If we knew Nigeria’s worth (1)

Indeed the 12th to 17th Centuries were solidly rooted with the Eastern bloc holding primacy.  China was then known to its own people as Zhongguo (the middle kingdom).  India was a force to reckon with under the Mukhal Empire.  We also had the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and Russia.  In those days, global trade centred around […]

Indeed the 12th to 17th Centuries were solidly rooted with the Eastern bloc holding primacy.  China was then known to its own people as Zhongguo (the middle kingdom).  India was a force to reckon with under the Mukhal Empire.  We also had the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and Russia.  In those days, global trade centred around farm commodities and spices (for which India was famous).  Those nations were however, deemed great because they controlled perhaps the most important factor of production at that time – labour.  A great economy needed people to farm in great numbers.  Till date that region still controls the power of labour, as between two of them alone (India and China), they have 40% of the world population.

With time, every advantage turns into a disadvantage and vice versa. The harsh climate conditions and extreme difficulties faced by Western bloc countries, alongside several plagues, famines, poverty and diseases, led to a series of researches, inventions and discoveries, in the areas of medicine, science and most importantly, industry.  A major breakthrough came for Western countries with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century, with Great Britain being the main arrowhead of this spring-forth.  Machines replaced humans in many roles and did jobs much better.  Technology went into overdrive.  The West, therefore rose to primacy and dominance, while the labour advantage on which the East had depended, became a huge disadvantage.  Redundancy and poverty set in, and the East nosedived…

Fast-forward to the 20th Century. The West having (oftentimes brutally) captured territory and appropriated other people’s resources for itself in the imperial games of slavery and colonialism, started to push an agenda called Globalisation.  In a quest to continue to dominate, they wanted factors of production to move easily from one country or region to the other.  They also wanted to be able to find markets for their finished products. They therefore railroaded many of their subjects, ex-colonial countries, like Nigeria, to sign trade agreements and devalue currencies, based on the promise of a level playing ground.  Of course, the playing ground was far from level, as they kept subsidies on many agricultural products, which were the mainstays of the third-world countries.  Third world economies naturally shrank and died!

Apart from that, labour, which third world countries had in abundance, was nowhere near mobile, in comparison with capital which the western world had, and still has (as a result of the plunder of resources of African countries during colonisation, and by the introduction of the corruption virus into African countries which makes their leaders transfer resources and monies stolen from their own people into western banks and real estate).  The immobility of labour is the reason why thousands of Nigerians sleep at embassies and high commissions trying to ‘jet out’ to Europe and America for ‘just any kind of job’. Many are unsuccessful and those who go, are often made to become unwelcome slaves in foreign lands, even when they parade lofty academic achievements up to doctorate degree levels.  

At the core of the strategy of western countries lies the Hamitic Hypothesis which states in part that black people, by their physical and mental attributes, are created to be slaves to other races.  The success of such thinking should be obvious, because while during the era of slavery, white people had to sail all the way down and sometimes paid cheaply for those slaves, today, black people, especially Nigerians, purchase slavery with their own money.  Many sell all their assets here in order to go and join the teeming army of modern slaves doing odd jobs in Europe and America.  Today, hundreds of millions of Africans are lost in this new slavery, compared with a few millions during the peak of the slave trade era.  A paradox is presented; that more slaves exist after the abolition of slave trade, albeit in modern guises.

Unlike Africa, China used Globalisation, rather than allowing itself to be used by it. First, the Chinese people shut their economy to outside influence and had a good conversation with themselves.  They called it Cultural Revolution.  In the end, they resolved to study the western way of economics and science.  In 1979, Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping, sent 50,000 of the best young brains in China to universities in the United States, to go and soak up and copy the best knowledge available there.  Most of them returned home and they are the ones transforming the Chinese economy today.  

The Chinese also made it easy for western companies to establish factories and businesses.  Companies started closing down in Europe and the USA and relocated en masse to China.  With those companies came a transfer of technology, developmental capital inflow, employment for Chinese people, massive build-up of infrastructure, stock markets, and a blend of social-capitalism.  China’s progress thus became irreversible.

As things stand, the East (China and India), have retained their labour advantage, have acquired and retained the power of industry/machine from the West (China is now known as the industrial capital of the world), and more embarrassingly, China in particular has taken over the power of Capital as a factor of production. China alone is sitting on over $2.8trillion of foreign reserves, which is almost four times that of the entire European Union, and which represents 30% of total world foreign reserves.  China’s biggest debtor is the United States, and it was said recently that President Barack Obama’s recent visit to China, was like a visit to their banker.  Most of China’s savings were raked up through trade with Western countries, especially the USA.  Positive trade balances have since been invested in US Treasury bonds, but China is getting restless to get more returns for its financial investments, over and above the puny 0.25% or so, that it gets from the US Treasuries. Africa is its next port of call, and Nigeria is the kingpin of Africa, in terms of size of its economy, and the potentials presented by yet undeveloped infrastructure.

To add to the ‘decline’ of Western nations, the United Arab Emirates have strategically utilised their oil money to reposition their region to attract cashflows from the rest of the world.  Nigerians have foolishly been major contributors in that area.  It would seem that ‘cashflow’ is another phenomenon that should be added to the lexicon of economic development, just as ‘machine’ became a factor of production during and after the industrial revolution.  But the interaction of China with Nigeria is our concern here and a great opportunity for Nigeria if it can avoid being cheated again.