These are interesting times for natural gas endowed African nations. These nations have to plead with developed nations not to abandon natural gas because of global warming. I heard it was the West that underdeveloped Africa? I thought we should be weary of our colonial masters yet we remain tied to the apron strings of the West and can’t develop without the West.
Nations losing sovereignty to other nations has been the historical norm rather than nations being fully autonomous. Self determination was not a given, it was easily lost to a conquering nation without moralising about the conquest. Though the seeds of national self determination was sown in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 it did not stop European nations from crossing oceans to take over the control of other kingdoms and empires calling them protectorates.
Subjugation of different parts of the world by Western powers had different flavours. Westphalia did not stop dominating powers from cowing other nations states in Europe. Russia is currently attempting to cow Ukraine three hundred and seventy five years after the peace of Westphalia.
Westphalia wasn’t for the Native Americans meaning they don’t have a national day to celebrate, neither do aboriginal populations of South America and Australia. Current nation states of South America celebrate independence from Spain or Portugal both European countries. Subsaharan African nation States were late in losing sovereignty to European states. The Indian subcontinent had been under full British subjugation for twenty five years before the partitioning of Africa in 1884 leading to complete loss of African sovereignty by first decade of 20th Century.
In Asia, Japan was spared embarrassment of Western subjugation though Japan was forced to open to the world by gun boat diplomacy in 1854. China danced to the tune of western nations after losing the opium wars and had to cede Hong-Kong for a hundred years. Self determination a principle in the earlier Westphalia treaty later became entrenched in the United Nations charter and starting with India European countries granted their colonies political independence.
By the mid 1960s most of Africa gained Independence but were they? Being independent means you are in control of your affairs. Then why do we feel helpless and unable to use our energy resources for industrialisation? Why do we have to plead that gas be a transition fuel towards meeting zero Carbon emissions.
It was postulated by radical thinkers that the raft of independence of the 60s was superficial hence coinage of the term neocolonisation showing newly independent nations were economically tied to the aprons of mother nation. Francophone West African countries have their monetary policies determined in France with Paris controlling their money supply and holding bulk of their reserves. This is the worst form of neocolonisation but there are others.
With the decline of the scourge of colonisation beginning in the late 1940s, some newly independent nations circled their wagons and in their efforts to be economically independent chose Autarky as an economic policy. India had this policy of self reliance in place until the mid 1990s while North Korea remains the epitome of an autarkic nation. China between 1949 and 1979 ran a closed economy. Nigeria toyed with this philosophy with the self reliant policy being a corner stone of development policies and plans of the 1970s and 1980s.
Autarky was not to last, China caved in and later India, they both opened up and joined the globalisation train of interdependence. Only North Korea and Cuba remain standing. As in individual affairs of a Man not being an island to himself in a society so too in the affairs of nations, interdependency had won the day. However while China and India had learnt lessons of what being interdependent is, Nigeria and Africa have not.
We have transversed over political independence to economic independence to economic interdependence, but we also have financial hegemony with America weaponising it’s dollar world reserve currency status and the Swift payment system. In global interdependence we have an hierarchy from the drawers of water to those at the top who own the pyramid. In the middle between the hewer of wood and those who own the pyramid are countries striving to get to the top. Some are starting to build their own pyramid to replace the existing one.
Contrast these with those at the lower rung of the pyramid that have to beg to provide wood to keep the top warm, that is Africa that is Nigeria. Junketing about with paper independence not knowing they have sunk deeper into dependency. Nigeria’s case is actually pathetic, how? With the financial independence that petrodollars gave, rather than spend to be more independent we spent to be more dependent.
We industrialised by Import Substitution Industrialisation Policy that has led to an import dependent economy. We dissed our indigenous construction firms like Oni and Sons and Akin Taylor construction firm then brought in foreign firms like Julius Berger and scores of others from Lebanon to China. Beyond rudimentary farming we can hardly do anything on our own. We can’t build simple rail tracks or factories. The first cement plants were built in the early 1960s sixty years ago by Europeans now they are built by Chinese and Indians. When will Nigerians build such things? Nothing of such in any of our development plants or in the AU Agenda 2063 or Imagine Nigeria or Nigerian Agenda 2050. It is in such endeavours that true independence lies not paying others to do stuff for us but by DIY, doing it ourselves.
We beg to use natural gas all because we are technologically dependent. On the other hand we have China burning dirty coal into the foreseeable future because they are technologically independent and can’t be dictated to. Real independence is in having technological capabilities. Even China does not have it all as we see the USA denying China cutting edge semiconductors and nanochips, where China is lagging. The USA has curtailed semiconductor export into China to rein in China over geopolitical tensions.
Without technological independence a country will remain dependent and those at the top of the pyramid or those who own the system would sanction countries that don’t fall in line. A time was Nigeria felt it was a middle power country and exercised it’s sovereignty by nationalising foreign assets of Standard Bank and British Petroleum in response to perceived slights, this was in the mid 1970s when petrodollars was pushing us’. We played the two ideological blocks, if the West will not sell us a Steel plant the Soviet block did. Unfortunately it seems we are still at the mercy of outsiders fifty years later than ever before. This calls for serious soul searching.
What is it in our soul that make us want to be dependent on others? We forever want to depend on government, forever seeking a Nigerian Lee Kuan Yew messianic figure who will put food on our tables. The search must be in our soul not in our stars because while other races have learnt from their encounters with the Caucasians the black race hasn’t. We remain where we were one thousand years ago with MansaMusa carrying slaves and gold to Mecca or supplying nature’s commodities to Vasco da Gama as he sailed to India. Later we supplied physical labour in form of peoples we enslaved to work the plantations in the Americas. Today the Labour is in form of cerebral donkey work. Juxtapose this against the spirit Elon Musk took away to the US from Africa or the intellectual property, patents and advanced weaponry Israel is contributing to the world.
Unfortunately documents such as AU AGENDA 2063 or IMAGINE NIGERIA fail to capture this necessity of building capacity for increasing degrees of technological independence. Neither has the Ministry of Science and Technology made Nigeria less dependent. However, there is some stirring of this old sleeping giant with the exploitation of oil and gas in the Gongola basin of Northern Nigeria and the absence of International oil companies. Indeed is the earlier concept of local content catching on? 100% local content as a policy should not be in oil and gas sector alone, it should run through the productive sectors of the Nigerian economy.
Olugbenga Jaiyesimi jerry3jaiye@gmail.com
