile and against the spirit of the commonwealth. However, others contend that there is absolutely nothing wrong in the British conservative government taking whatever steps it considers desirable to protect its perceived national interests. The Cameron government believes that citizens of the affected countries – Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – are most likely to violate that country’s immigration laws and compromise her security. Those who hold the latter view insist that Nigeria in particular, should get her act right, actualize her potentials, achieve rapid development and thus discourage her youths from seeking to flee the country to foreign havens at all costs.
Of course, those who hold this view have a pertinent point. On a personal note, for instance, I have persistently and trenchantly refused for several years to acquire British citizenship despite my wife being a British citizen. I simply do not see how the average Briton will not rightly see me as a bloody parasite and second class citizen should I indulge in such an option. Yet many of Nigeria’s depraved and thieving elite after looting the country blind, deliberately travel abroad to deliver their babies so that such children can enjoy foreign citizenship! Talk of absolutely unpatriotic elite with no faith in the future of a country whose grave they are actively digging on a daily basis.
For me, however, the proposed UK visa policy offers us an opportunity to re-examine the dependent role of Nigeria and Africa’s role in the global political economy and the way in which, at every point in time, her destiny has been determined by external interests to her continued detriment. Today, capitalism is in severe crisis and immigration has become a key issue in most western capitalist countries. The triumphalism attendant on the collapse of communism with Francis Fukuyama proclaiming the ‘end of history’ and capitalist democracy as the terminal point of human development, has largely evaporated. Global economic power is markedly shifting from the west to the east with the remarkable resurgence of China and other Asian countries, even as many western countries lie economically prostrate and millions of their citizens sink deeper into poverty.
In their authoritative handbook and guide to the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, a group of radical scholars and activists including Susan George, Alex Callinicos and George Monbiot, point out ironically that at a certain stage in the development of industrial capitalism, the western countries caused the ‘forced migration’ of millions of people from the underdeveloped world through the human slave trade. As they put it, “The imperialists obtained labour by force, first through transporting between 10 and 20 million African slaves to work in the mines and plantations of the Americas, then through various forms of indentured labour in which over 30 million Indians and Chinese were more or less coerced to migrate. Africans and Indians were also forced, through tax demands and sometimes physically, to work for European colonisers”. Yet, these same countries, which had developed largely through the exploitative slave trade and colonialism that lasted over 400 years, are today “imposing ever harsher and more brutal restrictions against the movement of people (unless they are white or exceptionally rich). At the same time they are demanding policies which create unemployment and poverty which are at least partly responsible for the wars and political repression from which people flee”.
In his immortal ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, Walter Rodney has demonstrated irrefutably the link between western imperialism and underdevelopment in Africa. Of course, some contend that several decades after the termination of colonial rule, Africa has no excuse for remaining mired in poverty and underdevelopment. This is a short sighted and simplistic view. Africa is the most brutalized, raped, oppressed and dehumanized continent in human history. The scars of the experience continue to haunt the continent. As Claude Ake so clearly put it “The circumstances of our history have conspired to produce an elite which cannot function because it has no sense of identity or integrity and no confidence, does not know where it is coming from or where it is going. This has to do with Africa’s long decline over the centuries and our domination by outsiders”. Nowhere best illustrates Ake’s thesis than the tragic experience of the Congo, one of the most resource-endowed regions of the world that is today a hotbed of mindless violence, brutality, unimaginable suffering and poverty. The current fate of the Congo can only be understood within the context of the brutal and savage plundering of the region by King Leopold II of Belgium in the colonial era.
The same western countries that forcibly exported millions of souls from Africa over four centuries and stalled the continent’s progress are today trying all means to stop immigration of people fleeing the hell that is a consequence of their historical legacy on the continent. Worse still, even after the formal end of colonialism, they are still dictating the continent’s economic destiny, insisting on the implementation of neo-liberal economic policies – free trade, unbridled liberalization and deregulation of the economy, privatization, removal of subsidies, currency devaluation etc – that worsen poverty and deepen underdevelopment. These are the same countries that subsidise and protect key sectors of their own economies.
In his classic, “Africa In The World of the 20th Century”, the late Professor Bade Onimode argues: “Why, this being the case, should the governments of developing countries not be allowed to exercise any controls on the entry of manufactured goods, capital, investment and technology into their countries, while the countries of the North stoutly shut out migrant workers (labour) from the developing countries, including Eastern Europeans, who want to enter their countries? Why should free trade, liberalization and globalization be good for manufactured products, capital and technology (intellectual property rights) and be bad for labour? Is this not simply because of the inequality between the powerful owners of commodities, capital and technology on the one hand, and the weak atomized owners of labour-power, on the other?”
The pertinence of these questions posed over a decade ago has been highlighted by the UK visa bond controversy. It is not enough for the Nigerian government simply to declare its intention to retaliate against the proposed UK visa policy. The challenge is more fundamental than that. We need a government in Nigeria that will give Africa the intellectual and political leadership that will help liberate the continent from the grip of neo-liberalism and come up with policies that can effectively address the technological dependency that lies fundamentally at the root of our underdevelopment. The current leadership across Africa has proven pathetically incapable of rising to the challenge of containing rampaging neo-liberalism and devising original, alternative ideas for transforming the continent. Thus, the empty talk of an African Renaissance championed by ex-Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Thambo Mbeki of South Africa a few years ago has expectedly fizzled out into nothingness. It is tragic that dyed in the wool World Bank and IMF apologists have been in charge of Nigeria’s economic policies for the last 13 years. We can thus understand the continuing remarkable attainment of unprecedented economic growth without development, which enables Nigeria to get richer while the majority of Nigerians get poorer.
