SAFARI TO DEVELOPMENT

       Okello Oculi contends that the blame heaped on ‘leadership’’ in Africa undermines the power of the community to fight against debt repayment

The Swahili word ‘’SAFARI’’ connotes a destination; travel through unknown spaces, and meeting hazards. The ‘’Motor Rally” designs routes to reflect these elements.

Attaching ‘’safari’’ to aspiration for achieving societal ‘’DEVELOPMENT’’, allows for comparative discourse. Britain’s record shows aristocrats chasing small farmers off their land and forcing them to gather in crowded urban slums. Millions died from starvation, pandemics of diseases, notably: measles, cholera and plague.

Desperate crowds were locked inside buildings designated as prisons. Others were forced inside ships that deported to distant lands. Australia has enshrined this experience in their concept of coming from ‘’DOWN UNDER’’. The merchants and farmers in North and South America hired prisoners to work on farms and mines.

Over four hundred years marked EURO-AMERICAN GENOCIDE against Africa’s population. Some North American film directors continue to expose the cruelties that regimented imported African labourers; including armed rebellions by its victims. The 1804 successful revolt and slaughter of French landowners in Haiti by African labourers shook European and American leaders.

This journey to Euro-American development is dressed with mass brutalities inside factories, urban slums as morgues; the destruction of Africa’s development with genocide.

From 1948 to 1994, a peculiar road was taken by BOERS (Dutch immigrants in South Africa). They replayed Europe’s record of using guns to rob fertile land from Zulu, Xhosa, Koi San, Sotho, Shona and other peoples. After winning elections in 1948, they used the state to get a larger share of the wealth being looted from mining diamond, gold and other minerals extracted by Europe.

They created state-owned companies to compete with Euro-American companies, and invest their shares for improving their human resources. They created high quality educational infrastructure to build capacity for intellectual competition with British, French and German companies.

They created a tribal secret society, the ‘’Broerdebond’’ which assumed the responsibility for enforcing discipline and loyalty to building BOER power. University staff conducted research and academic productivity that met assignments sets for them by the tribal secret society. They probably borrowed from the Soviet Union the ‘’GOSPLAN’’ – an assembly of the brightest brains to plan and supervise  the economic political and social sectors.

They used the state to force the African population to supply slave labour to their individual and corporate farmers and industrialists but not have income to become a market for their products. Supermarkets in Australia, Chile, and Western Europe sold their products.

This was a case of tribalism directed by a brilliant elite which enforced discipline; and guided by a competitive resolve to build for its people a developed industrialised economy. Its religious ideology claimed a God-given  mission to dehumanise African people.

Japan’s Meiji ruling class started their safari by destroying the land-owning Tokugawa aristocracy that thrived on consuming grain from impoverished peasants and serfs.  China’s communist leaders fought armed struggle from 1922 to 1949 which slaughtered the landed aristocracy. Later, elites trained in Euro-American colleges were forced to work in rural areas as a way of cleansing them of anti-people models of development.

Japan adapted core values of Buddhism to design economic processes like ‘’insurance’’; ‘’shares in a company’’, work inside factories, and ‘’wages’’ for workers. ‘’Groupism’’, for example, consisted of companies in an economic sector injecting personnel into each other’s management team on a daily basis.

Japan’s cruel colonisation of Manchuria imparted the value of creatively adapting local cultural values for social engineering modern industrial economy. China noted Lenin’s rejection of the view that Russia must go through capitalist industrialisation to create ‘’Socialism’’ born of ‘’proletariat’’.

Japanese companies used police units to brutally discipline workers, while making workers feel that they are part of a family and filial collectivism.

India’s ‘’CASTE’’ system gave leadership to the BraHmin class; while peasants worked the land to feed the people. The threat of being reborn into a lower being if an individual did not perform their task with utmost sense of duty. The notion of a soldier toppling a civilian government to assume political power is not conceivable. The notion that development is primarily dependent on ‘’leadership’’ is refuted by devotion to duty by all other sectors in India’s caste system.

Africa’s core values of ‘’UBUNTU’’ (I am because you are part of me); ‘’HARAAMBEE’’ (we pull together), ‘’CHI’’(a genius inside each individual striving to be manifested), and being CIRCUMCISED to assume responsibility for the welfare of a community, are widespread in Africa. Each has a disciplinary force that is yet to recover from colonial erosion unlike India’s caste system; Broderbond and Buddhism.

The blame heaped on ‘’LEADERSHIP’’ in Africa undermines the power of the community to fight against DEBT repayment as socio-economic violence; and demand anti-debt REPARATION for the disruption of Africa’s IDEOLOGICAL fabric. It diverts our safari with core African values for engineering politics and economic development.   

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja