By: Russell Bluejack
Captioning this work, the first in the series, was a serious challenge, the reason being that my objective is to uncover the endemic institution of corruption in the African continent and Nigeria’s receding nation and submit that Biafra will make the evasive difference.
Nations in Africa, with the exception of the white populated ones like South Africa and Namibia, have always had very low Gross National Product (GNP) due to selfish, greedy, myopic, and inordinately corrupt leaders. The figure for South Africa and Namibia is very encouraging due to their mixed racial state – a sign that colonialism is not that bad, after all.
Lootocrats have always been the ones to man what we call nations in Africa, with no end in sight. Walter Rodney wrote a classicus titled “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” wherein he said the coming of the white man is responsible for the stunted growth or absence of it in the continent.
Rodney is an advocate of DEPENDENCY THEORY, a theory that holds that Africans, having been colonized, have remained under the political and economic control of the West, with the IMF and IBRD (World Bank) as the specific instruments. Rodney, in my view, failed to see that the state of affairs in the post colonies is worse than that of the colonies.
W. W. Rostow, on the other hand, authored the five (5) stages every society must pass through in order to attain development, a submission that reveals that economies, like humans, grow from PRIMITIVITY to MODERNISATION. This submission is akin to that of the founder of Sociology, August Comte, whose “classical positivity” divulged how the human mind developed from the pristine/primitive to the positive/scientific era. Another French Sociologist, Emile Durkheim, used his distinction between a mechanic and organic society to drive home the point that the human society is DYNAMIC. MODERNISATION THEORY holds that progressive economies are so called because of the state of their economies with respect to GNP, employment, science and technology, and education.
Economies that have clambered up the echelons of economic growth (according to Rostow) fare better than their counterparts that remain below. The first three stages each economy must work hard to surmount are (1) the primitive stage (2) pre-conditions for take-off (3) take-off. African economies, I dare say, have a long way to go. The 4th stage, Stage of Maturity, is for economies that are classified as FIRST WORLD/CORE/DEVELOPED economies.
The dependency theorists who claim that the African problem is exogenous (caused by the West) are wrong, since they hinge it on IMPERIALISM/COLONIALISM. Africa is not the only continent with countries that were colonised. The United States of America was a colony of Britain for years. Are there still vestiges of colonialism in the US? Has the US not overtaken Britain in all the indices spelled out by the modernisation theorists that engender development? Africa must look inward for the cause of and solution to Africa’s problem.
We should note that the countries in the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, founded the New World – South America. Yes, Africans were the ones being shipped as slaves to the New World. The black man, his blackness notwithstanding, is responsible for the existence of the continent we refer to as South America today. It means we have been in existence for many years, albeit with SERVILE MENTALITY. When will Africa grow? When? It appears we are in dire need of RE-COLONISATION. Donald Trump may not be entirely wrong, after all.
Walter Rodney and other dependency theorists are wrong. Colonialism and imperialism do not keep colonies tied to the socio-economic, religious, and political apron strings of the coloniser. I disagree. I think the modernisation theorists, who based growth of economies on the indices mentioned supra (above), are spot on. Let us survey Africa, our own continent, using the modernisation theory scale.
WHERE IS AFRICA ON THE MODERNISATION THEORY SCALE?
Rostow talked about the 1) primitive 2) pre-conditions for takeoff 3) takeoff 4) maturity 5) period of mass production as the
