I am Africa's Future

How does the white man make wealth? He sends out ambassadors to foreign lands to exploit their resources and people. He gets cheap raw materials and cheap labour and then produces a finished product which he sells to the natives for a profit. The money from this endeavor is used to develop his land.

How does the black man make wealth? He calls foreign investors to come help him exploit his natural resources. He calls in foreign experts to get paid. He exploits his own people and destroys his natural environment in the process. When this wealth is made, he sends it into foreign bank accounts. He invests in foreign assets. He sends his children to foreign schools. They end up working in foreign companies.

In Nigeria, we have our president receiving medical care in a foreign nation. We have expatriates operating machinery in our specialist hospitals. Why build these hospitals if they are unusable? Why bring in foreign professionals here when you still have to travel to a foreign country for health care? A lot of these things simply don't add up in my opinion. I think the black man simply does not value himself.

Don't tell me anything about oppression from the white man or colonial whatever. Heck! Don't tell me squat about slavery. Who sold the slaves? Wasn't it your fellow black men? Didn't they sell their brothers for a mirror, some firearms and a bottle of whiskey? Didn't they use same fire arms to conquer their fellow black men in tribal wars and sell their prisoners as slaves? How did the white man do wrong? Wasn't it a simple business transaction? It is a simple rule of business. The knowledgeable one makes money off the ignorant one.

Lord Frederick Lugard wrote in "The dual mandate in British Tropical Africa, 1926"

"If my reader will turn to the pages of Miss Martineau's history, or to those of Carlyle, and contrast the condition of squalor and misery in which the bulk of the people of these islands lived in 1816 with the conditions prevail in1891, he will realise how insistent had become the prevailing demand alike for the food-supplies and for the raw materials which were the product of the tropics. These products lay WASTED and UNGARNERED in Africa because the natives did not know their use and value. Millions of tons of oil-nuts for instance grew wild without the labour of man, and lay rotting in the forests. Who can deny the right of the hungry people of Europe to utilise the wasted bounties of nature or that the task of developing these resources was, as Mr Chamberlain expressed it, a “trust for civilisation” and for the benefit of mankind?"

This was in 1926. It's sad to say that a lot hasn't changed. The amount of human and natural resources that lies "wasted and ungarnered" is appalling. Rather than develop these we keep running to our former colonial masters for loans and for aid. We keep calling on them to help us develop what we have rather than developing our people to become truly independent. Any one who develops their potential to a certain degree may be whisked off to foreign lands where his or her skill-set and knowledge base will be more appeciated. You don't blame them. Their president is receiving medical treatment in one of such countries.

If we do not take things personal and develop Africa for ourselves, nothing will ever change. It starts with you. What are you doing to affect the future of Africa? The Future of Africa starts with you, yes, it also starts with me.