Sub-Saharan Africa in global politics

(Link on Daily Trust)

The United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on a diplomatic tour in Sub-Saharan Africa visiting Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal. As expected, the officially stated mission of his tour revolves around the US commitment to partnering with the countries and the region at large in tackling various challenges bedevilling them. 

Tours by leaders and high-ranking officials from major international players and ambitious developing countries in Sub-Saharan African countries often prompt curiosity not only about the obvious absence of the countries’ influence in global affairs but also practically the absence of their uninfluenced influence in their own affairs, for that matter. 

It’s a tradition in Washington that once a new US administration is done settling down and rolling out its foreign policies on major issues e.g. relations with Russia and China, the Middle East issues, relations with US major European and Asian allies, and regional powers in various continents, it then attends to Sub-Saharan African countries. 

Usually, the Secretary of State would embark on a tour covering a number of countries to reiterate the US “commitment” to helping them tackle poverty, insecurity, corruption, among other things. Also, at some point, the President may equally embark on a similar tour. 

Secretary Blinken’s ongoing tour in Sub-Saharan Africa simply comes in the context of that tradition, for, in reality, the countries command no respect on the global stage due to the sheer failure of their power elites. This is not necessarily because they do things that their counterparts elsewhere don’t do after all, but largely because of how they do theirs. For instance, their penchant for reckless misappropriation of public resources in grossly unsophisticated hence effortlessly exposable processes is particularly peculiar. 

Besides, though they are extremely greedy, their ironically very limited ambition explains why they always end up with peanuts compared to what they cost their respective governments. This is quite clear especially in their dealings with ruthlessly ambitious and fast-growing countries like India and China that owe a great deal of their success to Sub-Saharan African natural resources and raw materials, which they acquire under largely questionable deals, to say the least. 

Likewise, Euro-American countries, which had literally plundered Sub-Saharan African countries' natural resources and raw materials, and exploited their people for a very long time until only six decades ago use subtle but systematic blackmail on account of their governments’ real or alleged human rights abuse, undermining democracy, and lack of transparency to extort huge concessions from them in favour of their (Euro-American) corporations.  

Consequently, while Sub-Saharan African countries remain grossly deficient in the strategic infrastructure necessary for sustainable industrialization, which is indispensable for sustainable economic development, their massive consumer markets continue to rely on imported products and critical services provided by foreign corporations. 

Also, the characteristic deficiency in dynamic creativity that Sub-Saharan African countries’ elites betray has further made it easier for such developed and developing countries and their corporations to manipulate them.  

Though corruption and other challenges persist in all countries, they never frustrate development as it’s obtained in Sub-Saharan African countries. While power elites elsewhere are creative enough to come up with and pursue strategic development policies according to their peculiar challenges, their Sub-Saharan African counterparts are largely too literal in their understanding of the standard textbook ideas they have imbibed, which were written in and for environments with absolutely different socio-political, economic, cultural, environmental and attitudinal challenges.  

One easily observable thing about every ambitious developing county is the flexible creativity of its elite. China, for example, is basically a communist country with a single party system, yet thanks to its ability to creatively add appropriate capitalist touches to its economic system, it has been able to dominate global industrialization and overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy after the United States.  

It’s the same thing with the likes of India, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. Even the relatively less industrialized countries in, say, the Middle East owe their success to the creativity of their respective power elites. The particularly remarkable success of the Gulf countries, in particular, says it all in this regard. 

Whereas, in Sub-Saharan Africa, even the supposedly more enlightened intellectuals are largely intellectually confined within the limits of literal meanings of either liberal capitalist or Marxist theories. In a typical Sub-Saharan African country, proposing solutions to common challenges in the light of either unrealistic Marxist populist rhetoric or inconsiderate elitist capitalist ideas, mere fluency in, say, the English or French languages, and tendency to determine the worth of things on the bases of Euro-American standards, are all that it takes for one to be recognized as intellectual and progressive.  

That explains why even after six decades of independence, power elites in Sub-Saharan Africa still betray an inferiority complex towards particularly their Euro-American counterparts; they behave as though they are still under colonial rule. In Nigeria, for instance, there have been instances where some rightly or wrongly aggrieved individuals among the political elite blatantly reached out to the US ambassador, the UK high commissioner, and the EU office in Abuja literally begging for their intervention in their favour in purely local affairs. 

Now, though I may have digressed too far, it’s only intended to shed some light on why the Sub-Saharan African countries are practically worth nothing in global politics, and indeed why racists and other chauvinists assume that Sub-Saharan Africans are inherently inferior to other human races.