Obi,
My apologies, I meant trillions of Naira, not dollars. It is estimated conservatively that since independence, Nigeria has earned $600 BILLION in revenue from crude oil sales. It is also estimated that at least $400 billion of those have been looted. I think the figure looted is higher. Even with these conservative figures, they trump whatever the colonialists had to work with.
I am very involved in many projects back home, I have been since I got here, it intensified during the prodemocracy movement and beyond. I am not alone in this, so let's not make it about me. You and I know that structurally, our systems are not set up to achieve what you are talking about. That is exactly my point. These structures are relics of a colonial past. Since independence we have not changed the structures to meet today's reality. I attended Edo College and the University of Benin. They were set up as if they were colonial constructs and we went in there and cloaked ourselves in a culture of entitlement and privilege. Upon graduation you left, you did not look back. That needs to change. Obi, I graduated from UniBen in 1979. By the time I left, it was struggling, there was no demographics data to predict the huge demand, our bathrooms and toilets became unusable. Go to today's UniBen and see for yourself what a "university" looks like. You will weep. Give me a break, I was one of the few voices here clamoring for ASUU reform. A few of us tried to hold them accountable. People around here looked the other way. Somebody has to speak up. O am saying we need structures of accountability to make things work.
In terms of a tax base, you are right, but I would argue with you that my people are over taxed considering that they get NO services for what they give. You should see the "teaching hospital" that my father literally died in in Edo State. It was built a few years ago as if by a drunken military administrator. Disgraceful is the word. The resources had all been looted and converted to private enterprises on the edge of the hospital that prey on the poor. I saw private drug stores that were just as good as CVS over here. There is a lesson there.
I don't just put my opinion out there. I see the data and the facts and they make me sick. Folks are in denial about how bad things are. I am sick and tired of avoiding the issues. And Obi, I find it interesting that OBJ and Atiku own two of the best universities in Nigeria. Go figure. Many people need to be lined up and shot!
- Ikhide
Ikhide, I do not know why so presume. Ok, you have data: be specific: how much EXACTLY did Nigeria make from oil in the last 10 years? I can bet you it is not up to $ 1 trillion. How much of these went back to the oil cartels through the so-called joint-ventures partnership? I mean you throw out figures like some mugu-statician, but that is not enough. Show hard data, since you're so data-driven. Meanwhile, using the same data, can you detail for me the exact tax base of your village? How many times have you paid property tax to your municipal council? You live here in the states, and you run schools, how many times have people in your village met to discuss schools rehabilitation and facilities upgrade for your village school in the last ten years?--
I have seen our schools, and they are eyesores. But let me take Edo College, your alma mater: how many times have you called a meeting of your classmates to raise funds for rehabilitation projects at Edo College? How much have you personally given to the University of Benin? What alumni commitees have you served in, since you left the University of Benin? It is not enough to rail against "our leaders" when you fail to self-account on your own citizenship obligation. Meanwhile, the universities built after Ibadan following independence can stand their own in terms of aesthetic and proportionate plan: the University of Lagos is far better planned than Ibadan; so is Ife; the University of Benin was a well-built place; the Naraguta Complex f the University of Jos was a very beautifiul campus, and ABU is its own city; and I can go on. The universities built in the 1980s in Nigeria had to contend with the radical turns in values; but they are works in progress. Now, Ikhide, I can point you to a great and evolving city called Abuja, which is far better built than any colonial city in Nigeria. I think you should be a little bit more generous in your views of that world, and in fact desist from some of your presumptions.
Obi Nwakanma
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who wants a return to colonialism?
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2015 18:36:07 -0400
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comObi,You make little sense, did you read what you just wrote? Do you even do any research before you write? Why are you like this?Let me help you. Take the trillions of oil dollars that Nigeria alone has gotten from crude oil, compare what we did with them to what the colonialists did with what little we had at the time. The two or so primary schools in my village were built during the colonial times. I have pictures of their wreckage. The cost per pupil in Nigeria is perhaps comparable to the cost per pupil in Western nations. Have you seen our schools lately? The funds were looted.Go and look at UI and UCH and other institutions that were built "in those days" and you will weep for us. Our black leaders are even more amusive than the hell that was colonialism. Again, go look at UI. More broadly, very little had changed structurally since colonial times.You are mistaking me for someone else; unlike you, hitting your keyboard for pay at the Vanguard, I do more than just criticize, and I am not just talking about my work with literature. If many of you would imitate me and get off your lazy asses, Nigeria, abi Africa would be in a better place.Please stop the bs. I don't buy the hagiography of Africa that you are peddling. The evidence taunts your bs.
- IkhideIkhide's positions on Africa and Nigeria are bipolar. It is its own kind of pornography. It is essentialism par excellence. And it confuses me. I mean Africa's neo-colonial condition (it is often called "Postcolonial") are defined by two mindsets: the first is the self-hating, insurrectionist posse of Afro-skeptics, who not only exaggerate the African situation but continue to perpetuate the Conrad complex by other means. Africa, in these febrile minds, is a bad dream; a hypnagogic vortex of failure beyond human possibilities or comprehension. In other words, in their view, Africans are sub-subhuman, and they alone who "see and talk" about African societies without sympathy are the human and the enlightened in that morass of history. The second are those, who like the old man in Ferdinand Oyono's, The Old man and the Medal, unconscious catalysts of their own Cartesian deaths, are colonial agents. They force us all to succumb to lethargy and cynicism.
In just about fifty years of independence, African societies have nearly closed the skills gap that widened between Africa and the rest of the world in the late 18th and 19th centuries. At the end of colonial rule, one of the greatest challenges facing Africa was where to get highly trained manpower. Not anymore. I do not know about Ikhide's village, but today, a macadamized municipal road, runs through my small town, connecting various towns in my ancestral neighborhood. The expansion of public education began in Eastern Nigeria in 1953, with the arrival of home rule, and communities continued thereafter to build on it; they built primary and secondary schools, as well as voluntary secondary and commercial schools. At the end of the civil war, my town union raised money through fund-raisings and citizens contributions for town development initiatives, including building two new secondary schools, where there was none. Children could now very easily walk down for secondary education, if they did not have the means to go to boarding schools. Towns and various local and state governments built Community Health Centers, and there are now many doctors to man these local Community Hospitals, where there were once only dispensaries. This is aside from the many private hospitals dotting the entire place. Economic expansion after colonialism was, by all records, humongous. We do critique our various societies for their many failures because we wish they could do more, and we are impatient to catch up. But realistically, 50 years after colonialism is like baby steps, and Africans have not done too badly if we examine the index dispassionately. The next phase of African development is to instrumentalize all the skills hat Africans have now acquired to rebuild our cities; expand infrastructure; maintain networking systems, and create greater opportunities for prosperity. The conditions are there: Africa has space and a manageable population. The rise in intra-African trade and easier trans-continental movements will create these conditions, and it is not too far in the making. In spite of what Ikhide has been taught to believe by his favourite media, African leaders are not all fools, driven by greed, or corrupt. Africa is beset by fundamental inequities in the balance of trade and in access to capital and other resources, the result of the structuring of the international system to which it is forced to be part, but not on its own terms.
The solution to Africa's problem is not pointless criticism; that's so dated. It lies in the hard fashioning of solutions; the creation of a productive civic mind; of a confident, well-adjusted public mind that believes in the African possibility through self-image; not a colonized, self-hating, and cynical mind that damns the African and their world; constantly perpetuating antinomy. The fabric of African life is central to the expansion of its possibility. Melancholia, such as the likes of Ikhide reproduce, breeds depravity and depression; they constitute a form of the Fanonian bind, or that condition that makes for what I call colonial hysteresis. It is dangerous to the healing of the African mind. Writing that continues to propagate the failure and impossibility of Africa, and continues to circulate the image of African people and their leadership as bestial, confused, and inferior is deadly assault on the psyche of the African. Whatever new African could emerge from that image will grow horns. Its serves colonial and colonizing agency. It is anti-Africa, and is of nose use in the movement towards a real African renaissance.
Obi Nwakanma
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2015 19:49:12 +0300
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who wants a return to colonialism?
From: ibk2005@gmail.com
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comIkhide,
You insult others glibly but all you say applies to you. You fall shamelessly at the first hurdle with your idiotic analogy and imagery of two marriages.
Colonialism is not akin to marriage. It is enslavement. Enslavement of the body which we were able to rid all of Africa of, and enslavement of the mind which you and many still suffer from.
Your mind is shackled. Go and read carefully Chinweizu and Nguigi wa'Thiongo on how to decolonize your mind.
Cheers.
IBK
On 3 Apr 2015 15:50, "'Ikhide' via USA Africa Dialogue Series" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:Around here, I generally do not engage in "dialogue", I say my piece and move on. My time is precious, I find that people are holding on to ideologies, prejudices and opinions that have atrophied and calcified their minds. It is too late for them to learn new tricks. I am finding also that age does that to you.
It is intellectual dishonesty or supreme deftness to suggest that anyone that says that Nigerians were better off during colonial times is calling for the return of the white man. That's silly. If you free me from a bad marriage, marry me, and you then proceed to treat me worse than the previous marriage, I have every right to tell you that I was better off in my previous marriage. That does not mean I want to go back to my old hell. There are other options and I should keep looking. The new black on black colonialism, apartheid, slavery that poor blacks are enduring in the hands of black rulers and their intellectual sidekicks is especially painful. From South Africa to Nigeria, some of the worst atrocities to happen to our people have been under black rule. The data is right there. I was born on the eve of our independence, come to my village, the only things standing outside of ugly mansions er country homes built by the new thieves are relics of colonialism, broken roads and water taps that have been dry since the sixties. How is talking about that yearning for colonialism or apartheid? It is at the very least a stinging rebuke of our collective failure as thinkers and leaders. Let us just admit it from the comfort of the white institutions we live eat and breathe in- we have failed Africa. There is no need parsing my words. The truth stares us in the face.
You sit here in the West and get defensive all day about your humanity; in the process you have elevated yourself beyond the limits of your competence. You are in bondage and even those back home are in bondage, everything is mimicry of the West, no ideological core, nothing. You don't believe me? Take your white plumber to Nigeria. The gates of Aso Rock will open for you as soon as they see his whiteness! Be there forming superior. Nonsense.
And for the record, this is what I said earlier about all of us. We should accept responsibility for our mess. The white man is the least of our problems; we are the problem! It is time to star thinking and acting differently. Right now we are the caricature we dread.
- Ikhide
------------------------------------------
Visiting South Africa's Johannesburg in 2005 left me confused. I expected a joyful place, ringing with the bountiful fruits of freedom from the horror that was apartheid. Instead, I saw in the eyes of the poor, fear and despair and one wondered if they knew the difference between the past and the present - or if there indeed was any difference. At this conference, poor blacks served the participants with a certain deference and trepidation that stayed with me all through. The Black and White conference participants seemed fine with it. What seemed obvious was that the black ruling class had merely mounted the saddle of the former oppressors and were now using the same state-sanctioned instruments of oppression to oppress the poor - and amass power and wealth. I looked around me and it just seemed that white on black oppression had been replaced with black on black oppression. No compassion.
This horrific dysfunction is repeated in virtually all black African nations. The poor in my village are blissfully unaware that they were freed from colonialism; huge swathes of the village look like a place time forgot. Take those nations freed from colonialism; not much in terms of the culture and structure has changed. All over the land, the intellectual and ruling elite swagger like drunks, armed with pie charts and PowerPoint slides, mouthing bullshit as the poor ferry them from broken hovel to broken hovel on their backs. No one holds them accountable because they own the bully pulpit.
It is as if the warriors merely took over from the white man, shoved the poor into "boys' quarters" and ghettoes and continued the looting and brigandage. In the case of apartheid South Africa, the oppressors came to stay with their families and so they built robust structures and institutions for their enjoyment and use. The colonialists came, ruled as if from afar, built temporary structures - which was fine since their families were back home attending real schools and being taken care of by real hospitals. Each time they got sick, they would fly back home to have their rashes treated. Today's post colonial African ruler is exactly the same as his white ancestor. His families are abroad and each time he has a cough, he flies home to the West to be taken care of in real hospitals. There is no investment in his society - because he does not believe in his society.
The dysfunction is now being aggravated by the uncritical adoption of a form of crippling governance, what I call democracy without accountability, an aping of what happens in the West. Outside of slavery and AIDS, nothing has hurt African nations more than decades of looting in the name of democracy. Why are things the way they are? Why are we like this? Until we confront our challenges with real honesty and rigor, African nations will continue to be the butt of jokes in the international community of nations.
We are headed in the wrong direction. That much is obvious, let's not lie about things. Our intellectual elite must stop bleating inanities and admit that there has been a rank failure to lead from their end. Our intellectuals have become the problem; lazy and loud parrots of lies and obfuscation all so they can feed their mouths. All I see is mimicry, and loud parroting of stolen ideas. In the absence of a robust infrastructure; of home-grown accountability, in the absence of a real willingness to work, our nations will remain caricature nations. We must think about these things.
And no, I do not agree with Jean-Pierre Bekolo Obama. A return to colonialism would be silly. But read his interview; he has thought hard about these things.
http://chimurengachronic.co.za/in-over-our-heads/
- Ikhide
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