When I agreed to this column sometime last year, I made a decision to cast my gaze squarely on financial and economic law issues since there was (and still is) a dearth of fresh perspectives on them in the media compared to, say, politics, violence, corruption and the like. It is also for convenience since they fall within the area of my professional engagement.
When I agreed to this column sometime last year, I made a decision to cast my gaze squarely on financial and economic law issues since there was (and still is) a dearth of fresh perspectives on them in the media compared to, say, politics, violence, corruption and the like. It is also for convenience since they fall within the area of my professional engagement.
For that purpose, I have resisted wading into the popular arena of politics countless of times, but this has not been easy since politics is ‘total’ in our daily life in Nigeria. In fact, it has been agonising at times to maintain focus on financial law when issues of grave political consequences to our being as Nigerians, indeed as Africans, are in the media spotlight. So it is with the on-going French intervention, and Nigeria’s acquiescence in Mali. We are witnessing the biggest foreign intervention in sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonialism and the most forceful re-assertion of hegemonic power in Africa since the end of the Cold War. In my view, it is a moment Nigeria finally lost any pretensions to being a “regional power” in West Africa. Africa’s continued dependence on the benevolence of their erstwhile colonial masters has been brutally exposed for the umpteenth time. During the European colonialism in Africa, the French practised what was known as the “policy of assimilation”, in contrast to Britain’s “policy of association”. The former, regarded and related to their colonial subjects as de facto French in outlook and orientation. They were to be absolved into the French civilisation and way of life at every level of society. The latter regarded their colonial subjects as ‘partners’, with local leaders acting as direct agents for the boss.
The above frame of reference between the French and British colonial masters has hardly changed since independence. ‘Your patch’, ‘my patch’ godfather approach of the British and French towards the region has been all too glaring over the decades after independence. The on-going military campaign in Mali, for instance, is admittedly ‘French’ with the British only acting in a ‘supportive’ role. The Americans are following from a safe distance behind. French speaking and English speaking Africans still find themselves tied to the apron strings of their former colonial Lords in a way that can only be described as heartrending. This state of affairs has stymied efforts at integrating the region into one cohesive entity. The French have been particularly guilty of this more than the British. They have encouraged an aggressive promotion of French culture mainly through the facilitation of an asymmetrical political contact between the elites in Africa and the French establishment. The French have the tendency to infantilise dialogue with their counterparts in the West African sub-region much more than that the British, whose attitude have tended to be rather nuanced and strategic although, ultimately, no less demeaning. I attended university in Paris with a lot of Francophone students in the 1980s, many of whom, to my horror, regarded going back home with white French brides as the sure route to the top in their countries’ civil service. As a matter of fact, Leopold Sedar Senghore, one of Africa’s great literary figures and former President of Senegal, was renowned for his poems eulogising “La femme Africaine” (the African woman), only for him to opt for a white French bride subsequently. He also doubled as a “deputy” in the French Senate. Post independence Francophone leaders, I would argue, had an unhealthy; almost incestuous relationship with their former colonial masters, while Anglophone leaders had a more cantankerous relationship with the British. When it was time to initiate a union of West African states through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1975, we had one part of the region looking to France and the other looking to Britain. This was underlined by the grim reality that the whole region had an unsustainable economic imbalance that relied heavily on foreign aid from the respective former colonial masters.
Consequently, therefore, when a group of countries are heavily reliant on outside powers for sustainability as the West African states are, the political price to pay can be equally heavy. This, on the whole, renders any attempt at forming a strong, dynamic economic union, let alone military force, in the region nigh impossible. Integration is further rendered difficult due to another grim fact that ethnicity remains a cog in the wheel of social progress within the countries in the region. The states were created along artificial geographical boundaries, and many of the newly elected leaders were immediately confronted with the dilemma of forging viable nation-states amid disparate ethnic groups. Forging a nation-state should normally have come before an assertion of independence, but that is not the way it happened in Africa. It goes without saying that consolidation of political power at home was far more important to the West African leaders than any talk of economic integration. Besides, creating integration in economies that are all based on primary produce with imported technology and a lack of manufacturing capacity did not bode well for any of the participants then, and since. It came as no surprise, therefore, that ECOWAS failed in its objectives ab initio. When you then add poor leadership, poverty (Malians live on one dollar a day on average, compared to Nigerians two dollars), and graft to already lopsided economies across the region, you have a fertile ground; the midwife for “ethnic” “religious” and “Al-Qaeda” wars breaking out at random. It is what the great Africanist historian, Basil Davidson, referred to as “the curse of nation-states”. It is a burden and a cross for the godfathers of African colonial states, which the ‘international community’ will prevail on them to bear for very long into the future.
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Having said all that is there anything Nigeria can realistically do other than kow-towing to the military wishes of the West in the region? This question was put in a different form to President Jonathan, by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, via satellite link from Davos, Switzerland, last week. “Let me go straight to the heart of the matter” She said, with the bravura of a seasoned journalist that she is. ‘.....Secretary Clinton has identified Boko Haram as an existential threat to Nigeria, do you agree?’ “Definitely” Jonathan responded. ‘Boko Haram, if not contained, would be a threat also to West, Central and North Africa’. He rambled through the rest of the interview in his characteristic disjointed and inarticulate manner. His poor grasp of the issue perhaps shows how little it has been discussed at the Presidency, and whatever happened to all the overpaid coterie of special assistants and advisers around the President? Could they not have anticipated the direction of the interview with Amanpour and prepared the hapless President accordingly? In the final analysis, the broader question we need to ask ourselves as Africans is why did it take France to send their jets to repel the “Al-Qaeda” incursion into Mali instead of a Nigerian-led regional force? Kwame Nkrumah, the father of modern Pan-Africanism, must be churning in his grave at the sight of a French President, Monsieur Holland, being garlanded and mobbed in the streets of Timbuktu as a ‘liberator’ and ‘hero’, not to talk of the exhilarated crowd chanting: “vive la France”! Oh, Africa!!
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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