AFRICA MUST PRODUCE OR PERISH
Imagine that it is May 25, 2063, the 100th anniversary of Africa Day, a day for reflecting on Africa’s successes and failures. The newspaper headline announces, “Last Remaining Oilfield in West Africa’s American Territory Dries Up.”
The article continues: “The last patch of rainforest will soon be empty land scarred by oil pipelines, pumping stations, and natural gas refineries. Wholesale pollution will be the environmental legacy for future generations.
“Africa’s offshore oil reserves will ebb away. Abandoned oil wells could well become tourist attractions, and oil-boom settlements will be transformed into derelict ghost towns.
“In a world without oil, air travel will disappear, and people will voyage overseas on coal-powered ships. Farmers will use horses instead of tractors, and scythes instead of combine harvesters. As crops diminish and populations soar, famine will grip the globe. With no means to power their vehicles, parents will be housebound, without jobs, and children will walk to school.”
This scenario could become a reality, because we no longer have an abundant oil supply. We know oil exists in limited quantities and that most oil wells dry up after 40 years. It is as certain as death and taxes. Rather than debate the exact year when we will run out of oil, I prefer to imagine that we have already run out. It may come sooner than any of us expect. Our heirs will thank or curse us for how much oil we left for them. Instead of asking, “When will Africa run out of natural resources?” we should ask, “When will Africa be unable to export raw materials, either for lack of our own oil or because foreign markets have themselves dried up?”
A $100 bar of raw iron is worth $200 when forged into drinking cups in Africa, $65,000 when forged into needles in Asia, $5 million when forged into watch springs in Europe. How can this be? European intellectual capital – the collective knowledge of its people – allows a $100 raw iron bar to command a 50,000-fold increase! It could be said, therefore, that a lack of intellectual capital is the root cause of poverty.
Without African intellectual capital, iron excavated in Africa will continue to be manufactured in Europe and exported back to Africa at enormous cost. To alleviate poverty, Africa needs to cultivate creative and intellectual abilities that will allow it to increase the value of its raw materials and to break the continent’s vicious cycle of poverty. Poverty is not an absence of money, Rather, it results from an absence of knowledge.
In oil-exporting African nations, multinationals such as Shell (selling rigs for a 40% royalty on exported oil) are getting rich, while the oil rig workers remain poor. Instead of addressing the underlying causes of poverty – minimal productivity resulting from a lack of intellectual capital – Third World leaders have focused on giving false hope to their people.
We need less talk about poverty and more action to eliminate it. So how do we do this? Education has done more to reduce poverty than all the oil companies in the world. So it is disheartening to realize that few leaders believe that their people’s potential is far more valuable than what lies beneath the soil.
Intellectual capital, not higher wages, will eliminate poverty in Africa. If we all demand higher wages, we will end up paying the higher wages to ourselves. Intellectual capital will result in the creation of new products derived from new technologies. The end result will be not just a redistribution of wealth, but the creation and control of new wealth.
And Africa’s power to reduce poverty will open the floodgates of prosperity for millions of people. One catalyst for such prosperity could be telecommuting. If 300 million Africans could work for companies located in the West (just as millions of Indians do), then both regions would benefit. The strategy would be to recognize the labor needs of the global marketplace, and enable Africa to fulfill those needs.
For example, tax preparation experts living in Africa, where labor is cheaper, could fulfill the needs of US-based accountants. Furthermore, the time difference could allow for a fast turnaround in service. It is clear that knowledge and technology is crucial to alleviate Africa’s poverty.
Africa will perish if it continues to consume what it does not produce, and produce what it does not consume. The result will be a depressing cycle of increasing consumption, decreasing production, and increasing poverty. We are missing a golden opportunity by not using the trillion dollars earned by exporting natural resources to break Africa’s cycle of poverty.
We are at a crossroads where one signpost reads “Produce” and another reads “Perish.” We risk becoming like the driver who stops at an intersection and asks a pedestrian,
“Where does this road lead?”
And the pedestrian replies, “Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” the driver replies.
“Then it obviously doesn’t matter which road you take!” replies the pedestrian.
If we adopt the same attitude as the driver, Africa will have lost its chance to “choose” its future.
For decades, power in post-colonial Africa rested in the hands of those with guns, not those with brains. We were not always at war with our neighbors, but we were always at war with poverty. And we spent more on guns than on books and bread.
Africa’s choice is clear: produce or perish. However, it is important that we do not blindly choose the lesser of two evils – producing what we cannot consume or consuming what we cannot produce. We can avoid this. My wish is that by the end of the 21st century high-end products in New York City will sport the label: “Made in Africa.”
We cannot look forward to our future until we learn from our past. Five thousand years of recorded history reveal that technology was ancient Africa’s gift to the modern world. Forty and a half centuries ago, geometers in Africa’s Nile Valley region designed the Great Pyramid of Giza, the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That man-made mountain remains the largest stone building on Earth. It is an icon of engineering, and testifies that Africa was once the world’s most technologically advanced region.
It is absolutely imperative that Africa regain its technological prominence, which will enable it to produce what the world can consume. When we do that, Africa will finally be eating the fruits of its own labor. When Africa has regained its technological prominence, the world’s leaders will seek it out. And, like a rainforest renewed, Africa will flourish again.
Speech delivered by me to the African community in Valencia, Spain on May 11, 2008.
Note from Editor: The article is the opinion of the writer
Ogbonna Nwuke: Communication as a vital tool for governance
It was Thomas Jefferson who lived between 1743-1826 that said a good government is one which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned. And Jim Morrison sums it up that whoever controls the Media, controls the mind. However, it is also on note that journalism school is the reminder of the age-long bitterness between the statesman and the pressman particularly for a fresher, though open to question, they need one another to grow. But just about, they are like two comparable lines, while we're on the subject.
The ancient rubber town of Okomoko, in the present-day Etche Local Government Area, Rivers State, is where the Rivers State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Ogbonna Nwuke, hails from. He is from the family of the Nwukes, a family widely recognized for their enviable contributions to the State, in socio-political, economic, cultural, educational and other progresses. These feats of theirs are not only recorded in Okomoko town, but also throughout the entire Rivers State.
His Royal Majesty, the late chief (Hon.) J.H.E Nwuke, Ogbuzo II, Onyishi Etche (1951 -1970), was an educationist parliamentarian and Works Minister and later the provincial Commissioner for Port Harcourt province. This suggests to what extend the Nwukes have helped mankind both in human and in infrastructural development in Nigeria.
It was a long period of time that the Rivers people had wanted a professional to head the Information Ministry of the State. It did not happen in other existed administrations in the State. The State was misled, information wise. Pseudo-journalist was appointed to head the Information Ministry of the State. Under one of the administrations, a lawyer cum pseudo-journalist was appointed to spearhead this exalted section that is so essential to mankind. That was why, Media, Jihad & All That, Mohamed Raisudeen, said that there is no greater power in America today than that wielded by the manipulators of public opinion. No king or pope of old ever disposed of a power approached by that of a few dozen men who control America's mass news and entertainment media.
In Rivers State, Mr. Nwuke has exemplified the relationship between the press and the politician. It has been enthusiastic about with the evolution of privately owned state-based tabloid. These tabloids have, at every step of the way, pursued their ethical responsibilities of being society’s overseer. This has in many occasions resulted to something very irksome in the assessment of the politician. And Mr. Nwuke, until his appointment recently as the Commissioner for information, was among the first in the business of independent state tabloids to stand against the biodegradable of injustice in the state by the administration Governor Chibuike Amaechi succeeded. Ogbonna Nwuke published and personally edited, as Editor-In-Chief, the Port Harcourt Telegraph. This tabloid, apart from high-pitched headlines androgynous feature, the newspaper used highly interpretative cartoons to capture topical issues of the moment, which often times, obey the rules of the press tradition. Kudos often goes to Late Evans Osi’s Independent Monitor background work which started up as opposition elements in the eyes of government.
Mr. Nwuke was the Chairman Rivers Independent Publishers Association when the opposition finally died under the Dr. Peter Odili heinous years – 1999-2007, as the governor of the state. It was Mr. Nwuke and the indigenous media that stood up to the occasion, condemning government’s missteps and at other times setting agenda for discourse. For that attitude, Nwuke suffered depression in the hands of the government and the privately owned indigenous tabloids were marginalized. The ears were filled with comments that Odili marginalized the indigenous newspapers “in preference for other Lagos based newspapers even when the issues are typically local, a trend which attested robustly to the Odili policy of “charity beginning abroad,” not at home.” But Nwuke did not waiver. He stood for justice. He stood for the truth and at various times criticized activities of the government officials. The officials saw public office as their personal booty and used the same to destroy the peace and ambiguousness of the people.
According to a saying credited to the late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe: It is only a mad man that can chase a man with a gun. But Nwuke stood irrevocable at the face of tyranny upon senseless bloodletting and state induced political bickering that was experienced in the state then. Was his unashamed stance against the tainted government not a risk to his life and that of his family? But Nwuke did not mind. He stood in relentless condemnation of the rush of Governor Amaechi’s mandate given to him freely by majority of party members at the December 9, 2006 PDP convention. He published publication after publication, highlighting the injustice that was meted out on Rt Hon Chibuike Amaechi and helped to keep the public faith for an Amaechi governorship until the Supreme Court judgment of October 25 2007, which ousted Omehia. Nwuke became a political foe to the ousted governor because of his belief in Amaechi and commitment to truth and justice?
It is no longer news that when Amaechi became governor, Nwuke was appointed as the Director of Press to the governor, though not the reason why he stood for Amaechi, but because he obviously knew that Amaechi was going to deliver. No one doubts this because most of Nwuke’s industrious adult-life he has known no other profession but journalism. His friends would tell you that his occasional stride into partisan politics notwithstanding was for the way forward of the state. It is on record that in the 1980’s and 1990’s Nwuke along with others, notably Eriye Iyaye and Charles Ogan hit the airwaves of the state radio with highly incisive, educative and powerful commentaries grounded in sound knowledge of developmental journalism. History also had it that it was also to his credit, under his watch, as chairman of the local Convention Organizing Committee of the NUJ, that a Rivers man, Mr. Ndagene Akwu, was elected president of the Union since its birth about 50 years ago.
To sum this article up but not limited to this, Nwuke is like the Television in the eyes of Witold Rybczynski (b. 1943), Scottish–born Canadian architect, educator. “Pastimes,” Waiting for the Weekend, Viking (1991): Television tells a story in a way that requires no imagination; the picture on the screen and the sound provide all we need to know—there is nothing to fill in. Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure—not that it’s passive, but that it offers so little opportunity for reflection and contemplation. At the beach—or reading a book, or listening to Vivaldi—our attention shifts from sight to smell to sound at will. The mind wanders in and out of the scene. The physical sensations stimulate thoughts, memories and reflections. These interruptions are an integral part of the experience of relaxing. Watching television, on the other hand, is focused, structured, and scheduled.
Rivers people trust Nwuke so much and as a matter of palpability the State NUJ perhaps would want him to re-channel his wealth of experience towards pumping fresh air into the lives of state-owned media organizations.
By Odimegwu OnwumerePoet and Author and Founder, Poet Against Child Abuse.
Rivers State (Nigeria) +2348032552855
