The favorite past time of the educated African elite is
finger pointing. We love to point fingers in all direction but to ourselves. We
blame everyone else for our failings but ourselves. We enjoy narrating how
everyone else is victimising and marginalising us but we never raise
constructive fingers against the perpetuation of our victim status. We are very
good at analysing what happened to us in the past but fail woefully in charting
a path to a future of sustainable development. We escape from our realities by
weaving conspiracy theories about how others want to keep us in bondage. We
fail to acknowledge that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. The
fault is also not that of those conspiring to keep you down. If you agree to be
kept down, you will remain down.
I was made to read Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa" in 1982 as a standard text of comparative economics in my first year at the department of Political Science, UNN. As a starry eyed student it
was mind blowing, especially when you combine it with Chinweizu's, "The
West and the Rest of Us", which was another compulsory text. The two books
then provided us with alternative viewpoints as to why Africa is
underdeveloped. Justifiably we were filled with righteous indignation about
what the West did to us. We blamed the colonialist policy of the West for
everything that went wrong with us and I agree. My opinion started changing when I observed that the Asian Tiger
countries have taken responsibility for their lives and are taking significant
strides into the future. Then it dawned on me that the fault was actually not
in our stars.
In Nigeria today, there are significant challenges in every
sector you turn to. Now is the time for us to make contributions to nation
building, rather than finger pointing.
After Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", it
is also about time for one of us to write a book on "How the Nigerian
Educated Elite Underdeveloped Nigeria"
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