By Reno Omokri
Not long ago, Ethiopia was held up to be the showcase of good governance in Africa, with its dashing young, handsome Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, who was seen as a stabilising factor in the Horn of Africa, and the rest of the continent.
Abiy was wined and dined and celebrated by the world, to the extent that on October 11, 2019, it was announced that he had won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
And then the trouble in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and slowly but surely, the peace, prosperity and stability that Abiy had painstakingly put together in Ethiopia began to unravel.
In less than two years, Abiy and Ethiopia went from being the darling of the world, to the whipping boy of the West, with accusations of genocide and war crimes being tossed about.
And just like that, an African utopia has become a dystopia, and all that cycle of good news has turned to a case of the same old same old, leading to the age-old question asked in Scripture, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?”-Jeremiah 13:23.
What is happening in Africa? The wind of change that had the whole world chanting Africa Rising, is suddenly looking like an ill wind that blows no one any good.
The latest sad case in this episode is South Africa. Make no mistake about it, what is happening in South Africa is not a protest. It is lawlessness, and it cannot be excused.
It is sad that looting is going on on such a grand scale in South Africa. However, I observed that though people looted strange items like coffins, furniture, hospital equipment and even sex toys, nobody looted books. Readers do not loot. And looters do not read!
This is a pattern I have observed everywhere on Earth. And that is why I am convinced that if you want to fight crime, you should not just invest in law enforcement. Educate people. Teach them to love learning. An educated people, who are readers, will loot knowledge from books, they will not loot goods from shops.
Africa is experiencing a downward spiral in many nations and the response by the governments concerned is to repress. However, that is not always the answer. We must not just build more police stations and military bases. Build more schools and you will build less prisons!
I am in perhaps a more privileged position to talk about this, because I am very well-travelled in Africa. There is no part of Africa I have not visited. And when I think about the recent slide in Africa, I begin to juxtapose it with my experience as an avid traveller.
In my travels, I discovered that almost all Sub-Saharan African towns have a brothel, a football viewing centre (mostly for viewing European football, and not the local league) and sports betting agents (pool). But few, very few, ever have a library!
Sadly, if you commit a crime in Africa and everyone is looking for you, the best place to run and hide in, is in a library. No one will ever find you there, because no one ever visits there. Africans must start reading if Africans want to begin leading in the world!
Africa is sliding. In the last two years, Nigeria, which in 2015 was the third fastest growing economy in the world, reversed its growth trajectory and overtook India as the world headquarters for extreme poverty.
The latest figures from the World Poverty Clock shows that 105 million Nigerians are living in extreme poverty, and while some Nigerians may sneer and snicker at what is happening in South Africa, it was not too long ago that the world saw masses of Nigerians also looting during the COVID-19 lockdown (remember palliathieves?) and also during the #EndSARS riots.
Just as poverty was the root cause of the Nigerian breakdown in law and order, poverty is also to blame for what is happening in South Africa.
South Africa may be touted as an upper-middle-income country, those figures paint a very false picture, because they rely on statistical averages, which hide the problem, which is that much of the wealth that makes South Africa an upper-middle-income country is in the hands of a very small elite.
Please research this: 72% of South Africa’s wealth is held by 10% of the population, who are mostly white.
And that is not even the worst part. The poorest 60% of the South African population (who are overwhelmingly Black), holds only 7% of the wealth of the nation. No other nation on Earth has such disparities between the rich and the poor. And that is the real cause of the ongoing looting in South Africa. The conviction and arrest of former President Jacob Zuma is just an excuse. A trigger if you will.
Africa is fragile because Africa is poor, and Africa is poor because Africans do not trade with each other, and Africa does not trade with itself because most Africans lack the requisite education to create a modern prosumer economy that produces what it consumes, which is why I am a big believer in education as a panacea for Africa’s economic backwardness.
Africa has the lowest intra-regional trade on Earth. When compared to Europe and the Americas, our intra-regional trade is nothing to write home about. 68% of Europe’s trade is intra-regional, compared with an abysmal 18% for Africa. 82 % of Africa’s trade is with non-Africans. This just means most of our money is circulating outside the continent. Meanwhile, America’s largest trading partners are Mexico and Canada, their immediate neighbours. Thankfully, African leaders like Paul Kagame have been pushing the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement. The ACFTA.
Nothing has excited me in regards to Africa as the ACFTA, because it provides for free movements of persons and preferred trading status for African nations (removal of tariffs on 90% of goods). It is proposed that ACFTA will increase intra-regional trade in Africa by at least 48%.
And this is why it is sad that nations like Nigeria and South Africa continue to hold back ACFTA by foot-dragging in the ratification and implementation of the treaty.
Nigeria closed its borders to its neighbours, and South Africa continues to be a notoriously xenophobic nation. Except these two nations commit to ACFTA (which fully came into effect on New Year’s Day 2021) it will not work, because they are the largest economies on the continent.
And except there is African free trade, Africa will not progress economically at a rate that is faster than her population growth. And except Africa’s economy grows faster than her population, Africa will only rise to fall again.
As you watch the looting going on in South Africa, note that each year, Africa makes about $3.2 billion from coffee and cocoa exports, much of which goes to Germany. And Germany makes $4 billion annually just by processing and re-exporting the coffee and cocoa imported from Africa.
So, while we loot petty items from shops, the real looters are in Europe and America making billions off the backs of undereducated Africans. What is really happening in South Africa, and Nigeria before that, and in Mali before that, and in many other African nations is misdirected anger. Africans are angry at the big corporations in Europe and America that have dominated them politically and exploited them economically.
And to end this cycle, Africa must invest in education and free trade, of which the fastest route is the ACFTA.
Reno’s Nuggets
Don’t say ‘when I make it, I will buy my parents a car’. You don’t know if they will even be alive when you make it. Buy them something now, even if it is a packet of biscuits. A packet of biscuit that your parents eat while they are alive, is better than 10 cows they can’t eat at their funeral. You can’t show love to the dead, and a person who lived a wretched life is not honoured if you give them a befitting burial. Give your parents a befitting life with whatever you have now. Tomorrow is promised to no one.
