At 60, Nigeria and Nigerians should stop agonising but organise like China at 70, (or like Nigeria at 20 in 1980 with double digit growth rate which once dwarfed China’s growth!)
As a child of independent Nigeria, independence discourse is a total commitment for me.
Many thanks to our parents who out of nothing fought for self-determination. They went further to imbibe in us a sense of patriotism, the best manifestation of which was the raising of the “Green- White- Green” flag on every October 1st, marking Independence Day.
Last week, Nigeria marked its 60th anniversary as a sovereign and independent country. There were once patriotic governments that promoted a deep sense of nationalism.
There were also patriotic teachers with knowledge of history, (especially in the first and second-generation public universities) who inculcated critical knowledge according to which Mungo Park, 19th-century British explorer, Mungo Park did not discover River Niger, as much as Nigerians who for thousands of years live by River Niger!
For almost a century, Nigeria and Nigerians suffocated under the heels of British imperial rule characterised by domination, brutal oppression, Lugardian military occupations and wholesale exploitation. The recent slide into “low-key” independence celebrations points to low value we assign to liberty and freedom. It also underscores unacceptable absence of history with respect to nation-building.
At 60, Nigeria and Nigerians must stop agonising but raise the banner of freedom and independence with high GDP growth rate, poverty alleviation, equity, justice and deepened democracy.
Reviewing most commentaries on Nige- ria at 60, it is regrettable that despair is taking the place of optimism which again points to loss of memory as much as absence of much-needed patriotism.
Sixty years of independence cannot be discussed in isolation from 200 years of Euro- American orchestrated trans-Atlantic trade in Africans as slaves. From the 16th to 18th century, what constituted present Nigeria was devastated by marauding slave traders who transported Africans to cultivate cotton and sugarcane which propelled industrialisation in America and Europe. Then followed by wholesale colonial occupation in the 19th century.
The great historian, Walter Rodney in his classic: ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ observed (and I agree!) that “Colonialism had only one hand – It was one-armed bandit!” Sixty years after independence, of course, we must agonise about the declining fortunes of the economy made worse by the global Coronavirus pandemic. Even at that, we should not forget that in colonial Nigeria, growth discourse was an aberration, an absurdity.
The colonial policy was to deliberately under-develop the Nigerian colony and develop colonial Britain through direct capital transfers which made the present P& ID & $9.6 billion a small scam. The scam was actually a British colonial legacy. With respect to industrialisation, for instance, colonialism deliberately prejudiced against the establishment of industries. The key drivers of colonial Nigeria and indeed colonial Africa were raw agricultural products to feed metropolitan industries.
African industrialisation was deliberately blocked by the colonial governments’ acting on behalf of the metropolitan industrialists. Pre-colonial West Africa had a range of manufacturing industries like clothing production that involved ginning, carding, spinning, dyeing and weaving which closely resembled those of pre-industrial societies in other parts of the world.
However colonial authority deliberately undermined the growth of this local enterprise such that 100 years of British rule did not set up a single value-adding industry!
The celebration of independence therefore can only be appreciated against the background of de-industrialisation of colonial era and commendable aggressive industrialisation of post-colonial Nigeria by the founding fathers. In the area of education, colonial education was designed to produce clerks and other functionaries to service the lower echelons of the colonial system.
Colonial education never produced social scientists, engineers, nor Nobel Laureates! Yours truly agrees that we can’t go on blaming the colonialists for all current challenges of insecurity, power failure, deepening inequalities and mismanaged diversity. But the point cannot be overstated that the spectre of colonial underdevelopment still haunts us today.
At 60 independent Nigeria has produced a Nobel Laureate, as many as 43 Federal Universities, 48 State Universities, and 79 Private Universities. The British never set up any university, (University College Ibadan was an appendage of metropolitan UK University of London).
Nigeria has trained, thousands of doctors nurses, engineers in the past 60 years, sadly being re-exported back to Europe and America, a new voluntary slavery after abolition of forced slavery.
By the 1980s Nigeria was marching towards full literacy with universal compulsory basic education and adult literacy campaigns.
At 60, it’s unacceptable that Nigeria parades new illiteracy with as many as 10 million children out of school. Nigeria must learn and copy China, which at 70, (just a decade older) as a liberated country has almost banished illiteracy, gone to space, lifted more than 700 million people out of poverty, parades “over the past 70 years, GDP averaged an annual growth rate of about 4.4% for the first three decades and 9.5% for the last four decades.
By 2020, China announced that “all people living below the current poverty line will be taken out of poverty”.
At 60, Nigeria should be upbeat to say like China: independence has “brought enormous changes to the country, creating an unprecedented miracle of development in world history”. The former Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria last year aptly put it better: According to him, the “path you take determines your future”. China he reminded us was once “labelled as the “Sick Man of East Asia;” life expectancy at the beginning of the new republic was around 35 years. It rose to 77 years in 2018.
The illiteracy rate in China stood at 80% in 1949, today the newly-added labour force has received over 13.3 years of education on average. The average years of schooling for the Chinese rose to 10.6 years in 2018 from 1.6 years in 1949. In 2019, the gross enrolment ratio in higher education rose to 48.1% from 0.26% in 1949”.
At 60, Nigeria and Nigerians should stop agonising but organise like China at 70, (or like Nigeria at 20 in 1980 with double-digit growth rate which once dwarfed China’s growth!). Certainly, there is a country at 60! Long live the Federal Republic at 60.
