Last week Gerald Capland writing in The Mail and Globe in
response to his prime minister’s Justin Trudeau’s intention to rethink Canada’s
African strategy pointed out that the west has been ripping off Africa for 700
years and that would be a good place to start from.
And he says beyond the colonial era the plunder continues
and has in fact accelerated. In 2012 Africa received $1.3trillion from the west
this includes aid, investment and income. But in the same year $3.3 trillion
flowed the other way. We gave away more than we received.
If we go back in history colonialism was about extraction of
raw materials to fuel home industries and to ease the pressure for jobs at
home. Of course it was couched as a humanitarian effort to civilise the black
man, but don’t tell that to the Congolese or South Africans or Algerians who
suffered the worst excess of the era.
"The second world war so severely drained the colonial powers that they allowed independence to happen but by that time they had so rigged colonies to continue serving them that independent Africa continued to supply western industry and to serve as a cash cow for them...
For instance the infrastructure from the producing areas to
the ports are better developed than the infrastructure between towns in our
countries.
Of course the few leaders who took independence too
seriously got overthrown or paid the ultimate price.
Fast forward to the present and many of Africa’s nations had
shaken off the post-independence economic down turn and were beginning to look
up again – with leaner governments, increased revenues and booming private
sectors.
However, taking Uganda as an example we still continue to
export raw coffee, cotton, tea and any number of commodities along the same
roads and railways, to the same ports that the colonialists built.
This is important because development history shows that before
you can become a great exporting nation you need to be able to trade with yourself
first. This happened with US, with the European Union and even with the Asian
nations. But somehow we are going to turn history on its head and become export
led economies without being able to trade with ourselves first?
The global financial crisis was a god send. With demand for
our exports falling in the west, the East African common market kicked in. To
the point now that Kenya is Uganda’s biggest trading partner and a leading
source of investment and not the UK or Europe as was the case before.
"But to subvert our independence there had to be willing accomplices. The elite in these nations who had gone through a colonial education system and continue to take lessons at the feet of the master either actively subverted efforts for greater self-reliance or unknowingly helped the project along, content with the status quo and unwilling or incapable to question why things are the way they are.
And this last scenario is particularly worrying...
As a nation we are poor because we are unable to aggregate
our great wealth and employ it for our benefit.
They say that the estimated value of all the extractable
natural resource in the Democratic Republic of Congo is worth $12trillion. This
the equivalent of the USA’s GDP. But Congo’s per capita GDP is about $500. And
why can’t the Congolese harness this wealth to benefit themselves?
In Uganda we have almost half the region’s arable land,
about a fifth of our land is under water and we have two planting season’s
annually but right now we are in the throes of drought induced starvation in
many parts of the country.
The same can be said for any number of countries on the
continent.
And why don’t we aggregate these resources of ours – human
resource, land and capital? Because it is too difficult when factored against the
handouts we get from abroad.
About a decade ago when we were making tentative steps
towards beefing up our treasury bond and bill markets – avenues for domestic
borrowing, those opposed argued why should we bother when donors can lend us or
even grant us multiples of the money we could raise locally at much lower
rates.
The detractors were ignoring the long term good of having
the local mechanism to mobilise resources versus the expedient option to raise
money from donors.
Thankfully the promoters of developing our local bond
markets soldiered on because as sure as night follows day we continue to fall
out with donors and they keeping cutting off or threatening to cut off their
aid.
Where would we be if NSSF had not been launched in 1985? The
fund now has assets totalling sh6.6trillion the biggest in the region. While
most of NSSF’s assets are concentrated in fixed income products – bank
deposits, bonds and bills, a process is under way to ensure more investments go
towards companies and real estate. However a lot of the money the banks have to
lend to the public come from NSSF. In fact since NSSF mechanism in place
government to aggregate more resources should raise member contributions to
seven percent of the income up from the current five percent.
A two percentage point increase in worker savings can
increase monthly contributions to about sh80b or s120b a year. A net benefit of
this may even be a lowering of lending rates.
"The point is that we have been made to believe that we are helpless, even hopeless. That we cannot develop unless we are helped from abroad. That our challenges are so vast that trying to mobile our resources will be wasting time so we should look abroad...
And we with our degrees, MBAs and PhDs have swallowed this thinking,
hook, line and sinker – of course the token consultancy fees, free business
class flights, big salaries we earn as
big fish in the small ponds we paddle in, are enough to deaden our thinking.
But then day of reckoning is fast coming.