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By Jerome-Mario Chijioke Utomi
Public Forum
Recently, on Wednesday May 25, the world joined Africa to celebrate the annual Africa Day, a day set aside to mark the anniversary of the signing of the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) agreements, which evolved into the present-day African Union (AU), and had its origin in May 25, 1963, when leaders of 30 of the 32 independent African states signed the founding charter of the organisation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Since then, it was reported that the commemoration of the historic day by Africans and Africans in the diaspora has served as an opportunity for each country to organise events in order to promote rapprochement between African peoples. It has now become a deeply rooted tradition in all African countries, and it represents the symbol of the struggle of the entire African continent for liberation, development and economic progress.
This year’s celebration is centred on nutrition, with the African Union’s theme for the year 2022, “Strengthening Resilience in Nutrition and Food Security on the African Continent.”
Alongside the commemoration of the day is the extraordinary summit of the AU in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea.
While, the leadership of the continent celebrates the flashes of socio-economic achievements of Africa, there are, however, reasons for Africans and true lovers of the continent to feel concerned about the happenings in the continent as they more than anything else confirm as true the argument by some European scholars that even though Africans have recently witnessed remarkable improvement in culture and civilisation, Africa remains a dark continent lit only by the flashes of foreign penetration and it has contributed nothing to world civilisation.
Indeed, Africans may have, in my view, overtly shown remarkable improvement in their culture and civilisation. That notwithstanding, the fact that, after almost 60 years of independence, African countries continually look up to other continents for aid, covertly tells a story of a continent lacking in capacity for taking responsibility for its actions and initiatives for values.
For a better understanding of this piece, the Chinese development aid to Africa, going by reports, totalled 47 per cent of its total foreign assistance in 2009 alone. And from 2000 to 2012, it funded 1,666 official assistance projects in 51 African countries. Also, the Brookings Institution Aid Data study found that at least 70 per cent of China’s overseas aid was sent to Africa from 2000 to 2014.
Also, Africa is the second most-populated continent in the world (1.2 billion people), yet, sadly, it represented only 1.4 per cent of the world’s manufacturing value added in the first quarter of 2020. This is further exacerbated by the fact that, out of over 51 countries in Africa, only South Africa qualified as a member of BRICS, an acronym coined for an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
In like manner, the book “Technology and Wealth of Nations” chronicled the slanted and unsustainable efforts different African governments made in the past to bring their nations out of the technological woods, as well as outlined the way forward. Separate from thoughtfully and masterfully examining the inspirable relationship between technological development and economic progress of nations, the book deftly argues with facts that the point of sail of all economies is the introduction of the manufacturing sector or the industrial economy. The book establishes that Africa’s prolonged economic plight is centred on the two fundamental challenges of a manufacturing economy.
It traces Africa’s economic backwardness to its roots, a key problem that has kept policymakers handicapped and economies crippled. With documented facts on the institutionalised crippling policies and organised sequences of stagnating events of the colonial masters, the author asks: “Why is it that Europe, which hosted the industrial revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries, did not permit technological education in Africa in about 50 years of colonization, and prefers to send aid afterwards?”
Of course, the above question, in my view, may not be lacking in merit, considering the fact that Africa presently is dotted with projects built with aid from Europe, the United States of America and, lately, China.
Whatever the true situation may be, I believe that there exists something troubling, technologically, that characterises Africa more as a dark continent.
More so, looking at the happenings and commentaries within the continent, it is obvious that fair-minded and foresighted Africans are in support of the position as canvassed by the book. On the way out of the continent’s technological debacle and the current wealth disparity among nations (industrial economies), Oragwu argued that the wealth disparity among nations (industrial economies), represented by highly industrialised Europe, North America and Japan, on one hand, and most developing (non-industrial economies) countries, in particular, those in sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, is primarily the difference in the technical capability and capacity to produce and manufacture modern technologies and use the technologies to produce and manufacture globally competitive industrial goods, and to sustain the commanding tasks of science and technology in the economy
The disparity, it added, has since considerably widened and will continue to widen, as long as the developing countries depend almost totally on industrial nations for the technologies and industrial inputs they need to sustain their economies. Consequently, the only way to bridge the wealth gap is for the developing countries of the world to build their domestic endogenous capabilities and capacities to produce modern technologies and competitive industrial goods in their own economies.
Catalyzing the process will again necessitate African leaders borrowing body from Asian Tigers in order to raise Africa’s industrial soul. They need to analyze and understand the essential ingredients of foresight in leadership and draw a lesson on how leadership decision-making processes involve judgment about uncertain elements and differ from the pure mathematical probability process. Find out why, in Asia, after grappling with the problems of unemployment in the region, their leaders came to the conclusion that the only way to survive was to industrialise.
•Utomi wrote via [email protected]
