What do the ordinary people of Africa need? What are those needs and why are they not met? My claim in this piece is that the needs of the ordinary people of Africa are very limited. They are not being met because of interest and forces that are external to the Africans; they are not being met because of the greed and corruption that have overwhelmed our leaders and our continent.
Let us outline the needs. I begin from the rural area. The rural people want their children to go to school, to have primary health care and trunk C roads that connect them to the nearest town. They want boreholes so that they can have portable water supply and they want subsidized fertilizer and pesticides to boost production and acreage. In the urban areas, the ordinary people want access to electricity and portable water, they want affordable houses. They want their garbage to be cleared daily and drainage well channelized. They want something to be done about crime rate and about traffic situation. They want job for themselves and their wards.
Artisans want small kiosks to rent and market their talents; women want to be saved from the harassment of streets urchins and urban miscreants, and illegal extortion by Local Government officials. Women want issues of Guinea worms to be tackled, and infant and maternal mortality reduced, drastically. The youth want jobs; they want avenues for self-expression; for displaying their potentials. They need support and micro-credit to self-empower themselves. The elderly want care, they want their pension to be paid regularly and elderly people want to be accorded respect. In general, the people of Africa want a modest and decent life, they want the basic things that will make life useful and worth living. They are not asking for too much.
However, they have been disappointed as their needs, modest as they are, are never met. The covenant with the people is often broken. Our leaders make these demands look more like a tall order or an impossible desideratum. They portray the people as asking for too much and ungrateful; insisting that there is meager or scarce resources to accomplish what is being demanded. They give the impression that it is the demand of the people that is causing problem for the state and for the system. They complain about the people as being too demanding and greedy. They tell the people that they have no right to question their reform programs; that in governance, a mandate once given cannot and should not be questioned until the next election.
In this way, our leaders in Africa are the Alpha and Omega. They are not accountable to anybody and they become intolerant of critical views passed on their form of administration. In no time, they become tyrannical and authoritarian.
One point that should be noted however is that year after year, programs and budgets are designed in ways in which the people do not prefigure or even where they do, it is on the fringes that the people prefigure; monies are allocated for specific programs, but these programs are scarcely prosecuted. What is worse, the following year, the same project will reappear on the budget line, and again the same cycle continues with total callousness, insensitivity and reckless abandon. Nobody is allowed to monitor or evaluate state projects and programs neither does the state have transparent internal mechanism for doing so; even where it has such mechanism, monitoring and evaluation only take place in the breach. A related point has to do with the fact that the people are viewed as incapable of doing much, of being able to do anything to state officials. This notion that the people will only grumble and life returns or continues as normal had always been the bane of many leaders and the basis for their downfall in history.
It is apparent that Africa has not done well in the wake of what Samuel Huntington calls the “Third Wave of Democratization”. The key features of this third wave are new form of authoritarianism, mass poverty and neglect of ruralites, greed and corruption at the state level. Corruption lives side by side with mass poverty in Africa . Indeed these sesame twins are the key features that are most dominant and for which Africa is very well known. Why is this happening? It is because there has been a shift in the focus of those who govern since the transition and embrace of the market economy. All over the world, those who embrace the market do so with caution or at least guardedly.
The whole of Europe and North America operate a market economy, but in two-thirds of those economies, there is a form of social welfare- they protect the weak. Where are our social safety nets in Africa ? We keep regurgitating the over-beaten cliché that Africa is a communitarian society and that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. I strictly doubt whether such a cliché can be pushed to its logical conclusion in the light of the realities of Africa in the current era. This is because increasingly, Africans are becoming socially atomistic if not individualistic. This is due to the limited options and alternatives left to them when measured against the meager income and means of material reproduction open to them-the interest of extended family is giving way to that of the nuclear family.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });
All over Africa , wage earners find themselves in a situation whereby their expenditure always outstrips their income. This is often a source of crisis. There is no country in Africa where unemployment is not at least 10% of the total population. In Nigeria , it is stated that there is 42 million unemployed youth and 23 million unemployable youth. Kano State alone has over 4 million unemployed youth. Now it is easy to talk of restive youth, religious and ethnic violence, without locating all these in the social milieu in which they occur.
As a result of the actions and inactions of the state, the women feel alienated, the youth feel unjustly treated, elders feel disrespected, the electorates feel violated, and the workers are vexatious. It is gallows of complaints and disenchantment with the system. The reason is simple-politics has undermined our people and sidelined their needs. The people are now asking basic questions. What is the basis of citizenship? What is the basis of nationhood? What is the basis of community? Where is our humanistic instinct? The more they ask questions, the more they realize that those who govern are not ready to listen; they do not care about the people; they are irascible and insensitive. They steal without having the conscience of the guilty. That is the reality of Africa . In this way, the state actors have not won respect for themselves; they are daily abused and even cursed by the people. All over, there is anger and frustration. The people want change, they want transformation for their social conditions for the better of the lives of their children.
What is often not known is that better social conditions are better than putting more money in, for instance, health. If somebody is well fed, the possibility of falling sick is minimal. If an environment is clean, there is little possibility for mosquitoes to breed. It has been suggested that close to 60% of health problems in Nigeria are from water borne diseases. The most logical thing to do then will be to face and tackle the challenge of providing clean water.
It is indeed a shame that while the rest of humanity on other continents are facing more serious challenges of life, of exploring the space and making scientific discovery, we are still dealing with problems relating to water, power, roads and poverty. It should be recognized that the state is central in the lives of the African people and as such, it has a fundamental role to play.
Europe and America have means of cushioning the social problems of their societies, and at any rate, they have solved the problem of social infrastructure. We owe Africans that social responsibility to provide them at least, the basic minimum. We cannot abandon them to the market. Let the market exist side by side with the state playing its role. The state cannot dodge its social responsibility in Africa -no way! The argument for the market is just an escape route. How can we get our people out of mass poverty? The market and its apologists cannot effectively answer that question.
In bringing the state back-in, that is the only way we can restore respect to our continent, that is the only way we can humanize our people. There is no continent in the world today that is as ridiculed and disrespected as Africa . This is because our leaders are just not serious; they are more interested in things that bring shame and humiliation to our people. Hence all the time, they are more interested in ODA, FDI and other forms of assistance that require going cap in hand to G7 and other countries of the North for help.
Africa is not a poor continent by any standard, as such it should not be treated by its leaders as though it is poor. Our people are rich and they have a rich heritage. We have boundless potentials that are unexplored or underexplored. Corruption, greed, and selfishness have been our bane. How do we overcome all this? The people must govern. They must take interest in what government does. They should not buck pass or complain, they should take on the gauntlet and call their leaders to account. Accountability is crucial in public service so is transparency and sensitivity. These are the cardinal principles that underline all civilized societies and we cannot escape it as a continent. To be accountable means that we must respect the opinion of the people, open the book to the public for scrutiny and account for our deeds while in government. Africa is great and it will return to its glorious and dignified past as a great continent. But do our leaders know this? Do they realize this? Have they read our history to know about Africa ’s past? I doubt if many of them have dine so, that is why they treat our people so disrespectfully.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });