Why So Poor? -- Of Minds(ets) and Men

Masitala, Malawi – According to this BBC news report, William Kamkwamba woke up one day, figured he could build a windmill out of bicycle parts to supply electricity to, and pump water for his village and did it with practically no formal education. A couple of years ago my father was working in his backyard garden. He needed to dig a shallow hole and with no tool at hand, picked up a broken piece of calabash that was lying innocently by. Before he began to dig, he looked at us and said, “Improvise”. It was the first time I had heard the word. Improvise! A blessing and a curse. I did not spend years trying to understand what he meant. No, I did not even think about it after the words escaped his lips. It was just one of the big words daddy liked to use on occasion. Like the time he said “my food is always palatable”. But I did get the old boy to tell us what exactly the word meant. I thought it was pretty simple -- use one thing in place of another. I’m not so sure anymore. I’ll tell you why in a little bit.

On many occasions, I’ve had the opportunity to ask myself why the African continent is so poor. I’m sure you have too. So why are we poor? Is it because of the many years of colonialism and the slave trade or the additional years of bad leadership, coups and counter coups, civil war and strife started by men who care for nothing but themselves? Are we still lagging in development because of neocolonialism and the strangling juggernaut of the western financial institutions or because our very minds are inferior to the best of the world and our mindsets inherently retrogressive instead of progressive? The question of whether colonialism, neocolonialism, political strife and the combined exports of the World Bank and IMF has been detrimental to the continent is a moot one and has been argued on many fronts so I will only briefly examine them here.

More than a hundred years ago, the white man landed on the shores of our beloved black continent (the Dark Continent as they called it) and proceeded to rape and ravage it out of gold, cocoa, timber, the strongest men, freedom and indeed its very soul. What this did was in essence take away the foundation on which we could build our countries and our economies. The remnants became second class citizens, strangers in their own land, told where they could go and where they could not, paying taxes to foreigners and unable to buy one imported commodity without the other – I suppose the forced balanced diet kept us healthy. After that came the age of the Strong Men of Africa, the Mugabes, Nyereres, Nkrumahs, Contes and a spate of coups with stories of US and Russian involvement as the two major powers of the world sought influence in the as yet unexplored philosophy of African neocolonialism—that would come later. And when it did, it was through the multiple protectionist moves in the World Trade Organization and the extension of loan facilities from the World Bank and IMF. They attached western imports of economic philosophy and conditions that, even with the best of intents, took no account of the peculiar economic and political climates of the recipient countries. Add to this the fact that some of these conditions require loans to be disbursed in installments from western banks with all the transaction fees applicable and stipulate that consultants be hired from the donor country on development goals in the recipient and you have, by anecdotal evidence, anywhere from fifty to eighty percent of loans going back into the donor economy while drowning the poor African country further into debt. It’s not all tales of doom and gloom, of course and I am not a proponent of the “the west is keeping us down” cacophony so I will focus on the African.

The point of this piece is to look at those two essential components of human progress, the mind and mindsets of a people, and the people themselves. The last time my mother visited the US was for my graduation from college. On a stroll through Chicago, she casually remarked on how nice it would be for the white man to build some of his skyscrapers back home. Needless to say I flew off the handle with a lecture on how we had to fight our own battles, et cetera. My mother, bless her soul, is the most important person in this world to me and the one I respect the most so this example is not to cast her in a bad light. She is also a certifiably smart lady and that is the crux of the story. In Ghana, we have brains and smarts. I read animal farm, makers of civilization, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Pride and Prejudice before I was out of 6th grade. The second year college classes I took in college taught little different from what I had read for three years in high school and when I pit my brains against friends with “similar” levels of education, I find out again and again how much more theory they know than I do. In fact the truth remains that one of the main reasons I came to the US for school is because I could not gain admission into medical school in Ghana. In every medical school I interviewed for in the US, there was one Ghanaian faculty member or two and even more students from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and the like. There are Africans excelling in most, if not all, of the greatest institutions of higher education this country. No! The African’s mind is flexible enough to bend the most esoteric theories and to propose some himself. Even with the limited educational infrastructure, the African child rises to the top. So why is it a bachelor’s degree at a third rate university outside Ghana is enough to gain you a promotion, in Ghana, over a long term employee with multiple Ghanaian degrees?

It is not the lack of firepower that is holding us back. It must be our mindsets then. From the ingrained mindset of inferiority of everything African through our unwillingness to chance innovations to the lack of support and in fact, the PhD (pull-him-down) of those entrepreneurs who try it, we have connived to drive the continent farther and farther into poverty. The problem with improvisation is that the African has been doing it for ages and has thus become complacent and comfortable. Improvisation allows us to use inferior tools albeit with extra effort for accomplishing tasks and we are just happy that way. We are not motivated to innovate. We lose sight of that intrinsic component of the word improvise, the creation of something new to replace what is. When my father first said “improvise”, it was while using a broken calabash in place of say, a hoe. There was no progress there. However, because we were just fine digging without a hoe, we had no incentive to look for better ways to dig. We missed the chance to innovate. But the buck does not end there. If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, why is there so little invention coming out of Africa? Our institutions are ill equipped to advance science, I know but that is just the beginning. Until we move beyond that essential Africanness of coping with the hard life and start looking to get into a more comfortable lifestyle, we will be unable to progress. Have you seen the travelling Ghanaian? Poor soul has oversized carry-ons, multiple oversized checked bags and some more for the children to carry. Why? Because he is bringing gifts to family members. Why? Because they are foreign goods. It is not good enough to buy these same things in Ghana. It has to have made the flight to hold any value to the Ghanaian. The Ghanaian has to have Holland prints in textiles to wear to a funeral --in effect stifling the local enterprises that seek to compete with the influx of cheaply made, overpriced foreign goods.

As much as the Ghanaian yearns after imported milk and bread however, few can afford it thus allowing room for local inventors to prosper on their minor creations. Yet, our economies suffer the ignominy of lagging behind the prosperous ones and our people suffer from lack of access to healthcare, education, employment and clean water. This is no fault of the minds and sets of minds in corpus but of the corpus itself. It is man and the men of our various countries that drive us deeper and deeper into the ground and bring our countries, which relatively flourished post-independence to their knees groveling for western handouts. The “Strong Men” of the continent began the looting process that continued in coup after coup which promised accountability but looted the state coffers while paying lip service to higher ideals. These were followed by pseudodemocracies installed to legitimize corrupt governments with the support of countries like France all so the interests of these supporting countries could continue being served at the expense of the poor African. No matter how great the demand, it is the African, like the times past when he sold his fellow man to the slave trader, who continues to sell his country out for thirty pieces of silver. And when he is finally thrown out of office by the vote, what right does he have to demand additional graciousness from a country he has so thoroughly helped to exploit and why must we pay him to relinquish power?

Many reasons are proffered for the poverty of my people. Though they all have legitimacy in and of themselves, none of them hold as much weight as the dead weight of corrupt men that bogs the continent down. From high school, when the senior student extorts sardines and milk out of the first year student so he can protect the latter from other extortionists and where a housemaster takes money from parents so as to reserve preferential treatments for their children and the headmaster takes money to admit a bad student over an excellent one, corruption runs riot in the fabric of our countries weakening the seams and breaking the bond of unity that keeps it strong. Until we change our minds(ets) and until there arises a new generation of (wo)men willing to stand tall and move our nations forward, we will forever lag in the darkness of our skins and our soils crying out as children of the dark yearning for the light of prosperity yet running back into the darkness from the pain the light causes our eyes which are so accustomed to nothingness. Long Live Africa and on men, may there be peace, and prosperity.

Prime

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This is the way I choose, the destiny I pursue
To help the unfit and the fit
To treat each according to his need
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