Public Agenda (Accra)
Ayuure Kapini Atafori
1 December 2008
Today, Africans pay glowing tribute to a man whose selfless devotion to the struggle of our motherland, and indeed the rest of the developing world, to liberate itself politically, economically and culturally was remarkable and staunchly unflinching. He was so committed to the universal humanistic cause in a manner that defied conventional logic and reasoning.
Despite the passing away of Professor Bade Onimode on November 28, 2001 in Abuja, Nigeria, his political activism and prolific scholarly and exemplary works still reverberate in all parts of the world. His ideas and principles still resonate among the youth in the progressive world due to their freshness and eternal relevance.
Born on November 20, 1944, Prof Onimode's parents little knew that their son would grow up to become one of Africa's eminent economists and mathematicians. Having gone through all the levels of the educational ladder, he finally became a professor of Economics at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
He was not only an economist par excellence; Bade was an academic, philosopher and a consummate champion of the masses. He espoused Marxism at an early age and remained an ardent follower of this ideology despite the demise of the Soviet Union and the subsequent seeming unpopularity of the Marxist doctrine. He died an unrepentant Marxist.
A through and through Pan-Africanist at heart and in mind, Bade was mostly concerned with Africa's development and dignity in a world where its place is supposed to be at the lowest of the rungs. Thus, he sought to find theoretical, empirical and ideological solutions for the problems at the root of the continent's under-development and marginalisation.
Bade, therefore, strongly expostulated that Africa's incorporation into the international capitalist division of labour was, and still is, the bane of her development. He regarded the interventionist programmes prescribed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s as fundamentally flawed ab initio.
When the abysmal failure of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was imminently obvious, some African governments approached the United Nations' Economic Commission of Africa {ECA} to fashion out an alternative to SAP. The ECA came out with the Alternative African Framework for Structural Adjustment Programme for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation {AAF-SAP}. Bade, together with Prof. Adedeji Adebayo, was the brain behind AAF-SAP - a blue-print he aptly described as a fundamental Organisation of African Unity {OAU} document.
Unsurprisingly, however, the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and IMF) viewed the document as a controversial ECA paper when it was launched on December 17, 1999. But the document was adopted by all member states of the United Nations except the United States. The blue-print was at once political and economic in nature. Thus, it was a departure from the insidious technicist papers usually produced by multilateral organisations.
Characteristically, Bade was an activist-scholar whose humility and ingenuity were irresistibly incomparable. He spearheaded the establishment of the Institute for African Alternatives {IFAA} in 1986. The institute aimed at promoting policy research and discussion on contemporary African problems. He was the chair of the IFAA, which organises conferences, workshops and seminars as well as lectures whose proceedings were published for the use of policy makers.
As a proponent of "Third World" economic emancipation, he chaired the South-South Development Scheme which was set up to prepare an economic master plan for the developing world.
The unassailable impact of Bade's civil society activism was most felt at home - Nigeria. He was active in the affairs of the Association for Good Governance and Democracy, a body set up to combat military rule from 1983 to 1994. He was also the co-ordinator of the Independent Policy Group - a think-tank that advises the then president of Nigeria.
In his seminal book, A Political Economy of the African Crisis, Bade argues, "No country can be simultaneously faithful to the IMF/World Bank and to its national population and development. So the IMF and World Bank must be resisted - politically and collectively - and African as well as other Third World scholars must expose the bankruptcy of the Fund's and Bank's theoretical positions."
The recent serial anti-globalisation protests and outcry against the G8, IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation meetings at Seattle, Karnanaskis, Doha, Cancun and Gleneagles demonstrates the pertinence of Bade's remonstrations and antipathy towards the doctrinaire western bilateral and multilateral arrangements in the international system that are contrived to keep the developing world perpetually marginalised. He could not have been less prophetic than this.
Bade, an advocate of indigenisation or domestication, contended that Africa must eliminate the "major contradiction between producing what is not consumed and consuming what is not produced domestically."
Prof. Onimode published several books, papers, articles and monographs during his life time. His major works include Basic Mathematics for Economists {1980}, Imperialism and Under-development in Nigeria: The Dialectics of Mass Poverty {1983} and An Introduction to Marxist Political Economy {1995}.
It is instructive that before he passed on, Bade accepted Christ as his personal saviour though he fought against religious bigotry all his life. This Pan-African intellectual freedom fighter is survived by a wife and children. He is sorely missed by Africa, and he is surely resting in eternal peace.
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