If we knew Nigeria’s worth (4)
“He lacks the power of organization, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business. He loves the display of power, but fails to realize its responsibility ….he will work hard with a less incentive than most races. He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than […]
“He lacks the power of organization, and is conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of men or business. He loves the display of power, but fails to realize its responsibility ….he will work hard with a less incentive than most races. He has the courage of the fighting animal, an instinct rather than a moral virtue…… In brief, the virtues and defects of this race-type are those of attractive children, whose confidence when it is won is given ungrudgingly as to an older and wiser superior and without envy…….Perhaps the two traits which have impressed me as those most characteristic of the African native are his lack of apprehension and his lack of ability to visualize the future.”
Lord Milverton (Sir Arthur Richards), Nigeria’s governor from 1944 to 1947, who had also been governor in Gambia, Jamaica and Fiji, among others, in 1932 said: “The African has had self-government… for countless centuries, and all it brought him was blood-stained chaos, a brief, insecure life, haunted by fear, in which evil tradition and custom held him enslaved to superstition, hunger, disease, squalor and ruthless cruelty, even to his family and friends. For countless centuries, while all the pageant of history swept by, the African remained unmoved—in primitive savagery.”
Alan Johnston, one of the most influential anthropologists of the 19th century, who concluded that we had smaller brains capacities, stated about Africans: “Dark skin, squash nose, woolly hair, “blubber” lips, and “lark heel”—these are the principal taunts flung at the Negro. Greater refinement of life will no doubt tend—is slowly tending—to modify or eliminate the elements of facial ugliness; but the most effective method of doing so is crossing with the Caucasian….. The Negro has been so busy eating, drinking, marrying and begetting, that he has devoted little attention to the arts and industries […] The savage negro type is essentially unmoral. Men and women of this race are probably more inherently lustful, more eagerly addicted to sexual pleasures, than are the mass of Asiatics, Europeans, white Americans, and black Australians”
A lot of the claims above have seeped into public policy and has informed the way and manner that African countries have evolved and have been treated, after colonialism. The colonial masters knew that African countries will fail after independence. This can be inferred from the above statements. ALL African countries have wallowed in wars, ethno-religious crisis and poverty since then. It is therefore our ‘intellectuals’ biggest failure, to continue to assume that since they hear it said on CNN and BBC, the world has become a level playing field and our fate is entirely in our hands.
Why did our colonial ‘masters’ set our currencies at par or stronger than theirs immediately after colonialism, while we exported primary farm products to them and got little for our exports? Also, if they did not reckon that we were ‘stupid’ and cared less for the future, they couldn’t have sold the globalisation bogey successfully. How could African countries have been conned to sign free trade agreements when they had nothing to sell! Why are black African countries still being encouraged to be natural resource suppliers – opening up the bowels of their countries to rapacious exploiters who turn around and manufacture expensive finished products with these resources and sell back to black Africa? It is also our ‘big man’ trait, which Lugard captures succinctly when he mentioned the black man’s crave for power (but not its responsibilities), that made the corruption virus spread after being surreptitiously introduced by the clever whites.
But Nigeria is more than blessed, otherwise it would have run out of resources as a result of several years of international and domestic pillaging. International pillaging because in the realm of espionage and intelligentsia, the western world needs to permanently keep Africa in the dark. Domestic pillaging because our leaders (our people) are as stupid and blind to facts and the future as they were regarded in the above statements.
We should also note that except we develop and display the magnanimity of heart, the humility, and the maturity that the world wants to see (like China has), it is unlikely that Nigeria will be allowed into the circles that it deserves to belong. We needn’t be begging to be allowed for photo-ops at UN / G20 meetings. Imagine if the estimated 20million Nigerians in diaspora could return to make their country great. What a huge hole it will create in critically needed labour in western, or even eastern bloc countries. Many of those economies will buckle up and die. In the least, we can seek more dignity for our people slaving away there, and we can seek to improve the standard of living of our own people living here.
Nigerian leaders present and future (for there is still hope), must therefore devise clear strategies, and incorporate this knowledge into governance so that this country stops flying blind. And they say when you don’t know where you are headed, any road will take you there. Nigeria is presently on ‘any road’, therefore other people are determining our destiny for us as a country. And we have turned on each other, just as Lugard and co knew we would and how our ancestors must have done!
This shouldn’t be so, for Nigeria still has a vast quantity and diversity of human, natural and social resources. Even our culture is a resource of which equivalent the western world lacks. But there are aspects we must jettison, especially where it leads to barbarism and wastages. If, as argued in the case of China, development is measured in terms of access to factors of production (of which China has cornered industry/machines, retained labour, and has amassed Capital over and above the West), Nigeria is great as it has latent quantities of all of those. We have more cultivable land than China, per capita. Only 1million out of 70million hectares of such land in Nigeria is being farmed presently. One day soon, Nigeria will use its latent human resources to develop its natural and other resources, and march into the prominence that it deserves. Oh, if only we knew Nigeria’s worth…
Concluded.