Let us go the Asian way (2)

If a people decide to adopt the Americo-European way it means that they have the guile, the strength of character and the will to impose their will on others and the sense of courage and adventure to go as far away as possible from your continent to conquer, enslave, mercilessly exploit, loot the treasures of […]

If a people decide to adopt the Americo-European way it means that they have the guile, the strength of character and the will to impose their will on others and the sense of courage and adventure to go as far away as possible from your continent to conquer, enslave, mercilessly exploit, loot the treasures of the colonised and use your loot to develop your own country. Even if the exploited people throw off your yoke of colonialism, you will use various imperialistic tricks such as trade agreements and practices, deceptive language and protocols and many others to keep them in perennial poverty and want. As you grow fatter, they become leaner and leaner. You obey the law of the fish. The bigger fish eats the smaller ones in order to grow bigger and bigger. You cage the colonised or dominated mentally and sometimes physically. Their taste for certain goods and services are tailored to make them perpetually dependent on you. That is what fate many African nations and many others in the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific have suffered and continue to suffer in the hands of those colonialists or former colonial overlords.
The Americans and the Europeans are the brains behind what is popularly known as Western civilisation. This civilisation has been one of the most advanced known to man, yet it is fast decaying, declining and will sooner or later fall because the builders of this highly advanced civilisation are characterised by certain negative virtues. They are loud, aggressive, domineering, arrogant, exploitative and contemptuous of others, especially of us Africans who are seen as sub-human. They are also increasingly becoming godless. Because of their achievements in various fields of human endeavour, they believe they do not need God any more. And they have subsequently embraced Satan with a passion.
They are rapidly losing their sense of fellow-feeling. Greed and their abandonment of the approved ways of God have made some of them become so weird. They love animals even more than fellow human beings. Those people believe that some members of the human family exist for the sole purpose of creating a market for them to feed fat on and become dominant.
They believe that for their nation to be great they must go out there conquer, enslave or bend the will of others to accept them and their ways. After achieving that important goal, they proceed to systematically exploit those people and repatriate resources to develop the empire back home. Their weapon of great prosperity is a highly developed unfair trade practices legitimised by underhand laws and conventions.
They believe they are the centre of the world. What they think is good for them must necessarily be good for everybody in the world. If they like abortion you must also like it or you are in serious trouble. If they like democracy, or rather their own version of it, you must like it also and practise it the way they practise it. If they see everything in the light of human rights, everybody in the world must see things that way or else you will be in their trouble. Their arrogance is almost insufferable.
They have also succeeded in fostering on the world consumerism. In spite of our enormous poverty, we foolish Africans have unfortunately embraced the taste of spending money on things we do not really need instead of investing on things that will help us develop and better our living circumstances. We ride on our rough roads big, expensive, fuel-guzzling cars whose values are far in excess of what Asians use to set up cottage industries. We appear frightfully earmarked for self and national destruction. We have imbibed from the West a culture of loudness. We Nigerians are especially too loud a people. We walk so arrogantly and with a certain swagger as if we are co-owners of this earth with God. And we are not very much on ground. We just walk like that. Empty.
But unlike the West, we are extremely lazy and lack resourcefulness. Some of the few among us that we celebrate and advertise as great success stories attained their greatness through manipulating the system or depending on their closeness to power to make good. Many of these negative traits of ours, copied mostly from the ways of the West, have helped in no small measure to further entrench poverty in our nations.
Clearly, therefore the Western way is not the way for us to go if we want to become developed. We have suffered cruel treatment in the hands of the Americo-European people and will not like to inflict such a fate on others even if we have a golden opportunity to do so. We have neither the heart nor the head nor are the times we live in favourably disposed to the adoption of this option even if we have what it takes to employ it. We do not have the viciousness required to go and kill or enslave a people who have done us no harm and who share a common humanity with us in order for us to exploit them to develop our countries. In short, the Western option cannot, therefore, be our preferred one. It then means that we should go the Asian way which I will describe shortly.
What represent the Asian way are discipline, frugality, hard work, positive respect for others, self-effacement and belief in the great value of investment and respect for superiors and constituted authority. The Asians take like seriously. They go quietly, humbly and simply about their individual and national duties. You do not notice their ‘presence’ very much but you can see the great job they put on the ground and how their countries are growing at such fast rates. They work like bees and give you the impression that they know what they want in life. And they really do know. Today the Asians are dominating the world through sheer determination and discipline. I think it will help our national cause better if our leaders collectively decide that they will mobile us, the citizenry, to go the Asian way. The Asian way will be more self-sustaining. It is more humane, more self-reliant, more humane, more just and Godlier.

concluded