POPULATION FOR PRODUCTIVITY IS NOT DOOM

Okello Oculi writes that China holds lessons on how vast patriotic population can be put to good use

China’s Global Television Network (CGTN) celebrated 70 Years of Communist Party rule over China by, among other things, telecasting a series of documentaries chronicling the country’s record of building a socialist nation. One theme which received dramatic treatment was the power of population numbers. This matter had several points of interest for me.

One issue was my recalling the intensive silence by the American media and scholarship about China’s strategic successes in using its vast population to propel its development. At the Madison Campus of the University of Wisconsin, the legacy of governance based on promoting the welfare of the community, allowed a small group of ‘’radical students’’ to access fringe socialist publications about China.

There were, however, no television and film visuals of economic production and the building of infrastructure across vast areas and severely challenging mountainous geographies. I recall seeking to demonstrate the option of ‘’labour-intensive’’ construction work to students of Public Administration at Ahmadu Bello University by borrowing from the Chinese Embassy in Lagos a documentary on the construction of TAZARA railway line from Dar es Salaam Tanzania to Ndola in Zambia.

The CGTN documentary discredits cynical claims that a vast size of population results in food shortage and mass starvation. Advocates of population control scare political leaders with claims that Africa’s rapidly increasing population is a primary cause of poverty by cancelling out any gains in economic growth.

Such consumption is less than billions of national wealth carried away by multinational corporations as ‘’profits’’; blatant theft and ’’illicit outflows’’ of over 50 billion American dollars annually.

Also not emphasized is the crisis of disposing vast amounts of food left to rot or thrown away in Euro-American food markets. NGOs collect ‘’surplus food’’ from supermarkets for feeding poor and starving urban destitute. Moreover, Euro-American foreign policy operatives buy food from their farmers for use as ‘’loans’’ to African governments, while denying their own markets to African farmers.

China’s experience flows from a record of arousing rural populations to build and support a guerrilla movement which defeated a Japanese occupation and a Kuomintang Government with sophisticated weapons supplied by Euro-American countries.

The lesson was to ideologically train and put a vast patriotic population into vast productivities. ‘’Population size-engaged –in production’’ was more important than a large population whose productive energies are either idle or ignored by those who gain from importing foreign technology.

One memorable scene in CGTN’s documentary showed workers dangling from ropes to erect a bridge across a deep river valley between two mountain cliffs. Another picture showed vast numbers building heavy industrial machines; while ‘’rivers’’ of peasants marched to till vast agricultural farms.

In the early 1970s, John Bryant noted Chairman Mao Zedung directing 14 million people into rivers to dig out of river banks snails which hosted transmitters of Bilharzia through entering human liver. Victims had bloated stomachs, and passed out blood in their urine; debilitating and killing millions of Chinese peasants annually.

Likewise, members of local branches of the Chinese Communist Party were directed to borrow tails from rats and bring to meetings as evidence of taking part in a campaign to eradicate plague. To combat clouds of birds that consumed grains, millions of farmers beat metal objects all night long as a means of killing the birds. Birds die if denied sleep all night long. The combination of knowledge and human labour was more effective and cheaper than using aircraft to spray chemicals at grainconsuming birds.

Bryant also celebrated Cuba’s elimination of Malaria by mobilising communities to clear bodies of stagnant water that became breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It was a preventive measure opposed and resented by companies that earn billions of dollars from selling anti-malaria drugs and mosquito nets.

The transition in 1978 by China into building what is officially called ‘’Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’’, put emphasis on Animating Production by farmers’ cooperatives; teams of scientists and workers inventing, producing and marketing new products, and individuals inventing and marketing new products.

Commentators report that China turned to ‘’capitalism’’ as the secret to its rapid development after 1978. What is missed out is the special emphasis on directing a process of inciting the productive power and creativity in a vast population. The good quality education, discipline, dedication to work and comparatively low wages of a vast mass of China’s labour is what attracted American corporations to relocate factories to China; arousing President Trump’s patriotic rage.

In relation to Nigeria, the huge number of youths whose labour is wasted in non-production sectors, such as : riding tri-cycles (NAPEP); being ‘’Walking Supermarkets’’ by hawking consumer goods in sun-and-rain; by ‘’babysitting’’ imported consumer goods in urban markets, and working as apprentices to mechanics, etc., manifest a national economic scandal. An economic theory which dismisses this wastage with the euphemism of calling it “the informal sector’’ is cynical in the extreme.