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

JUST as the need for some form of domestic control and direction of economic forces has dawned on most, if not all, of the countries of the world, so has the necessity for some form of international control and direction of these same forces become manifest to all the Governments of the world. To this end, various Agreements and Institution” have been and arc being executed and established, as a result, we now have World Commodity Agreements 1’01’ wheat, tin, coffee, sugar, copper, etc. An International Commodity Agreement for cocoa is still in the making. We have world organisations like the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to mention the principal ones, which are established for the purposes respectively of providing capital for development, facilitating international liquidity, and promoting the gradual elimination of all artificial barriers to international trade.

The objectives of these organisations and of their subsidiaries are bold and laudable. But their achievements have been most uninspiring and unedifying. In spite of their outward sophistication and civilisation, and of their altruistic protestations, the nations which compose these international bodies still pursue their individual naked economic self-interests and aggrandisement.

Indeed, there is, among them, unassailable evidence of an increasing overtone of what Sir Norman Angell termed, some thirty years ago, the ‘economics of cannibalism’. Around the different international bodies, various interest and pressure groups have been formed to strengthen their joint ‘cannibalistic’ designs. And so, we have the Group, and other groups, all of which seek not to promote the overall common interests but to advance their sectional economic greed, aggrandisement, and supremacy.

Now, when you want to eat me and I also want to eat you, it is difficult, indeed impossible, whatever may be our verbal declarations to the contrary, to agree on an arrangement which will redound to the survival of both of us, let alone our prosperity and happiness.

It should be quite clear from what I have said thus far that the vices and evils of capitalism cannot be cured by adopting a capitalist approach to them. But the worst of these evils remains to be considered. It is that, in its essence and intrinsic nature, capitalism offends against the principles of dialectic.

Whenever we speak of the dialectic, two great names readily come to mind. They are Hegel and Marx. They are par excellence the propounders of the principles of dialectic as we currently know them. But they arc not the originators of dialectic.

As Plato originally used it, dialectic meant the process by which man’s mind, either in disputation with another person or with itself in the form of an ‘inner dialogue’, tries to discover the truth of any matter in issue. By means of questions and answers, the ontradictions in any matter under discussion are exposed and -cjected, and the truth is ultimately arrived at. As a later development, )Iato regarded the dialectic itself as the very embodiment of truth.

About 24 centuries later, Hegel introduced what he called ‘the cftier dialectic’. According to him, dialectic is not an activity of ie mind applied to some external matter in issue with a view to exposing its contradictions and discovering its truth. Rather the legelian dialetic is the unfolding of the very soul of the matter itself under the impetus of the idea. The idea is complete in itself and absolute. It has in itself and in absolute perfection the qualities [freedom, justice, equality, truth and other forms of social ideals and moralities. But since the idea is a Spirit, it seeks through the dialectic to realise itself in the concrete world of men and matters.

In other words, the dialetic means simply the interaction between the idea on the one hand, and the events of nature as well as what lIegcl terms ‘the complex of human passions’ on the other. It is from this interaction that, to use another of Hegel’s graphic expressions, ‘the vast arras-web of universal history’ is woven. The principles of dialectic, as propounded by Hegel, therefore, are the principles of change and of progress: of progress ‘from lower to higher; from part to whole; from the indeterminate to the determinate.’

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

Hegel regards each stage reached by the idea in its dialectic procession to absolute self-realisation as a THESIS. But since each such stage falls short of perfection, the dialectic, of its own volition, calls into being a movement designed to remove the prevailing imperfection. This counter-movement, Hegel calls the ANTITHESIS. With the emergence of the antithesis, a war of attrition between the thesis and the antithesis begins. At first the waging of this war is imperceptible; then, it becomes fairly obvious that such a war is in progress; and then, in the end a sudden explosion occurs in which both the thesis and antithesis, in their original forms, disappear, and the SYNTHESIS appears which embodies the best in both, but with the best in the antithesis being the dominant feature of the synthesis. For a while the dialectic process comes to a temporary halt: ‘the antithesis is in abeyance’. But in due course of time, the dialectic procession resumes its forward march, as perfection is not yet reached.

 

To be continued