Matthew Ewansubhor
13 December 2007
Lagos — There is usually a huge gap between the foreign aid rhetoric and the foreign aid reality. I do not believe it can ever change. - Vaclav Klaus, Czech President
The presentation of the guest speaker, Prof. Vaclav Klaus, at the ninth session of the Osigwe Anyiam-Osigwe Lecture series in Lagos on November 29 was as controversial as it was candid. Stopping short of asking developing countries including Nigeria not to seek foreign aid anymore, he said it is based on the interests of the donors not on the needs of those who are supposed to receive it and use it.
To him, the aid is never free, and in many cases very costly in the long run and even the gifts, not to speak about soft loans which turn out not to be free or soft after all. "The donors have their interests, priorities and prejudices. The lending institutions have a bureaucratic incentive to lend and to be involved," he asserted.
Yet Klaus was not prescriptive. The erudite economist mainly suggested ways Africans can navigate to achieve sustainable economic and social development. In doing this, he drew from his experience of taking a communist country to the successful path of free market economy.
Before Klaus participated in the 'Velvet Divorce' of the Czechoslovak republic which saw the foundation of an independent Czech Republic in 1992, he was a trained economist who took advantage of the liberal educational policy of the former Czechoslovakia to study in American and Italian schools and from there became a hardboiled economist who continued to lecture and publish books before he was appointed professor of finance at the University of Economics, Prague. Klaus has published over 20 books and has also won numerous international awards. Today, as president of the Czech Republic, Klaus serves as a "free-market economist and Co-founder of the Civic Democratic Party'.
The Czech Republic, under Klaus has made significant progress in the areas of the environment and the economy. Look at the statistics: compared to Nigeria: The electricity consumption per capita in kilowatt hours today in the Czech Republic is 5,200 compared to ours that is less than a paltry two or three kilowatts. While the Gross Domestic Product per capita, GDP, of the Czech Republic is 6,500 US Dollars, Nigeria's again is less than a dollar! We may also find out that despite all of the hoopla that has heralded the introduction of phone lines by private telecommunications outfits, Nigeria still is light years away from the Czech Republic that has an average of 360 phone lines in every one thousand among the Czech.
But Nigeria, blessed with an abundance of human and natural endowments continues to baffle the rest of the world as a country that cannot be described as rich or poor. Is there some kind of nexus between our underdevelopment to our seeming inability to fashion a workable economic and political blueprint that a committed leader could stick to? Is there something our leaders have not gotten right yet? Is it that the people who lead us yet do not have the kind of vision or passion that leaders invest in their jobs as leaders of a people who desperately need leadership? Do they yet understand the immense burden that history places on them to do things on behalf of their peoples that will outlive them? Perhaps perturbed by these, year after year, the Anyiam-Osigwe foundation brings world leaders to provide fresh insights on resolving the African condition.
Consider the sensitive topic the Rt. Hon John Major, the former British Prime Minister handled in 2002, Youth and Education in a changing world, at the twilight zone of the Olusegun Obasanjo regime when the effect of incessant strike by lecturers in our universities was taking a heavy toll on university education. Warning of the implication of allowing the educational sector to rot via strike, Major said that if the government of the day were to put its act together, "young people born today will see the conquest of the stars; a genetic rebuilding of failing bodies; technical innovations beyond our present imagination. It will be a world unrecognizable to earlier generations and young people will know things, see things, do things their forebears never dreamed of".
Consider too the lecture by Simon Peres, current Israeli Prime Minister in 2003, titled, Man, the State and a Better World Order. Peres, formerly an agric worker, newspaper columnist, shepherd and an essential key to the search for peace in the Middle East told his distinguished audience that, "Israel is a strong economic nation because of her strong investment in agriculture. Israel does not have oil in commercial quantity like a few African nations including your country. But she is one of the leading industrialized nations of Europe, and in the world. Soviet Union used to import cows from Israel. We do not have oil as you have, but we are able to manage the land that we have. I advise that African leaders invest heavily on land rather than on armies. They should invest in science and technology rather than in buying ammunition". His call re-echoed that of Major for the Nigerian government to work hard to reduce the strains in the education sector.
If Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister, who delivered the 2004 lecture, Human Rights, Morality and Development believed that we all must make a commitment to human rights because we all have 'a duty to ensure that others live in dignity", Helmut Kohl, former German Chancellor, who was also at the Anyiam-Osigwe lecture that same year and handled Introspection and Integration as Effective Strategies for Development was certain that Nigerian leaders would need a lot of courage and patience in the determination of how big a role Nigeria will want to play in the effectiveness of the African Union. It was obvious that on that day, Kohl spoke as one who placed a lot of premium on the efforts made by Otto Von Bismarck to unify the tiny German states like Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen under the hegemony of Prussia in the early 19th Century. He was also destined to play that same role, as another architect of German unification after the post World War II schisms that balkanized Eastern and Western Germany.
In 2005, a former Sociology professor, Fernando Cardoso, who later became president of Brazil gave a lecture at the Osigwe lecture series based on a critical study that he undertook while in exile in Chile. In his lecture titled Socio-Political and Economic Development in the Developing World: Activating a National Mindset, Cardoso argued passionately for Nigerians to participate fully in the kind of democratic processes that lead to social and economic changes in Brazil that gave him a second tenure in office as president. He said that "what is crucial for development in Nigeria or Brazil is the fact that more and more, it is necessary to mobilize people to understand, to expand awareness vis-à-vis every important issue Without a vibrant civil society, it is no more possible to have democracy. Without democracy, it will be seemingly difficult to go ahead in terms of development ".
What some of this immediately brings to mind is the fact that a lot of these people fit the idea of the King-philosopher and that of the Philosopher-king that was the idea put forward by ancient thinkers as panacea for a truly egalitarian society. In addition, we must deduce that nearly all of the ideas expressed by the keynote speakers seem to meet at a confluence of thought with the "holistic approach to human existence and development", which is the treatise of Chief Anyiam-Osigwe.
Bamidele wrote from Lagos
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