Additionally, and this might appear
paradoxical, trade
figures and associated data readily obtainable indicate that these African
states of seeming dysfunction have performed their utmost, year in, year out,
in that key variable for which their European World creators established them
in the first place: redoubts for export services of designated
mineralogical/agricultural products to the European World/overseas. There are
no indications, whatsoever, that any of these countries has found it difficult
to fulfil its principal obligations on this accord. This is the context that
that seemingly contradictory aphorism, “Africa
works”, becomes hugely intelligible. Appositely, the raison d’être of the “state” in Africa
is not really to serve its people(s), African peoples; it is, on the contrary,
to respond, unfailingly, to the objective needs of its creators overseas.
For instance, thanks to the continuing
inordinate leverage that Britain
and France , the two foremost
conqueror-states of Africa, exercise in these essentially anti-African
principalities tagged “the state” in Africa, both European countries have a
greater secured access to Africa ’s
critical resources today than at any time during decades of their formal
occupation of the continent. France, right from the post-World War II
leadership of Charles de Gaulle to the current François Hollande, has
such glaring contempt for the notion of “sovereignty” in the so-called francophonie Africa, ensuring that France has
invaded most of these 22 African countries 51 times since 1960 (for an
excellent study on French hegemonic control of the finances/economies of these
countries, see Gary Busch, “Africans pay for the bullets the French use to kill
them”, http://www.afrohistorama.info/article-africans-pay-for-the-bullets-the-french-use-to-kill-them-82337836.html [accessed 15 May 2013]). As for Britain,
sheer greed and opportunism appear to be the guiding principle to attaining its
unenviable position as the leading arms-exporter to Africa, including Africa’s
leading genocide-states (See, for instance, journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo’s
candid insight on the subject in a BBC interview, “UK arming African countries”,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/699255.stm [accessed 12 May 2013]). Indeed, France
and Britain have never had
it so good in Africa .
Those
crucial African capital exports referred to earlier, legitimate or/and
illegitimate, are funds of gargantuan proportions produced by the same humanity
that many a commentator or campaign project would be quick to categorise as
“poor” and “needy” for “foreign aid”. In the past 30 years, these funds could
and should easily have provided a comprehensive healthcare programme across
Africa, the establishment of schools, colleges and skills’ training, the
construction of an integrative communication network, the transformation of
agriculture to abolish the scourge of malnutrition, hunger and starvation, and,
finally, it would have stemmed the emigration of 12 million Africans, including
crucial sectors of the continent’s middle classes and intellectuals to the
Americas, Europe, Asia and elsewhere in the world since the 1980s.
Yet, despite these grim times of pulverised economies and failed and collapsing states in Africa, we shouldn’t ever forget that those who still ensure that the situation on the ground is not much worse for the peoples than it is, are Africans – individuals, working alone, conscientiously, or working in concert with others or within a larger group to feed, clothe, house, educate and provide healthcare and some leisure to immediate and extended families, communities, neighbourhoods, villages and the like. For example, the surgeon who not only works tirelessly in a city hospital, with very limited resources, but uses his scarce savings to build a health centre and an access road in his village with subsidised treatment and prescription costs; the nurse who travels around her expansive health district, unfailingly, bringing care to the doorsteps of the people who neither can afford nor access it physically; the retired diplomat who has mobilised her community to set up a robust environmental care service that has involved the construction of public parks, regular refuse collection and some recycling, after-school free tuition for children with a planned community newspaper in the pipeline; the coach transport operator who lays out scores of his coaches to ferry survivors of a recently organised pogrom 350 miles away to safety; the civil rights activist and intellectual who rallies members of his internet discussion groups within the course of a month’s intense campaign to successfully apprehend a contractor who was about to abscond with millions of (US) dollars’ worth of public funds meant for a crucial upgrade of an international airport initially built by the community; a stretch of individuals’ programmes of scholarships for students at varying levels of school life, provision of staff salaries in schools and colleges, maintenance of libraries and laboratories in schools and colleges, construction and maintenance of vital infrastructure in villages and counties, etc., etc. These are the authors busily scripting the path of the renaissance
To cap these phenomenal strides of Africans,
the 12 million African émigrés mentioned earlier presently constitute the primary exporters of capital to Africa
itself. Africans now dispatch more money to Africa
than “Western aid” to the continent, year in, year out. In 2003, according to
the World Bank, these African overseas residents sent to Africa the impressive
sum of US$200 billion – invested directly in their communities (World Bank,
“Migrant Labor Remittances in Africa”, Africa Regional Paper Series, No. 64,
Washington, November 2003: 12). This is 40 times the sum of “Western aid” in
real terms in the same year – i.e. when the pervasive “overheads” attendant to
the latter are accounted for (cf. Fairouz El Tom’s recently concluded informed
research, “Do NGOs practise what they preach?”, http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/87395). In a sentence: The African humanity
currently generates, overwhelmingly, the capital resource that at once sustains
its very existence and is intriguingly exported to the
Western World. It is precisely the same humanity that those who benefit
immeasurably from this conundrum (over several decades and are guaranteed to
benefit indefinitely from it, except this is stopped by Africans) have
consistently portrayed, quite perversely, as a “charity case”. The notion that
Africans are in any way dependent on a European World/Western World or any
other overseas’s “handout” is at best a myth or at worst an all-out lie –
perpetuated by a circle of academics and in the media who in fact in the
not-too-distant-past would have been in the vanguard
“justifying”/“rationalising” African enslavement or/and the conquest and
occupation of Africa.
Surely, this historic big lie of
characterisation can no longer be sustained. Africa is endowed with the human
resource and capital resource (in all its calibration and manifestation) to
build advanced civilisations provided Africans abandon the prevailing
“Berlin-states” of dysfunction that they have been forced into by the latter’s
creators as we shall be
elaborating soon. Thus, Africa ’s pressing
problem in the past 57 years of presumed restoration of independence has been
how to husband incredible range of abundance of human and non-human resources
for the express benefits of the peoples rather than it being fritted away so criminally.
Population, food, future
There
has often been a “politically
correct” rhetoric bandied about incessantly by some in academia, media and
elsewhere who discuss this grave crisis of contemporary Africa in the context
of population (as a useful background to this rhetoric, see, particularly,
Roland Oliver, “The condition of Africa”, Times Literary Supplement, London, 20
September 1991: 8). Africa , it is concluded in
these assertions, requires some “decrease” in its population and/or
population-growth as an important measure towards achieving a “solution”. On
the contrary, as we now demonstrate, Africa
is, indeed, in no way overpopulated. The population argument is usually
advanced on a number of fronts. First, there is a “theory” that the given landmass
which presently defines Africa and its various
so-called 54 nation-states cannot sustain the existing populations, but, more
critically, the “projected populations” in years to come. We shall examine the
degree to which this “theory” is able to stand up to serious scientific
scrutiny first by comparing Africa ’s landmass vis-à-vis its population and those of
some of the countries of the world.
Africa’s population is currently one billion covering an incredible vast landmass of 30,221,533 sq km or about four times the landmass of Brazil (all the statistics here on countries’ population, landmass and the like are
derived from The World Bank, World
Development Report 2012 and
United Nations Development Programme, Human
Development Report 2012). Ethiopia ’s
landmass is 1,221,892 sq km, five times the size of Britain Britain ’s population of 62 million is
three-quarters that of Ethiopia Somalia ,
it is 2.6 times the size of Britain Sudan
and South Sudan provide an even more
fascinating comparison. Whilst both countries are 10 times the size of Britain , they support a population of 45 million
– about 70 per cent the size of Britain Sudans have a
landmass equal to that of India
which is populated by 1.22 billion people – i.e., more than the population of
all of Africa ! Britain
is one-tenth the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which has a
landmass of 2,345,395 sq km, similar to the Sudans
and India Britain Britain , France
and Germany
Second, let us examine similarly sized
countries. France has a
landmass of 547,021 sq km close to Somalia France ’s population of 65 million is about seven
times the population of Somalia Botswana is
slightly larger than France
at 660,364 sq km but with a population of 2 million, a minuscule proportion of France Uganda ’s landmass at 236,039 sq km is about the
size of Britain Uganda is about half that of Britain Ghana ’s landmass
of 238,535 sq km makes it approximately equal to the size of Britain Ghana is however populated by only 25 million
people, far less than one-half Britain
Southern
World to Southern World comparisons can also prove useful in exposing the
fallacy of either Africa ’s “large population”
or “potential explosive population”. Iran ’s size of 1,647,989 sq km is about
two-thirds that of Sudan and
South Sudan combined. Yet its population,
unlike the Sudans Sudans but with a population of 115 million, Mexico Namibia ’s 864,284 sq
km but Pakistan ’s population
is 174 million while Namibia Angola
and South Africa are about
4-5 times the size of Britain
Crucial reminders, genocide, post-Berlin states
Finally,
we should turn to the question of resource, its availability or lack of it, and
therefore its ability or inability to support the African population – another
component of Africa ’s “over-population”
fallacy. Well over 50 per cent of Uganda ’s
arable land, some of the richest in Africa ,
remains uncultivated. Were Uganda Africa is being cultivated
presently (FAO and IIED, “What effect will biofuels have on forest land and
poor people’s access to it?”, 2008). Even here, an increasingly high proportion
of the cultivated area is assigned to so-called cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea,
groundnut, sisal, floral cultivation, etc.) for exports at a time when there
has been a virtual collapse, across the board, of the price of these crops in
international commodity markets. In the past 30 years, the average real price
of these African products abroad has been about 20 per cent less than their worth during the
1960s-70s period which was soon after the “restoration of independence”. As for
the remaining 75 per cent of Africa ’s
uncultivated land, this represents 60
per cent of the entire
world’s potential (John Endres, “Ready, set, sow”, The Journal of Good Governance
Africa, Issue 6, November 2012: 1). The world is aware of the array of
strategic minerals such as coltan,** cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, industrial
diamonds, iron ore, manganese, phosphates, titanium, uranium, and of course
petroleum oil found in virtually all regions across the continent.
It is an inexplicable and inexcusable tragedy that any African child, woman, or man could go without food in the light of the staggering endowment of resources in
We now no longer require any reminders that
the primary existence of these principalities is to destroy or disable as many
enterprisingly resourceful and resource-based constituent peoples, nations and
publics within the polity that are placed in their genocide march and
sights. Here, the
example of the Igbo people of west Africa cannot be overstressed. This is one
of the most peaceful and industrious of peoples subjected to the
longest-running genocide of the contemporary epoch by the Nigeria Africa .
It inaugurated Africa ’s current age of
pestilence. During the course of 44 months (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) of
indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the
German-perpetration of the genocide against the Herero people of Namibia in the
early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and
military, murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s
population. To understand the
politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is
to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive
indices of politics across Africa in the past
50 years. Africans elsewhere remained largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences
of such indifference as subsequent genocides in Rwanda ,
Darfur, Nuba Mountains ,
South Kordofan (all three in the Sudan )
and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo ,
and in other wars in every geographical region of Africa
during the period have demonstrated catastrophically. Just as the Nigerian
operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the
rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in
Nigeria’s footpath, murdering a horrifically additional tally of 12 million
people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents”. These 12
million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if
Africans had intervened robustly to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo
people.
It is abundantly
clear that the factors which have contributed to determining the very poor
quality of life of Africa ’s population
presently have to do with the nonuse, partial use, or the gross misuse of the
continent’s resources year in, year out. This is thanks to an asphyxiating
“Berlin-state” whose strategic resources are used largely to support the
Western World and others and an overseer-grouping of local forces which exists
solely to police the dire straits of existence that is the lot of the average
African. As a result, the broad sectors of African peoples are yet to lead, centrally, the entire process of societal reconstruction
and transformation by themselves. Surely, an urgently
restructured, culturally-supportive political framework that enhances the
quality of life of Africans is really the pressing subject of focus for Africa .
One immediate move
that states across the world, especially Britain ,
the leading arms exporter to Africa, and the rest of the West, Russia and China
and others can make to support the ongoing efforts by peoples across Africa to
rid themselves of such frighteningly genocidal and dysfunctional states is to
ban all arms sales to Africa . This ban must be
total and comprehensive. A total and comprehensive arms ban on Africa will radically advance the current quest on the
ground by Africans, across the continent,
to construct democratic and extensively decentralised new state forms that
guarantee and safeguard human rights, equality and freedom for individuals and
peoples. Africans have both the vision and the capacity to create alternative
states – for them it is an imperative upon which their survival is based.
Forty-seven years
and 15 million murders on, Africans finally realise that there cannot be any
meaningful advancement without abandoning the post-conquest state, essentially
a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. It
is in the longer-term interest of the rest of the world, especially in the
West, to support African transformations initiated by the peoples rather
than the “helmspersons”/“helmsconstituent nations” ostensibly entrenched
in the hierarchical architecture that maps the typical continent’s
genocide-state.
*Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is visiting professor in graduate programme of constitutional law at the
Universidade de Fortaleza, Brazil, and specialist on the state and genocide and
wars in Africa. This is a keynote paper he gave to a one-day conference on
Africa on Monday 20 May 2013 at the Universidade Estadual do Ceará, Fortaleza.
He wishes to thank Professor Mônica Dias Martins and her team for a very
successful conference which featured a very engaging and rewarding stretch of
discourses among scholars and students from an array of disciplines well into
late evening. Obrigado!
**Refined columbite-tantalite, coltan, is critical in the manufacture of a range of small electronic equipment including, particularly, laptop computers and mobile phones; 80 per cent of the world’s reserves of this mineral is in the
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
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