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.
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