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Africa Shall Rise, When? By Emmanuel A.C. Orji
From 1935 to 1941, I lived with my father in Kano where he worked for the Nigerian Railway. Each year, my father bought an almanac, which was marketed by a Yoruba patent medicine dealer whose main medicine was a crude-looking but effective balm called MENTHOLINE. This Yoruba patent medicine dealer was popularly known in Kano then as Blessed Jacob. Each year’s edition of the almanac he marketed bore the same question. And the question was, “AFRICA SHALL RISE, WHEN?”
When I asked my father what the question meant, he told me that Africa was a backward continent, but that it was hoped that one day it would rise in development to the level of Europe and America; but no one knew when that would be. My regrettable experience, however, is that to this day, Africa has not yet risen.
You may ask the question, what of the fact that Africa has graduated from colonialism to independence? Does that not show that Africa has risen?
My answer to this question is a capital NO. Contrary to all expectation, the attainment of independence has worsened the plight of the people of Africa. What independence has meant for Africa is mass suffering, mass illiteracy, ignorance, disease, hunger, poverty in the midst of plenty, intolerance, corrupt and repressive, usurped leadership as well as loss of freedom. Thus, the struggle against colonial rule has not yielded the desired freedom; rather, white imperialism has been replaced with native tyranny to the extent that people would now prefer white rule. In Nigeria, for example, we are supposed to operate a democratic government, but the reverse is the case. For the past six years, we were said to operate a democracy, but no one could embark on any protest without police permit because of the existence of an anti-people law called Public Order Act. It was only a few days ago that an Abuja High Court declared this law null and void. Whether the Abuja High Court ruling on this bad law will be respected and obeyed is another matter. Time, however, will tell, because the government selects the court order to obey or disobey. Never in the history of democracy has the judiciary been treated with such disrespect and contempt. More annoying is the news that the Inspector General of Police is said to be contemplating appealing against that Abuja High Court judgment. If he eventually succeeds in taking such an anti-people decision and action, then he will be telling the world that the police are the enemy of the people. Reports from other parts of Africa appear to be the same as in Nigeria.
In the name of politics, all manner of funny and callous actions are taken against the people by government. Most recently, in Zimbabwe, several thousands of people were rendered homeless through the bulldozing of their houses on the orders of the government that is said to be elected by the people. Earlier, food donated by other countries were discriminatorily distributed to the exclusion of members of the opposition party. That is Africa in action.
It is clear that governments in Africa deliberately pursue policies that promote poverty among Africans as a strategy for weakening the will of the people so that those in power may continue to be in power endlessly by maneuvering the people as it suits them through bribes at election. Indeed, in Africa, election can be rightly defined as a political game of football in which an incumbent office-holder is bound to ‘win’ because he is player, referee, linesman and spectator, all rolled into one. Reuben Abati says that ‘there is no connection in Nigerian politics between public opinion polls and election results. This is a country where a convicted armed robber can become President if he so wishes…. Nigerian politics is driven by money: that is money in people’s pockets.” (Reuben Abati in The Guardian, Sunday May 19, 2002 page 14). In Ethiopia, the result of election held on May 15, 2005 was published only on August 9, 2005! Why? Your guess is as good as mine. The resentment of Africa to this situation is gradually building up and could explode sooner than later. Recently, in Mozambique, some people protested against election rigging in an unusual manner when they demonstrated nude in the streets.
Poor, frustrated and wretched, the people of Africa resort to drugs, alcohol and sex. In June 2005, 48 persons died in Kenya after drinking locally brewed alcohol while three others went totally blind and five partially blind from the effect of this local drink. The totally and partially blind persons were admitted into Kenyata Specialist Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya. This local brew is popular among the poor in East Africa. In fact, in Uganda, it is called KILL ME QUICK. HIV/AIDS is on the increase in the continent of Africa. Africans can’t however continue to drink to drown their problems because problems are the best swimmers. Africans should rather begin to think of how to find solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, however, only few Africans find time to think. Someone, in assessing the percentage of thinkers in the former Soviet Union, said “5% of the people think, 10% think they think, 85% would rather die than think”. If this was the position in the Soviet Union that sent people to the moon, then in third world Africa, only 1% would think, 4% would think they think and 95% would rather die than think. Because so few are thinking, there are bound to be few to argue. So, Africans must think and argue against irresponsible leadership and encourage educated Africans to come out and participate actively in politics for, “if people of goodwill hold aloof from political organization, the state will sink into disorder; control will fall into worse hands, and they themselves will be penalized” (Viscount Samuel in Belief And Action).
On Tuesday 12/7/05, about 70 persons (mostly children) were massacred in cold blood in Northern Kenya as a result of inter tribal/ethnic conflict now rampant in Africa. In Monrovia, as many as 22 candidates are contesting for the one seat of President of the country . In this contest, people have resorted to ritual killings in the belief that it confers magical powers to political ascendancy. Thus are Africans filled with superstition which has continued to hold them down. In Swaziland for example, pregnant women are forbidden by tradition to sleep under mosquito net because it is believed that doing so would cause miscarriage. (Radio Deutsche-Welle, 10 p.m. news on 24/4/03)
In a country like Swaziland, there is an absolute monarchy in the 21st century that is even resisting the modernization of the political system! Swaziland’s indulgent monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland, 36, has 14 wives and recently acquired a Daimler-Chrysler Maybach car with all the accessories – a television receiver, DVD player, 21-speaker surround-sound system, refrigerator, cordless telephone, golf bag and sterline silver champagne flutes, all for a ‘mere’ US$500,000.00 or £360,000.00 or 4 million Lilangeni, when his nation is surviving on food aid. In fact, the World Food Programme was feeding 150,000 people in 2004 in Swaziland after a drought, the same year 2004 as the extravagant monarch of the tiny mountain kingdom in April celebrated his 36th birthday to which he invited 10,000 guests, a party that cost the state US$600,000.00 It must be noted that about 66% of his country’s one million population live below the poverty line. In addition to being debt-ridden, Swaziland has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. (Africa Today: Vol.II No.2 February 2005, p.6)
African leaders are crazy over luxuries when they can ill afford necessities. But beyond this, those in power in Africa are madly intoxicated with power. An example of such intoxication happened in Kenya recently. Because I cannot report it as well or better, I would rather quote the following account of the incident given by the Voice of America (VOA): “On the eve of World Press Freedom Day, Kenya's first lady stormed the offices of one of the country's major daily newspapers, harassing journalists on duty to protest coverage of an earlier incident in which she was involved. Kenyan First Lady Lucy Kibaki, along with her security detail and Nairobi's provincial police boss, entered the offices of The Daily Nation just before midnight local time. She then ordered her security staff to confiscate staff members' cell phones, cameras, and other equipment. For the next five hours, Mrs. Kibaki berated The Daily Nation's staff, accusing them of publishing lies, abusing her and husband President Mwai Kibaki, and misleading Kenyans. Mrs. Kibaki was protesting coverage of how she interrupted the weekend farewell party of the outgoing World Bank country director, who was her neighbor. She reportedly tried to get police to break up the party because the music was too loud. Clifford Derrick is a cameraman for Kenya Television Network and last year's winner of the CNN African Journalist of the Year award. Mr. Derrick describes to VOA his encounter with Mrs. Kibaki and the police boss, the PPO, when his network assigned him to cover the event. "I started taking pictures," he recalled. "After five minutes, she noticed I was taking pictures and then she ordered the PPO [Nairobi's provincial police boss] to come for me. As the PPO was hesitating, she advanced to my side herself and started asking me why I was taking the pictures. In the process, she grabbed my camera, though she never took it. I managed to hold it in my hands. Then she struggled with me to get a hold of the camera and the tape, and I refused. I managed to overpower her, and then, that was when she slapped me." Mr. Derrick says he then slipped away into the washroom, where he exchanged the tape he was using with a blank one. Mrs. Kibaki had ordered him to be arrested, says Mr. Derrick, but he managed to hide among the furniture and continue filming. Mr. Derrick says he felt, in his words, horrible and terrified by the incident, saying he could not believe something like that could ever happen. The government spokesman could not be reached for comment.” Driven into desperation by acts of bad governance at home, many young Africans escape to other countries in search of a living. In Sierra Leone, for example, an employment agency called ESS Support Services Worldwide recruits young people and sends them to dangerous Iraq to perform menial duties. Interviewed over the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Network Africa programme, these desperate young men say they would rather die working in war-torn Iraq than remain idle, hungry and wretched at home in seemingly peaceful Sierra Leone. The story is the same all over Africa. 20,000 professionals leave Africa yearly and Africa loses 4 billion US dollars in the process! (BBC News 9.00 p.m. on 30/4/2002) Thus, there is a part of Spain, which is now almost ‘colonized’ by Ndigbo to the extent that Igbo Language is spoken freely there. (Sonnie Ekwowusi: Tinubu’s Promise to Ndigbo – ThisDay, Wednesday, October 8, 2003 p.16) On 3/5/05,the BBC reported that 40 Kenyan athletes have changed their nationality to run for other countries in the World Championship coming up in Helsinki, Finland, in spite of President Mwai Kibaki’s appeal to them to stop defecting to richer countries.
Currently, there is jubilation all over Africa over debt forgiveness. How long will this jubilation last? Time will tell. Meantime, however, people who claim to know say that the Nigerian debt is yet to be forgiven, because, so far, the “Paris Club creditors agree in principle on a comprehensive debt treatment for Nigeria”. Writing in THE NEWS magazine issue of July 18, 2005, an economist Dr. Ayo Teriba explains ‘The (Paris Club) statement simply said that the representatives of the Paris Club met on June 29 in Paris and expressed their readiness to enter into negotiations with the Nigerian authorities in the months to come on a comprehensive debt treatment.’ He concludes that this simply means that the debt is yet to be forgiven. So, why the fanfare over debt forgiveness? Already, we have been told that we shall continue to borrow. Shall we not also continue to loot borrowed money that to a large extent created our past problems in the first instance? That is the crux of the matter.
When then shall Africa rise? Africa shall rise when good leaders chosen by the people in fair and free elections take over the management of African countries. Such leaders must be well educated. It must be admitted that a Ph.D holder may not necessarily be an educated man, for, he could only be a man of letters. An educated man is a refined gentleman who, in all his daily duties acts as if the eyes of the whole world were upon him, never stooping to perform anything mean but acting the part of strong and noble character. Africa must follow the example of Rome as recalled by Machievelli who reminds us that ‘merit not age or birth, was always the qualification for office under the Roman republic. Any state that wishes to accomplish what Rome did should follow this example.’ Indeed, that was what Singapore did under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew who transformed the country from a third to a first world nation within a decade.
How did Lee Kuan Yew perform the miracle? He believed in good government and that a good government can only be achieved if it is run by good people. ‘So determined was Lee Kuan Yew to induct good men into government that he made in 1994 a most revolutionary alteration to the way they would henceforth be rewarded. He introduced a formula pegging their salaries to the top earners in the private sector. In his speech in Parliament, he spoke about how times had changed and why it was no longer possible to depend on men who were motivated by a desire to serve the country while paid a pittance’ (Lee Kuan Yew: The man and his ideas p.331). He said ‘my generation of political leaders have become dinosaurs, an extinct breed of men who went into politics because of the passion of their convictions. The problem now is a simple one: How to select younger leaders when the conditions that had motivated the old guards to sacrifice promising prospects of a good life for a political cause no longer obtain in a completely different social climate. This change in climate is inevitable with economic progress and a change in social values.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, as prime minister, I responded to this problem by a gradual increase in pay to reduce the big gap with the private sector. But in the 1980s it no longer worked. So in 1984 I, decided to target ministers’ salaries at 80 per cent of their private sector counterparts.’
How did Lee Kuan Yew select men for the big jobs - ministers, civil servants, statutory boards’ chairmen? He studied many systems of recruitment and finally ‘decided that Shell had the best system of them all, and the government switched from 40 attributes to three, which they called “helicopter qualities”, which they have implemented and they are able to judge their executives worldwide and grade them for helicopter qualities. What are they? Powers of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles. You score high marks in Mathematics, you’ve got it. But that’s not enough. There are brilliant mathematicians but they make poor executives. They must have a sense of reality of what is possible. But if you are just realistic, you become pedestrian, plebian, you will fail. Therefore you must be able to soar above the reality and say, “This is also possible” – a sense of imagination.’…. He added ‘certain other attributes – leadership and dynamism – a natural ability that drives a person on and drives the people around him to make the effort’ (Lee Kuan Yew: Speech in Parliament on the White Paper on ministerial salaries, November 1, 1994).
Those we need to lead in Africa are people like Lee Kuan Yew and not mentally deficient, ruthless, amoral and manipulative thieves in the guise of leaders, political prostitutes and weather-cocks, empty Braggadocios who engage in continuous self-adulation promoted through the action of rented crowds of competitive sycophants. New leaders of Africa must be patriotic, selfless and tolerant. In this connection, private media must be allowed to function freely. A situation like in Uganda where the KFM Radio was closed down by government for airing a news item that was unpalatable to government on 11/8/05 (BBC News 11/8/05) or where the Catholic Church radio station that it had earlier banned was unbanned on the condition that the station tells less truth because too much truth creates tension and could cause trouble (BBC Focus On Africa 6 p.m. 30/8/03) is unacceptable. New African leaders must understand that what Africa needs is not aid from Europe or America, but trade. They must be leaders that are inspired, because only an inspired leader can inspire others. And in these days of democratic rule, such leaders must also be democrats for, as Francis Fukuyana has rightly said, ‘there cannot be democracy without democrats’ (Francis Fukunaya: The End of History and the Last Man). ‘What we have today as democrats are sycophants, toadies and malevolent dictators who brook no dissent of any sort, let alone diversity’. But above all, the people of Africa must take their destiny in their own hands, by developing an enlightened populace with the courage to oppose what is wrong, in the realization that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, for, as V.D. Uwemedimo, a one-time National President of St. Patrick’s College, Ikot Ansa, Calabar, Alumni Association, once said,
“Those who will bring salvation to their race Are not men who stay at home And talk glibly about salvation But men who brave all odds By going out into arena of service Combining with others to convert labour Into a feast of love.”
Mr. E.A.C. Orji is a senior citizen and wrote from Orji, Uratta, in the Owerri North Local Government Area of Imo State.
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