“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos—and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth (Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin, White Masks”).
Indeed, Frantz Fanon, one of Nkrumah’s influential friends, gave the world an entire system of revolutionary ideas that birthed movements across the world, including such places as Africa, Asia, and the United States of America. Fanon’s transformative impact on America’s Civil Rights Movement is irrefutable. Also, the scholarly work of the Brazilian thinker in the area of critical pedagogy, a concept accepted the world over in educational circles, owes a lot to the scholarship of Fanon. And with the quote above, we finally have a moral precedent to guide us in affirmatively asserting a positivist view, that Africa’s destiny or self-determination is hers to shape and that collective African self-knowledge, an Afrocentric position, is her exclusive right to rigorously pursue and protect as well! This is not a racist statement. Critically, it is an intellectual, moral, and cultural statement of fact, else who should undertake the philosophical enterprise of understanding the African better if not herself?
That is to say, a patient’s vital signs only provide a physician with a general outlook of his or her physical condition, but it is the former who is the best interpreter of his or her homeostatic disequilibrium, if at all. Bob Marley captured this existential phenomenon when he sang “Every man thinketh his burden is the heaviest…Who feels it knows it” (“Running Away”). Therefore, we need to critically reassess Ghana’s post-Nkrumah balance sheet on Africa’s post-colonial political existence to see whether, generally, Africa’s development credits outweigh her underdevelopment debits. Hopefully, we may blame the CIA and uncompromising Western interests for Africa’s developmental retrogression, however long we conveniently choose to do so, but it is the directionless, timorous leadership of Africa that consistently collaborates with foreigners to thwart her development and growth.
In the meantime, we have not worked hard enough to develop independent, proactive, innovative, and thoughtful leaders. That, however, brings us to one of the complicated moral issues we raised in Part 1, “Are the Noble Dwarfs Invited Too?,” that the intersection of politics, superstition and dereliction of official responsibilities is not the preserve of black thinking. However, the question is, how has Cuba been able to build one of the best, most powerful, and progressive medical systems in the world even under the crushing weight of international embargo? For instance, Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” a 2007 documentary film, tells the poignant story of “911 fire fighters and rescue workers with life-threatening lung problems,” but, unfortunately, whose medical problems American insurance policies would not cover. Subsequently, Moore took them to Havana where Cuban doctors treated them (See Kate L. Shenk’s “Cuba Can Teach About Healthcare”).
Accordingly, Cuba, we believe, should be a case study for African political leaders, policy makers, health professionals, educational reformers, and researchers. In this context, Ghana and other African countries should not only send their students there to study medicine, as it were, but also should send their educational reformers, health professionals, policy makers, researchers, and political leaders, along with students, to learn from the Cubans, firsthand, how they have achieved medical successes in the face of embargoed encumbrances. The Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), for instance, offers scholarships to 22,000 students from Latin America, Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and Asia. Thirty countries are involved in this program (See “Cuba Can Teach Us About Healthcare,” published on the website of “Scholarships for Minorities,” Nov. 22, 2013). Also, Cuba has made great strides in the area of education. What is more, it also has a high Human Development Index and, in 2006, the World Wide Fund for Nature ranked Cuba as the only country in the world to fit the definitional criteria for “sustainable development.”
Further, Cuba represents a country with the tenth-highest literacy rate in the world, and life expectancy of 78 years, with its life expectancy placing her as the 37th in the world, even beating the United States of America, the world’s largest economy, coming only after Chile and Canada in the Americas. Finally, her GDP is $121 billion (2012), the 66th in the world, and her per capita income is $10,000 (2010), 92nd in the world. How has this tiny country achieved these unseeming feats since an international embargo was imposed on her in 1962? In addition, the Medical Committee of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), an American-based non-profit organization, “brings young people from underserved US communities to study medicine at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (See Michele Frank’s “U.S. Physicians at the ELAM”). What has Ghana been doing after Nkrumah left the scene? If the capitalist United States of America, Cuba’s staunchest enemy, teaches America, who is to say Ghana and Africa cannot also learn from Cuba?
In that case, we ask: How many cutting edge medical schools do we have? How many cutting edge hospitals do we have? What are we doing to expand our medical schools to train more qualified students locally rather than sending them far away to places like Cuba? What are we doing to increase the capacity of our medical schools so that we, like the Cubans, can export our medical students to the rest of the world? Are we only good at exporting raw materials and producing one bad leadership after another? If the source of our problems is not a lack of Afrocentric leadership, then what is it? Thus, proper management of official affairs is lacking in Africa’s leadership, as are political and moral heavy-handedness, spiritual foresight, cultural assertiveness, intellectual proactivity, and analytic decisiveness. In fact, Ghana’s leadership needs progressive programs akin to Nkrumah’s Five-Year Development Plan and Seven-Year Development Plan. Other than that, our government and the private sector need to look seriously at Research & Development (R&D) and science, mathematics, and technology education.
That also calls for creative collaboration among the private sector, government, and research universities, with focus fixed on producing competent industrial engineers and engineers, among others. A good illustrative model comes from Nigeria. The local government of Lagos State has set aside N1.5 billion for funding innovative research in the state. Reportedly, Babatunde Fashola, the governor of Lagos State, believes such a program has the potential to lead to homegrown innovative solutions, a project, which, in turn, can defuse underdevelopment. In addition, his government has also set up an institution, “Research and Development Council,” to spearhead the necessary innovative research required to advance the state’s development (See “Fashola Urges Utilization of N1.5BN Idle Research Funds,” “Daily Times,” June 7, 2013). Ideally, this demands some level of decentralization in respect of Ghana’s rigid democratic centralization, because political ethnocentrism, ethnocracy, and political polarization appear to be eating away at Ghana’s opportunity to develop innovatively. Unfortunately, Ghana’s entrenched democracy of insults and counter-insults is anathema to intellectual democratization.
What this also connotes is an appeal to governments and institutions to create enabling environments for innovation, providing researchers and scientists who deliver the necessary perquisites. Particularly, relying on our own internal resources, intellectual, emotional, cultural, and spiritual, for development necessitates another essential conditionality, that, we do not necessarily have to play to the imposed patronage and misplaced sympathy of external forces, which we can only say is not always the best option for a people’s progress. The other side of the political coin is to learn to take the initiative and to wean ourselves from foreign aid, a variable Prof. Dambisa Moyo thinks contributes to the equational underdevelopment of Africa in the first place. She has rightly pointed out that no nation has made significant or long-term progress in national development by relying on foreign aid. Quite apart from these noble considerations, investment in R&D should be tied to conditionalities of accountability, transparency, and probity on the part of the private sector, researchers, investors, and governments.
In other words, we need progressive national goals with set deadlines for unimpeded execution, where, to say the least, political polarization, ethnocentrism, and corruption do not interview with their planned implementation. By the way, many foreign leaders, Western mostly, look down on, if not askance, at Africa and African culture. George Bush, Sr. referred to Reaganomics as “voodoo economics,” deriding an important African religion. Rev. Pat Robertson blamed Haiti’s devastating earthquake on a pact Haitian Founding Fathers allegedly had struck with the devil. Also, Rev. Pat Robertson lobbied for Charles Taylor and Mobuto Sese Seko, two of Africa’s greatest enemies. Yet again, in 2006, Rev. Falwell also predicted a catastrophic tsunami on American soil, and then, in 2006, a terrorist attack on America, both of which never materialized (See Dan Fletcher’s “The Haiti Earthquake”). Unfortunately, the likes of Rev. Falwell, in the person of Rev. Owusu Bempah, TB Joshua, Prophet Jacob Ampomah, etc., are mushrooming in the Ghanaian body politic by the day.
Not so surprisingly, pastoral or evangelical arrogance is gradually becoming a major threat to the office of presidency, though, in principle, we do acknowledge poor, timid, and clueless leadership as one of Ghana’s and, in fact, Africa’s most serious problems, a point alluded to previously. Still, if Ghana cannot single-handedly expand or build additional cutting edge medical schools, is it beyond the collective reach of African countries, with their vast wealth, to pool resources together to build enough medical schools to accommodate the surplus we ship off to Cuba? The pressing issue is that we need to look closely at ourselves first. For instance, Ghana’s president went before the United Nations to complain about foreign mining companies operating in the country of sending up to 100% of their earnings out of the country into offshore accounts, with Akomalefe writing: “It was a nice speech, more so coming as it does in the wake of a UN Africa Report, which said the continent loses $63 billion yearly from illegal tax evasion and exploitative practices by multinational corporations operating on the continent (See Femi Akomalefe below).”
Yet existing Ghanaian laws allow repatriation of earnings by foreign companies operating in Ghana out of the country (See Femi Akomalefe’s “Ghana: Fury Over Offshore Accounts,” “New African,” Nov. 25, 2013). The question is, why does a sitting president, surrounded by a team of lawyers, political scientists, policy makers, and researches, appear before an international body to seek redress, when the very laws of his land actively support the corporate misbehavior he so poignantly complains about in the international community? Did he not know about the existence of these corporate laws before appearing before the world body? Is it the moral responsibility of the United Nations, the mouthpiece of the West, primarily of capitalist America, or Ghana to make internal laws to protect its national interests? Why have Ghana and Africa not considered protectionism as a strategic interest? Another good but troubling example is the perceived and pragmatic impact of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) on African national economies. According to Haruna Iddrisu, Ghana’s Minister of Trade and Tourism, Nigeria has already done fiscal impact assessment on the EPA to conclude that signing the agreement means it is going to lose one trillion dollars.
On the other hand, in theory, our moral rejection of the EPA is rooted in historical and contemporary precedents. Kwesi Quartey, Ghana’s ex-Ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union, has written: “Governor John Hippisley, Governor of the Cape Coast writing on the population of Africa was able to say that ‘the extensive employment of our shipping in, to and from America, the great brood of seamen consequent thereon, and the daily bread of the most considerable part of our British manufacturing are owning principally to the labor of negroes. The negro trade and the natural consequences resulting from it may justly be esteemed an inexhaustible fund of the African Slave Trade writing that ‘Africa not only can continue supplying the West Indies with the quantities she has hitherto, but if necessity required, could spare thousands, nay millions more and go on doing this to the end of time.” We are not, however, implying that the EPA is the philosophical equivalent of the European Slave Trade (Transatlantic Slave Trade), though it may arguably qualify as the moral equivalent of the latter, as would be made eloquently clear shortly.
Technically, what do we have to fear of trade agreements such as the EPA? Quartey seems to have a very good answer. He writes: “The Slave Trade was mainly responsible for the late development of cash crops in Africa, especially from 1740 onwards. In 1751, the British Board of trade ordered the Governor of Cape Coast Castle to stop the development of cotton cultivation among the Fantis on the grounds ‘The introduction of culture and industry amongst the negroes is contrary to the known established policy of this country, there is no saying where this might stop, and that it might extend to tobacco, sugar, and every other colonies…(See “Kwame Nkrumah and the Roots of Ghana’s Pan-African Policy”). This is one reason the West is so good at industrial espionage (See Michael Crichton’s novel “Rising Sun”). That notwithstanding, what was the reason behind the policy? Competition from Africans! Europeans were scared of the fact that, by introducing relevant technologies to Africans for local production dealing with cash crops which drove the engines of their economies, they were putting their competitiveness on the line. Adams Smith generously referred to this phenomenon as “rational self-interest.”
On the other hand, Nigerian, Ghana’s powerful neighbor, has raised serious objections to the EPA’s ratification, let alone its implementation. That said, we have another historical precedent given by Olusegun Aganga, Nigeria’s Trade Minister. He writes: “In Benin City, a small but prosperous kingdom with an established governance system was attacked and ravaged in 1897, simply for the purpose of enjoying unbridled benefits from its Palm oil, rubber and art wealth, then the EU, which in contemporary times can be considered a reflection of the old British empire should know that it has to make a lot more sacrifices to convince Nigerians and other Africans that in the proposed EU-West Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), its interests go beyond the pecuniary need to control the economic wealth and prospect of the subregion (See “Nigeria and the EU/West Africa Economic Agreement”). Given that we have asked elsewhere, Mr. Alanga also asks: “What finished goods can these African countries sell successfully to Europe, considering the mismatch of the two regions in terms of technology and manufacturing experience?”
As a matter of fact, Walter Rodney exhaustively explored moral and policy questions related to commercial pacts, such as the EPA, in his influential work “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” though the average African leader is more likely to pay attention to Adam Smith’s “rational self-interest,” Milton Friedman’s “trade liberalization” or “free trade,” than to, say, Walter Rodney’s practical theories on development economics or Kwame Nkrumah’s progressive ideas on self-autonomy. Anyway, which planet practices “free trade” or “trade liberalization”? Is it pragmatic for ECOWAS member countries to develop their industrial capacities before signing this agreement? What happens to the fate of goods and services already produced by ECOWAS member states? How do import-dependent economies like those of ECOWAS member countries protect their competitive and comparative advantages against the powerful economies of the West’s?
In fact, Alanga has sounded a note of warning to the West: “This is not the 19th century, so it may not be possible for the EU to directly concoct phantom reasons to begin a military expedition against Nigeria for its decision not to endorse the EPA as did the British when the Benin Kingdom terminated trade relationship with its trade agents in the 1890s.” Admittedly, these historical precedents are there to inform policy decisions on national development but are ignored for lack of historical consciousness, moral fortitude, and intellectual confidence. Nkrumah explored these questions as well (See Nkrumah’s “Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization,” “Africa Must Unite,” and “Towards Colonialism: Africa in the Struggle Against World Imperialism”). That is why we need to set aside our informed ignorance and self-defeating pride to learn from others, with primary good examples represented by Cuba and Lagos State.
More importantly, public discourse on the topic of capitalism/socialism dichotomy has no moral utility in the scheme of things as to which countries Ghana and Africa should learn from, as neither capitalism nor socialism/communism represents the best economic model. It is why many countries are turning to democratic socialism. Moreover, the social policies advanced by the four-term consecutive tenurial Franklin D. Roosevelt, America’s longest serving president, were informed by fear originating from a perceived proliferation or takeover of America by communism. Social security, unionization, universal health care, to name a few examples, are, arguably, socialist-oriented programs. The capitalists have found a means to appropriate progressive socialist ideas to appease the masses and to make the social and political control of the masses an easy task.
Meanwhile, Alanga concludes: “Also, if the EU is considering indirect economic sanctions against Nigeria as a way of punishing the country for daring to speak up against an agreement it is uncomfortable with, then the Western giants should remember that one way to earn Africa’s forgiveness and possibly its trust again is to allow the region have its own say without feeling bullied by the giants that may have impoverished it by its influence in past centuries.” What do we learn from the Nigerian example? Alanga’s statement should have constituted the collective voice of ECOWAS, not a single voice as Nigeria’s. On the contrary, the proactive leadership of Nkrumah would have made it a continental voice. Other questions worth asking are: What are we doing to shore up our relatively weaker currencies in order to make them more competitive in international trade as far as trade instruments like the EPA goes? What institutional and fiscal measures have we put in place to cushion trade deficits? More importantly, why is the West relocating its advanced technologies and modern factories to Asia—China, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.—in droves, but to Africa?
Interestingly, the answer, particularly, to the latter may not be farfetched. In effect, it is partially shrouded in Quarter’s historical recollection. Of course, Africa has most of the natural resources undergirding the military, technological, scientific, and economic dominance of the West and, therefore, relocating these relevant technologies and modern factories to Africa might jeopardize Western impetus for dominance and survival. Alternatively, problems related to human capital, weak political leadership, political instability, infrastructural deficits, institutional weakness, political ethnocentrism, lack of strategic collective African interests, black intellectual crisis, political polarization, and failure to diversify Africa’s national economies maybe part of the matrix of distant or not-so-distant reasons for Western economic orientation toward the East! What do we do then? We need to work hard on these development variables!
With the Nigerian objection aside, how much is Ghana set to lose if she signs the EPA? Ghana stands to lose 300 million dollars according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (See “Signing EPA or Not Will Come with a Cost”). Comparatively, how much is it going to cost the European Union? We have not been told yet. However, outside the rigid legal framework of the EPA, are there not viable alternatives for the ECOAWAS member states to pursue? In other words, what radical measures have we put in place to cushion the negative impact of the EPA on local creativity, production, and expansion of local markets for homegrown goods and services? Again, how do homegrown products compete successfully with identical goods and services produced by the European Union, and then, shipped off to Ghana, granted that the average Ghanaian preference for foreign goods is irredeemably insatiable? Does the EPA possess the collateral potential to make local markets more competitive, a porous argument which politicians are now advancing as their holiest alibi for cluelessness?
Even if that is technically the case, why must we wait for the EPA’s virtual arrival to drive the competitiveness of Ghana’s local markets? What have we been doing all this while? What do we produce other than raw materials? What happened to Nkrumah’s Tarkwa Gold Refinery and Tema Oil Refinery? What are we doing to add value to raw materials? How is the EPA going to aid in that creative transition from raw materials to value-added products? Answers to these questions are important only within the contextual confines of strong, focused leadership; stronger institutions; patriotism; progressive and modern educational systems; intra-continental collaboration; diversity or plurality, and the like. And by strong, focused leadership we mean the leadership skills of great leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah or Marcus Garvey. The people of Africa should be able to fabricate this kind of strong leadership via public consensus. That implies avoiding foreign meddling in public processes fashioned to select a leader from among the people, recalling that external meddling may produce a leader who may not represent the aspirations of the people.
In fact, foreign meddling has always produced leaders who have been the people’s close and ardent enemy. And the reason is obvious: Serving the interests of foreign entities at the expense of the people! Do we want to add the EPA to Boko Haram, Al-Shabab, Ansaru, and the Lord’s Resistance Army? Let Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah speak on behalf of Ghana and Africa!
We shall return…
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