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

AT this stage in human development, it should be admitted that the optimal concept of population is a measure of man’s incapacity to keep pace with his economic problems, as and when they arise.

From the foregoing definitions and analyses, two inferences appear to me to be incontestable. First, a country is underdeveloped simply because it lacks the following indispensable prerequisites of development, namely; education, and good health; technical, managerial and administrative competence; and capital. Second, an underdeveloped country, by the very fact of its underdevelopment, is permanently exposed to the foreign exploitation and deployment of its resources, and hence to economic dependence, subjection, and what is now called neo-colonialism, even though it is politically independent and sovereign.

The goals which an underdeveloped country must pursue, therefore, are quite clearly two. There is the immediate goal of economic freedom and the ultimate one of being counted among the developed countries of the world. The two goals can be achieved almost simultaneously, provided they are pursued in the order in which I have stated them. I hold the view, quite strongly, that in the pursuit and attainment of economic Freedom, economic prosperity is inevitable. But not the other way round.

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Because I am convinced that every attempt on the part of an underdeveloped country to achieve economic prosperity, without first of all taking steps to ensure its economic freedom, is not only patently doomed to failure but would also make the country’s economic enslavement more certain and tighter. In order to attain to the goal of economic freedom, however, an underdeveloped country must do certain things as a matter of urgency and priority.

It must provide education and health facilities for the masses of its citizens. It must breed and constantly maintain an adequate number of technicians, managers, and administrators. It must ensure, from year to year, that the quantity of its available capital is sufficient for its purposes. Since the welfare of the people is the aim of all economic activities, it must foster and insist on a balanced growth in all the sectors of its economy. It must discipline its citizens to eschew all forms of ostentatious consumption, be they traditional or foreign-inspired. as they tend and are bound, in the long run, to distort the utilisation of resources, and generate endemic social disequilibrium, which will in turn encourage foreign exploitation and economic enslavement. It must exploit, mobilise and deploy its natural and human resources in such a manner as to benefit all its citizens relatively equally, and without discrimination. It must seek to be self-sufficient in non-durable consumer goods. At any rate, it must endeavour to export enough to pay for all such consumer and capital goods as it has to import. It must avoid, like the plague, an adverse balance of payments on consumer accounts, because it is this kind of economic factor, more than anything else, that forges, with ruthless effectiveness, a country’s chains of economic bondage. Foreign capital should be admitted only for the purpose of executing capital projects which are designed to strengthen the country’s economic freedom and self-reliance, as well as its self-respect for itself and its citizens abroad.

In its march to this goal and to the attainment of these objectives two paths or two systems, with separate and distinct polarities, are open to an underdeveloped country. They are: the capitalist system, and the socialist system. There are other paths. But they are, in my view, nothing but empirically ineffective adaptations of one or other or both of these two systems.

To the underdeveloped country, groping its way to economic freedom and prosperity, the capitalist system is very tempting. Its achievements are not merely a matter of theoretical exposition or of recorded history of a distant past: they can be seen everywhere around us, and particularly on the continents of Europe, North America, and Australia. The cardinal virtue of the system, which is naked self-interest or greed otherwise known as private enterprise, is tirelessly and eloquently extolled by its protagonists. But very rarely are we told that this virtue is at once capitalism’s greatest vice and doom.

To be continued