WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com | justme4justice@yahoo.com
In the next few days, Nigeria will be celebrating its 63 years independence anniversary. For the very first time, the Federal government is mulling a quiet non-ostentatious celebration. We are not used to this absence of celebration on this auspicious occasion, and it would appear to us that all is not well with our nation. But what is wrong with Nigeria? It is obvious from all indications that we had gone the wrong way for a very long time as a people and a nation, when we got the acclaimed independence from our then colonial lord in 1960, and the semblance of our nation’s Eldorado to come as soon as possible; but post-independence and till now has shown that what we had and still having and sharing with the rest colonised African nations is a cleverly framed and packaged neo-colonisation and subtle imperialism that we subconsciously accepted as a nation and a continent. Now, it is time we develop ourselves by ourselves with our resources, at our own pace.
The UNGA 2023 was a revelation that must not be allowed to go down without appropriate follow-up policy measures at national and continental level; it is indeed necessary that we are allowed to ‘breathe’ as a continent and Africans. As the Nigerian President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has submitted at the United Nation General Assembly, indeed, Africa countries including Nigeria have failed to progress developmentally because good governance premised on several indigenous factors have cumulatively hindered our growth and successes on many desirable fronts; but the factual factors that disposes us to the developmental ills we suffer are both directly and indirectly linked to the gross unfair treatments we have continuously received from the so- called developed Western nations, that hide under the guise of offer of assistance albeit with some underlying perennial yoke to continue their undue exploitation of our resources.
They sold the concept of globalisation and the world being a global village where we all need one another, but what we continue to have with the developed West is not a mutually benefiting partnership but a smart format of slave-master interactions. For all that has been persistent, we subtly reach out to them for survival. They have sold us the mole that we do not have the capacity to develop from within and on our own. Our nations and continent, even at this age, could not coordinate the tangible partnership they needed to develop from within, organising their resources for development and desired level of growth.
They started with us, with colonial capitalism, and suffocated our socio-economic productivity capacity in Africa. They keep deceiving us that we are ‘developing nations,’ yet, our problems at independence are still with us and in many ways intensified over the years till date.
Then, they openly exploited our existing economic, social and political structures to create wealth for themselves. The transatlantic slave trade lasted for 440 years, the self service triangular trade that transport enslaved Africans, export our plantation produce, and import Western goods to Africa in a market fully controlled by the same European capitalism. From there, we became submissive colonies and vassals; subdued to become raw material base for their countries. They continue to become more technologically advanced while our stagnation in the same gets more obvious. They obviously do not want African states to develop their own technology. They did not want them to be able to make their own manufactured goods. They have done everything to control us and our wealth.
Now, even decades after independence, it is apparent that we are not truly free from the domination by the West. The exploitation has continued, albeit while deceiving us that we are equals and partners in development. It is now neo-colonisation and imperialism. The West now subtly and decisively orchestrates economic instability in our nations, weakening continent-wide GDPs, promoting reliance on foreign loans to survive, inducing low industrialisation, and instigating territorial and internal insecurity to deny us space to develop which allow them to keep dangling their offers to us and to continue their undue exploitative access to our resources and wealth.
The fact remains that Nigeria would not ever grow out of the challenges it faces in isolation, nor would we be able to solve the many problems confronting us without having the African continent truly free of external manipulations that deceitfully keep making the Western world to seem like trustable allies. We have so much corruption bedeviling our capacity to govern our systems effectively and yet we see no feasible solution to corruption, why? Because the same Western world that labels us corrupt nations are both the instigator of our corrupt tendencies and as well the custodian of stolen Africa monies. Who operates the safe havens for our stolen monies? Who runs the Swiss banks?
We have for decades struggled with insecurity, most especially terrorism, banditry and other extremists and the Western world presenting themselves as allies in our plights and offering support to help us overcome the challenges. Yet, they are the indisputable forces behind the non-ending terrorism in Africa. When at the sideline of the 2023 UNGA, the Nigeria National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu solemnly begged the Western nations to give us back our freedom; to help us stop the terrorism, the banditry and the extremists, it was a message that we are well aware of the genesis of the terrors on our land; that we are fully aware of the forces behind the terrorists. It is a message that we cannot win the war until the same countries that are sending aid to us to fight the terrorists first stop arming the insurgents.
How do the terrorists access and accumulate weapons; the AK 47s and the tanks that they use to terrorise our nations in Africa? Who trains the terrorists to use these sophisticated weapons including the tanks? These nations with sophisticated intelligence know well about the underground arms dealing markets in their countries; they know the forces fueling terrorism on our lands to create markets for their merchandise, yet, they close their eyes to allow these dark businesses to flourish while they keep sending aids to us as ‘allies’ in the fight against insecurity. Taking from the words of the NSA, the Western world can do it; but unfortunately, they have chosen not to do it.
The utterance of the NSA is an echo of the position of many African Leaders and also that of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the same UNGA. To quote the President, “…failure in good governance has hindered Africa. But broken promises, unfair treatment and outright exploitation from abroad have also exacted a heavy toll on our ability to progress,… Today, and for several decades, Africa has been asking for the same level of political commitment and devotion to resources that described the Marshall Plan… We are not asking for identical programs and actions. What we seek is an equally firm commitment to partnership…” We are equals and only choose to be treated as equals.
After directly asking the developed nations to help stop their direct and indirect actions to stop the 21st century pillages of our continent’s riches, the President directly informed them that neither Nigeria nor Africa, want to be an appendage of any nation; we do not wish to replace old shackles with new ones. Our nation’s and continent’s only desire is that the rest of the world should truly see us as partners, and not a problem to be avoided or pitied.
We have been ably represented at the UN session, we have had our mind spoken, but the job is now on us to force the change that we want from our home. When we say enough is enough, we must also act on it. We cannot continue to wait for assistance from somewhere to tap into our God’s given wealth of resources, just as much as we cannot continue to expect the developed world to begin to treat us as equals; we must however exert our position by our actions and dispositions. Nigeria must refuse to continue to be a dumping ground for deceitful aids, as we forcefully take our destiny in our hands and begin the reconstruction of our broken heritages.
Now is the time for us to act. For decades, we kept deceiving ourselves that we could survive keeping the obnoxious fuel subsidy regime, while we were losing out on real development as our capacity to build roads, hospitals and manage our infrastructure are lost to wastefulness in subsidy payments on a singular product. Now that the subsidy is gone, we must organise our house to truly invest in industrialisation, creating real employment for our teaming population and transforming our economy into a producing and exporting economy rather than the dumping ground it is currently.
It is time for us to recognise our endowments, nourish and harvest our capabilities and generate multiple pools of talent for local development and international export to the benefit of our nation. The Talent Export Initiative of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment launched at the sideline of the 78th UNGA is a showpiece of the way to go, but it is not enough. Let us find our resources, and find a way to the effective and efficient utilisation of all that we are blessed with.
It is then that real governance of our nation will commence and we will become free from every undue external influence and manipulation. Our destiny is in our hands.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
