Opinions

Nigeria and Africa in a changing world (I)

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7 years ago

HOW difficult it is to believe that it has been 65 years since first I set foot on the continent of my ancestors. So much has happened since then. So many hopes have been realized but, sadly, so many more have not. The predictions of the greatness that lay ahead for Africa and its people have yet to be fulfilled. The dream of the important role that the most resource endowed continent would play in world affairs has been too long deferred. Today what was once dismissed as the “dark continent” remains largely ignored and marginalized by the outside world.

As a young boy I shared that dream. It was implanted in me by my five cousins who were born in Nigeria when their father worked with the Nigerian Railways in the years before the Second World War. After my uncle and aunt (who was my father’s sister) returned to the United States I would often spend my summers with them in their Brooklyn, New York home. Members of delegations from Nigeria coming to the newly formed United Nations to plead their case for independence from British rule often dined at my uncle’s home. There I met my first freedom fighters and overheard many of their hopeful expectations of what their homeland would be once the yoke of colonialism was removed from their necks.

My own African odyssey began two weeks after my graduation from university when I was one of eight American delegates to the first international conference to be held in Africa. Students and youth from more than fifty countries around the world gathered together in Dakar, Senegal in 1952. There, I came to know many young people who in less than a decade would join with older nationalists to haul down the British Union Jack and the French Tri-coleur from their government buildings and replace them with the flags of their newly independent countries. I became especially close to the African contingents and returned home as committed to African liberation and independence as I was to the Civil Rights struggle in America in which I was already much involved. I would be forever after infused with what the greatest of black intellectuals, W.E.B. DuBois, labeled a “double consciousness.” In whatever I did I would take pride in an activism motivated by, in DuBois’ words, “two warring ideals in one dark body.”

Recently in doing research for my memoirs, I came upon an article I wrote for a student magazine at Harvard shortly after returning from Dakar. Six and a half decades have passed since, in the early days of the Cold War, I penned these words:

“The struggle between the Communist and the non-Communist world does not have the same urgency for Africans that it has for us. They are too much preoccupied with their ancient enemies – poverty, illiteracy, hunger and colonial rule. That the first three should be so formidable after three centuries of the latter speaks volumes for the failure of the white man to bear his professed burden.”

That was 1953, when, I would argue, it was not too naive for a young black American law school student to believe that once independence came, so too would come social justice and the beginning of the end of the economic exploitation which had left so many Africans impoverished.

How much the world has changed since then. The Cold War is more than a quarter century gone. It is more than half a century since the liberation of Africa began. The world’s resource richest region embarked upon its long journey to put its natural wealth at the service of its own people rather than that of the citizens of Western metropoles which for too long had imposed their imperial rule upon them. And what a treasure trove the newly liberated nations would, at least, nominally control – from the gold and diamond mines of South Africa to the oil fields of Angola and Nigeria; from the coffee plantations of the Cote d’Ivoire and the cocoa farms of Ghana to the copper mines of Zambia, the cobalt mines of Congo and the chromium mines of Zimbabwe. Beneath the African soil lay 90 percent of the earth’s cobalt, most of its diamonds, half of its gold, and 40 percent of its platinum. Dig deep enough and you would find more chromium than anywhere else in the world. Africa sheltered a vast store of uranium, to say nothing of 64 percent of the world’s manganese; 50 percent of its phosphates; and huge deposits of bauxite, nickel and lead. Today, it harbors the world’s 9th largest reserve of natural gas and 8 percent of known petroleum reserves.

In international fora it is a potential powerhouse. The Africa Group is, after all, the largest voting bloc in the United Nations. Its 54 countries represent 28% of that august body’s entire membership. It has at least 25% of the votes on most of the UN’s bodies except, of course, the most important one of all, the Security Council on which it is not represented at all while the other major regional blocs Europe, Asia and the Americas are.

Africa’s standing in the UN serves as a perfect metaphor for its standing in the world as a whole. Size, it seems, doesn’t matter. That is true whether we are talking about Africa’s long held natural resources or its projected population boom. The Population Division of the UN predicts that by 2050 Africa will account for more than half of the world’s population growth. During that same period Nigeria will replace the United States as the world’s third most populist nation. Today, you are number seven. By 2050 you will be one of only six, along with India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan and the United States whose population will exceed 300 million. You will, by then, be not only the giant of Africa but one of the titans of the world.

A century before your independence, and a year before the outbreak of America’s Civil War, one of my country men, Martin Delany, the patron saint of black nationalism, sailed to these shores in search of a homeland for freed blacks. He and his party were warmly received in Abeokuta by Egba chiefs. Delany prophetically proclaimed that out of this part of Africa would arise a mighty nation to which all the world would pay commercial tribute. He foresaw the Nigeria of today. But, sadly, no nations beyond it or the continent of which it is the natural leader feel any compulsion to pay either of them tribute. Why should this continue to be so?

Foreign media cover Africa mostly to report its calamities. Their political leaders often give the continent little more than lip service and put it on the back burner of their concerns. They see it as the continent of the poor whose peoples lag hopelessly behind in education, health, and most standards of living.

That is when they see it as a continent at all. Much of the world sees all 54 nations as if they comprised but a single country. The ills of one are assumed to be the ills of all. That is why it is so important to have a few success stories that will rid the world of its stereotypical assumptions. That is why it is so vital that a country like Nigeria succeed. For as goes Nigeria, I would argue, so goes Africa. It, like the rest of this region, is tied to a world economy over which it has little influence and even less control. The recent worldwide recession demonstrated the truth of the conventional wisdom that when the developed world catches a cold, Africa contracts the flu. After all, Europe is the continent’s principal trading partner. China, rated by the International Monetary Fund, as the world’s most dominant economic power, is shifting from an investment-led to a consumption-based economy, to the detriment of Africa which may receive far less public and private investments from it. We do not yet know what the impact of Brexit will be on Nigeria and South Africa which have the closest financial ties with both the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Nigeria continues to be frozen out of membership in confederations of nations which are thought to be the most important in the world. Although its economy is the 20th largest in the world and is expected by 2050 to rise to number 9, it has not been invited to membership in the G-20, which claims to represent the world’s most advanced economies. Nigeria is not regarded as influential enough internationally or regionally to be included in the company of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

South Africa whose economy is smaller and is not expected to grow as dramatically as Nigeria’s, is however, a member. I continue to wonder whether the continuing domination of South Africa’s economy by her white minority gives Western countries a comfort level that they do not feel when dealing with black controlled economies in the rest of Africa.

Some 15 years ago, four of the world’s major emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China, came together in a group that became known by the acronym BRIC. In 2010, seeking an African member, they chose South Africa which became the S in the newly named BRICS. I look forward to the day when Nigeria becomes the N in a renamed group of 6 which will be known as the BRINCS.

As we shall see, Nigeria has a more a rosy outlook for the future among economists than it has ever had before. Why then is it still an understudy on the world stage? Why is it when the G-8 group of highly industrialized countries or other gatherings of the world’s most powerful nations occur, it has been more often to Johannesburg that they first call than to Abuja, on those all too rare times when they seek an African perspective at all? There may, however, according to the 2017 United Nations Economic Report on Africa be some realistic hope for optimism that Nigeria’s day is, at last, believed to be coming.