Individualism and good governance in Africa

I was seriously thinking about the challenges of democratization in Africa today and the role that the Western concept of individualism has come to play in Africa’s development. In fact I was not even thinking about it until I had to explain something to my wife. The idea runs this way, in Africa there is individualism, just as in the West but there is where the difference starts. In the West there is a point of conjuncture for individualism and community. In Africa, there are points of disjuncture. In other words, whereas individualism has no human face in Africa, in the West it does. That is the reason why democracy does not work and may never work in Africa. When the West had contact with Africa, they came with an administrative system that was alien to Africa. In fact, Western administrative system inherited by Africans was like a ticking bomb that exploded as soon as it was institutionalized. 

That explosion germinated in form of ethnicity, ethnocentrism, religious fanaticism, state corruption and financial waste, failed elections, failed officers, failed political system, poor health and declining education, child slavery, child trafficking , armed robbery, kidnapping , assassinations,  and now Boko Haram insurgency. Yet, this list has not scratched the surface in the catalogue of woes that Nigeria’s or Africa’s administrative systems have come to represent for the continent. I also made a comparison between President Jonathan and Cameron. One of the most remarkable differences I have noticed is in the area of continuity. Jonathan started as a rookie without any antecedents. He needs to be very knowledgeable to navigate the very murky waters of governance and politics. If he does not have enough knowledge, he will be doomed because he will forever depend on his spin-doctors who can easily mislead him and make him to take unpopular decisions. Jonathan does not have the advantage of his generations governing Nigeria, so, it is a very new role for him. 

The same cannot be said of Cameron who has a long line of family members with high level of education.  Not only is this an advantage, Cameron attended a so-called Ivy League university in Oxford, where he even ended with a first class. In the United Kingdom, there is a tradition of knowledge acquisition and dissemination, which implies that nobody has an excuse to be ignorant, not least the PM. In Nigeria, intellection or knowledge acquisition is not publicly embraced. The idea is that people are free to know, but they should not display their knowledge in the public. What is reserved for the public place is the knowledge gained through spiritual escapades. Such people are elevated to the status of gods in Nigeria and they are so embraced because Nigerians love quick-fix, get rich quick, without any intention to work hard to earn it. That is the reason why spiritually inclined people are the richest people in Nigeria, not the manufacturers of products. It is within this framework that we see the Nigerian president who himself displays zero interest in education, but has a very strong thirst for wealth acquisition.

So, democracy or democratization is another bomb that has recently been dropped on Africa. It will lead Africa to nowhere so long as we refuse to modify it and use common-sense in its application in Nigeria or Africa. Before the coming of the Europeans, Africa operated on a system of communalism. Within each of the communities in Africa, there used to be leaders of thought who was uniquely gifted with wisdom. They exercised superordinate influence over their people at that time. What education ought to have done for us is to enable us refine this system in a way that it will be suited for our democratization. But due to laziness, we accepted the Western liberal democracy without any attempt to adjust it for our use. That is why liberal democracy has become a ticking bomb for Africa today. Globalization flows out of liberalism of the West, and the whole world is embracing it. But the question is, by how far has liberalism helped Africa to be rooted in the markets created by globalization? Instead, whenever anything happens in the West, as we have seen in the recent recession, Africa shares a greater portion of the burden. In the 1980s when the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) were forced on African states, many of those economies creaked under the weight of the adjustments and debts. African states accepted the conditionalities of the Bretton Woods institutions, such as rationalisation in the public sector, removal of fuel subsidies and reduction of grants. none of those African states recovered from the SAPs because shortly after , the Cold War ended, and the ‘benevolent’ states of the West abandoned the continent. 

There is a sense in which this problem goes deeply to the heart of the attitude of the West to Africa’s development. Even as at the time that there was a romance between Africa and the West, it was because of the unequal exchange in trade, investments and diplomatic relations between Africa and the West. For example, African political elite did not just start the culture of siphoning public money to the West. This is a practice that is as old as the states in Africa themselves. It appears that the relationship forged between the Western and African leaders had been designed deliberately for exploitation and the expropriation of the continent. That was why development was paid a lip service both by the Western aid donors and their African counterparts. It is even more depressing to factor in the idea that actually, African leaders play to the gallery as they consider their inabilities to challenge Western exploitation as an opportunity to ‘join them’, as the old saying goes. This is why we are where we are today. And it is the reason why some Africans in the 80s and 90s foolishly reinforced the belief that only the West can make life worthwhile for them—hence the exodus of many African children to Europe and America towards the end and immediately after the Cold War. 

The deluge of flow to the West since the 1990s empowered the West to indirectly take charge of African economies, justifying capital flight as an evidence of African  leaders inability to govern their people. Whereas, the hidden truth is that the West needs help itself, but in the same breathe, a form of justification for multiculturalism. Now that the West is no longer as it used to be, after the unfortunate episodes of 9/11 and the foolish decisions of Iraq invasion and the war in Afghanistan, the west remains poor, but Africa remains poorer. Yes the African continent is the richest, but the people are kept in the dark, by the conniving African elites who ally their Western masters to keep the lid on Africa. It will take Armageddon for Africa to be really free, I think. Many in Africa know the West is poor, but they feel that regardless of the poverty in Africa, it is better to stay there than to go to the West. Many have now chosen to return to live in Africa. And I was just wondering, why are human beings so foolish. Didn’t they know that nothing lasts forever? 

Would it not have been better for them to develop their father’s continent using all the force necessary rather than selling their birth-rights to the West by asking it to help them take care of their children? We now know that there is a great conspiracy against the black race in the West—and recently in the Eastern Europe.