Abdul Warees Solanke
21 April 2008
opinion
Lagos — Most countries now classified as the Third World share traumatic experiences in slavery and colonization by western developed countries, especially in the 19th and the second part of the last century.
These historical experiences with the former colonial masters and the associated dependence linkages are therefore often blamed for the present state of affairs in the Third World that manifest in excruciating poverty and underdevelopment.
Should the developed countries be wholly held responsible for the development dilemma of the Third World? What is the Third World share of the burden of this misfortune? Is there a foolproof prescription to end poverty in the Third World? Is there a commitment to addressing the problem of poverty among developed and developing nations through multilateral approaches that take into cognizance past experiences and new experiments in reforms?
This essay, is a critical reflection on issues affecting the pace of development in the Third World, and lessons that can be learnt from the past as well as from best practices that the newly industrialized countries(NICs) are adopting to address their peculiar challenges of development. While probing the historical experiences, the essay shall examine the validity of Third World's arguments that the West is responsible for their woes, as well as the feasibility of the West meeting the developing countries' demands on how to bridge the development gulf between them and the advanced countries. Finally, it shall attempt a synthesis of positions of both sides with a view to discovering the middle ground for mitigating poverty in the Third World.
Poverty in the third world
When understood that poverty manifests not just in the lack of basic necessities, but also in their poor quality or insufficient provision, in skewed or unequal distribution and in difficulty of access, the Third World emerge as a pool of poor countries where quality or standard of living is anything but near countries of the Northern Hemisphere.Whereas the Northern hemisphere with only a quarter of the world's population produce 80% of the gross global product, the Southern hemisphere that contains three quarter of the world's population claims only 20% of the world's income. It would take Mauritania, one of the poorest nations in the world for instance, 3224 years to close her development gap with the developed industrialized countries who spared 25% of their income on food(1).
In the Third World's quest for a way out of their crises of development, they usually shift the blame on their former colonial masters who they accused of playing double standards in their development schemes for the outposts or oversea territories ; that the colonial policies were to leave the former colonies in the midway of civilization and development in which the former colonial masters would continue to dictate direction for the independent seeking countries; that the developed countries were exploitative of the rich natural resources of the Third World, paying ridiculously low prices for their commodities; that whatever values the developed countries gave in the name of education and modernization, were targeted at disorienting or de-linking countries of the Third world from their wholesomely rich traditional values and heritage. In short, the Third World's position is that the West never had any good intention for them as all their programmes and agenda were alienating, consigning Third World countries to the periphery of human development without a profitable linkage to the centre of civilization.
But also in the drive to banish the colonial interlopers, developing countries still ironically subscribed to the West's prescriptions for liberation, followed their timetable for independence, imitated their systems and structures of government in the management of national or domestic affairs and relied on them for stabilizing the local economy and polity. Except for a of these former colonies who painstakingly, bravely and progressively tackled their peculiar development challenges and rapidly climbed to a respectable pedestal of economic prosperity and human development, most of the Third World countries are lamentably stuck in the quagmire of disease, war, famine, desertification, corruption and infrastructural failures. They sit gloomy at the bottom of human development scale. Dotting their socio-political and economic climate are features of unemployment, capacity underutilization, galloping inflation, unfavorable balance of trade and import dependence with unattractive pricing for their export commodities. Hence they remain almost inextricably trapped in the poverty vortex.
The West and Third World woes
Much of the reasons adduced to poverty in the Third World are rooted in the past of colonial appendage and slavery, which the West partially acknowledge, and feel morally obliged to address But also in the West assessment of the lamentable situation of the Third World, they justifiably blame the developing nations for mismanagement and lack of transparency in the utilization of grants and aid from the donor countries and loans from multilateral financial hub ( the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the London and Paris Club of Creditors) to take care of their development needs. The West buttress this with Third World's misplacement of priorities in their development schemes, their lack of accountability, corruption of the entire public sector, political instability, lack of maintenance culture, poverty of committed leadership and sometimes, natural calamities beyond their response and control capacities. By and large, the West argue that the prevailing socio political and economic environment in the Third World does not readily conduce to sustainable development, and submit these countries need to radically depart from their culture of corruption and mismanagement and commit themselves to good governance, take responsibility for their own affairs, without any longer passing bulk or shifting blame, but concentrating on reforms, because in the final analysis, the dividend of development that will accrue from self-efforts will not be shared with the developed countries.
Beneath poverty in the Third World
The West's position that there is lack of good governance, political instability and corruption in the Third World is appreciably true when view against the backdrop of the crises of nation-building that plague most of the Third World countries. But this is an isolationist position, because those crises would still have to be located within the historical and colonial circumstances, when the colonialists for their selfish and exploitative convenience partitioned most territories of Africa, and Asia among themselves under the agreement reached at the Berlin Conference of 1885 in flagrant disregard for ethnic and racial affinities, as well as territorial contiguity of the affected countries.The present Nigeria created through the amalgamation, in 1914, of disparate peoples the British colonial power earlier governed as Northern and Southern Protectorates, and the Colony of Lagos, offers a classic example of how not to construct a nation. Within each protectorate and the colony were extensive diversities of more than 300 language groups, cultures and religions, which offered perfect recipe for future power struggle, competition and conflicts.
So ab initio, the Nigerian nation was built on a time bomb that would sooner or later explode. It did, in 1966, with a military coup d'etat staged to end the political turmoil and corruption that had gripped the nation, clearly less than six years after the country became independent. It eventually snowballed into a civil war in 1967 , lasting the next three years with millions of lives and resources wasted in the tragedy. The scars of that episode are yet to be completely effaced from her body polity, more than four decades later, as the country is still grappling with the problem finding the best political arrangement that will address her diversities.
Such crises characterize most countries of sub-saharan Africa: Rwanda witnessed an unprecedented genocide in 1994; a similar scenario is playing out in Kenya, Liberia underwent a civil war; Sierra Leone has seen its repeat; Ivory Coast is yet to fully settle; Sudan and Chad are presently not yet in peace. In Asia, Cambodia and Sri Lanka are not good stories, just as Myanmar In such troubling milieu, it is difficult to banish poverty or pursue development goals and objectives, because behind most of these crises are the desire to protect vested interests created in the past. Hence, the steep graph of poverty in most of these Third World countries is nothing to cheer about, when compared with the affluent and quality standard of living in some other regions of the world.
The Poverty Picture
The global economic trend for instance shows that the gap between the developed and developing countries is so wide that consumption difference is as much as 200 times. In specific terms, the GDP per capita according to regions as at 1998 reflect this magnitude: Region/Group and Income (US$), OECD 20,357, L. America & Carribean 6,510, E. Europe & CIS 6,200, Arab States 4,140, E. Asia(-China) 13,635, ASEAN/Pacific 3,234, SSA 1,607, S.Asia 2,112, LDC 3,270, LLDC 1,064 These were adapted from 'Development Challenges of the 21stt Century : A publication of the World Bank.
Kolodko, G.W (2001) corroborates this trend as he admits that " n the course of history less than 30 nations have become rich and still more than 80% of the world population lives inn the middle and low income countries.: it is true not only for the majority of economies traditionally considered as developing countries, but also for the new post-socialist emerging markets".
However, it is not just about the past that the Third World countries are up in arms against their advanced counterparts in the West, especially the Group of Seven (G7) countries for perpetuation of poverty and underdevelopment. It is also about the contradictions in the present international economic order and systems. It is also about the disproportions of globalization which push the Third World to the wall end with little or no muscle to compete with the big players
Former chief economist at the World Bank, and 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize For Economics, Joseph Stiglitz graphically illustrates the politics of the international economic system in his explosive book, Globalization and its discontents with an insider view into the management of globalization. He is unsparing of the IMF and the WTO who preach fair trade yet impose crippling economic policies on developing nations; how free market "shock therapy" made millions in East Asia Russia worse off than they were before and how the West has driven the global agenda to further its own financial interest,
Globalization as defined by Stiglitz is the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capita, knowledge and (to a lesser extent) people across borders. Although globalization may have some inherent benefits, but as Stiglitz concurs with its antagonists, the idea has neither succeeded in reducing poverty, nor has it succeeded in ensuring stability. Rather, in practice, the West has with globalization, pushed poor countries to eliminate trade barriers but kept their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income. If as Stiglitz explains Globalization has so many discontents that put the Third World at the negative pole of development baton, the instruments of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have deepened the poverty crisis among them. Because, one cannot explain how these institutions established specifically after the Second World War to deal with the post war reconstruction and development challenges and global economic stability could turn round to champions economic disproportions which market supremacy implies.
According to Stiglitz, the IMF now 'typically provides funds only if countries engage in policies like cutting deficits, raising taxes, or raising interest rates that lead to the contraction of the economy'. Nigeria is one of the victims of the World Bank/IMF strong arm demands in the implementation of a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) required to benefit from their loan packages. On one hang, SAPt took food off the table of the average Nigerian family, and on the other, it wiped out the middle class from the income distribution table of the country.
Solanke writes from Universiti Brune,i Darussalam
It is not surprising that the gap between the developed and developing countries are widening, the palliatives or assistance the former may claim to be giving the Third World, whether as loans or grants, debt rescheduling
Painfully, they also tend to associate material wealth and physical/infrastructural growth with development, a perception that promotes unbridled race for survival and negates basic moral development.
Yet, the human resources that are supposed to manage the national wealth and maintain the physical structures are robbed of the requisite moral and intellectual fertility, with patriotic and nationalistic spirit that can stimulate real development, the development of the human capital.Most of these problems can be attended to gradually when the process of leadership recruitment and training in the Third World is transparent, merit and competence based, and not conditioned by considerations of ethnicity, tribe, religion and economic class, all which are factors that heat the political environment and make the those countries chaotic and unstable, and accounting for the fragility of their economies Tackling poverty in the Third World therefore requires looking inward more and having confidence in their own capacity for redemption, entrenchment of good governance, committed leadership and patriotic followers. These are not necessarily far or to be taught from outside. It is a question of faith, commitment and resolution to change in the Third World as exemplified by how the New Industrialized countries like Japan, Singapore and Taiwan tackled their own challenges.
How rosy would it be if the Third world countries could fast-track their development with local reform initiatives with benefits of a restructured international economic order? The industrialized world and the institutional players in the World economic scene must realize that it is a moral obligation to initiate programmes and policies that would assist Third World countries to find a way out of their poverty mesh. But the Third World leaders and policy workers must not wait till then, because at their own backyards are abounding talent and human resources lying idle to be explored. In The Diaspora are their best brains drained away by the attractive environment of the exploiters of the developing countries. Let the Third Leaders reflect on the expose writers like Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Professor Ali Mazrui, and even Jeffrey Sachs or Joseph Stiglitz.
For us in Nigeria, let us revisit the warnings of the Ojetunji Aboyades, the Alukos, the Claude Akes, the Bade Onimodes, the Pius Okigbos, or even the ilk Dr. Gamaliel Onosode and Chief Philip Asiodu, not forgetting the predictions of the Kole Omotoshos, the Chinua Achebes, the Niyi Osundares and the Wole Soyinkas who with their literary prowess graphically illustrate the anomie in our nation, our collective amnexia, and the moral and ethical anaemia being suffered in the land, not inflicted on us from outside by our enemies, but engineered by crises and contradictions created from within.
They saw and wrote much on the future of our nation; in the way our reckless politicians were conducting Nigerian domestic and public affairs and running the national economy; in the manner they set the stages for military incursion into government and in they were mortgaging the nation to the West. Now the Verdict: Having surveyed the Horizon generally, the bottom line is for us to create The New Republic of our dream. Let's listen to the Voice of Reason from the wilderness.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
