Our inferiority complex
Femi Orebe
A time was, some four, five years ago, when the writer of the bulk of your piece today was like a permanent fixture on these pages as he sent to me those his un-put- downable reactions to my articles. Then they stopped coming. But voila! We have Fola Aiyegbusi today as he regales us with the above topic.
Happy reading.
I HAVE never been a fan of independence anniversary celebrations by African countries as it looks, to me, not only slavish but demeaning and belittling of the entire continent.
For me, it is an acceptance of inferiority, and beggars belief that Africans can call the recovery of their rightful inheritance, an unjustifiable usurpation of their political rights, independence. Colonialism is a theft of the African persona, in all its essence. It is as ridiculous as a Mr Mungo Park claiming to have discovered River Niger when he actually met people living by the river side. No wonder, President Robert Mugabe once quipped that we Africans need to do a rediscovery of our identity, personality and self-esteem.
It was particularly instructive, watching the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in both the U. S and the U. K, a few months ago, pulling down the statues of some leading lights of colonialism; statues of yesteryears raised to some people for the ignoble roles they played in slave trade and other things totally demeaning to the Black race. Not to do something analogous to that of the BLM on the African heartland is to accept that we African are still in slavery, at least its mental variety.
That, of course, still shows in the way we still allow the white man to come lecturing, if not hectoring us, poking their noses in our domstic and internal affairs, whereas you never see any Nigerian Ambassador or High Commissioner in Europe or the U S interfering in the domestic affairs of those countries.
Suffice it to say, however, that we are the cause of this abnormality as hordes of Nigerians still troop to foreign embassies, not only to demonstrate on matters that are purely domestic, but to ask them to interfere, as if they too are not battling problems of their own.
If, for instance, the extra judicial murder of George Floyd had happened in an African country, both London and Washington would have been bombarded with pleas to literally send an expiditionary force to that country, as if we are beyond shame. Shouldn’t issues like that teach us to solve our problems ourselves?
Why, for instance, have we not seen that these western democracies are merely using the concept of election monitoring to imply that we are too incompetent to handle our own electoral affairs, granted though, that there are many ‘Trumps’ amongst our politicians in Africa, who would do just about anything to win elections or fight to the death when they lose? Didn’t President Trump just show the world how these viruses are, by no means, a monopoly of Africans?
Or how exactly have they shown they are better than us given what the world just saw play out in the U S 2020 election with the ultra rights ready, and quite willing to file out with their guns to fight on Trump’s vanquished side?
In a thoroughly belittling, unreflecting and demeaning fashion, didnt we see PDP’s spokesperson, Ologbodiyan, severally shouting on rooftops, calling on the same racist ‘Akintola – taku’ President Donald Trump of America, and his British conterpart, to come and insinuate themselves into the littlest of our electoral problems despite Trump never hiding how much he hates anybody of colour, and readily stigmatising African countries as ‘shithole’ countries?
So for people of Ologbodiyan’s mindset, how different is Trump from a Museveni who has tuned Uganda into a ‘Monarchy’, Alhassan Quattara of Ivory Coast who is fighting to the death to change his country’s constitution in order to have an unconstitutional third term just like our own Obasanjo tried, unsuccessfully to do, or even a Laurent Gbagbo of the same Ivory Coast who, in spite of losing an election still had to be forcefully chased out of power for this same Quattara?
How exactly is Mr Trump different from these persons that many here in Nigeria have come to see him as their messiah?
Thanks to Americans who voted for President- elect Biden, thus ousting the greatest racist ever, and in the process saving, not just America, but the rest of the world, which could barely have survived four more years of Trump the way we saw him carelessly treated Covid – 19 on top of violated almost all existing multi – lateral organisations, most of which have stabilised the world since 1945, that is, since after World War 11. Today, no thanks to his one – ups – manship, the U S is out of the World Health organisation, the Climate Change Agreement and the Iran Nuclear deal, to mention but a few.
All these should show us here in Africa that we need to have a self-discovery, get the right mental attitude and have the determination to stand, toe to toe with the white man, who many of us presently see as superior to us. He is, obviously, not genetically superior to the black man or in any way better, except that – and this we must admit – that he is more technologically advanced than us.
And no thanks to them as they it is who deliberately schemed that Africa must be, and remain, only a raw materials producing part of the world. By deliberately impoverishing African countries through policies designed to keep us in perpetual poverty, western countries have continued to perpetuate colonialism indirectly through their so called aids and grants, most of which they end up cornering, sending us ‘experts’ and selling to us exorbitantly priced tevhnologies”.
The above are the nuggets from our guest writer and I sincerely believe it is time we beat off our inferiority complex and let Nigeria, in particular, take its rightful place among the comity of civilised countries .
However, I surmise that Nigeria has far greater problems than what inferiority complex has caused it. Our problems are now worse as in the double jeopardy of Nigeria, unreflectingly borrowing billions of dollars from China, only to pour a huge part of it into developing the infrastructure of some neighbouring countries with the Federal Exacutive council ever so eager to approve such projects even where the road networks to our country’s economic nerve centres remain literally unpassable.
The problem with Nigeria today looks to me, two fold: one,we are now reaping grandly from the failure of the North to socialise education at that time when other regions were involved in a healthy competition, even providing free education to their citizens. One of the immediate consequences of that today is that Nigeria now daily ‘burns’ billions of naira, fighting all manner of criminalities in that part of the country. From the decade old Boko Haram, we have now regressed into massive banditry which is engaging, full time, our patriotic fighting men and women of the airforce, kidnappers and sundry other criminals who are readily recruited from the pool of a huge uneducated or unemployed youth in a region where population still grows in leaps and bounds.
This has now grown worse with its threat to food security in the country as farmers in the region, who produce the bulk of the country’s food stock are now having to pay huge sums of money to bandits who would, otherwise, neither allow them to plant or harvest. One can only hope that the federal government would do all that is necessary to nip this horrible practice in the bud lest we begin appealing to the outside world to come feed us.
Another source of pain, which is fast seeing the mushrooming of separatist agitations in the country is the abjectly poor handling of the country’s diversities. One had thought it begins and ends with skewed appointments, so it was, for me, a huge disappointment when leaders and opion moulders in the North, at a recent meeting, saw the #ENDSARs protests only in terms of a regime change with the President specifically commending Northern youths who did not take part in what was a shout out to government to seriously take in hand issues concerning about 60 per cent of the country’s population. The irony of it all is that those same youth, who like buried their heads in the sand when all that effort was happening before some government agents were seen ferrying thugs to dismantle an otherwise peaceful protest, are now guaranteed, as usual, to benefit the most from the schemes the CBN is now furiously announcing as if it was just waking up to the problems of youth unemployment in the country.
My guest writer has copiously shown in how many ways foreigners are impeding our development in Africa but I make bold to say that in cohering this country, not only does government need to become empathetic to its youth and the hoi polloi, President Buhari must learn a thing or two from the healing hands President- elect Biden has offered his country, America which is certainly not more divided than Nigeria today.
Also, all hands must be on deck. The federal government must now deliberately encourage the National Assembly to shed its overbearing weight on the country through power devolution, the Revenue Mobilisation commission must wake up and rejig its distributive formula in favour of the states to which Local Givernments shiuld fully belong just like it makes no sense to put community police, for which the President suprisingly allocated a whopping N13B, whilst the real Nigeria police is suffering from inadequate funding, under the control of the Inspector General of police as that will amount to same of the same.