Like Icarus that flew too high, too close to the Sun and melted, the theme over the last few years of Africa is Rising, Nigeria is Rising has come to a sudden halt! Burnt out!
Kenya maybe next!
Up until 2014 Nigeria was reported by credible economic monitors of having the fastest economic growth, the highest foreign direct investment, the largest economy in Africa. Nollywood was booming, as well as music. Shopping malls were popping up everywhere. Retail banking grew. China signed its biggest foreign investment to build 50 station railway system in Nigeria. Private investors built 10 powerplants and an equal number of steel mills. Roads were built or refurbished everywhere, state and federal. The plan was agric for the North, manufacturing for Southwest and petrochemical for Southeast.
Suddenly in 2015 millions of people are facing job losses, especially as state and federal trim their civil service. The private sector will also witness a serious contraction as projects are stalled due to lack of money.
So what happened?
Politicians will claim the cuts are due to the corruption and profligacy of the last regime. Even though the new Delta State governor, Ifeanyi Okowa, from the same PDP, admitted that Delta, one of the richest oil states, has seen its federal monthly allocation fall from N20 billion to $8.3billion, BUT in order to pay the over N8billion monthly salary for 60,000 workers, Okowa has declared null and void all employment from 2013 because the exercise was riddled with corruption! This will reduce the number of workers and there will be more to come!
This will be replicated in nearly all states and the federal government. The federal government has hinted it will half the number of ministries, as it cites corruption, profligacy et al. Declaring that the treasury is empty will result in most ongoing projects being starved of funds
However, if we take a closer look, we will see a trend that goes back over 500yrs which has kept us parambulating in this underdeveloped poverty state. Recently, its been called austerity measures, SAP, rationalization and other names after a period of surplus.
After Gowon’s boom era came Muritala/Obasanjo mass sackings and austerity measures; Shagari’s Green Revolution surplus was followed by Buhari’s War Against Indiscipline and food rationing; and now this cycle.
A closer examination of the Shagari and Jonathan governments reveals a scary trend. Shagari’s heady days as well as Jonathan’s, brought about a lot of projects that had the propensity to propel the nation forward, at the center of which were the Agriculture, Steel and Petrochemical sectors. However, suddenly oil prices crashed, the currency dropped, social upheavals from Islamists to electoral violence and cries of corruption saw an end to the promise.
In both cases, the invisible hand of the God of Economics became the gloved hand of the Western world. In both cases, the oil prices were deliberately crashed by geopolitical forces. In both cases, despite the obvious fall in oil prices that halved our national income, the turn of our fortunes was firmly placed at the foot of our corrupt leaders.
To stop this recurring trend in our national existence since 1960, we have to go back to the beginning and understand how we even changed from being different free independent African nationalities to the enslaved and then colonized before becoming an independent Nigeria.
In the beginning when the Portuguese arrived in 1446, they met flourishing kingdoms like Benin, Oyo, Kongo and Zimbabwe. We exchanged pleasantries like diplomats and traded, but they did not have much to trade for our vast array of goods, apart from Moroccan leather.
So they devised ways to copy our goods like sugar, cotton and tobacco first in Cape Verde, until they stumbled on the Americas. Southern America gave them tropical land but they didn’t have the sickle cell trait to survive the planting conditions. Neither did the Native Americans.
From that point on peoples of the present day Nigeria were in trouble and the cycle started, especially when kingdoms like the Benin limited the slave trade to women that could be taken for the sum of a dowry. Benin banned Europeans from their soil from 1505 to 1610.
So, Europeans resorted to destroying the economy by mining our currency in form of cowries off the coast of Kenya and dumped on us to make it useless as an exchange medium. Next was dumping of 400,000 guns on our coast to cause anarchy and terrorists. Then it was Dahomey and Angola at the fringes of the population centers of the Yorubas and Kongos, now its Sambisa forest. Next was propaganda through religion that our spiritually corrupt ‘pagan’ leaders were responsible for God’s Wrath taken out on us in our economic and sociopolitical lives.
The African kings will eventually fall, some early like in Kongo, while Benin remained for 100yrs before Akensua came in to open up to slavery. During slavery, many of those whose conspire with the europeans to overthrow an anti-slavery regime, end up on the slave boat themselves.
In all cases, foreign backed despots take over and despite selling the people for cheap, they were loved as the Europeans stop the economic sabotage, the religious propaganda and social upheavals and anarchy.
Ultimately, the Europeans, fearing being overwhelmed by African slaves as experienced in Haiti, decided to keep Africans slaves on their own land, in what was known as colonization.
To achieve colonization, they increased the anarchy, sent missionaries to disseminate the propaganda and further destroyed the economy. They then formed protectorates to protect us from their own slavery and sabotage. The protectorate colonies were to serve as sources of raw materials and protected markets for the colonists manufacture goods.
This lasted for about 70years before Africans demanded to return to independence and they once again started the cycle of destroying the economy, propagating corruption stories and indirect sponsoring of army usurpers and terrorists.
Haiti, the first Black nation was the template in colonial era, whereby real leaders are overthrown or embarassed out of government for a stooge. This was named ‘la politique de doublure’ – politics of the double, whereby an old African sellout is placed at the head of a Western puppet government. Ghana, the first independent nation, witnessed this as Nkrumah was wrongly accused of being corrupt and overthrown by a army puppet government
The same thing still happens.
Now, we have seen a technocratic government embarrassed out of power, and immediately electricity has greatly improved. Despite building more powerplants than any single government, bringing the capacity to over 5500mw, sabotage kept people in darkness as barely 1000mw could be transmitted. The electricity provides a feel good factor for the masses, but there is more going under the surface.
The foreign backed president, preferably a mulatto or Fulani, normally indoctrinated through religion or the foreign trained army will talk down the value of his people, the past regime and the economy will be broken up.
The leaders and civil service will be accused of corruption and millions of poor workers retrenched. The huge retrenchment will be a source of brain drain, cheap labour from economic migrants to the Western world.
Key economic infrastructural projects that can threaten the colonists economic system, like steel mills, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industry, will be stopped either under the guise of anti-corruption or lack of funds. In a bid to beg for crumbs, they will be forced to open up the economy to foreign subsidized foods and manufactured goods that will kill local industry.
The austerity measures due to the downgrading of the economy will continue until the next visionary leader attempts to change the status quo and the European imperialist respond with their long tested strategy.
This is why there is not a single Black nation in the world that is developed. Nor has a complete steel or petrochemical sector. This is why every Black nation is not a real nation but a plantation colony! And until we realize the trick and educate ourselves, we will always fall for it, even with our eyes wide open.
Infact, now we go out of our way to vote for it. Lets hope Kenyans are wiser this time around. But, Nigerians have fallen for the trick. As usually, those who plot with the foreigners in the hope that they will share the procceds are usually consumed by it, as we have seen with Tinubu.
