Nigeria and the Future of the Black World
Thank you for that very kind introduction. I cannot adequately express how comfortable I feel being back here in the home of my in-laws. This city in which now we are gathered was the heart of one the world’s great ancient cultures and one of Africa’s great kingdoms.
The purloining of Benin’s magnificent treasures may have begun with the long ago British so called punitive expedition which resulted in the looting of the palace of King Ovonramwen. But it didn’t end there. It continues still. So I am here to confess to my own culpability. Twenty years ago I stole away your most beautiful modern treasure, my beloved wife, Arese. What a great honor it is to be with her here today in the city of her royal ancestors.
It is also a great honor that she and I have been asked to jointly inaugurate The Eminent Lecture Series of the University of Benin, or UniBen, as it is affectionately known around the world. I am sure that Arese’s great great grandfather, King Ovonramwen, would be proud of this premier university and of her role, this day, in it.
There was a time when Europeans marveled at what they referred to as Great Benin. Travelers returned home, each out doing his predecessor, with tales of an African Kingdom the equal of their own royal courts in organization and administration. Its treasures and artistic masterpieces were widely envied. Then, in 1897, came what the pages of the London Times proclaimed as the “Benin Disaster” leading to the sending out of that punitive expedition to avenge the deaths of members of a British delegation allegedly at the orders of local officials. It resulted in the overthrow and exile of the Oba and the looting of his palace. While intricately carved Benin Ivories had been known to Europeans for three centuries, the hitherto carefully guarded Bronzes, became, at the dawn of the colonial scramble for Africa, stolen booty, spoils of war triumphantly displayed for the first time on foreign shores.
That the “dark continent” could have produced such great art, in the words of a BBC documentary, “changed European understanding of African history.” But many who should have known better were discombobulated. The curator of British Museum, at the time, declared:
“It need scarcely be said that at the first sight of these remarkable works of art we were at once astounded at such an unexpected find, and puzzled to account for so highly developed an art among a race so entirely barbarous.”
“Barbarous!” that is what they thought all black people to be.
And so it has ever been. Whether discussing African art or ancient ruins like Great Zimbabwe, they fantasized that they must have been copied or inspired by artisans of lighter hue (meaning their fellow Europeans) or even aliens from another planet. Anybody but black people! It was greatly satisfying to me when a friend of mine, the African art expert, Warren Robbins, opened an exhibition in Washington, a few years ago, demonstrating that several modern art masters such as Picasso were in fact heavily influenced by (or even copied) the traditional art of many African societies.
When I was a young boy growing up in the United States, I knew nothing about the Bronzes of Benin or of any other art and cultural achievements of the people of the continent of my ancestors. Indeed, I had no idea of how little I knew.
How could it have been otherwise in the Nineteen Forties? In the age before television, we got our images of the world mostly from the movies. Africa existed on the screen only as a place where Tarzan and Jungle Jim heroically bore the white man’s burden. Tarzan’s pet ape was portrayed more sympathetically than most of Africans, who were seen as little more than benighted savages. In secondary school when Africa was mentioned at all in geography studies it was not done in a way that instilled pride in the heart of the only black student in the class.
As the storm clouds gathered, portending another great war in Europe, the parents of my five cousins, four of whom were born in Lagos, decided to return to the United States. That decision was to have a profound impact on my life. My aunt had accompanied her husband to Nigeria a decade earlier when he took up a job with the Government Department of Railways, as the NRC was then called.
My cousins were only a few years older than I. The two boys took great delight, when I would visit them in Brooklyn, New York, in telling me tales of fighting lions and tigers in Lagos. It would not be for many years before I would learn that there were no tigers in Africa nor lions prowling the streets of Lagos. But I would soon learn other lessons in Brooklyn more relevant to the reality of Africa.
I was a high school student when World War II ended and the fight for independence from colonial rule began. Delegations from Nigeria arrived to present their country’s case to the United Nations. A number of the delegates would stopover at the home of their friend and my uncle, Edward Kelly. I was fortunate to meet some of them on the occasions when their visits coincided with my vacations. I met some of this country’s founding fathers and was fascinated by the political discussions I overheard. Thus did Nigeria become the first foreign country with which I felt any affinity. But a century before I was born the kinship with Africa, and especially with Nigeria, was being rekindled by blacks in America.
Despairing that the kidnapped and enslaved sons and daughters of Africa could ever be accorded dignity in the land of their captivity schemes were developed to recolonize them in Liberia. But these plans hatched by whites were largely opposed by a highly educated group of free blacks. Most prominent among them was Dr. Martin R. Delany, the father of Black Nationalism in America.
Delany preached race pride in an age when black was considered anything but beautiful and the black race, worldwide, was held mentally and morally inferior to all others. Frederick Douglass, arguably the most consequential black leader in American history said of him:
“I have always thanked God for making me a man, but Martin Delany always thanked God for making him a black man.”
Delany saw blacks in the United States as “a broken nation” - a nation within a nation as the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, and the Welsh, Irish and Scots in Britain. “The claims of no people,” he argued, are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity...”
Delany disparaged the Liberian experiment of the American Colonization Society, dismissing it as “not independent - but a poor mockery - a burlesque on government.” He wished instead to see a great state built in Africa, “a nation, to whom all the world must pay commercial tribute.” To this end hoping to find such a state to which black Americans could emigrate Delany led an exploring party in 1859-1860 to what is now Nigeria, characteristically sailing aboard a ship owned by three African merchants.
His one-year stay resulted in the signing of agreements with Egba Chiefs in what is now Ogun State giving their American cousins the right to settle in their areas.
The agreements were never followed up because the Civil War broke out just as Delany returned to the United States. He put aside his emigration schemes and joined the Union Army to fight for the freedom of his people.
How prescient it was of Martin Delany to have come to Nigeria in search of a black nation that could become so great that “all the world must pay (it) commercial tribute.” Sadly, his dream of a century and a half ago has yet to be realized. Africa continues to be marginalized on the world stage. Despite all our sloganeering of “Africa Rising” this continent, in spite of its vast natural resources, remains the least respected in the world. But more of that later.
When Delany declared that “the claims of no people,” are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity...” He was, of course, speaking of the claims of the black race. The colonial scramble for Africa began soon after, leaving only the weak states of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia nominally in charge of their national destinies.
When, at last, the colonial yoke began to be loosened and then thrown off, blacks in the African diaspora joined those in the motherland in joyful celebration. In the U.S for the first time we felt that we had, in the new black ruled countries, powerful allies on our side as we fought for our full civil rights. From the Nineteen Fifties onward that alliance has remained strong. During the Cold War mistreatment of blacks especially in the American South became a foreign policy embarrassment for the United States. African leaders and diplomats raised the issue with top American officials and before the United Nations. Here, in Nigeria, the press continued to highlight every instance of racial discord.
On the other side of the ledger, black Americans made the causes of ending apartheid in South Africa and freeing Nelson Mandela their own. They took the lead in agitating for the U.S. government to support the liberation struggle in southern Africa. The only time I ever got arrested was when I joined a group of former black ambassadors protesting in front of the South African Embassy. These protests directed by TransAfrica continued for months and brought the issue to the attention of millions of Americans. And might I add that it was that same TransAfrica, led by Randall Robinson, which united so much of Black America against the Abacha regime.
Before taking up my post as Ambassador to Nigeria in 1993, I had been deeply involved in the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States. I wrote and spoke often about South Africa, as I would later do about Nigeria. By the time I arrived here, Nelson Mandela had been freed and five months later elected as the first President of a democratic South Africa. At the same time there was much discussion about the expansion of the United Nations Security Council to include one permanent member from sub Saharan Africa. I received criticism from the Abacha government and its supporters for suggesting that unless Nigeria got its act together that seat would not go, as many expected, to military ruled Nigeria but instead to the newly democratic South Africa. The enlarging of the Security Council never took place but the competition between Africa’s two most watched emerging economies continues. It might be compared to that between China and Japan in Asia. China, in a world in which one of every five people is Chinese, lagged for a long time behind its much smaller neighbor. Nigeria, on a continent on which one of every five people is Nigerian, does not seem to be closing the gap between it and its smaller southern rival even though its economy is projected to surpass South Africa’s.
The recently released World in 2050 report by the prestigious management firm, Price Waterhouse Coopers projects that Nigeria could be one of the two fastest growing large economies over the next 35 years. That rapid growth it cautions:
“…requires sustained and effective investment in infrastructure and improving political, economic, legal and social institutions. It also requires remaining open to the free flow of technology, ideas and talented people that are key drivers of economic catch-up growth.”
One impediment it warns would be the continued “overdependence on natural resources.” To overcome this, it insists, countries like Nigeria must diversify their economies. Today Nigeria ranks 20th. By 2050 it is expected to rise to becoming the 9th biggest economy in the world.
A similar outlook for Nigeria is predicted by the HSBC 2050 report. Its economic growth will be fast while South Africa’s will remain stable.
Nearly 15 years ago four of the world’s major emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China, came together in a group that became known by the acronym BRIC. In 2010 seeking an African member they chose South Africa which became the S in BRICS. I look forward to the day when Nigeria becomes the N in a renamed group of 6 which will be known as the BRINCS.
Nigeria has surpassed South Africa as the continent’s largest economy and yet has not been admitted to that prestigious group of five with which it has more in common with the four non-African nations, as one of the world’s most populous nations, than does relatively small South Africa.
Nigeria is not even thought worthy of being a member of the Group of Twenty usually referred to as the G-20 They are not regarded as influential enough internationally or regionally to be included in the company of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States
With such a rosy outlook for the future, why is Nigeria still such an under performer on the world stage? Why is it when the G-8 group of highly industrialized countries or other gatherings of the world’s most powerful nations occur it is more often to Johannesburg that they call than to Abuja on those all too rare times when they seek an African perspective at all? Maybe there is a bit of the old “boy who cried wolf” legend involved. In that story the boy falsely cried so often that a wolf was coming that when, at last, his warning was true, nobody believed him. So it seems to be with Nigeria. For how long has it been proclaimed that its vast potential was about to be realized only to have those hopes dashed time
after disappointing time? Nigeria has always been portrayed as the country of the future but that future, sadly, never seems to arrive.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Nigeria was seen as the indispensable and most important country in Africa. It had been so since the event whose centennial you celebrated last year – the amalgamation of three large contiguous pieces of British West Africa into what became on October 1, 1960, the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It instantly was acknowledged as the greatest and most important black nation in the world. There was much to back up such an assessment. Nigeria was Africa’s largest producer of petroleum, a member of the powerful international oil cartel, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). It became and remains one of my country’s five most important sources of imported crude oil. A decade after independence it was booming economically. The naira was as strong as the dollar or the pound. Diplomatically, it led the fight to isolate the apartheid government of South Africa. Militarily, it continued the tradition it started in the Nineteen Sixties in the newly independent Congo of being one of the most responsible members of the United Nations when it came to providing troops for peacekeeping missions around the world. Nigeria’s universities were the pride of the continent. Its graduates took top honors wherever they studied in Europe or America. And I am happy to say they still do.
The oil boom which once lubricated a growing economy turned from a blessing to a curse. Most of the great wealth it provided was embezzled by government officials and their cronies. While the citizens of other oil producing countries prospered, Nigeria became the only member of OPEC to be listed among the world’s poorest companies.
International storm warnings have consistently been ignored. When I was here serving as ambassador, The United Nations Development Program mission in Nigeria issued its 1996 report:
“This indicates that Nigeria has all the potential to develop into a true >giant of Africa= if and only if, the appropriate political and social measures are implemented to help the people to alleviate and eventually eradicate mass poverty by adopting a human-centered holistic development strategy,”
That report also observed that regional disparities in Nigeria were among the worst in the world. Noting that a ranking of the Nigerian states by the United Nations Human Development Index put Edo and Delta states on top, while Borno was at the bottom.
The report further noted that were Edo and Delta states constituted into a separate sovereign country, their nation would rank 90th in the world, relatively high among the medium-level human development countries while Borno as a separate polity would rank lower than any country in the world.
Why should there be such skepticism? Nigeria has so much going for it. In this age of intra-state disharmony and sectarian strife; when so many countries especially in the Middle East are threatening to fall apart, Nigeria could be a beacon of how to stay together. Think about it for a moment. What other country contains within its borders as many as 250 ethnic groups speaking even more languages and has managed to stay together, despite a bloody civil war and regional and religious differences. No other country of any significant size has a population that is nearly equally divided between Muslims and Christians. Nigeria’s tradition of religious tolerance must be preserved despite the strains that are being put upon it by fanatics who have killed and kidnapped so many.
While terrorism is the greatest strategic challenge of our time, the greatest moral challenge remains the persistence of poverty. That scourge continues to plague the black world. Unlike Europe, the poor are in the majority in every country in Africa. And in most they are disproportionately young. They are a tinderbox of future mayhem and unrest. In Nigeria they make up nearly half of the population. Their unemployment rate is a staggering 50%.
Nigeria is confronting one of the most confounding contradictions in development economics – growth without development. From 2006 to 2015 the country’s overall unemployment rate rose from 6.4% to 24.20% which was about half of the rate for young people between the ages of 15 and 34. At the same time many were celebrating Nigeria’s GDP or Gross Domestic Product growth rate. That Nigeria has had one of the strongest growth rates in Africa is encouraging. However, its sustainability is in doubt because of the near collapse worldwide in oil prices. Nigeria suffers, as do so many other highly endowed extractive natural resource countries, from what economists label as the “Dutch disease” whereby other sectors of the economy such as agriculture and manufacturing are relatively ignored.
The country must do what so many OPEC members are doing – diversify its economy to lessen the dependence on petroleum which provides an outsized portion of the national budget. Members of my generation remember the days before the oil boom. We remember that at the time of Independence in 1960 Nigeria’s annual agricultural crop yields were higher than those of, Indonesia and Malaysia. Today they have dwindled to half as much. The fact that Nigeria’s current yield per hectare is less than 50 percent of that of comparable developing countries dramatically demonstrates how much Nigeria has abandoned its once promising agricultural sector. Until Nigeria is able to rely less on capital intensive sectors of the economy and more on labor intensive ones it will be difficult to see how it will meet its ambitious goals to make the country one of the world’s twenty most important economies. Diversification is urgently needed to make the economy less vulnerable to downswings in petroleum prices. Even when oil prices were historically high the national unemployment rate, instead of falling, rose rather than fell. As the African Development Bank report pointed out, Nigeria’s recent economic growth has been mainly driven by the non-oil sector because of high consumer demand.
As I noted earlier much is expected from the awakening of the “giant of Africa.” A resurgent Nigeria could shift the whole continent from the margins of world affairs towards the center.
There is a far flung African diaspora which sees a revitalized Nigeria as the great hope of the Black World. At a time when so many dismiss Africa as a continent made of nations whose leaders are too venal to govern on behalf of their people we look to Nigeria to prove them wrong. I feel confident that in President Buhari you have a leader honest, dedicated and tough enough to turn this country around. I have always admired his record of public probity and his lack of private flamboyance. As a private citizen he has lived modestly and since taking on the duties of head of state has set a refreshing example of financial transparency which all public officials should and must emulate.
More than a century ago, the greatest of American Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, described the ideal democratic state as one which was of the people, by the people and for the people. It is by this standard that we continue to judge nations today. A year ago Nigeria celebrated the 50th anniversary of its Independence from British colonial rule, the fiftieth anniversary of its becoming at last a nation “of the people.” The sad follow up is that for most of the half a century since then Nigeria had rarely been a country that was ruled “by the people.” For most of that time it has been controlled by military juntas who neither had nor wanted the consent of the people. I believe, that having been democratically elected as a civilian head of state, that President Buhari will fulfil the third of Lincoln’s prepositional triad making his a government “for” the people, a government which cares more for the welfare of the poor majority and disadvantaged than for the unjust enrichment of the privileged few and their enablers who too often in the past have looted the national treasury.
Two years ago I challenged a group of young Nigerian graduates selected by the American Consulate as fellows in a newly established youth fellowship dedicated to the pursuit of social justice:
“Do not let fifty or even ten more years pass in which the impoverished poor make up the majority of your countrymen. The eradication of extreme poverty is the great moral challenge of our time. This challenge will not be met so long as male elites continue to use government to meet their own needs and not those of their poor brothers and sisters. Nor as long as women are denied their rightful share of power and opportunities. Nor as long as corruption permeates so much of society.”
So, too, do I challenge all of you today. For I remain forever optimistic than even at my advanced age, I will live long enough to see Martin Delany’s dream realized and that this country of my in-laws, and possibly of my ancestors, will become that great black country to which all the world will pay tribute and wish to emulate.