Values for African development (III)

Continued from last week Tuesday

Being the text of the 30th anniversary lecture of Obafemi Awolowo Foundation delivered on March 6, 2022, by Rt. Rev. Prof. Dapo Folorunsho Asaju

Prescribed Values for African Development

Daniel Athior Atem Manyuon, of South Sudan describes Africa’s development problems in the following words “

For generations, Africa has faced numerous social, political and economic challenges. These endemic problems range from abject poverty, violence, underutilize agriculture, infrastructure, lack of access to credit facilities, social fractionalization, poor health facilities, poor education to catastrophic civil unrest; which are linked to illiteracy, lack of proper institution and exploitation by corrupt and brutal leaders. These block African from encountering and supporting sustainable development and recovery of Africa. When these gaps are addressed, many opportunities will open for the youth like entrepreneurship, which shall, in turn, create millions of employments and solve the problem of transitioning to the risk of unemployment.

Development of societies and nations require certain intrinsic values which are compatible with the qualities of good leaders worldwide. Values are imbibed through religious doctrines, home training, cultural moral guidelines and taboos, influences of political mentors, personal discipline and self-development, strong principles and moral values and above all, divine benefaction. A good leader does not happen accidentally, it is grown in the soil of virtues mentioned above. A leader is first good in himself before he can mediate goodness to the people whom he serves in politics and government. When a good leader is placed anywhere to serve, he achieves success in spite of difficulties hat may be encountered there. Obafemi Awolowo was well cooked by godliness, self –discipline, philosophical erudition, academic excellence, professional competence, political mentoring partly through the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawarhalal Nehru, etc. He was a hard working man who acquired western education with toil. The following values are epitomized in is life and in his books.

1. African Identity, Cultural values and Grassroots participation

Africa needs to free herself from the shackles of colonialism, even today. Afric is not totally independent. Some African governments are still under colonial influence. Francophone Countries still pay colonial tax to France toll today. Britain and France, etc still influence government leaders and policies, as much as they still exploit and manipulate the economies of African nations. Obafemi Awolowo was in the group of African leaders who fought against colonization until Nigeria gained independence in 1960. We recall that even the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914 by Sir Frederick Lord Lugard was a colonial marriage imposition, whose consequences still persist today. In Lugard’s words, the poor husband of Northern Nigeria is given in marriage to the rich wife of the South. By African culture, in spite of her wealth, the husband still; claims to be permanent head of the family. By his usurpation of authority, even the wealth of his so –called wife is becomes under his control. The British and other colonial masters are yet to free Africa. They could be happy that Nigeria did not have the opportunity of Awolowo becoming President because he was a threat to the continued control of the European powers. He was too intelligent and principled for their liking. International relations, we are told, most nations have no permanent friends but permanent interests.

It is necessary to sound a note of caution to African countries who unwittingly take foreign loans thereby mortgaging the future of their young generations. Most loans taken by African leaders are stolen by their leaders or spent on unproductive projects. It makes no sense to take loans overseas and commit same to projects that are not revenue yielding enough to repay the loans and the interests accrued. Consequently recent African countries such as Kenya and Uganda are already running into trouble with Chinese companies and government over unpaid loans and the resultant taking over of public assets such as Kenyan Railways an Ugandan Airport etc. Nigerian states have also been taking Chinese loans in huge amounts, and under very unfavourable conditionality. Obafemi Awolowo was a prudent manager of resources. He was not corrupt; he used revenue derived from legitimate commerce and trading in Cocoa to execute his development projects and infrastructure. During the Nigeria civil war, he managed the resources of the Federal Government so efficiently that the county did not take foreign loans to prosecute the war.

Awolowo was a grassroots man. His attire was mostly Nigerian dress with his iconic cap and pair of round-rimmed eye glasses. He was an indigenous politician who believed in African identity and culture. He was popular and almost idolized by the generality of te people. He identified with them. When he established Free Education in Western Nigeria, he registered his daughter, our Chief Host today, Her Excellency, Ambassador Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosumu in public primary school in Ibadan, in the same class with children of the poor. How many African leaders would do that ? This is the ideal servant-leader ideal expected in our societies, not larger-than life leaders that cannot be approached by or relate with the common man.

2. Ideology, Peace and Security.

African leaders of the 1950s to 1960s were ideologically-inclined. That quality is rare in today’s political parties and their manifestoes. In Nigeria, adults who knew Obafemi Awolowo remember his Party’s cardinal programmes, both in Action Group and Unity Party of Nigeria. Their promises were rooted in socialist cum capitalist egalitarianism.

The following statements by Geotge Yittey of Ghana provides appropriate backgrounds to ideology and free market economies in Africa,

After  independence, in the 1960s, most African nationalist governments spurned their own indigenous African heritage of free village market . free trade and free enterprise and adopted socialism and development planning as their guiding ideology. … Transformation of African societies required state control of the  economy to protect the newly-fledged nations from foreign exploiters. This set the stage for massive state interventionism in the  wave of socialism swept across the continent as almost all the new African leaders succumbed  to the contagious ideology, copied from the east. The proliferation of socialist ideologies that emerged  in Africa, ranged from the ‘Ujamaa’ (family hood or socialism in  Swahili) of Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, the vague amalgam of Marxism, Christian socialism, humanitarianism and Negritude of Leopold Senghor of Senegal, Humanism of Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia; scientific  socialism of Marien N’Gouabi of Congo (Brazavvile). Arab–Islamic socialism of Moammar Ghaddafi of Libya; Nkrumaism  (Consciencism) of Kwame Nkrummah of Ghana, and Mobutuism of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.  Only a few countries such as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya were pragmatic enough to eschew doctrinal socialism. Awolowo was champion is canvassing his own original political ideology.

Do we still have ideological leaders in Africa today? I doubt this.

In Africa, the most compelling need for development planning in the eyes of African leaders was Africa’s colonial legacy. Colonial objectives were not to develop Africa but to undertake only such forms of development that were necessary to facilitate the extraction of resources for export to Europe. Since the European metropolitan powers were mostly industrialized, the colonies were envisaged to function as non- industrial appendages to the metropolitan economy; consumers of European manufactured goods and providers of minerals, agricultural and sylvan commodities. As a result, the development of the colonial economies was perniciously ‘skewed, making African economies highly vulnerable to oscillations in commodity prices on the world market.

Awolowo was Nigeria’s “leading social democratic politician. He supported limited public ownership and limited central planning in government. He believed that the state should channel Nigeria’s resources into education and state-led infrastructural development”

“Awolowo wrote the influential Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947), in which he made his case for the need of a federal form of government in an independent Nigeria to safeguard the interests of each ethnic nationality and region and to create a sustainable basis for Nigerian unity. He also called for rapid progress toward self-government”.

3. The Fear of God, Righteous living and Prayer

Abraham Lincoln (1842 -1864 )  identified rightly that religion could be a good instrument for good governance, not to foment trouble on ethnic and religious fanatical lines.  According to him,

• “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.
• And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God … and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
• Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty.
• With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.
• Nevertheless, amid the greatest difficulties of my Administration, when I could not see any other resort, I would place my whole reliance on God, knowing that all would go well, and that He would decide for the right.

And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.

Obafemi Awolowo was a committed Christian. He was a member and  Communicant of the Anglican Church, but with close active relationship also,  of the Methodist church and Apostolic Church. His writings reflect his faith in God and the influence of Biblical precepts on his personal life and politics. He was a man of prayer and spiritual contemplation. His personal morality is traceable to his Christian convictions and faith in God.

4. Integrity, Truth and Honesty

Desmond Tutu, the South African iconic archbishop and theologian said:

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of water. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.” Why is northern Nigeria forever in the news for things ghastly? And why are the victims there hooked till eternity on sleeping pills? Political and religious bandits and other common criminals raid them daily from farm to home; they groan and moan and blame their stars. …“There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep.

Awolowo was a man of string moral principles. After he was sent to jail, efforts were made to propose compromises which could have made him become free, but he turned them down for reasons of his integrity. When Sir Mobolaji Anthony proposed that he quits politics and go on self exile from Nigeria, Awolowo responded as follows:

My reaction was swift and firm. I told ‘M de Bank’ (as his contemporary friends called him), that the two conditions were totally unacceptable. What will I do if I withdraw from politics? Politics was my chosen career, Law was my profession; I acquired the legal profession in order that I might pursue my chosen career as an independent person.  I would suffer from psychological Anaemia and eventual death, if I withdraw from politics. As to the second condition, why should I send myself into exile  in order to be free from incarceration? It would be cowardly to do so. Besides, it would be an act of betrayal  of the masses of the people of Nigeria to accept either of the two conditions… I emphasized that if I were released on either of the two terms, I would be totally discredited forever in the eyes of the masses and once so discredited, it would be well-nigh impossible to stage a comeback.

continues tomorrow