By Abuchi Obiora
Last week, we discussed poverty and deprivation in Nigeria in the work titled “Nigerians are dying of hunger.” This week, our discussion will centre on the major reason why poverty and penury is both malignant, endemic and generic in Nigeria and other African countries, irrespective of the efforts of a few patriotic African leaders who, once in a long while, dot the leadership space in their countries. We are also going to see why and how these few patriotic Africans failed to effect the necessary changes most needed in their countries.
In ending the discourse, we shall recommend an unpleasant ‘surgical’ exercise as the only remedy to correct the socio-economic and political anomalies in African countries and the need to guide this measure from being high-jacked and thwarted by those people, including the African agents of imperialism, who benefit and enrich themselves through the woes of Africa and the vast citizens of the continent.
Western European and American imperialism is the foundation of underdevelopment and poverty in Africa. Long before African people understood and became aware of the economic benefits of their natural resources, the Portuguese had arrive the shores of Africa in what they mischievously called African ‘discovery’ expeditions. These business expeditions were undertaken by economic pirates working by the auspices of some western European business conglomerates who either sponsored or bought over those expeditions with a profit for the economic pirates.
With the tacit support of western European governments, these sinister expeditions recorded resounding successes. The successes were quickly followed up with an impunity that can only be exercised on a conquered peopled who had been frightened and dazed by the superior firepower of the Portuguese invaders armed to the teeth by those western European and American business conglomerates who sponsored them. Upon this inhuman conquest and forcible capture and taking of Africans into slavery and evacuation of their agricultural and natural resources, was the foundation of western and American capitalism laid. This foundation was eventually formalized by themselves in their Berlin conference of 1884 and 1885.
The Berlin conference saw the balkanization of African nations and the unilateral lumping of those nations into what ordinarily should not be countries. With the Berlin conference, too, came an end to peace, homogeneity, and unity of Africans. Inter-ethnic distrusts and internecine squabbles were to become rife amongst Africans because of clash of culture and traditions which manifested as a result of the implementation of the articles of the Berlin conference in Africa. By this time, the Western European countries to whom the African nations had been apportioned had effectively taken over those African nations now lumped together as countries, they became their colonial masters and ruled them with iron fists, extracting anything extractable from the African countries. Starting with India and Liberia, the colonial masters began to grant the colonized people what they called ‘independence’ but not before setting up the well-oiled economic and financial control machinery that has become the veritable tools in the forms of sundry economic and financial organizations around the world, to maintain their chains of dubious business enterprises in Africa. With that departure of the colonial masters from the shores of Africa came in force what has been known to be neo-colonialism and imperialism in Africa. Courtesy of the institutionalized neo-colonialist and imperialist machineries which the former colonial masters put in place, African countries have ever since then, been kept under socio-economic and political bondage, being merely apron strings discreetly tied to their former colonial masters.
By the way, “neo-colonialism is the control or dominance of powerful countries over weaker ones (especially former colonies) by the use of economic pressure, political suppression and cultural dominance”, while “imperialism is the establishment of economic and political dominance over other nations”. These two related evils of modern colonization as tools of modern warfare levied against African countries by Western Europe and America jointly constitute the albatross for development of Africa and with it the unending trend of the growth in the number of Africans falling into poverty. Having instituted imperialism in Africa, Western Europe and America have consistently used African agents to advance the agenda of imperialism in the continent, or where that fails, use the ‘jackals’ to take away ‘stubborn’ African Presidents.
Let us take a brief history of pan-Africanism in the continent. African nationalism first started after the Second World War as a mass movement to protest the oppressive social changes in the world as a result of the degenerating forms of treatments of Africans by their colonial masters, which has become increasingly humiliating. African nationalism was first referred to as a set of political ideologies which are based on the common idea of self-determination and the creation of political nation states. Presently, African nationalism embodies such ideas that are generally referred to as socio-economic emancipation of African countries from the clutches of European and American imperialism hoisted on African countries by their former colonial masters.
In his 312 page book published in 1972, which he called “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, Walter Anthony Rodney (23rd March 1942 – 13th June 1980), a frontline Guyanese historian, political activist and academic, articulated the foundation of African underdevelopment which he traced to the former colonial masters of Africa. Walter Rodney, a Pan-Africanist who believed that the various ethnic groups in Guyana that have been displaced and disenfranchised by the ruling colonial class should work together to address their common problems was assassinated by the instruction of the then sitting Guyanese president, Linden Forbes Burnham whose ideas about oppressing the Guyanese people was in conflict with the freedom sought for the people by Walter Rodney’s book has in the last 50 years become the first port of call for knowledge on the major reasons for the underdevelopment of Africans as well a compendium of knowledge for the rebirth of pan-Africanism. In his short life (38years) Walter Rodney became one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anti-colonial revolution.
Thomas Noel Sankara, (21st December 1949 – 15th October 1987), a Marxist revolutionary and another pan-Africanist was to become president of Burkina Faso from his coup in 1983 till he was deposed by assassination through another coup organized by his friend and former colleague, Blaise compaore, who was used by the imperialists to do the odd job and thwart the socio-economic recovery programs initiated by Sankara. Till date, the death of Thomas Sankara is still haunting the conspirators in Burkina Faso as the Burkinabes have suddenly discovered that Thomas Sankara would have taken them away from economic doldrums.
The efforts of another pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah (21st September 1909 – 27th April 1972) to achieve a common African union was botched by the imperial masters who worked through the other Presidents in the continent, who were their stooges, to hurriedly inaugurate the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on May 25th 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Though Nkrumah was one of the first leaders of the 32 signatory government organization (OAU), he had wanted a union of common government and currency amongst African countries. A great pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah was the most principal driver for pan-Africanism during his time. He said, “I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me”. He recognized, in his words, that, “The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart”.
For his pan-Africanist posture, Nkrumah was almost bombed out of life in the Kulungugu bomb attack on 1st August 1962. Nkrumah who was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana was targeted in Kulungugu, a minor port of entry in the Pusiga District in the Upper East Bawku Region of Ghana. He was later overthrown by the National Liberation Council (NLC), a government that emerged from a coup d’etat supported and sponsored by the American secret service organization, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
It is important to note that what I prefer to call the ‘African Leadership bug’ caught up with Kwame Nkrumah who named himself Osagyefo (meaning ‘Redeemer’), and instituted a fair-reaching constitutional amendment which made Ghana a one-party state with himself as the life President for both the nation and the political party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
The master of them all, Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (August 17th 1887 – 10th June 1940), a Jamaican, believed that all black people should return to their rightful homelands in Africa. His idea was to restore Africa through a direct reversal of the damages caused by the enslavement of Africans in Europe and America. For this reason, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914 and also founded and led the pan-Africanism movement called African Communities League which sought to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide. Sabotaged by imperial forces, the movement suffered reversals and ended up only as one of intellectual foundations for pan-Africanism goals, without achieving empirical results.
I have gone this depth in history to show how strong and malignant the forces of imperialism have become in Africa. The tentacle of imperialism in Africa is so widely spread and deadly that people who oppose it run the risk of losing their lives and/or their governments. Courtesy of the revelations of John Perkins in his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, corruption which is another major cause of hunger, general poverty and penury in all the African countries including Nigeria, is actually encouraged by the imperialist masters who use corruption as the carrot stick to entice selfish, and unpatriotic African leaders who are always cajoled and blackmailed to sell their countries for Sterling Pounds, Dollar or Euro currencies.
In a book review interview which John Perkins granted The Thom Hartmann program in Washington D.C, the author drew a graphic picture of how those he called the ‘Jackals’ will ‘take out’ (through assassination and/or change of government) of an African leader who may refuse to play ball (accept the imperialist conditions) given through the so called multilateral institutions of western Europe and American like the IMF (International Monetary Fund) the World Bank with its subsidiaries called Bretton Wood group such as International Finance Cooperation (IFC), the International Bank for Construction and Development, etc, plus of course, the Paris Club of Creditors and other such-like hawkish creditor and financial companies in western Europe and America whose financial traps into deeper sorrows African countries find difficult to escape.
To address the depreciating condition of African countries, several groups and organizations have risen up both in Africa and amongst Africans living in the Diaspora. Some of these groups founded their ideologies on the theory of Karl Marx, while others derived the authority for the operations from the works of people like Marcus Garvey, Walter Rodney etc.
Karl Heinrich Marx (5th May 1818 – 14th March 1883) was a Prussian German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, political scientist, journalist and social revolutionary, who, together with his closest associates and academic collaborator Fredrick Engels (28th November 1820 – 5th August, 1895) propounded what has come to be known as Marxism. Marx’s critical theories about society, economics and politics are collectively understood as Marxism. Marxism believes that human society develop through class conflicts as in the capitalist mode of production where conflicts manifest between the ruling classes (which he calls bourgeoisie) that control the means of production and the working class (which he calls the proletariat) who sell their labour power in return for wages.
But there is a pan-Africanist extra-ordinary who is a campaigner for true independence for Africa and Africans. Presently living, still active and 80 years old, he has spent his life to champion the course of social, political and economic freedom for African countries. This man is Omali Yeshitela. Born an Afro American as Joseph Waller on the 9th of October 1941, Omali Yeshitela is the founder of the Uhuru (a Swahili word meaning ‘freedom’) Movement, an African internationalist organization based in Petersburg, Florida, U.S.A. who is also the founder of African People’s Socialist Party in America, as well as a writer and political activist.
Proposing the necessity to bring about a one United African Union with a common interest in the form of the United States of America in a talk show organized by Oxford Union Society on 13th February 2019, Omali Yeshitela traced the origin of Africa’s underdevelopment, deprivation and hunger to the 1884/85 balkanization of Africa in the Berlin conference by America and the Western European countries. He noted that African slaves became the very foundation of modern capitalism. He further opined that to maintain the continuous flow of industrial fiber and cheap manpower resources from Africa is the reason for neo-imperialist actions of Western Europe and America who insist that African countries must remain divided, prevented from having any form of unity so that their business must go on as usual.
Justifying the need for informed and strong leadership in Africa to challenge and address the apathy of Africans on their centuries-old subjugation and submission to imperialism, Omali Yeshitela writes in his book “An Uneasy Equilibrium: The African Revolution Versus Parasitic Capitalism”, that “Sometimes, our positions are unpopular in the short term, even among the masses, only to be vindicated as events unfold to reveal a truth that was obscured by the faulty analysis of the prevailing common perception”.
Omali Yeshitela continues, “On such occasions, we must move in opposition to the direction the masses are attempting to go. Otherwise, what is the meaning of leadership?”
Omali Yeshitela applies rare intelligence in his critique of the works of Karl Marx though he finds fault with the perspective from which Marx, a non-African, saw issues concerning Africa and the less privileged nations of the world. Nevertheless, Yeshitela who is also regarded as a historical materialist and an African internationalist believes that some of Karl Marx’s opinions on the natural freedom of man must form the foundation of the African internationalist theory which he, Yeshitela, founded and is still propagating. Evidently, Omali Yeshitela is the most visible and powerful proponent of the African liberation movement as well as the most foremost black political thinker and activist presently living anywhere in the world.
Imperialist masters have for long been working against such strong leaderships as Yeshitela recommended that will turn the economy of the continent around. To achieve the imperialist agenda in Nigeria was the reason why the APC government of President Mohammadu Buhari was ushered into power to ruin the Nigerian economy further in spite of the available reports around the world pointing to him as a President that will be non-performing.
There were tacit, albeit obvious covert influences by the imperialists with their masquerade toga of Superpowers, which made it possible for President Buhari to come to power in Nigeria in 2015. One of such influences was the unwarranted and un-diplomatic meddling into the affairs of the sovereign country of Nigeria by the United States government of President Barak Obama who loaned the managers of President Obama’s campaign to the ‘change 2015’ campaign team in Nigeria to ensure victory at the presidential election for their candidate. Another of such meddling into the affairs of Nigeria was the unnecessary international hype created by the U.S.A to castigate the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan during the kidnap in Chibok, Northern Nigeria of some secondary school girls by the Boko Haram.
Preferring to support Presidential candidates in Africa who will run their countries aground than supporting those candidates who will develop African countries, Western European countries and America have been severally incriminated in cases of sabotage of African interests through subtle supports and withdrawal of supports, respectively, preferring African countries to be underdeveloped and Africans wallowing in hunger so that the imperialist agenda will continue unhindered.
With hunger and deprivation stalking the villages, towns and cities of African countries, the chicks seem to have come to roost and Africans must act now, both impulsively and compulsorily in the manner of the ‘Arab Spring’ to liberate themselves from their sold-out politicians, the corrupt leaders and the imperialist masters. Nigeria and indeed all other African countries need benevolent, yet iron-fisted pathfinders who will defy the tantrums and tricks of the imperialist masters to direct Africans to the path of sustainable wealth and development, utilizing the natural and manpower resources that richly abound within the shores of the continent.
In Part 2 of this work, we shall explore as well as examine the political roadmap for a social revolution that will shake-up the economies of African countries and improve the welfare of Africans.
ABUCHI OBIORA
abuchiobiora@gmail.com
For: Global Upfront Newspapers
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