That negative narrative competed with horrors Japan committed during her war to destroy European and American colonial rule over Asiatic races. Japan’s image in the media continues to be haunted by demands for reparations for tortures of Korean ‘’Comfort Women’’ through rapes by Japanese soldiers. Likewise, reports of massacres of hundreds of thousands of Chinese war prisoners.
What gets ignored is Japan’s tradition of banking based on core ancient cultural values and service of a political vision. The notion of ‘’groupism’’ was used to get individuals to open savings accounts in post offices. The saving earned 1 percent interest rate and government loaned the collective (or national) fund to strategic businesses and industries at cheaper interest rates. Toyota or Nissan or Sony benefited from being chosen by political, economic, academic leaders to build Japanese power in automobile or communications sectors. The Bank of Japan, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of International Trade sent staff to serve as co-managers in beneficiary firms to ensure transparency. American and European Union officials have fought against this system of ‘’subsidy’’, despite their own subsidy strategies.
When Japan ruled Man-churia as ‘’Japan abroad’’, Chinese nationalists and communists imbibed this culture of banking for building carefully and resolutely directed national economic power. Koreans, Malays, Singaporeans and other Asians influenced by Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 and British, Dutch and French armies out of their colonies in Asia, took deep interest in secrets of Japan’s power. Accordingly, these “Asian Tigers’’ modelled their banking practices on the Japanese vision. They also share the mission of politics as culturally-based building of national economic power and collective welfare. This often involved abandoning Euro-American models of banking.
At independence, political parties in Africa did not launch banking based on urging all households to drop monthly savings in post office accounts to be loaned out as capital to specific businesses and industries. That communal road remained in the informal ‘market- women’s domain. Most African countries inherited colonial banks that did not campaign for savings from all adults in villages and urban areas. Their goals promoted economic interests of European companies; but not of the majority of colonised peoples.
Importers of mer-chandise; exporters of agricultural and mineral resources; and builders of transport infrastructure were their prime customers. Such loans were contracted by branches of companies with roots in Britain or France which were assumed to have ‘’dependability’’ in paying interests on capital when due. Colonial banks had no interest in nurturing local capitalists started on small and medium scale ventures. Such local capitalists had grown to become leaders of the American war of independence against imperial Britain.
The majority of voters in African countries without European settlers are rooted in subsistence small scale farming using low energy implements. They lack access to a tradition of loans from banks to buy fertilisers, improved and high-yielding seeds (like maize, millet and groundnuts) or stems (like cassava). Pension funds have not embraced the burden of financing peasant agriculture. They are either dormant or stolen. Voters as anchors of electoral democracy were, and are still, not the constituency of banks. They are not “risk worthy’’. Like colonial banks, commercial banking remained makers of profit without fighting poverty among the mass citizenry. Because peasant farmers lack capacity for holding those they elected answerable to their needs, banks remain insulated from the anger of democracy. The ‘’transformation’’ of banking culture remains ignored by that political force inside representative democracy.
Economists insist that agriculture is a vital stimulus for economic development. It provides food for feeding workers and children as future workers; raw materials for processing into industrial products as consumerables. As an example, Shea butter has been processed into oil, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals; harvesting crops led to industrial manufacturing of harvesters, and large scale production of oils created demand for large boilers. Robots now package agricultural products.
In his brilliant 2013 book: A Good African Story, Andrew Rugasira derides bankers who denied him long-term loans to finance an innovative chain which began with his team training small scale coffee farmers to produce high quality arabica coffee; roast the coffee locally; export to supermarkets in Britain and the United States of America to be bought by rich consumers. He, thereby, bypassed “middlemen’’ and paid extraordinarily high prices to farmers. It took a desperate appeal to President Yoweri Museveni to avert a disastrous failure to deliver his brand of coffee to a London supermarket. Museveni had his eyes on votes. Uganda’s bankers do not and lent only 4% of capital to farmers.
Nigeria’s CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has fought to wean bankers from earning profits from government’s Treasury Bills while lending only 2 per cent of loans to farmers. With 80% of Nigerians are in small scale agriculture, this tradition of parasitic banking is ignored by politicians. Its hostility to economic democracy and socio-economic development remains unlocked. The parasitism resolutely ignores records from Japan, the Asian Tigers.