The Tsunami Called Neo-Colonialism
(Africa's Future Continues To Be As Bleak As Ever)
Take what the G8
policies have done to Nigeria, for example. Gowon’s military regime in
the early 70s structured corruption into governance by importing junk of every
conceivable nature; sand, broken bottles, toothpicks and (because European shit
is superior to ours), European excrement as fertilizers with the active
systematic nudging of the IMF, World Bank and WTO (tagged globalization), to
usurp our sudden oil windfall of the era and get the chance to divert the
crumbs received from foreign exporters as agents into their (Gowon and his
cronies in power) individual private accounts in Europe.
With our foreign earnings from oil exports all returning to Europe to
buy rubbish or to idle away in private foreign accounts, more and more
of the Nigerian currency, the Naira, began to chase after fewer and
fewer US dollars and so began to loose value.
Obasanjo as military Head of state 1976-1979, gallantly resisted IMF
and World Bank interference (called SAP, Structural Adjustment
Programme), in our economic affairs, although without putting a viable
alternative economic programme in place. Shehu Shagari as President
between 1979 and 1983 robustly expanded without qualms, on the Gowon’s
regime culture of day light looting of the treasury and squandermania,
by overwhelming us with more importation of rubbish and the cement and
rice deluge, to divert staggering wealth into their individual private
accounts abroad and punish us with a debilitating national debt load of
over US$18 billion.
We were already a failed state when Buhari (the military leader who
ousted Shagari’s regime in December 1983) provided a home-grown
alternative to the IMF’s SAP. It was to maintain a strong Naira at
approximately one to the US$1.50. Stop all further borrowing from
abroad and institute counter trade for essential or desperately needed
commodities. Buhari put an upper limit on our foreign exchange earnings
used in servicing foreign debts. Rejected all the dubious and
unverifiable debts and in less than three years in power, reduced our
debt burden by nearly 50%.
Even Britain was already scheming to enter into counter trade
agreement with Nigeria when Babangida was sponsored in 1986 by the West
to sack Buhari in a military coup and reverse our gains. America,
Britain and the other leading western nations hailed Babangida’s coup
and immediately sent emissaries to strategize with him. President
Reagan went out of his way to send him gifts including books such as
Niccolo Machiavelli’s: the Prince, advocating the destruction of civil
freedom to strengthen despotism.
Babangida, who promptly crowned himself the Prince of the Niger,
pretended to allow a debate on SAP. The masses rejected the IMF
programme but Babangida went along with the IMF all the same and
instituted what he described as his version of SAP. Babangida’s SAP
re-launched our re-colonization in earnest. His leading architects of
SAP were two World Bank and IMF trained experts. Chief Idika Kalu and
Chief Olu Falae who argued that our economy would collapse without SAP.
Our economy promptly collapsed despite SAP.
Babangida entrenched corruption as a way of life on a massive scale
and fostered the previously unheard of illegal drug trade and the
notorious 419 (the legal code for financial fraud), culture. Babangida
compounded our foreign debt crisis by recalling and accepting the Buhari
regime’s rejected and cancelled dubious debts and between 1986 and 1991
piled up over US$30 billion foreign debt through dubious contracts,
over invoicing and the importation of non-essential services and
commodities including toxic waste. He did not bother to service the debt
and between him, Abacha and their cronies in office diverted over USA
$200 billion, including our USA12.2 billion oil windfall during
Babangida’s regime, into their foreign accounts by 1996, buying up posh
estates all over Europe.
Babangida alone allegedly garnered over USA $35 billion with which he
now cows our politics. He owns estates all over Europe and one of the
grandest estates in the world, in Egypt. Babangida’s SAP protagonists
told us that we needed to increase our foreign currency earnings to be
able to pay our strangulating foreign debts, import more goods and, of
course, technology that use foreign raw materials and spare parts to
stay in operation. SAP, we were told ensures increased foreign exchange
earnings by liberalizing trade and (scandalously) marginalizing the
naira to enhance our export capabilities. Sheer jargon because, the
liberalizing business turned out to be a one-way trap. A vicious circle
in effect, encouraging us to export more at low prices to import more
at high prices because foreigners dictate the prices and no matter what
we do, we always end up the debtors.
Our IMF African gurus argued further that after all, the Japanese yen
is 120 or so to the dollar. What they concealed from us is that Japan
is an export dependent country. They have no raw material. Their
export is totally based on what they manufacture. They sell cheap to
compete. They fixed the yen deliberately that way from inception, with
local values in mind; same way as a hundred British shillings was fixed
to produce one pound. In other words, the yen was worth about a
shilling relatively from start. The yen didn’t just jump overnight from
1 to 120 to the dollar as African economies were forced to do by the
IMF? When the yen wobbles a fraction or two downward in strength, the
Japanese government panics and moves close to declaring a national
emergency. In general, the yen gets stronger against the dollar yearly
and the current projection is that it would exchange 115 to the dollar
two years from now.
It would be a miracle if the naira has not jumped from its current
150 to a new rate of 1,000 to the dollar by then because it volts
abnormally downward only.
That is how the Ghanaian cedi catapulted to 9, 060 to the dollar in
thirty years. The government could hardly pay teachers salaries. They
collateralized their gold mines to the West to keep afloat. Without
regular foreign aids and donors support, budgets would not balance
yearly. Although the current civilian government has tried significantly
to tackle the economic problems they inherited, the people are still so
poor and helpless they are, like other Africans in Africa, dying out
gradually from starvation.
The foreigners we are trying to pacify are not investing in our
economies. Of course, they are grabbing our forced privatized
parastatals like the airways, power and steel, oil, mines,
communications to consolidate their control mechanisms and our total
emasculation. Why should they invest in the other sectors to earn our
worthless currencies?
No one needs to bring money from abroad to do business in Nigeria;
rather Indian and Lebanese traders are operating illegal private banks
from several bases around the country. Some of the bases in Apapa, a
suburb of Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, are well known to the security
personnel who even patronize them. The foreigners have no respect for
our laws because they are fronts for our leaders and retired generals
and where that fails, they can buy off law enforcement agents. Indians
and the Lebanese are printing the local currency (naira) illegally to
buy up privatized industries and our hard earned dollars to send home.
During the week-ending 24th June 2001, a senior government official
(Chief Bode George) who was the Chairperson of our ports announced (and
as expected quickly denied it the following day) that five container
loads of Nigeria’s new N500 notes were impounded at the Apapa ports by
the Nigerian customs. That kind of money (obviously in trillions of
naira) would be enough to wipe out Nigeria’s hundred years oil sales
revenue in one swoop and oil is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy.
The illegal currencies were reported to be as good as our genuine ones
and the owners would have been in a position to pay a thousand, two
thousand or even a million naira of it to buy a dollar. Even if they
spent one million dollars to print it, they could buy millions of
dollars with it to take out.
The only group of people making it, apart from the foreign
manufacturers exporting obsolete products to us and the Indian and
Lebanese crooks in our midst; are our banks round tripping on the
exchange rate scheme; retired rogue leaders living off their loot;
senior government officials siphoning our resources into their private
accounts abroad; their relations favoured with plum government contracts
that are paid for without performance; drug barons and the 419
(con-men) kingpins. Nothing productive is going on right now in our
society. We still import everything from sand, toxic waste, European
excrement as fertilizers, toothpicks and broken bottles just to earn the
opportunity to export dollars. The middle class has been completely
wiped out. All we are left with are the rogues and the very poor.
The people determining the exchange rate are, of course, the rogues
from the unproductive sector of the economy. They are the ones with
access to bank’s bidding facilities for foreign exchange allocations.
These are armchair opportunists working off their briefcases. They
don’t employ staff, need office accommodation or pay taxes. Every naira
they corner, they convert into dollars immediately and transfer abroad.
These are the people determining the fate of the exchange rate
courtesy of the IMF and the World Bank. The ordinary everyday Nigerian
worker, doctor, lawyer, teacher, secretary, market woman, taxi driver,
roadside mechanic etc do not make any contribution to the determination
of the value of the naira. And yet, they work very hard, so hard that
they are the most stressed people in the world, just to earn N100 a day
to buy less than a dollar’s worth of value.
It takes less than five seconds for the average worker to earn a
dollar in the USA but the Nigerian needs to work a day or two for it
because the West wants him to remain ever dependent on them. Today, you
need to work 150 times as hard in Nigeria as you would in the USA to
earn a lousy dollar. It is the dollar that determines the value of
local products. Every one is calculating prices by it, traders,
contractors, prostitutes, since the government trades with it and values
it more than the naira, thanks to the IMF and the World Bank. A whole
day’s wage (which is five seconds wage in the USA) can only buy two
jerricans of garri now or four ripe plantains. How can that be value
for labour and for exchanging the naira? No one can feed himself and
his family that way. Not all of us have jobs so, a day’s work for a
lousy meal a day per person is sending all of us to our early graves.
Economic experts from around the world often paraphrase their
economic theories with: “all things being equal.” Our IMF and World
Bank trained African financial wizards interpret this with their heads
buried in the sand because it is obvious even to the most illiterate
person that all things are not equal in African economies. We are often
one-export product economies. The buyer insists we drastically devalue
our currencies because that is the only way we can compete. Compete to
do what? We do not manufacture anything. They would not allow us and
when they do, they say ours are substandard and put all sorts of
regulations to bar our entry into their markets. They have cartels like
the EU. They insist we throw our markets open, the world trade trick,
and flood us with so much of their junk and rejects, we don’t have time
to think of competing anyway.
All we have to sell of our own are raw materials and they fix prices
and pay in their currencies. They force us to trade in their
currencies. Our governments, banks everybody trades in the foreign
currencies. The local currencies respond by continually falling in value
(like a discarded bride) to catch the scarce “real” money coming from
abroad.
Nigeria, for example, after paying over US $40 billion (N54 trillion)
over the years, was still owing $34 billion (N46 trillion) in 2005 for a
debt of $19 billion (N11.7 billion) made up largely of interests and
penalty charges in 1985, so who is the fool, the IMF and the World Bank
or Nigeria? The latest we hear is that the Paris Club and the IMF have
tricked Nigeria into parting with US$12.4 billion in virtually one swoop
from her recent oil windfall to close the books on the US$19 billion
debt that had already consumed over US$40 billion in payments to the
Paris Club. At the rate they are manipulating us, we would continue to
be indebted to our colonial masters for another one million years even
if we never borrowed a dime from them again.
Because of the gross marginalization of the naira, our economy is
comatose. Most factories have closed down. The few still in business
are operating at below 20% of installed capacity, resulting in massive
unemployment. Warehouses are full of unsold goods. All our
infrastructural facilities have broken down. It is too expensive to
replace them or buy spare parts. Hospitals have no drugs and no new
hospitals are being built. Nurses are not being paid on time and
receive pittance when paid. Doctors have become government contractors
to survive, neglecting their professional callings.
Our educational system is in shambles. When not closed down, there
are no books or teaching aids. They are too expensive to procure. No
one can afford to buy books and no one is reading except the Bible and
the Koran, which are dumped in millions of copies on us free of charge
to keep us ever illiterate and subservient to them. Most teachers have
even migrated abroad to more lucrative jobs. Thousands of our youths
are unemployed and thousands more waste away at home because schools are
closed for a year for every month they open. The most actively pursued
business by Nigerians right now is the visa to jump out of the Nigerian
sinking ship.
Social services are nothing to write home about. Roads are
impassable for potholes and floods. We queue for days on end to buy
petrol wasting otherwise valuable man-hours in the process. We have no
drinking and cooking water in most homes, no electricity generally for
months at a time and yet the authorities are threatening to increase
their tariffs.
Telephones are a luxury, they are not for the poor, remarked David
Mark when he was Minister of Communications in Babangida’s regime and
yet telephones are unreliable. The rogue elite minister, with one of
the world’s best gulf courses in the US, wakes up one morning as
communications boss and jerks up telephone tariffs by some 700%. Why
should our leadership hijackers care if the poor are eating from the
dustbin? It is our fate. We are eating something anyway, so telephone
companies bleed us dry over epileptic, low quality services.
The typical Nigerian family on a monthly salary of N5,000 spends
upward of N3, 000 a month on GSM tariffs (which currently are the
highest tariffs in the world) and that is only by perfecting the flash,
call me back, and SMS text cultures. People unable to feed themselves
or their immediate families, or pay school fees or house rents are going
about begging for loans for GSM credit vouchers. It costs a day’s
average wage to post an ordinary letter by air abroad and still the
letter gets stolen or tampered with before destination.
We are under severe siege as a people thanks to the IMF and the World
Bank’s marginalization of the naira. Fear now rules our daily lives.
Ugly, harrowing fear of the known and unknown. When we go out in the
mornings, we are not sure we would return home safely and with our cars,
bikes and other properties, including even the shoes on our feet or the
earrings in our ears. If we are lucky to arrive to find our homes
unraided in our absence, we sleep with one eye open expecting the worst
any moment of the night. In other words, we do not sleep any more, and
psychologists must have a thing or two to say about the consequences of
lack of sleep on our ability to perform daily chores. The orchins
controlling our lives are no longer the illiterate, no-good, lay-abouts
of yester-years but generally smart looking, well educated and spoken
people who could pass any day for bank executives. They are graduates of
our higher educational institutions unable to find employment for as
many as 8 to 20 years.
Societal values have completely broken down. Marriages are
dissolving as soon as they are contracted. Children have lost respect
for their hapless parents who can neither protect them nor provide their
basic needs. Hard won earnings can no longer buy simple everyday
necessities of life, not even garri, our staple food, let alone
encourage us to aspire to own a car or a home in a lifetime. Many wives
are prostituting to help families make do with the one measly meal a
day now available to only a few in society. Many of our daughters leave
their university dormitories at night to hawk their bodies to pay
school fees and feed. The boys hold up banks, petrol stations during
daylight and whole communities at night in convoys and formations
reminiscent of military operations, all to make ends meets.
Armed robbers kill just for the fun of it and to watch us agonize in
pains. Dead bodies are everywhere. On the streets and in open graves,
deliberately piled in sadistic heaps to poison the atmosphere. Lying,
cheating, pulling tricks have become virtues and friends and neighbours
are usually the first casualties. No one and nothing is spared in the
new culture of destruction instigated by the World Bank and the IMF.
Suicides have become common place and obituaries are largely about
people in their 30s to 50s. The supposed productive age in society.
Our present worthless, nasty, violent life has infested our kids and
will infest theirs also like a virus without cure because no one has the
courage and vision to put a stop to our rot and gradual
disintegration. Recently, thousands of Africans, including Nigerians,
died from Meningitis. A few months earlier, a strange Ebola disease
ravished lives in Zaire and Cote d’ Ivore.
After the Russian (Chernobyl) nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986,
farm products, including cow milk contaminated with nuclear debris and
radioactivity, earmarked for destruction were secretly repackaged and
dumped in Africa for profit. Nuclear contaminated Russian liquid milk
surfaced in Africa as powdered milk under a variety of labels causing
strange ailments, suffering, pains and deaths since. For the Group of
8, it is business as usual. Generally, foreign based institutions and
NGO’s rushing to our aid from abroad are not in the know about the
secret strategy behind the strange and deadly diseases. Often the aid
is no more than medicine after death anyway.
NAIWU OSAHON, Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader) World Pan-African Movement); Ameer
Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford);
Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M;
A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: ‘The end of knowledge’. One
of the world’s leading authors of children’s books; Awarded; key to the
city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City
Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary
Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield
trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift
the African race.
Naiwu Osahon, renowned author, philosopher of science, mystique, leader of the world Pan-African Movement.
Source:
Sahara reporters
Africason
Africason is a die-hard believer in Africa.
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