GLOBAL AFRICA VIA NIGERIA GLOBALISED 

Abonu, a Public Affairs Consultant, writes from Abuja

                     OKELLO OCULI argues that skilled Nigerians in the diaspora will make better contributions at home

A fellow student at Stanford University chose a moment to hit me with a secret Mustard Seed inside his heart and mind. It landed so hard that it lodged in me from 1965 till today.

Peter Chen suddenly said:”When I get my Engineering Degree I will return to China to build the country’’. By the time I looked up, he had vanished into the zone of silence. He had been watching me from a distance and sensed a will not to be addicted to Americanism.

 China had known a guerilla war led by the Communist Party across a vast countryside from 1922 to victory in 1949. Mao Zedung had lit pains of poverty and exploitation by brutal feudal landlords into a resolve to fight a long war of liberation. The strategy for a war against superior government’s military weapons had built a solid nation of people by using their numbers and collective determination to achieve victory.

After winning political and military power, Mao Zedung insisted on using the power in collective community effort to build roads, railways and factories. To eliminate Bilharzias, for example, he put 14 million into rivers to dig out snails which host its vectors from river banks. He put thousands of workers to stoke furnaces to build machines for industries.

His injunction for achieving development was by relying on the collective design and sweat of the people in building bridges, dams, roads and official buildings. People owned their victory and sovereignty.

Mao also purged Chinese civil servants and professionals (who had been educated in Europe and North America), off modes of thought imbibed from their education. Thousands of them were sent to live and work in villages to understand the intelligence embedded in peasant agriculture and architecture.

They had to learn to rely on Chinese people. Their tactics in the bush war is what had won the guerrilla war against an army trained and armed by American and European generals.

Peter Chen was RETURNING engineering skill from a top American university to a China governed by self confident leaders and masses of people. India’s DIASPORA were also returning scientific research skills and industrial knowledge to a country where religious Hinduism commanded people to perform their KHARMA with utmost dedication.

When Donald Trump started his campaign against Candidate Barack Obama, it provoked multinational corporations to openly condemn the atmosphere of hostility to immigrants. They noted that research by foreign students doing research for Doctoral Dissertations, had yielded fantastic scientific inventions. They defended Stanford’s nuclear research programme because it had produced tools for Space Travel.

Trump’s hostility hastened the RETURN of Diaspora scientists back to India, China,  South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. At his lecture to honour the 90^th birthday of General/Dr. Yakubu Gowon, Dr Akinwumi Adesina must have had this exodus in mind when he condemned the massive exodus of Nigerian medical doctors, engineers, nurses and academics.

Research undertaken to oppose Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign showed that over 50 percent of immigrants from Nigeria had university degrees from top universities in Nigeria and North America. Unlike the Diaspora from China and India they, however, saw only the ravages of IMF/World Bank policies on Nigeria’s educational system and deepening poverty and corruption.

Dr Adesina told his audience that only 7 per cent of Nigerians currently have university education. Northern Nigeria hosts 63per cent of poverty wrecked section of Nigeria’s population; while 35 per cent are in the South. With escalating rate of food inflation at 40 percent in Nigeria’s North-West region, the only attraction for Nigeria’s high income Diaspora is in buying millions of cheap Naira for building houses for rent; stocking hospitals with expensive imported equipment, and money laundering.

 Sweden’s commentators have been furious with the view that the quality of inventions by Nigerians working in America are of far higher monetary and technological value than the funds they send to relations and agents in Nigeria. These Swedes favoured to glamourize brilliant achievements by Africa’s Diaspora but not pay REPARATION for true values of their work.

 Dr. Akinwumi Adesina did not follow this line. He was more interested in ‘’RETURNING’’ the talents; and investment in industrialization inside a ‘’Global’’ Nigeria that exports quality products..

Although Nigeria is currently behind Morocco in North Africa; Botswana, South Africa; Uganda, Kenya and Mauritius, he believes that Nigeria can go ‘’GLOBAL’’ and assume a mission of pulling Africa into industrial development.

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina’s brutal statistics dramatised Nigeria’s descent into relentless decline after the coup against Gowon’s ‘’brilliant industrialization policy’’. Successive governments earned his rage and impatient pragmatism.

His rebuke of lazy neglect of PRODUCTION in preference for imports echoed a pandemic of IMPORTED wigs and loss of self pride by Nigeria’s ‘’modern’’ women in their natural hair.

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja