I am in awe of the achievements of white people, and of late, the Chinese and other Asians like Koreans and Indians. The only thing is that I will forever fiercely defend my people from oppression and condescension from any quarters no matter. But a critical look at our environment will reveal a trite fact, that we are a very dependent people – most of black Africa; but especially Nigeria, its densest member country. This is the truth; let us stop engaging in chest-beating for nothing. I find it ridiculous when we engage in romanticism, reminiscing about Egypt or about how great our people were before the white man came. Past is past. How we are doing today and where we are heading are what matters. Two things; the level of our dependence on others is yet to be properly documented, and we are yet to identify fully, much less imbibe, the mindset of those people who supply almost our every need so that we may be on our way to supplying our needs ourselves. Look around you and if you were honest, almost 100% of our life dependencies are the products of some of these other peoples – except for the God-given air we breathe and other heavenly endowments. These people have since gone ahead to contemplate the world and deliberately add value to that which God gave man – most of which we here simply take for granted. The mere belief that ‘God’ will continue to provide for our needs and desires is one great impediment that holds us back. Perhaps God has been using men to provide for our needs, but most of those men are not our own people.
Consider your daily activities. You wake up and say your prayers. You read a Bible or Qur’an printed on paper from a printing press. You dash into the bathroom and brush your teeth, use water from the white man’s iron tap, and depend on his pump to supply you some of that. You brush your teeth using his toothpaste and wear clothes made from his technology. You use his cream and accessories and you cook your food using his gas or kerosene. You keep your food in his refrigerator. You drive to work in his car, and you spend money invented by him. You wear a wristwatch made with his technology. You do your work using the technology he provides, and are now reading this – most likely – using his phone or computer. Truth be told, there is little we do these days outside the inventions and innovations of these other peoples. I use the word ‘other peoples’ because we are not talking about those known today as Caucasians, others too have contributed – including Blacks – but on average, and considering recent history, we here are not doing very much for ourselves.
They say the wheel is round, and so to a large extent, we must follow some first principles in order to emerge as a people to be taken seriously. There is nothing wrong in ‘reinventing the wheel’, but that too, will have to be done based on first principles. From evidence on ground, Africans are yet to get a grasp of first principles, even though they are now freely available and are taught often in our institutions of learning. Our refusal to understand and imbibe the science and wisdom behind established first principles is the reason we are in economic quagmire today, and why our society is regressing when others are moving forward. It is the reason we constantly seek for miracles and for God to help us bend the rules. It is the path of mental and physical laziness and if we are serious, this path must be abandoned.
I type this from several thousand metres above sea level in a propeller engine airplane. The technology is dated, but this one still works. It ain’t broke, but it has been fixed. Fixing a ‘problem’ does not mean jettisoning whatever existed before. The world of aviation probably started with propeller engine plane, but later, jet engines were invented and have become more and more sophisticated over the decades. Who knows what innovators are thinking of next? The world of shipping started with physical rowing, then moved to steam engines, now diesel engines, and I’m sure the white man is working on environment-friendly ships that may use biofuels. And where do my people feature as this pageant of history parades by? Are we born to buy off others, ignorant of the cost of being so dependent? The cost of dependency takes forever to pay. Every inventor and innovator, including his people and country, has designed tricky ways of extracting their pounds of flesh, not only from current generations but unto generations unborn, from those who depend on them. It may look small to us – the prices we pay for these innovations – but when carefully considered, it is limitless. Not knowing how to innovate and being so dependent, is therefore akin to an eternal sin against God because humans are expected to add value on this earth, not just come, feed on the place, die and go to heaven.
The white man – or whoever it was – made up his mind to methodically challenge the status quo and make things better (and make better things). It is a mentality; the idea of challenging how things are and moving for consistent betterment. It must be stated though, that the very starting point is attention to details, then maintenance, then documentation, and many things follow from there. We seem to agree in this corner of the world, that we lack those three critical paradigms; attention to details, maintenance, documentation… and that we are unable therefore to come up with the fourth in the quartet; innovation. All these four bring progress, so it is no surprise that we aren’t making much progress.
Look at the world of phones. Time was when we would spend long hours in NITEL. Today, we take for granted the GSM revolution and actually boast that a former president brought the technology from abroad. Most Nigerians see the evolution of telephony in Nigeria as our greatest achievement but we have added almost nothing of our own ideas into the so called revolution, yet governments like to use it as a reference point in their need to sell off public entities as if the best we can do is sell-off. Is sell-off an innovation in itself? Should we clap for ourselves for merely opening up our sphere to be further consumers of the products of other peoples’ thinking?
And so phones moved from when you had to wait some seconds to hear what the person on the other end says, when there were two separate sets; a receiver and a mouthpiece, to when a mobile phone was as large as a full grown man’s arms, to today when we have smartphones with storage capacity that will put a hundred mainframe machines of the 1990s to shame (I remember the mainframe computers we had in the basement in the bank where I first worked in the 1990s. The place had to be kept seriously refrigerated. They cost a bomb, but a small Samsung phone today has more memory capacity that these things we needed a large room to store). We enjoy it, we Africans. All we do is buy, buy, buy. More than those producing these things, we know how to buy them, to use them, to abuse them, to criticize them, to condemn them, to castigate them, to communize them, to denigrate them. It is in Nigeria that we name cars ‘Toyota Big-for-Nothing’, ‘Honda Pure Water’ and call smaller cars ‘Keke Napep’. As we do this, the world forges ahead with innovation, fixing not only the things that appear broken, but even those that seem to be working perfectly. More next week.
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