What the uproar about her visit to a shrine tells us about
the crisis of post-colonial Africa
Rebecca Kadaga caused uproar when she visited a traditional
shrine to thank the spirits of her ancestors for her election as Speaker of
Parliament. Every pundit of any heft was in the mass media denouncing her for
indulging in “devil worship”. The uproar only reaffirmed the tight hold
colonialism has on our minds. Assuming Kadaga had gone to church for a
thanksgiving service to honor Jesus Christ for her election, who would have
complained?
We have totally internalised the ideology of our conquerers.
Colonialists labeled our traditional religions “devil worship” in order to get
us to accept Christianity. Our traditional doctors were labeled “witch doctors”
thereby throwing away centuries of knowledge in local herbal medicine. True our
society had not yet separated medicine from religion. But the stranglehold of
the colonialist can be seen in how we deride anyone who visits a traditional
shrine for spiritual healing or a traditional doctor for medical care.
The conquest of our minds has been thorough. Today, debate
on the development (or lack of it) of Africa is conducted in terms that are
akin to religion. Indeed, development itself has become a religion, perhaps the
largest religion in the world today. It has a following larger than that of
Christianity and Islam combined. And like all religions, it has developed
creeds that are accepted on the basis of faith than evidence. Violation of
these creeds is a sin that its high priests tell us is punishable by remaining
mired in poverty and misery.
Take the example of corruption, one of the sins of
development, which it is claimed, is the stumbling block to our rapid economic
transformation. As I have argued before – to the ridicule of the development
faithful – almost every country that rapidly grew from poverty to riches had
high levels of corruption during its intense period of transformation. Today,
China is industrialising as if on steroids yet corruption is endemic and
getting worse. So why is corruption said to be Africa’s biggest development
impediment?
As a caveat, I also think that in many of its
manifestations, corruption is unfair. Public funds meant to serve a common good
are diverted to private bank accounts to serve purely private appetite. But
that is a moral not a development issue – and some can ask: whose morals?
In any case, corruption is a cousin of capitalism. Karl Marx’s
critique of capitalism, especially his Labor Theory of Value, suggests a
similarity between a capitalist and a corrupt official. Both “steal” from the
public. Capitalist ideology may praise one and criminalise the other. But Marx
would not have seen moral differences between the two.
Take another creed: that to develop you need democracy and
respect for human rights as preconditions. Do we know of any country that had
democracy and respected human and women’s rights before it industrialised?
Certainly not UK, USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland,
Germany, Italy, etc. – the countries that make the biggest noise about
democracy and respect for human rights being necessary (sometimes absolute
preconditions) for development. African elites (including me of old) argue this
creed with religious fanaticism. But it is based on faith, not evidence.
Sometimes when I indulge in conspiracy theories, I speculate
that maybe the West promotes these issues as a strategy to divert African
elites and their governments from addressing the real factors that undermine
rapid economic growth and actual transformation of a society. Yet I know that
even a concept as “The West” is nubilous because the West does not have a
central brain and it is not univocal on these issues. Besides, the worst
dangers to human social evolu-tion have rarely come from self-interested people
but self-righteous ones especially when they are intoxicated with ideas they
perceive as self-evident truths.
We can safely say that both corruption and authoritarianism
have advantages and dis-advantages. We really do not know for sure when and how
the disadvantages outweigh the advantages – or if that ever happens.
But I suspect that in the wider scheme of development, it is
highly probable that the contribution of corruption or authoritarianism is
insignificant. The factor with the most powerful impact on development is a
country’s terms of trade i.e. the value of its exports relative to the value of
its imports.
If the value of the commodities you export you have
corruption, lack democracy and do not respect human rights. In fact, as you
keep growing richer, you tend to produce new social forces and classes, which
may demand and get an improved form of government with greater democracy, increased
respect for human rights and more account-able government. This means better
governance is a consequence of development, not the cause of it.
International trade is the arena where countries grow rich
by selling dearly and importing cheaply. But it is also a form of hierarchy.
Some countries produce cotton, others weave cloth and others market high
fashion. Your earnings therefore depend on whether you sell raw cotton or
designer shirts. A cotton farmer earns less than 0.01% of what Gucci or Louis
Vuitton earn from selling the shirts made from her/his cotton. Some countries
produce iron ore others make steel while others sell automobiles. Your earnings
depend on the niche you occupy in this hierarchy.
If there is any substance in my claim here, it also means
that Africa’s energy has been sucked into quarrels over peripheral issues like
corruption, democracy, human rights, etc. In the process we ignored the more
fundamental issues of the terms of trade that have the most fundamental
implications on our capacity to develop. If most of our fights over democracy
and corruption were fights over say, policy independence to build manufacturing
by developing a local industrial class and on resisting WTO rules that relegate
us to producers and exporters of raw materials, may be our economies would have
performed much better.
My frustration, however, is that these heresies do not
attract much attention because our brains are clouded with too much religious
dogma – corruption, human rights, democracy blah blah blah. It is very
difficult, nay impossible, to get a critical mass of African elites to see the
real threats to our development. Often, they lie in the ideas we have
internalised not the actions of our leaders. Our leaders, like ourselves, are
slaves of these ideas.
****
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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