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Celebrating in Chains: Dancing Debtors and Their Masters By AbdulKareem Olayiwola
Structural Deprivation – what most comfortable people elegantly call “Poverty” – now claims over 18 million lives every year; a third of all human deaths: 50,000 daily. Children under the age of five make 34,000 of these deaths! Since persistent daily deaths on such a massive scale must cause unimaginable indignation and chaos globally if human agency is widely understood to be involved, there exists a powerful global conspiracy to maintain the illusion – through both the media and the mainstream academia – that such an atrocious calamity is unavoidable, even ‘natural’, something to be expected. We find supposedly learned professors still pontificating: “extreme poverty has always been with humanity, and it’s inevitable”, a very lay opinion; also an flawed one. They forget slavery and infanticide for example, which both date back thousands of years to prehistory but were eradicated as institutions only during the past 100 years. Even though both slavery and infanticide are still ‘with humanity’ in several fringe societies, mostly hidden from the view of earthly governments, both are not now institutionalised nor brazenly practiced in any nation. On the other hand, poverty – let’s call a spade a spade – deprivation, is now not only institutionalised, it is legitimised as a (cultural) norm, brazenly practiced as a sponsored art, and is supported both by science (certain fields of economics), and by political ideology. Yet, all the claims (including those made by academicians hiding behind a mask of objectivity) about the ineluctability of extreme poverty are now known to be decidedly false.
All those who are in a position to know do now agree, mostly in private, and occasionally in public, that for the first time in history, courtesy of advances in science and technology that have revolutionized agriculture, the means of production, commerce and transportation; humanity is confronted with real excess wealth, and for the first time, there is more than enough wealth in the world to ensure that every human person has access at least to the very basic needs of survival. Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer’s unimpeachable analysis on inequality singles out the United States for special treatment, as I shall here. It’s not because the US is the only rich country that now acts to sustain and even widen the growing gap between rich and poor. It is simply the case that, having now accumulated for 4% of humanity about one-third of the global GDP in gross incomes, and having now amassed nearly half of the world’s coercive power, US structures of power are responsible for pushing, more than any other institutions at the global level, those very policies that worsen this dichotomy and sustain this inequality, with all its atrocious consequences.
Since we make just about a tenth of humanity, the fact that nearly half of all these deaths are of black-skinned persons ought to cause us moral outrage. By ‘we’, I mean black people, whether at home in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Diaspora. That it often does not is a testament to what Congolese philosopher Valentin Mudimbe calls Africa’s continuing intellectual colonization, a reference to the inextricable link between knowledge and power: between ideology, ‘culture’ and imperialism, and the way that Africa is especially and peculiarly a victim.
Deprivation kills more humans than any other phenomenon today, apart from being directly implicated in almost all the other major killers: conflicts, failure of governance, the spread of infectious diseases, to name but a few. Africa pines under a murderous duo: unfair trade and inescapable debt; joined of course by the more commonly named culprits – HIV/AIDS, incessant conflicts and the now hackneyed “corruption and poor governance” – all supposedly simplistically ‘caused by ourselves, rather than by others’: matters that I shall attend to in subsequent essays.
Here, I only focus on inescapable debt: relevant, I think, at a time when what appears to be a majority of Nigeria’s political class – joined sadly by the country’s intellectual elite – remain locked in a misplaced euphoria about the recent debt “cancellation”. Or is it “forgiveness”, or “exit”, or “buy-back”, or whatever. Suffice it to say that no debt has been forgiven or canceled in any sense of those terms. What has been agreed are conditions (most notably and ominously, the “correct” implementation of certain “policy support instruments”) – conditions (whose finer details are still being ‘negotiated’ at this time) under which about 60% of the debt will be ‘bought-back’ (not canceled or forgiven) by having the Nigerian government pay to our Masters an amount in billions of dollars (not yet fully disclosed, never mind $12 billion) from the ‘excess’ wealth that our government has recently accumulated from high oil prices, so that our benevolent creditors may waive 60% of what we are said to owe – and so that our government may then be brought under other firm terms by which the remaining is to be repaid. Here, I use ‘our’ quite advisedly. While I do not now carry Nigerian citizenship, I have a profound affinity to the nation of my parents’ birth. And whenever I think about Africa generally, I still regard that “Dark Continent” as the place where my own people are.
Looked at carefully under a lens, the PSIs (policy support instruments) associated with this debt buy-back will require Nigeria to hand over even more of the nation’s Sovereignty. Foreign determination of the country’s broader economic policies, already very, very considerable, can only now increase precipitously. It is sad that Obasanjo has persuaded himself to surrender a part of what he swore to defend and uphold – for Nigeria’s greater good, he must have convinced himself. Now, I don’t want to sound like just another critic who knows the price of every compromise but knows the value of none. So I hasten to say: it’s not that Nigeria’s overall debt situation wouldn’t get better after this has been done. It would. Or rather, it should. I only point out that the lack of transparency, the denial of the true costs, the obfuscation of the alternatives forgone, the euphoria, the celebrations, the propaganda and all the photo-ops over the recent ‘debt forgiveness’ must rank as a sad failure of national leadership, a display of want of courage by the country’s political elite, and most sadly for me, a failure of imagination by Nigeria’s intellectual class.
Amartya Sen and Jeffrey Sachs are the world’s leading experts on Development and Deprivation – at least thinkers outside of the rich Western countries would recognize these two towering economists as such (even if the powerful global structures that feel threatened by the ideas that they produce would seek to minimize the importance of their contributions). These two are amongst a minority of those at such lofty station who continue to recognize that knowledge is useful only if placed fully at the service of humanity. It might be more understandable for Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics who sits in a powerful professorial chair at Harvard, the world’s top university. After all, he is Indian, a country formerly subjugated to the physical and structural violence of Western colonization. Sachs however, white male American of Jewish descent that he is, seems to me even more admirable. Chief Economic Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General and a top professor at both Columbia and Harvard; Sachs it was who stood before African Presidents at the summit in Addis Ababa and told them passionately and unambiguously to damn the rich countries and walk out on the debt repayment regime that was killing their economies and peoples. Now, at Sachs level, when you’re an American, there are serious consequences for opposing your own government and siding with poor countries. But he made the sacrifice and embraced those consequences, the smallest of which will be considerable lost influence with the US government when Kofi Annan leaves the UN and Sachs has to go back to Harvard and Columbia full time.
Jeffrey Sachs argued unimpeachably that there was no ethical, economic or legal reason why African leaders, including Obasanjo, should continue (in a global economic system already unfairly arrayed against them), to use N4 of every N10 their country had available for development to pay debts that have already been many times repaid of the original capital; debts whose interest rates make them clearly inescapable; and most importantly, debts whose continued ‘servicing’ was diverting crucial resources away from the basic needs of life for the peoples of their countries – debts in short, that were helping in no small measure to sustain the immense toll of death due to Deprivation in Africa. If they will not help you, you must “do it yourself”, he urged. You cannot sustain “this charade” of endless debt repayments, the leading economist told African leaders. Stop paying; reject the debts and walk out. Nothing would happen, Jeffrey Sachs assured them. For a brief glorious moment, it seemed as if Africa’s leaders might just soon issue a joint communiqué and say “No More”. Perish the thought.
The Powers-That-Be in our world quickly swung into action at the highest levels, behind the scenes. Powerful voices worldwide quickly denounced America’s top economist for inciting Africans to rebel against the unjust global economic system imposed upon them. Stern warnings and criticisms came from other renowned colleagues of nearly equal distinction, mostly economists and political scientists in the US and UK. The most powerful governments joined in criticizing Sachs. He was “ill-advising African governments to default on their debt obligations”. Alas, once Nigeria’s Obasanjo ruled out the possibility of “unilaterally defaulting on our debt obligations” and assured the ‘International Community’ (i.e. Western Powers) that African leaders would “rather negotiate a fairer deal” than unilaterally default, no African leader had the courage to take the plunge and adopt the Argentina Option. The rest is history.
No one should minimize Obasanjo’s influence at the African Union. He leads not only Africa’s largest population, but also one of its three big economies, and the country that may supply over 20% of North America’s petroleum needs by 2015, or more, if, as is now expected, things continue to slip out of America’s firm hold in the Arab world. Note that only three US presidents – Carter, Clinton and Bush – have ever visited Nigeria. Note also that Obasanjo hosted them all. He now has “an understanding” with Bush, whom he has visited repeatedly. Lesser-informed persons think that is good news: a “sign of Nigeria’s clout under this president”. They are ignorant of the huge costs involved, not to mention Obasanjo’s broader regional geo-political and strategic role beyond Nigeria. We should not forget that before 1999, most of Nigeria’s trade was with the Europeans and the Japanese. In so short a period, courtesy of Obasanjo, the US, which until recently was receiving only 23% of Nigeria’s exports, now receives 48.2% of the country’s exports (and still growing!) – odd and ominous at a time when all other developing countries, from Venezuela to Malaysia to The Philippines, are wisely diversifying away from dependence on the US, towards the EU, China, and India and embracing other forms of South-South trade interactions. Nigeria under Obasanjo is riding the tiger. It is foolish to ignore the dire price to be paid for being so cozy with Empire.
In my opinion, in spite of the gains that may be made from the reforms he has engendered and the very promising institutional changes he has brought into place, it is a tragically immense price indeed that this country is paying for having a leader who is closer to the Powers-That-Be than any other African leader. It is the most important reason, in my opinion, why he must leave in 2007 as demanded by the Nigerian constitution. Empire wouldn’t mind if, ‘for stability’, he stayed on – or is replaced by a similarly inclined figure in Nigeria or South Africa. Recent events indicate that South Africa will not replace Mbeki with a more pliable leader, more reason why Empire’s focus will be on what happens – or does not happen – in 2007, in Nigeria. Remember, Empire is not known for idly sitting by, watching and waiting. Empire acts to bring about its “desired outcomes”. Obasanjo’s stay beyond 2007 would carry extremely severe political and economic costs for Nigeria and for Africa as a whole – apart from derailing Nigeria’s attempts at democracy and decentralization of power from the centre – a process which Washington will always undermine whenever it hampers its broader strategic interests; as it will; as it must in Nigeria, in the near future. As the private joke goes in certain Washington circles, “Damn Democracy!”
But something totally unforeseen happened to restore the possibility that Nigeria might announce a ‘unilateral default’ and trigger a domino effect that other countries might follow. This was the threat that emerged from Nigeria’s legislature. The leadership of the House of Representatives had apparently followed Jeffrey Sachs’ analysis and clearly agreed with the UN Secretary General’s Chief Economic Adviser. The House clearly believed Nigeria should walkout of the atrocious debt regime. Its leadership had vowed to block further debt repayments in the 2006 Budget. It was a threat both credible and ominous. Now, whether the reader believes it or not, it was this, not anything else, which forced the two Anglo-Powers (with Britain as the generous public face, and the US leveraging things behind the scenes) to rapidly offer Nigeria what we now so ignorantly celebrate as debt-relief from the “Paris-Club”, itself a misnomer. It was a pre-emptive strike that worked. The threat of Nigeria taking the Argentina Option, becoming a precedent in Africa, sending a signal to many others and triggering a domino effect, was not only averted, new terms are now being brought in, in the shape of PSIs, to bind us more firmly to “our obligations”. And now, Nigeria cannot lead other African countries on a walkout anymore.
We now fully understand the reasons for the dramatic offer made to Nigeria at the G8 meeting. It is consistent with the principle of having bilateral (rather than multi-lateral) agreements with individual countries to head-off the possibility that countries might coalesce and rebel. Old divide-and-rule. Sadly still works! But the events leading to this offer given to Nigeria also drew attention to Nigeria’s Lower House. Very clearly, unlike the tame and sedate Senate, this institution was yet to be fully secured under Empire’s wings – perhaps due to its size, diversity and exuberant temperament. Reuben Abati, writing recently, correctly observed that the House was the ‘more radical’ of the leading institutions of the Nigerian State. Empire now sees this as a dangerous oversight to be corrected. In this respect, Nigerians, and especially the media, need to support the House more than they have ever done. Notwithstanding its faults (and there are many); it may now depend on this rambunctious but ultimately effective bunch of “honorable members” whether or not Nigeria surrenders more and more of its Sovereignty to what development experts call the ‘Washington Consensus’. Current attempts to undermine Nigeria’s House of Representatives, for example by sacking its leadership and bringing in a tamer successor, ought to fail, in the medium and long-term interest of the vast majority of the Nigerian masses. If such a scheme succeeds, all of the nation’s crucial institutions would have been subdued to an Executive that too readily accommodates Empire’s designs.
Argentina had suffered under the weight of similarly spurious and odious debts that stifled development and crushed all possibilities of economic well-being for that country’s vast majority who are not of the well-off class. Once the Argentinean masses had successfully elected Néstor Kirchner into power (in spite of the efforts of the Washington Consensus and other global capitalist movers to derail that possibility), the die was cast.
There were grave and loud warnings about what would happen to the economy if the country’s leadership carried out its threat to announce a unilateral walkout of the debt repayment regime. The currency would collapse. Investors would leave. The stock market would crash. Argentina would be ostracized. The Unkind Enforcer, IMF itself, threatened expulsion and released a list of benchmarks that must be met in the budget. Joined however by an intellectual class more principled than Nigeria’s, Argentina’s courageous leadership took all the precautions in the books, ignored the threats, damned the rich West and walked away. The country simply stopped paying. A short period of macro-economic fluctuations promptly ensued, yes. But once it was all clear that Kirchner wasn’t budging, things stabilized. Not only did Argentina refuse to make any further payments, it even refused to discuss with its creditors. The previous threat that “the interest would only keep going up and up and Argentina would eventually still have to pay” did not materialize: the so-called creditors themselves unilaterally froze the debt ‘pending negotiations’. They had to plead with the Argentines to return to the negotiating table, something that country refused to do until things ‘fully cooled out’. Now, Argentina, unlike Nigeria, is not an oil exporter. Yet, last year, in spite of very high oil prices on the world market, the Argentine economy grew by an unprecedented 8.3%, almost now approaching double-digit, and so much more money is now available for health, education and food security for the poor of that Latin American country – money used until recently to make rich non-Argentines richer. The threats of national bankruptcy if Argentina dared walkout never panned out.
This was what Jeffrey Sachs told Africa’s leaders to copy – at grave cost to himself. Like Argentina, Africa’s ‘indebted’ nations had already paid by far in excess of what was originally borrowed. African leaders lacked the spine to even debate it. My own premise is that Nigeria owes no debt, and this forms the basis of the second part of this essay.
In spite of how it may sound, it is not in any way a radical claim to assert that Nigeria and other similarly ‘indebted’ countries in fact owe nothing. Nothing. It is a very valid claim, hinged on very well recognized economic, legal and human rights principles that are increasingly in mainstream global thinking, but are still rarely pronounced by persons who have the political clout to make such arguments heard. I shall expatiate on these principles.
No one doubts that certain leaders acting on behalf of Nigeria took certain loans over a long period of time. There are debates over exactly how much was borrowed, exactly how much has been repaid over the years, and exactly how much still remains. The following is however not disputed by anyone, including the ‘creditors’: Nigeria has made payments already far in excess, and perhaps multiples of the amounts originally borrowed. Yet, instead of reducing, the principal of the debt is, as at the time of this writing in early August 2005, still increasing. The huge wealth that Nigeria had poured ceaselessly into the ‘repayment’ regime over so many years was only to service the interests on these debts – doing nothing to reduce the capital, which was only growing further, into multiples of what was originally loaned. No one doubts that under such an arrangement, the debts could never be repaid – and were clearly intended as a trap. Both the ‘debtors’ and ‘creditors’ know this, even though they will often deny it. There are therefore many reasons why the debts should be treated as a “Myth for Enslavement”, a myth propped up by Power.
Firstly, I shall use the simple analogy deployed by the most profound thinker that America has produced in the past 50 years, Professor Noam Chomsky, described by the world’s most influential newspaper, the New York Times, as “arguably the most important intellectual alive”. I shall use Chomsky’s very words, quoting at length from an interview he gave very recently, in July 2005 (and he would approve the rather lengthy quotation): “Take Third World debt. First of all, does it exist? I mean, if I lend you money, and I know that it’s a very risky loan, and I therefore demand very high interest payments so I make plenty of money out of the loan that I give you – and then at some point you can’t pay – whose problem is it? Well, by capitalist principles, it’s my problem. If anyone believed in capitalism – which of course, no wealthy (country is truly) willing to do – it would be my problem. I made a risky loan, I made a lot of profit out of it, but if by now it turns into a bad loan – well, too bad for me. But that’s not the way the international system works. If a bank makes a loan to, for example, General Suharto of Indonesia...and they know it’s risky, they use high interest rates to get a return on it. The bank makes plenty of money, and the debt stays about where it was. If then at some point Indonesia...or whoever it is can’t pay the debt, it’s not the bank’s problem because at that point, the IMF steps in. The IMF was described accurately by its American Executive Director as the ‘Credit Community’s Enforcer’. That’s what the IMF is. Now what does the IMF do? Well, money was actually borrowed by General Suharto – the most corrupt dictator of the modern period by far…He took loans, he enriched himself, he enriched his other friends, and so on. Indonesia can’t pay off its subsequent debt, so who’s supposed to pay it? Poor people in Indonesia are paying for it – they’re subjected to Structural Adjustment Programmes – so they get strangled in order to pay off the loans that they never borrowed in the first place. Meanwhile, what about the rich banker here (in the West)? Well, you know, he’s not going to accept any risk – he has to be paid off...via the IMF, who make sure that the investors and lenders don’t have any problems. So the System works by the combination of imposing the debt – which they didn’t borrow in the first place – on the poor people of the Global South...That’s called Third World debt. Why does this scam even exist? There probably is no Third World debt if we adopted just elementary capitalist principles. It’s a Power System!”
Does any reader still doubt that this is really all about Power, control and subjugation? If you replace “Suharto” above with the names of those greedy generals who have ruled Nigeria with iron fists while plundering the nation’s wealth, and replace “Indonesia” with “Nigeria”, every other thing clicks into place. Nigeria and many other poor countries owe nothing. They’re only servicing a Power System. As Chomsky concludes, “it’s a power system”. It calls for rebellion; otherwise the World’s poor will never be free. Freedom is never given. It is fought for and won.
Secondly, under Human Rights Law, currently living Nigerians (and especially the under-18s who make a slight majority of the country’s current population) are not legally obligated to honour spurious loan agreements signed by an IBB or an Abacha. Let me explain by quoting America’s leading Ethicist on the issue of World Poverty and Human Rights (he too would approve my quoting him at length). In his Oslo lecture series, Thomas Pogge told the Powers-That-Be:
“It is a very central feature of the Global Economic Order that any group controlling a preponderance of the means of coercion within a country is internationally recognized as the legitimate government of this country’s territory and people – regardless of how this group came to power, of how it exercises power and of the extent to which it is supported or opposed by the population it rules. That such a group exercising effective power receives international recognition means not merely that we engage it in negotiations. It means also that we accept this group’s right to act for the people it rules, that we in the rich countries, most significantly, confer upon it the privileges freely to dispose of the country’s natural resources (international resource privilege) and freely to borrow in the country’s name (international borrowing privilege). The (resource and borrowing) privileges we confer upon a group in power is much more than mere acquiescence in its effective control over the natural resources of the country in question. This privilege includes the power to effect legally valid transfers of ownership rights in such resources. Thus (an entity) that has purchased resources from…Suharto, or from Mobutu or Abacha, has thereby become entitled to be – and actually is – recognized anywhere in the world as the legitimate owner of these resources…”
“A group that overpowers the guards and takes control of a warehouse may be able to give some of the merchandise to others, accepting money in exchange. But the person who pays them becomes merely the possessor, not the owner, of the loot, under law. Yet we impose a Global System where a group that overpowers an elected government and takes control of a country has rights. Such a group, too, can give away some of the country’s natural resources, accepting money in exchange. In this case, however, the purchaser, (we in the rich countries), acquires not merely possession, but all the rights and liberties of ownership, which are supposed to be – and actually are – protected and enforced by all…courts and police forces…This…has disastrous effects in poor but resource-rich countries...Whoever can take power in such a country by whatever means can maintain his rule, even against widespread popular opposition, by buying the arms and soldiers he needs with revenues from the export of natural resources and with funds borrowed against future resource sales…This is the Global Economic Order we impose on the World’s Poor, and through it, we make ourselves richer while making them even poorer…The continuing imposition of this Global Order, essentially unmodified, constitutes a massive violation of the human right to basic necessities of life – a violation for which we, the governments and electorates of the more powerful countries, bear primary responsibility…”
“This charge cannot be defeated through appeal to baseline comparisons, by appeal to the consent of the global poor themselves, or by appeal to other causal factors that the present Global Order may merely do too little to counteract”, America’s Thomas Pogge concluded.
The rich countries know very well that all it takes is for credible democratically elected leaders to rise up in the poor countries and say “No More”, and there is very little they can do legally or morally. They’d have to resort to trying to topple such leaders – illegally and immorally. Africa especially badly needs such courageous leadership now. Latin America is freeing itself before our very eyes. Almost all of the countries of that continent have over the past five years elected leaders who have publicly told Empire they would no longer do its bidding. Asia is also liberating itself. India now boasts publicly that it will have far more computer programmers than the US in 2020 – incredible power in a world where every structure of power, from finance to military and space systems, are all under-girded by computer networks running on software-programme platforms. China in 2005 had already surpassed the US in consumption of all key raw materials except oil. And that includes consumption of steel, a critical indicator of power. China is already the World’s factory, whether the West likes it or not. Against the will of most countries, they imposed ‘Free Trade’ on everyone when it paid them during the nineties. China is now better at it than them and they now seek to block their markets to good-quality but cheaper products, deploying dishonest subsidies and tariffs, and accusing China of ‘dumping’. Crass hypocrisy.
But whither Africa!? Africa is the only continent projected to be economically worse off in 2015 than it already is in 2005: at the end the result of a lack of political courage and the greedy connivance of Africa’s leaderships with those who maintain their peoples in sub-human deprivation. I have no doubt, going by human rights principles, and by the fact that she has already paid far more than she originally borrowed, that Nigeria currently has no debts. Some of Nigeria’s leaders and intellectuals know this, but they are silent in an appalling complicity with the rich Western countries, at the core of which is Obasanjo’s special relationship with Washington.
For the sake of argument, let us even ignore the centrally important fact that the debt repayment regime actually breaks Capitalism’s own rules concerning bad loans and high interest rates, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out. Let us also ignore the fact that Nigeria has already paid so much in excess of what she borrowed. Let us also assume that (some) adult Nigerians at the time did really entrust IBB and Abacha to borrow money (mostly subsequently plundered) on their own behalf, and on behalf of their living children, and against the yet-to-be-produced wealth of their unborn grandchildren. And let us in addition assume that the loan agreements signed by IBB and Abacha, are in fact somehow legally valid in spite of all of the above. There are still two arguments. First, it is doubtful that anyone has the legal right to sign off the future well-being of his own children and grandchildren and it is certain that no one has the right to do so for other people’s children and grandchildren. A second and more important argument: non-adults lack the competence to sign off their own rights. And if they did so, even un-coerced, no privileges can thereby be legally conferred on the parties that accept such transaction. It is the same reason why a man goes to jail for statutory rape for having sex with a 14 year old girl, even if she said yes and meant it. She is under law, incompetent: her consent is of no value. A clear majority of currently living Nigerians were minors and unborns when the debts they are being asked to endlessly re-pay were taken on their behalf. Never mind that this was done by un-elected “representatives”, in addition to the fact that, as children, they could not sign-off their future well-being and socio-economic rights even if their representatives were by consent truly appointed.
Under the same human rights principle that outlaws debt-bondage as equivalent to slavery (e.g. “I’m serving him because my father owed his father money and never repaid it”), Nigerians, especially the almost 60% of the current population that was born after 1985 (not to mention a large proportion of adults born even before), have no single ethical reason to consider themselves debtors. There are, as shown above, a million economic and legal reasons why they should not consider themselves debtors in any way. Sadly, due to our continued “intellectual colonization”, many do, and there is no leader to free these people from such thinking at the moment. From the arguments above by Chomsky and Pogge – two world leading thinkers, both of them Americans by the way – we see how the top elite of poor countries align themselves together with the rich countries in sustaining an unfortunate situation where less than 15% of humanity controls a growing 81% of global wealth. Note that the US, with 4% of humans, now accounts for one-third of global wealth (measured in gross incomes) a situation sustained more by coercive power, than by simple economics, if the truth be told.
When Nigeria’s House of Representatives placed the country on a track where it might walk out; where any further repayments would become illegal, Obasanjo, helped by the strategically-placed rosy-cheeked Madam from Washington who manages Nigeria’s economy, moved quickly to re-commit the country by a new device that eased the burden on Nigeria a bit in order to prevent a future walkout by Nigeria, and more importantly a future walkout by many other countries that would follow suit if Nigeria took that path. In negotiating a bilateral rather than a multilateral agreement, Nigeria shamelessly failed to offer leadership on the Continent – for a small temporary relief. In my mind, Nigeria now needs a younger, wiser and more patriotic leader, who can better see that the parameters of power on the global scene are changing fast, and who is not so mesmerized by American Power. Someone who owes to the US and the UK no major past favours or obligations – as Obasanjo clearly does.
We live now in a world where, in spite of the fact that for the first time, courtesy of advances in science, world food production has far surpassed the needs of the living 6300 million human persons, over 800 million still suffer daily hunger: incredible waste side by side with incredible deprivation. 1000 million still lack access to safe drinking water, 2400 million still lack basic sanitation, 2000 million still have no electricity, 880 million have still have no access to basic medical care, 876 million adults are still illiterate and 250 million children (aged 5 to 14) still do wage work outside their family, 8.4 million of them in the “unconditionally worst” forms of child labor, “defined as slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labour…forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and illicit activities.”
Now, how can poor governments provide for education, health, medical care, electricity and basic sanitation, when they use an amount equivalent to 40% or more of their development budgets on servicing debts that both they and their creditors fully realize are inescapable under existing terms? Debts from which the creditors have already made a handsome profit, by the way. Now, consider that in some cases, up to half of all the numbers of the victims above are Black Africans, even though we make just a tenth of humanity altogether. The fact that many of us do not realize that current levels of World Poverty and death-due-to-deprivation are avoidable may be the reason why the foregoing facts do not in anyway outrage us. Then perhaps these other facts should outrage us:
The three richest persons, all Americans, own assets that exceed the combined GDPs of all the Least Developed Countries and their 600 million persons. The richest 20% of the world’s population enjoys a share in global income that is 86 times that of the poorest 20%. A yearly contribution of 1% of the wealth of the richest 200 individuals (over a third of whom are Americans), some $8 billion, would provide universal access to primary education for all children currently excluded in the world. Meanwhile Europe spends $11 billion yearly on ice cream for its own kids. The US alone spends $8 billion yearly on cosmetics, but that country is notable in pressuring governments worldwide to hands off education and make the provision of education commercial, even when basic education is recognized as a fundamental human right, not a privilege for the wealthy. Europe spends $50 billion on cigarettes yearly and $105 billion on alcoholic drinks. For the smooth prosecution of organized destruction large-scale violence, some $900 billion is spent yearly on the world’s over 190 military forces: half of this money is spent by the United States’ alone on its own military. Africa groans under the need to import $22 billion worth of food yearly to avert starvation of its humans, but $17 billion a year is spent on pet food in Europe and the United States. Debt relief for the 20 worst affected countries would cost the same as three of America’s most menacing stealth bombers – the like of which were flown to bomb ‘special targets’ in Iraq during ‘Operation Shock and Awe’. All the above are facts published by the World Bank and similar international bodies. It would cost the rich far less than half of 1% of their wealth to eradicate global poverty altogether – including writing off the debts that are supposedly owed by poor countries.
The rich will do nothing of the sort, of course. Not willingly. The poor need to be as hard-nosed as the rich have been merciless for so long. This alone will force the rich to negotiate – in their own interest. The day that the poor rise up and say, “No More”, then and only then, will they be free. It won’t happen yet when many otherwise intelligent Nigerians still believe that Nigeria is morally obligated to pay such spurious and odious debts – to oil and maintain what Chomsky calls a ‘Power System’. It won’t happen yet when a significant proportion of the country’s intellectual class still chooses to forget that these debts have already been many times repaid of the original capital that was borrowed!
And do not forget: there has been no debt cancellation or debt forgiveness. To recap: what has been agreed are conditions (most notably and ominously, the “correct” implementation of certain “policy support instruments”) under which about 60% of the debt will be ‘bought-back’ (not canceled or forgiven) by having the Nigerian government pay an amount in billions of dollars (not yet fully disclosed; never mind $12 billion) out of the ‘excess’ wealth our government has recently accumulated from high oil prices, so that our benevolent creditors may waive 60% of what we are said to owe – and agree other firm terms under which the remaining is to be repaid.
“The Commission for Africa finds the condition of the lives of the majority of Africans to be intolerable and an affront to the dignity of all mankind. We insist upon an alteration of these conditions through a change of policy in favour of the weak”. Those were the opening lines of the March 2005 report tabled for the consideration of the world’s eight most powerful men at the G8 meeting. The so-called debt forgiveness for Nigeria, such as it is, is the most tangible of the responses of the powerful in favour of the weak of Africa. We can all see through the lies and the tricks and decide for ourselves. It was a preemptive strike to maintain the weak in their weakness. And we should remember that the weak are not simply weak: they are made weak by the powerful. The poor are not just in poverty: they pine under deprivation.
In the face of the reality of ‘third-world debt’ and similar institutions that sustain the unjust Global Economic System, Eduardo Galeano accuses the rich Western countries of practicing “terrorism of money”. Harvard’s Paul Farmer, the kindly medical doctor who doubles as one of America’s leading anthropologists has recently concluded that the avoidable deaths that occur in poor countries as a result of this economic terrorism is “comparable to genocide”. He tells us plainly that 99% of these deaths occur outside of Western societies: in Africa, Asia and Latin America. I add that these are the geographies of the coloured peoples that make over 85% of humanity. In Pathologies of Power, Paul Farmer does not merely identify the persistence of 50,000 avoidable deprivation-related deaths everyday (something like sixteen 911s happening everyday, day after day) as a crime comparable to genocide. He goes further to place the blame for this “New War on the Global Poor” squarely on the shoulders of the rich Western countries and the tiny elite of the poor countries who work in concert with them in sustaining this worsening dichotomy between the Development and Deprivation – the famed “growing gulf between rich and poor”.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which all countries have signed is clear: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”. For the first time in history, humanity now has wealth far in excess of what is needed to give every human person the chance to survive in dignity, free of deprivation. The atrocious debt regime under which Africans are placed denies their governments the capacity to provide these fundamental rights. The linkage between knowledge and power still prevents us from realizing that the harm we have brought on ourselves, while substantial, is still less than what the Western-propped Global Economic System has inflicted and continues to inflict upon us.
To other pertinent matters, I shall return in subsequent essays. But my question is this: why are Nigerians dancing, when they are still debtors? Why does the country choose to celebrate while it, and Africa are still in chains?
v Writing here under his nom-de-plume, the author is an international development expert and policy analyst, and works in London and New York.
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