SEASONS OF NATION BUILDING AND DEMOLITION

Projects assisted with community labour have additional value of a sense of ownership, writes Okello Oculi

‘’All roads lead to Johannesburg’’, was Alan Paton’s pun on a colonial logic in railway constructions by which rail lines lay like metal tubes on the land for sucking cotton, groundnuts, coffee, cocoa, copper and ores of other minerals into the sea for ships to deport out of African territories. The railway lines, wagons and engines would have been hauled on heads and backs of thousands of unpaid Africans. A notorious example was that from Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire during which 25,000 labourers died from exhaustion and hunger. They were not working to build a nationhood in the sense in which Prime Minister Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika exhorted his people with the slogan: ‘’UHURU NA KAAZI’’ (or our freedom must be fed with our work). It was brutal colonial forced-labour.

In 1953, British colonial officials used armed soldiers to guard over suspected supporters of Mau Mau armed revolt in Kenya to build with bare hands Embakasi international airport covering seven square miles. As one American observer reported: the men would be seen ‘’labouring at a million-tonne excavation job, filling in craters, laying half million tonnes of stone with nothing but shovels, stone hammers and their bare hands’’. President Jomo Kenyatta, a University of London graduate in Anthropology, would later recall such collective labouring as part of the culture of Gikuyu and other peoples in Kenya. He exhorted Kenyans to engage in ‘’HARAAMBEE’’ (or let us pull in unison) – in building the post-colonial Kenya. Notably, it was used in building projects in individual constituencies of members of parliament.

The notion of irrigating work with the sweat of members of a team or a community has the value of imparting a sense of ownership, both individually and collectively, in a way which projects constructed by foreign contractors cannot enjoy. I recall the pride with which our Moroccan guide told us that the magnificent art works on stone walls hosting a King’s grave in Rabat were done by the most skilful carvers brought from all parts of Morocco. That was a process of building a nation through arousing feelings of ownership of a monument by both artists and citizens. Colonial governments blocked such feelings; generating suffering.

The New Year announcement by President Muhammadu Buhari of plans to construct several railway lines offers an opportunity to adapt the example of Embakasi airport for the engagement of millions of unemployed and underemployed youths across Nigeria. This would be under paid labour. These youths would earn incomes; develop feelings of building their own country, and build new relations across language and religious identities. As they labour and sweat, their earnings would support local women who cook fresh meals for them under inducements of a financial ‘’multiplier effect’’. This form of economic contact would also entrench feelings of ownership for these railway projects.

Moreover, local smelters of components of rails, wagons and engines should emerge from these projects. The season of industrialisation inside Africa being blocked by companies abroad must be terminated. In 1927 Senegalese businessmen started processing groundnuts into oil for export. French companies forced colonial officials to suppress it. In1928, a Development Commission encouraged Europeans and Indians to gin cotton in Uganda but ‘’Africans were prohibited by legislation from owning gins’’. The inventive and innovative geniuses of Nigerians should fuel railway-related industrialisation as vital elements in economic growth for nation-building.

Both Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda have been attracted by Franz Fanon’s dictum that psychological damage done to dignity and self-worth of a group of people must be cured and purged by victims inflicting physical violence on those who had done the injuries. For both leaders, beneficiary groups have been greatly relieved and rejuvenated. However, Fanon did not offer answers for the ‘’healing’’ new culture of violence that grows across a country. In Algeria, for example, angry Islamists led by fighters against French colonial troops, easily returned to atavistic violence against civilians and military personnel following the cancellation of the 1992 elections which they had virtually won. The new violence overwhelmed nationbuilding values.

American taste of political blood in Rumania, Iraq, Libya and Egypt seems to have ignited President Donald Trump’s becoming an instant cheer-leader for anti-government protestors in Iran during the first week of 2018. In each case, NATO’s intelligence operatives had adapted tools for building awareness in ordinary citizens - as outlined by Che Guevara (in Cuba) and Amilcar Cabral (in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde) - to demolish targeted regimes. Molten pools of anger, discontent, growing poverty, stolen election results, terror by the secret police and gangs regarded as tools of rulers, were patiently mapped out. Ways of lighting them up into violent wraths were crafted in laboratories. President Clinton’s team recruited collaborators from among unemployed Egyptian graduates working as NGOs. Experts speaking on China’s television outlet (CGTN) fingered Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States as throwers of this weapon at Iran as a 2018 New Year gift.

The degree to which a targeted country can survive such attacks depends on its success in building the fabric of nationhood. Chinua Achebe once heard a bird saying that since humans learnt to shoot without missing, it now flies without perching on a tree. Since post-Cold War imperialists have leant to put poison inside stomachs, African countries must fight against ‘’Re-colonisation ‘’ with creative tools for nation-building.

THE NEW YEAR ANNOUNCEMENT BY PRESIDENT BUHARI OF PLANS TO CONSTRUCT SEVERAL RAILWAY LINES OFFERS AN OPPORTUNITY TO ADAPT THE EXAMPLE OF EMBAKASI AIRPORT FOR THE ENGAGEMENT OF MILLIONS OF UNEMPLOYED AND UNDEREMPLOYED YOUTHS ACROSS NIGERIA