PHILOSOPHY FOR INDEPENDENT NIGERIA

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK

Every conceivable inducement is being given to foreign investors of the Western Bloc to come to Nigeria to exploit our natural resources in whatever way they choose. The type of venture, its financial structure, and its location, are left entirely in the hands of intending foreign investors. The assumption appears to be that foreign businessmen are so altruistic and philanthropic that their main concern would be to help the masses of Nigerian people, and not to enrich themselves at our expense. In seeking foreign aid for our development, our Government has allowed itself to be led into a blind alley by its Western masters and mentors. ‘Money has no earmark,’ so says an old adage which is as true as ever. But our present Government has so imbibed the prejudices of Britain that it appears to see the very Devil himself in any foreign currency other than British or America.

It is now eleven months after independence, and yet our Government has not succeeded in producing a bold development programme for the prosperity and happiness of our people, with the result that, economically, we just drift, and become more and more dependent on foreign aid of a kind that is not likely to be in the long-term interest of Nigeria. I understand – or more precisely the country has been promised by the Government – that a five- year development programme is in preparation. The architects of this programme are a Mr. Prasad from the International Bank Mission and an American from the Ford Foundation. The United States has promised substantial aid towards the execution of the programme, but 90 per cent of such aid, I understand, will be in the form of American goods.

As a matter of interest, it may be mentioned in passing that while Nigeria’s proposed five-year programme is already being studied in Britain and America, for the past five months or so, even an outline of its contents has not yet been made known to the Nigerian people or their parliament. In other words, Sir Abubakar wants to clear the programme with Britain and America first, before his Government can ever have the courage to lay it before its follow-citizens whose lives and fortunes are going to be affected for good or for evil by the proposed programme.

The Government has also slavishly committed itself to British economic and political ideals and prejudices. Words like nationalization, public ownership of the means of production, or socialism, are to the Government what the red rag is to a bull. The advocacy of the Opposition for the nationalization (a) of the Plateau Tin Mines where foreign companies declare as much as 150 per cent yearly dividend, (b) of the entire mercantile marine operating in Nigeria, and (c) of insurance business, as an interim step, has been roundly condemned by the Government as heretical and mad. Instead, the Federal Government has declared that industries shall not be nationalized in Nigeria beyond the extent to which public utilities are already public-owned.

Before independence the Government of the Federation was not so scared by the demand for nationalization as it is at present. Indeed in a Government publication, first issued in 1956 and reissued in 1958, it was made clear that in the event of any industry being nationalized, fair compensation would be paid. It would appear, therefore, that on the issue of nationalization, which conflicts with the basic economic ideal of the Western Powers, our present Government has shown less courage in freedom than its predecessor had done in bondage.

In emulating British political ideas, the Government has even gone much farther than the Tories of the deepest dye would approve here in Britain. Up till today, Communist literature is banned from entering Nigeria. Even though the public has been told, after pressure from the Opposition, that permission has been given for the opening of a Russian Embassy in Nigeria, every obstacle is actually being placed in the way of the Embassy being opened. The representative of the Russian Government, who has been in Nigeria for some months now, stays in the Federal Palace Hotel. Every effort of the Soviet Government to secure accommodation for its Embassy is being secretly foiled by some countries of the Western Bloc with. Embassies in Nigeria. I know a Nigerian businessman who has been threatened with reprisals by a Federal Minister for daring to offer suitable premises to the Russian Government.

In keeping with the fashion obtaining among newly emergent Asian and African nations, our Government has put the label of ‘Neutrality’ on its foreign policy. But our brand of ‘neutrality’ is to all intents and purposes; sui generis. In our ‘neutrality’, we are already militarily aligned to Britain, and hence indirectly to N.A.T.O. In our ‘neutrality’, we do everything to prevent the opening of a Russian Embassy in Nigeria and we do nothing to open one in Moscow ourselves.

We proclaim ‘neutrality’, and yet Chief Okotie-Eboh, Federal Minister of Finance, on his way to Soviet Russia at the head of our Economic Mission, went to very great pains to assure an audience of British businessmen and politicians here in London that though he was going behind the iron-curtain, they could be rest assured that he was going .to return from there with his natural colour intact and untarnished. We proclaim ‘neutrality’ and yet the Sardauna of Sokoto, with the express consent of Balewa, is moving heaven and earth to drag Nigeria into a Commonwealth of Moslem States. He had done more. As if the Northern Region is not just an integral part of the Federation of Nigeria, and as if he is entitled under the Constitution to pursue a separate foreign policy for the North, he has, with the open acquiescence of Sir Abubakar, committed the Northern Region to the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli dispute. We proclaim ‘neutrality’, and yet we refrain from participating in the Belgrade Conference of ‘non-aligned nations’. Our Government’s ‘neutrality’ in foreign affairs must, in the light of events, be said to have been conceived in deceit and born in hypocrisy.

Before I pass on to deal with matters of purely domestic character, r would like to make one or two observations. The emergence of Nigeria as an independent nation was hailed as an event of exceedingly favourable portent for Africa.

CONTINUES NEXT WEEK

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