Ayomide
My mind has been full of a montage of imageries in the past week. I think it was around September 2002 or so, that President Obasanjo and a host of other African leaders, such as Thabo Mbeki, Abdoulaye Wade and Hosni Mubarak, had been invited to attend the G8 summit somewhere in Canada. A few days after summit, I had taken part in the regular Presidential MEDIA CHAT with Obasanjo at the Aso Villa. As is the wont after the program, we had been invited into the inner chambers of the Villa to have dinner with the President. It’s usually a very good moment to either continue talking about some of the issues raised at the media chat, or to even get to ask other questions. On that occasion, President Obasanjo was particularly open and seemed to be on a charm offensive with us, against the backdrop of his perception that the meeting had been a success for Africa. The leading imperialist leaders didn’t only give our leaders a photo opportunity, something that our president seems to relish; they also threw some sop at the African leaders.
In all, I think a package of aid totaling about a billion dollars of old promises were raked up to reward the complete surrender to neo-liberal reforms which the African Development (NEPAD); a program that was enthusiastically endorsed by the Breton Woods institutions, got the imprimatur of the imperialists at Davos and had not been discussed with African Civil Society up to that moment. Despite the upbeat mood of President Obasanjo that night, I asked him if he had read the response of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh to the NEPAD initiative. Obasanjo told me that he had not. Then I told him the story. Jammeh had obviously been skeptical about the optimism with which the NEPAD initiative was being touted by its two leading salesmen, Mbeki and Obasanjo. At his cynical best, he advised the two gentlemen, Mbeki and Obasanjo in obvious pain, to purchase KNEEPADS which they would need as they crawl in from of the Americans and other imperialist powers, begging for money for NEPAD (see the pun, KNEEPADS and NEPAD!) Money Jammeh said they will never get. Obasanjo had then replied, ‘Don’t mind that stupid boy. He will soon come on a visit, and I will take him up on that.’ I then expressed my own scepticism to President Obasanjo that the whole NEPAD program seemed to be a mixture of utopian daydreaming and unrealistic expectations. In all fairness to the president, he asked me why I thought so, and I replied that it was unrealistic as the NEPAD program had done, to envisage about $96 billion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Africa.
I pointed out that before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, FDI peaked around $ 17 billion in Africa, and it witnessed a dramatic drop to less than $12 billion just a year after the end of the cold war. On the contrary, I had argued, that Africa is a net exporter of capital to the imperialist countries, as a result of the repayment of dubious debts incurred by corrupt military regimes and authoritarian rulers, mainly clients of the Western countries during the Cold War years of the 1970s and 1980s. As a matter of fact, Africa had been exporting human and material capital, to the detriment of our peoples, in the last five hundred years of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, which reached the peak today with the triumph of the neo-liberal paradigm. I have recalled this particular day, because this week and also last week, as I said at the beginning of this column, I have been wrestling with a montage of disturbing images in my mind. For example, President Obasanjo was at a Business Roundtable organized by THE ECONOMIST magazine this week, where he had assured his audience that his commitment to implementing the neoliberal project, that is causing so much harm to our country, was “irreversible”. He went further to solicit foreign investment, one of the essential ideological props of the contemporary surrender to imperialism.
It was in fact the excessive pandering to this new ‘ideology’ of ‘foreign investor-ism’ that reminded me of the Yahya Jammeh advice about kneepads. In the past five years, our president has traversed the world many times over, begging cap-in-hand, and obviously on his knees, in search of foreign investment, without tangible success. I get the feeling that his kneepads must be worn now, and pebbles on the pavements of Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, etc must be hurting on his knees very badly. But the committed man that our president is, he is taking all those pains and the attendant insults thrown in regularly, either by Transparency international, and the little matter of corruption index; the IMF/World Bank Bureaucrats and how Obasanjo’s government is not selling our national assets fast enough, despite assurances they have given the West, etc. it is all part of a commitment to an “irreversible” project of economic surrender! But the question a rational mind ask is why continue to follow a path that is strewn with pains, loss of sovereignty, the unending pauperization of your own people and had never been known to bring development to any other country in the world? Why do we think our ‘born again’ fanatical commitment to the implementation of these programs can make a difference? This is where the other set of imageries have come into focus. As the reader might know, last week we held the second Media Trust Dialogue, with the theme ‘Reforming Nigeria: which Model? The event provided me the first opportunity of ever meeting with Professor Sam Aluko, the distinguished Economist. At the pre-event dinner, he had given me several reasons why he believed that the neo-liberal reform program of Obasanjo would not lead our country on a path of national development.
On the contrary, but without using exact word, they would deepen our dependence on imperialism. Prof. Sam Aluko’s 55-page paper is particularly rich in statistics, and for me, some of the most instructive are related to the depth of Nigeria’s Debt crisis. Aluko’s paper says that “Total amount actually borrowed by Nigeria has been estimated to be $18.60 billion. It was interest penalties and rescheduling and default accumulations that jerked the increased the debt (SIC) from time to time. Some of the debts are of doubtful validity”. However, the devil, as the saying goes, is always in the detail. So is a total debt of $18.60 billion, as at 2003, Nigeria has repaid $48,165.1 billion and we still own, by 2003, a total of $32,916 billion. These are the statistical underpinnings that help to lay bare the truth about commitment of Obasanjo’s administration to continue to implement those cut throat programs of neo-liberal reforms, and to spend the past few years of our national life, crawling on Kneepads. It is clear that has been imposed on our country. This is despite the arrogant huffing and puffing of individual members of Obasanjo’s economic inner circle that the program they are implementing is original and home grown. These programs which commenced with the Structural Adjustment policies in the mid-1980s are driven by the desire to ensure that ailing debtor economies like Nigeria’s, did everything possible to pay back the debts. Stripped of all subterfuge, this is the reality that drives our country today, and has been the basis of our woes from the mid-1980s. The logical outcomes of these reforms include the erosion of our nation’s sovereignty, the entrenchment of great disparities in wealth, living conditions and life expectancy.
These reforms have been at the base of the introduction of higher user fees in public utilities, subsidy cuts and the increase in poverty, unemployment and the consequent erosion of the capacities and legitimacy of the Nigerian state. It is fact the crises that processes have generated, that have fuelled the near-permanent state of anarchy in our country today. The Nigerian state has become progressively weakened as a result of the destruction of its capacities, through the dogmatic adherence to the dictates of the foreign financial institutions. The corruption at the heart of this weak state fuels resentments, anarchy, tendencies towards disintegration, violence and the retreat of vast segments of the population into ethnic and religious cocoons. The sounding of the death knell of the development state, as a result of the implementation of a hopeless program of neo-liberal economic surrender to imperialism, unleashed the demon of ethnic and religious violence of Nigeria. Unfortunately, a lot of analysts and commentators have not taken as seriously, and with the detached, rigorous analytical frame appropriate to the problem at hand, to understand how the crisis of neo-liberal surrender ties up to the debt burden, and both providing a structural basis for the prebendalist content of Nigeria’s politics. It is the dialectical wholesomeness of this scenario that needs to be properly apprehended, in order to understand why Obasanjo is taking us on a journey to nowhere, and why we can predict as night follows day, that Nigeria will not know development, nor have its sovereignty re-enforced with the process that our rulers have become so gun-ho about.
There can no development in a colonial society through which the tanks of SAP and neo-liberal economics have been driven. The landscape can only resemble a war front. Who would deny the fact that our dear country resembles a place where a permanent crises phenomenon is the order of the day? The political elite is locked in fierce battles to loot, the people are at the mercy of a ruthless economic regime and the nation itself lies prostrate at the feet of imperialism. Nigeria’s neo-colonial status today is worse than even in the early years of our national independence. The resolution of the debt crises facing us through policy choices rooted in SAP and neo-liberal madness have ensured that independent policy-making and national economic management have diminished and narrowed considerably. To confirm this, it would be interesting to compare the patriotic and ambitious visions encapsulated in the Second and Third National Development Plans of the late 1970s to the early 1980s, with the mystification and confusion reigning today. The truth is that countries like Nigeria that implement SAP and neo-liberal economic policies have become enslaved to operating under an “external policy command” which discourages national dialogue on social reform. This is because the process by its logic destroys the social contract fundamental to ensuring that government policies work effectively. This is why individuals like Nasir el-Rufai would say, they don’t debate policies with the Nigerian people! But these so-called technocrats, most of who have been trained in the institutions of the imperialist world, would cringe with trepidation in the presence of their mentors in Washington. They are in reality alienated from our societies, because despite their technical expertise, they often don’t have a necessary grounding in the historical dimensions of existence of our peoples to even appreciate grand issues of national sovereignty and independent development of our national productive forces. They are not autonomous actors, but mere pawns on the chess board of imperialism. Being intellectually dependent, they play a tragic role in the stripping of the Nigerian state and Nigerian people of their autonomous capacities for creatively, development and independence.
Again it must be emphasized that the logic of the “follow-follow” economics of neo-liberal surrender to imperialism ensures that our country loses the capacity to conquer the space of development. This is the reason why we can argue that the processes of SAP and neo-liberalism are in fact a project of revenge; revenge by the imperialist power, that Africans, and the most populous Africa nation of them all, Nigeria, ever fought against colonialism, attained independence and sometimes ago, during the 1970s, even attempted to dismantle neo -colonialism. That is why the debt trap, SAP and neo-liberalism have been unleashed without mercy. The result is the decay, the violence, the alienation and the crises that we harvest each day as a nation. This is why I have been talking about a montage of imageries this week. I see in my mind’s eye, Obasanjo crawling on his knees, from one imperialist capital to the other, in search of foreign investment. Unfortunately, the kneepads he is wearing are worn; the pebbles on the pavements of Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo are beginning to draw blood from his knees. But the foreign investments he is crawling for are just not coming. The old man deserves out pity. Daily Trust, Thursday, January 20, 2005.
