Home ›› 07 May 2022 ›› Opinion
African politicians tend to blame foreign actors or external factors for the problems at home. This is nothing new nor is it unique to African politicians. Across the world, rulers and politicians do not miss a chance to blame domestic woes on local or foreign scapegoats, thus shielding themselves from their own policy failures.
With African politicians, however, this tendency is more persistent than elsewhere. For example, the Ghanaian government recently blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for its economic woes. The Russian embassy in Ghana responded, demanding that officials stop blaming Russia for Ghana’s dire economic situation and pointing out that the problems started well before the Russia-Ukraine war and before covid.
Africans suffered under the cruel, oppressive, and dehumanizing system of Western imperialism, and Western control over Africa did not end with decolonization, with African countries living within the context of neocolonial domination. Most of the coups and cases of political instability on the continent since the 1960s have Western fingerprints on them.
For example, the first coup in Africa happened in 1961 with the overthrow and subsequent assassination of democratically elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, hero of Congolese independence. A crime wholly orchestrated by the United States, Belgium, and Britain, Lumumba’s assassination is regarded as one of the most important assassinations of the twentieth century. His killing precipitated a series of events (e.g., the Western-sponsored dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko) and regional conflicts (e.g., Africa’s world war) that resulted in a major humanitarian crisis and the deaths of more than 5.4 million people—the deadliest conflict since World War II. Plus incalculable social and economic ruination.
Lumumba’s assassination was the most crippling blow the West inflicted on postcolonial Africa, and it so crippled the Congo that it still cannot stand firm on its own feet. Similarly, the overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s government in 1966 was hatched by the CIA.
Fast-forward to today, when Western-trained military officers are still staging coups, creating further instability in Africa. This is a culture the West helped to create and that traps African societies in tyranny, instability, and therefore poverty. Thus, the West is, directly or indirectly, responsible for the political instability and conflicts that have plagued the continent since its “independence.”
While the injustices done to Africa cannot be undone, African politicians and bureaucrats play the blame game where it is unwarranted and fail to take responsibility for today’s dire economic situation on the continent. Africa has failed to develop not only because of what Western regimes have done, but also because of statist economic systems implemented across the continent. Like almost everything, Africa’s failed government-led development attempt must be looked at in context.
Today, the veneer of economic development can no longer be maintained. The various crises boiling up simultaneously at local and global levels have exposed the fact that state-led development largely failed. Economic prosperity, fifty years after independence, is almost nowhere to be seen on the continent. The heavily statist economic system imposed across much of Africa (including North Africa) did not create free and prosperous African societies. Given that many of these failed statist systems were developed by African intellectuals who were fed socialist doctrines at Western universities, we are witnessing a perverse colonialism in which the very programs designed to aid Africa created poverty and ruin instead.
Systemic aid (loans and grants), a statist economic concept, not only failed but also made poverty worse, as explained by Zambian economist Dr. Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2010). Systemic aid trapped Africa in debt and helped perpetuate a vicious cycle of tyranny, dependency, and poverty.
Though the truth about postcolonial Africa may be unsettling, as Africans we must nonetheless face it to be able to change course—if what we want are free, prosperous, and dignified African societies. For that, African politicians must quit the blame game and also stop dogmatically following foreign socialist economic models. We should realize and admit that African societies failed to develop not so much because of malicious Western meddling, but primarily because of the socialist and statist economic systems our freedom-promising but oppression-delivering leaders have implemented.
Blaming foreign actors and external factors (e.g., covid and the Russia-Ukraine war) for today’s economic woes will not do us any good. Admitting that the state-led economic development approach failed and left most African societies in a very precarious economic situation characterized by high inflation, high debt, high taxation, high dependency, persistent poverty, food insecurity, massive youth unemployment, meager “economic growth,” and popular discontent will be a good start.
How so? It compels us to rethink the present economic model. We must embrace a fundamentally different approach since the statist system of government control and command of the economy has failed. Moreover, since across Africa the majority of rich people have a direct or indirect past or present connection with the state apparatus, one can say African ruling elites and associates have done very well for themselves already.
If we are waiting for a savior or the International Monetary Fund to come and tell us the truth about economics (and economic development), we’ll be waiting (and wasting Africa’s potential) forever. Also, escaping neocolonialism does not have to take us under Communist China’s control through debt. Neither China nor any other entity should (out of collective self-respect), and in any case cannot, develop our economies for us.
The present economic system, a bizarre cocktail of socialist, protectionist, mercantilist, and Keynesian economics underpinned by a 48 Comments, has been destroying societies around the world and the West itself. The situation in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and other countries is a warning signal African leaders should heed.
eurasiareview
