Wole Olabanji: Why Africa is a ‘country’ that doesn’t make sense

by Wole Olabanji

Sometimes you are tempted to say “Africa is where sensible ideas go to die”, but you think about our extreme aversion to critical appraisal, and the deadly violence with which we quickly silence dissent, and instead you say something nicer like “Africa is a country”.

 

… where two plus two equals zero

Somalia is an interesting slice of that ‘country’. Interesting; not in the sense of some exotic honeymoon destination, but in the sense of a specimen – a curious, mutant manifestation that bins most of what you had always thought was sound, established logic.

People born in Somalia in the past three decades can be excused for thinking it is normal for humans to constantly be at war; they have known nothing else all their lives. Yet, Somalia has the mind boggling reality of a 0-14years demographic making up 45% of its population. On the surface, this might be explained as orphans of war, but the bigger picture is that overall population is actually growing; a reality from which one is forced to infer that at least one inadvertent strategy for national survival is to bear more children than the war consumes.

If you were to be a sensible person however, you would expect an entirely different reality for this piece of Africa. As with many of the other logic defying parts of the ‘country’… continent if you like, Somalia has so many incredible things going for it that one can only be gobsmacked seeing it only manages to fill a huge chunk of the news quota for what is wrong with the world.

Somalia is located in what can only be described as a maritime strategist’s dreamland. It sits on the horn of Africa at a critical junction of one of the world’s most important maritime routes through which passes over 20,000 ships annually and cargo worth over $60billion annually from India alone. The Gulf of Aden on the coast of Somalia is the gate way to the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea leading to the critical Suez Canal. Given this geographic advantage (if you had Sarah Palin eyes, you could literally see right across to Mumbai, Guangzhou, Jakarta), it would have been reasonable, sensible even to expect that Somalia would have built a strong maritime economy which takes advantage of its proximity to both Asia (Industries) and Europe (Consumers) to become a key transit point for sea freight. Instead, it did manage to develop a thriving sea piracy industry.

Somalia’s maritime advantages does not end with its location along a strategic sea route, it also has the longest coast line (3,300km) in mainland Africa. Now you can be forgiven for conjuring images of sandy beaches fit for post cards and advert copy. Indeed with all of that sun and sand, it should be easy enough to connect the dots and arrive at a thriving tourism industry; but have you ever heard of anyone going on vacation to Somalia?

To be fair, it can be legitimately said that Somalia has been at war for far too long and under those conditions, it is practically impossible to develop the economy along the lines suggested above. But then this also raises the critical question; should Somalia be at war at all?

For a country with a relatively homogenous population: 85% are ethnic Somalis and  over 98% Muslim of the Sunni extraction, it becomes difficult to adduce the conflict in Somalia to the usual tensions that arise in other parts of Africa, i.e. from attempts by different ethnic or religious groups (Nigeria’s north-south, Rwanda’s Hutu – Tutsi etc.) to dominate the others.

Furthermore, explaining it as a fight for scarce resources would be tenuous because in fact, for its 10-million population, Somalia has a relatively generous endowment of natural resources including Uranium, Iron ore, Copper, Bauxite and natural gas, as well as strong indications of crude oil deposits on its north western coast.

Yet, sitting on this incredible fortune, the only thing that has managed to thrive in this slice of Africa is the unfortunate and unrelenting blood lust.

 

East or West; Mogadishu to Malabo, all is ‘weist’.

Before you become tempted to put Somalia in a geographic compartment of Africa and view the problem through a regional lens, I would beg you to get out an atlas and make a bee line parallel to the equator from Mogadishu (on the eastern coast) to Malabo (on the west) and see what you find.

Malabo is the capital of Equatorial Guinea; a small West African country with a population under 0.7 million. As far as fitting into the logical frame of countries with the right conditions for development goes, this slice of Africa is a perfect fit. Like Somalia, the population is relatively homogeneous along the two critical fault lines of ethnicity and religion. 85% of the people are Fang, with the remaining 15% being fragmented into several other groups as to not constitute a critical mass. On the religious front, 93% are Christian; nearly all of which are Catholics.

If the homogeneity reduces the chances of conflict, you would assume that the amount of resources available to share should completely eliminate any chance of it happening. More importantly, you would expect that it should turn the tiny country into an oasis of development in a region that is generally backward. Many would be amazed to learn for instance that due to its low population and considerable earnings from its oil exports (3rd largest in sub-Saharan Africa), Equatorial Guinea has a GDP per capita that ranks 44th (IMF ranking, World Bank ranks it 29th) in the world. Believe it or not, this means it is higher than that of all of the BRICS countries: Brazil (79th), Russia (58th), India (133rd), China (93rd) and South Africa (84th).

What do we find however? When we look at Equatorial Guinea’s ranking on the Human Development Index, it ranks 144th, well below any of the BRICS countries. This ranking comes out of realities like a dismal 50% access to tap water and a disastrous 20% child mortality rate.

These two slices of Africa, taken from two regional extremities provides very stark warning that what would ordinarily be logical assumptions are very dangerous here. In Africa, two plus two is not always four; many times, the result you get is zero.

 

More is not always merrier

The logic defying realities of Mogadishu and Malabo provide caveats in bold prints to some of the intelligent sounding ideas we like to bandy about. Unfortunately our culture leans more towards adoption rather than gestation of ideas, and so we have found it difficult to get beyond the level of governance by buzz words; a culture in which national planning tends to prioritize how many buzz words we can pack into a convenient acronym far above how closely the plan syncs with our realities and aspirations.

We are too unquestioning about the contextual meaning of the ideas that we adopt, too lazy about interrogating the validity of the arguments we have been handed. Why for instance do we accept the idea on face value that we are where we are because of what others have done to us? Why is the thesis that the slave trade caused our backwardness more valid than the one that argues that the slave trade resulted from our backwardness? Why do we choose a reference start date that favours our preferred version of history?

Let us pause for a second from the tiring lamentations of victimhood and consider that long before the slave trade, intermarriage between Obosi and Onitsha (next door neighbours) was almost a taboo. Well, many centuries after the slave trade and a full five decades after independence, we are living in a time when a young man from Onitsha will still find it easier to take a white lady from Windsor to his village and do ngbankwu (igbo traditional marriage rites) than walk a few miles to the next town of Obosi to take a wife. Whatever you may say about slave trade and colonization, it is not the reason why the idea of an Onitsha man marrying an Obosi lady has been frowned upon for centuries.

It is in the context of this sort of realities that we must examine the meaning of ideas like diversity the next time someone tosses them carelessly into a conversation about how to move this nation forward. While developed societies are increasingly championing the idea of diversity as a strategy for growth and development, we must not erroneously equate the fact of our ethno-cultural fragmentation with the idea of diversity as a strategy: there are many tall people who don’t play in the NBA because the fact of your height is simply not enough.

A valid take-off point for discussing diversity might be “why did we become so diverse?” How come there are over 500 distinct languages spoken in the relatively small geographic area called Nigeria? This question is necessary because if we find the answers, it might provide useful insight into why we have had a hard time living together in harmony and leveraging our diversity for development.

Just as we choose the more convenient sequence of cause and effect when we think about slavery, I suspect that the popular view that our cultural differences are a strong reason for our inability to effectively manage conflicts is also defective. Isn’t it entirely plausible that it is our poor conflict management mechanisms that led to our diversity in the first place?

To be clear, generations before us built societies with relatively well developed intra-group mechanisms for achieving cooperation as manifested in various communal undertakings. However, this spirit did not feature prominently in inter-group relations which were dominated by generational feuds. More than any other externally imposed reality, this seeming inability to build sufficiently broad common ground and subjugate personal or clannish aspirations to the common good was and arguably remains the main reason why African societies have been largely unable to stay on the path of development.

 

A limiting rather than enabling factor?

Two traits seem to underlie the inability of our society to build broad, sustainable coalitions: ethnocentrism and the inability of the individual to of his own volition surrender to an accountability system. These twin traits are buried deeply in the cultures that we have spawned over time and have assumed the status of pathologies in our psyche. Critically, they are the things which undermine our society and continue to make it difficult for two plus two to equal four.

Our ethnocentrism usually manifests as that particularly debilitating type which seeks to yoke every reality; old and new alike to a culture which in many respects insists on staying true to ideas overtaken by time or truth. Unfortunately, with the level of ethnic fragmentation that we have and the natural consequence of many irreconcilable cultural differences, we are naturally unable to reach common understanding of the times and the truth that is valid. Our ‘diversity’ thus tends to function as a limiting rather than enabling factor.

As what ails a society is no where clearer than in its religious life, we find good examples of this type of mindless ethnocentrism in the way our Christian and Muslim groups are organized. A cursory observation will reveal that groups are organized largely along ethnic lines with the dominating groups being generally that of the founders. As examples, you will find RCCG dominated by Yorubas, and The Lord’s Chosen by Igbos. For Muslims; Nasfat is predominantly peopled by Yorubas while JIBWIS tends to a Hausa-Fulani flock.

What tends to be more difficult to countenance is the fact that even for-profit organizations which assumably should be more focused on what value staff can create seem to be similarly more concerned about what language they speak. In Abuja for instance, a visit to some of the major departmental stores (Sahad Stores, Exclusive Stores, Next Cash & Carry), will reveal that a noticeable majority of the staff are the same tribe as the owners of the business.

Beyond tribes, and beyond relatively small businesses like departmental stores, my personal knowledge of some major Nigerian banks with international branches is that there is a disproportionate (almost exclusive) representation of certain ethnic groups in senior management. Invariably, this invariably results in a customer base so skewed that some banks in Nigeria are considered Igbo Banks and some others Yoruba Banks.

So on one hand, ethnocentrism shackles the key institutions of society and prevents real progress, while on the other; our deep aversion to accountability ensures that we do not confront our reality, much less change it.

From the man who would rather be CEO, and own 100% of what amounts to nothing than be a partner or COO, and own 10% of something meaningful (to paraphrase Soludo); to the one who prefers to start his own church to staying on to help build another; the pathetic idea that seizing your own destiny means answering to no one runs too deep in our society.

On the contrary, individuals and societies can never realize their destiny unless they embrace fully that duality of living for oneself by living for others.

 

A compound problem

On their own, each of the two pathologies described above can keep a society stuck in a rot. Their combined impact can however assume a catastrophic dimension when they reinforce each other. This is the case with Nigeria.

It is here that we are daily confronted with the scenario where it becomes impossible for society to hold an individual to account because his constituency: his ethnic group, religious group/denomination, will rise in his defence. Our group-centric instincts thus make it impossible to reach a consensus on punishing deviant behaviour as a society.

The catastrophic consequence of this type of behaviour is that we are not merely unable to agree on punishing criminals; but that we are increasingly unable to reach any sort of broad consensus on what is a crime. In essence, our society is losing its moral compass.

 

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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