VOICE OF COURAGE: Selected speeches of Obafemi Awolowo (Vol 2)

Full text of lecture delivered by Chief Obafemi Awolowo at the First Lecture in the University Of Lagos Annual Lecture Series 011 Friday, 15th March, 1968.

Continued from last week

Furthermore, the gap between the rich and the poor is wider in an underdeveloped than in a developed country. The reason for this is not far to seek. The rich, in an underdeveloped country, arc invariably the professionals, and those engaged in foreign-trade orientated activities—exporting agricultural products and importing finished articles; whilst the poor are those engaged in peasant and subsistence farming, and in unskilled employment.

If we apply the mathematical yardstick which we previously mentioned, to all the countries of the world, we will see that underdeveloped countries are to be found in Africa. Asia and Latin America, and that they all have one thing in common: the badge or stigma of antecedent colonial status.

There is one other feature which is common to all underdeveloped countries. As a result of the conquest of space and time, brought about by highly developed systems of communications and information media, all underdeveloped countries, without exception, are exposed to the demonstration effects of the consumption patterns of the developed countries. For psychological reasons, the underdeveloped countries unreflectingly imitate these consumption patterns—placing premium on ostentations, status symbols and the like—with disastrous distortions to their economies, and disturbing and unsettling effects on their social structure and political progress, generally.

In view of all that has been said thus far on the point, AN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRY can be defined as ONE WHOSE NATURALAND HUMAN RESOURCES ARE PARTLY UNUTILISED, PARTLY UNDERUTILISED, AND PARTLY MISUTILISED, AND IN WHICH THERE IS A GROSS DEFICIENCY IN THE QUALITY OF THE THREE PRODUCTIVE AGENTS OF LABOUR, CAPITAL AND ORGANISATION.

Two implied but important assumptions need to be explained.

Firstly. it has been assumed that every underdeveloped country has enough or natural and human resources for its purposes. It is true that some countries are richer in these things than others. But it is also true that, granting a rational exploitation, mobilisation and deployment of these resources, each country has enough of them to make it carry on a happy and economically free existence. Instances are not wanting.

Israel has shown that any kind of land or natural resources can be made productive, as long as the other productive agents are sufficiently qualitative and optimally quantitative. What the lsraeli experience has proved beyond any dispute is this: the only difference between a country which is rich and the one which is poor in natural resources, is that the same dose of the other productive agents will produce better results, when applied to the one than when applied to the other.

• See amazing photos from Hajj 1953

In the Sudan, the Gezira Scheme has also shown that natural resources which appear hostile and barren can be tamed and made abundantly fruitful, when the right quality and quantity of the other productive agents are applied to them. Under the Gezira Scheme, not only has a once-barren like desert-land been converted into one of the most fertile and productive areas on planet, but also the nomadic population, which was once uneconomically thinly spread all over the place, is now being permanently settled into viable and lively towns and villages.

Secondly, it has been assumed that nature has so organiscd the affairs of this world that no country is deficient in or starved of natural or human resources. Those economists who speak of under-population or over-population relative to the natural resources of a country, are, like Malthus before them, only building far-reaching theories on a complete misunderstanding of man’s infinite resourcefulness in the face of difficulties. When Malthus enunciated his famous but erroneous theory of population, he had taken the qualities of the productive agents as given for all time, and had not applied his mind to the vast improvement which was possible and which has since been made in the inherent qualities of such agents.

To be continued