Africa as a Stranger in the House of Globalisation:
A Socio-ethical Critique of the Poverty Question in Africa, in lieu of the fundamental ideological, socio-economic, and political engines of Modern Neo-liberal Globalization

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

1.      Prologue

Globalization reduced to its basic ontology is an invention of human mobility, imagination, self-insufficiency and rationality. Globalization was born the day man was created with an irrepressible desire to preserve himself and his posterity in being. This natural or congenital desire, which Baruch de Spinoza identified as “Connatus Essendi” is the gravitational pull, flowing from the core of our ontological blueprint, which aligns the nature of almost all living beings, with an instinctual compulsion to strive to exist, and to resolutely and stubbornly resist the entropy of extinction. This entropy which battles to set all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity, or which reduced to lay terms means that the inevitable and steady deterioration of a system of energy or matter  would eventually triumph over all strivings to the contrary. But that does not nullify the movement or dash towards self actualization and fuller life by man. This is because it would remain a tragic illusion if man is to lock himself up in inaction and perpetual potentiality, simply because he is necessarily heading towards the dissolution of his being. It is then in his bid to actualize himself against the backdrop of the fundamental insufficiency environing his being, that man is naturally mandated to make a dash out of the black holes of solipsism, to embrace others in some relational interactions or transactions that are socially, psychological, economic, and politically beneficial to his existence, and which equally conduce to the mandates of his nature.

To this end, we can authoritatively aver that globalization or the tendency thereto, arose the day that man was thrown into existence, with an ontological propensity to escape the parochial, insularity of narrow solipsism, if he is to survive the extinction of his species. Man was made a being-in-the-world according to Heidegger. In this regard, he was not created to bask in morbid solipsism that will quarantine him within himself to the exclusion of others of his kind. To prevent him digesting himself in the eternal boredom of isolated existence, nature armed him with a privation; which is an omni-dimensional self-insufficience. This insufficience propels him to go out of himself in other to seek better opportunities to redress his inadequacies. This primeval soup of privation and endowments created  micro-universes of needs, desires, wants, attitudes, propensities, affinities and infinite potentiality in each human person, which paved the way for a mandatory reconnection of human tangents, engendering the creation of culture in the process. In this regard, globalization mirrors and attests to the interdependence of human universes.

Downloading this metaphysic into the economic and socio-cultural realm, shows that armed with an insatiable range of needs, desires and wants; endowed with a mind that is both rational, imaginative and constructive; physically prepared for the task of dominating nature with the most adaptative instruments for that, namely his limbs: Hands and feet; which makes the most sophisticated robot look like the antics of drunken craftsmen- man became suitably equipped to go to the lengths it takes to achieve what could be termed his basic Maslownian needs and many more. This led to human invention of culture. This equally led to the dynamism of culture ensuring the fluidity of its export, exchange; diffusion and borrowing of cultural products, heritages and achievements across the mosaic and spectrum of human experience. It is this natural tendency to extricate himself from the unthinkable emptiness of isolated and non-relational existence, that is the fundamental engine that drives human civilization, which globalization has assumed its rightful, though sometimes corrupted role, as a stage in the logical progression of human social evolution.

As a process built on the metaphysical scaffolds of instinctual rationality, globalization should never be allergic to the functional oversight of ethical consideration, since it impacts on man positively or negatively, depending on how this process is directed or its fruits employed. We are then forced to erect this metaphysical scaffold for our consequent submissions, because we have some serious accusations to lay on the conscience of the world; in relation to the operational dynamic running globalization, as it relates to Africa. Ours runs the risk of being labelled and dismissed as the partial reactions of consolidated prejudice, speaking from the pedestals or prism of prefabricated unease. In order not to leave ourselves in a vortex of epistemic ambiguity, that would easily be latched upon by critics to label our ideas as reactionary. We have essayed to situate globalization and its dynamics, as a human heritage, that welcomes all human inputs. We have equally established the inevitability of globalization as man marches towards self-actualization. And from there: to forcefully state that we are not advocating or canvassing the abrogation of globalization in our critique of its operations in the African theatre. We are advocating from a deep ethically-inspired viewpoint, and philosophically sound conviction a humanization of globalization. This humanization will ensure the inclusion of majority of human beings in our world today, who are today forced by the global socio-economic, political and cultural variables, to necessarily exist at the frozen deserts of insignificance, and outside the gains of the globalizing process. This is a call for a “new globalization of ethical values, a renewed sense of solidarity among peoples and nations, based not on racism or prejudices but on universal and intrinsic bond of the human community wherever they may be”^[1]

2. Globalization of Discontent

Today, to say that contemporary globalization; a hybrid of socio-economic currents, political equations, and cultural variables propelled by technology, which powers the accelerated worldwide intermeshing of economies, supposed cross-border traffic, and denser communication that is the order of the day today; is working in, or beneficial to Africa is an amusingly deluded belief, without empirical evidence, as well as a discredited science. This concern cannot be more strongly represented than by Joseph Stiglitz, who was of the opinion, that the financial and institutional structures propelling globalization is only liberalizing poverty and globalizing discontent in Africa, and so many parts of our world. Stiglitz in exasperated anger forcefully told the world:

Globalization is not working. It is hurting those it is meant to help…If, in too many instances, the benefits of globalization have been less than its advocates claim, the price paid has been greater, as the environment has been destroyed, as political processes have been corrupted, and as the rapid pace of change has not allowed countries time for cultural adaptation. The crises that have brought in their wake massive unemployment have, in turn, been followed by longer-term problems of social dissolution - from urban violence in Latin America to ethnic conflicts in other parts of the world,[2]

There seems to be a mystifying conspiracy among notoriously aggressive globalization fanatics, majority of who were born into sumptuous privilege, to pose a nelson’s eye to the African situation as a factual refutation of their outworn and outmoded dogmas and assumptions. This was the dogma that was deflated and dangerously eroded by Stiglitz.

Globalization, which should have been directed towards bridging the gap between human isolation and the chasm between human divides that are geographic, socio-political and economic, and sometimes artificial, has been hijacked by the forces of neo-liberal capitalism, and wielded as an oppressive instrument of a new imperialistic enterprise, that leaves poor regions of the global village, like Africa as fodders that unfairly feeds the avarice of capital and funds the caprice of profit. 

Globalization is conceptually and actually neutral. It is a process created, managed and driven by man. We make it what it is and what it does in human and international affairs. This force can be deployed for social good, which can be seen in advances like in communication, transportation and exchange of ideas. We have no problems when this is used for the service of the whole human family. But when it pushes the weakest members of our race to the peripheries of consideration and significance, then it sends an urgent call for a re-evaluation of the values, principles, and engines driving that kind of exclusionary and polarizing trend, which profits the rich or powerful and pauperizes the poor and the weak. Today, the globalization we are witnessing as it affects Africa is simply a reconfiguration of imperialism. This issues from its fundamental neo-liberalism, which in its extreme midwifes 

a kind of “Economic fundamentalism”, which puts an absolute value on the operation of the market and subordinates peoples’ lives, the function of society, the policies of government and the role of the state to this unrestricted free market. Neo-liberal policies support economic growth as an end in itself and use macro-economic indicators as the primary measurements of a healthy society. It assumes almost a religious character, as greed becomes a virtue, competition a commandment, and profit a sign of salvation. Dissenters are dismissed as non-believers at best, and heretics at worst.[3]

3.      What Globalization has been for Africa

Globalization is not a new phenomenon, invented at the dying days of the 21st century. In fact:

Statements to the effect that developing countries are now increasingly globalised can be misleading because these countries have always been a part of the global economy, participating in international trade through exports and imports of goods and services, through foreign direct investment and through loans and aid and transfer of technical know-how and skills. Developing countries are also subjected to the impact of changes in the international economic environment. The bust-and-boom cycles of commodity markets and the fluctuation in exchange rate, not to mention general business cycles, which always emanate from developed industrial countries affect them. In fact, it can be argued that progress in developing countries has been impeded by their disadvantageous participation in the global economy.^[4]

That it has been repackaged today in new foils, made in Washington, does not nullify the fact that it has been an old given, experienced in painful and traumatic strokes by Africa in the course of her chequered history. It has come to Africa dressed in various robes, that masked its exploitative intentions at first, to enable it gain admittance into African consideration, from where once it gained some foothold, like all parasites, started releasing the dangerous toxins of it infelicitous self-serving agenda into the African socio-cultural, political and economic bloodstreams. Globalization as it relates to Africa and her long history, even to the thresholds of the 21^st century, seems to be nothing but the unending battle for Africa’s resources; which has always relegated Africa, to the peripheries of its gains. The conclusions are right that,

…the global integration of countries and people has progressed in an uneven and unbalanced manner. By breaking borders, collapsing space, and time and expanding opportunities, globalization has turned the world into a global village, but unfortunately not everyone qualifies for citizenship.^[5]

The brutalized African psyche tells the tale of an era in the globalization process. African crooked and tortuous boundaries bear the marks and scars of a metaphysic of oppression, while the African historical landscape harbours memories of devastation and treachery at the instance of the imperial globalization. When Chinweizu wrote the West and the Rest of Us, he was exasperated into anger by the history of despoliation, which was inflicted on Africa by some 500 years of the Western contact with the rest of the world especially with Africa. We are not new in the house of globalization, but we remain strangers in this house. The past attempts of imperialism, to convoke a huge honey pot off African economies, for the development of the West was colonial and naked in its advertisement of its crudity. Today, it is dressed in clean, deceptively innocent robes. But that does not hoodwink a disinterested observer from seeing through the wooden apologetics, to the fact that globalization in Africa, is simply a generous assemblage of shortcomings; an amalgamation of neo-colonial blueprints and the avaricious scenarios of rugged capitalism.

I will limit my voyage into history to the contemporary history of the last 600 years or so. I will spare you the details and the controversies surrounding the history of how African slaves manned the imperial sweatshops; contributed and yielded the slave labours that built some of the great architectural masterpieces of the Roman Empire. Historians have had and are still having a field day steering that controversy through the minefields of diverse opinions and educated guesses. I will equally save you the penance of driving you through African contact with the Arabs, the Trans-Saharan slave caravans, or the importance of Timbuktu in the configuration of African historical trajectory, as the impact of these though, may have been significant, but have been radically rendered insignificant by the history of our contact with Western imperial enterprise, which has continued to change apparels in history as to don the paraphernalia of globalization today.

In fact, Peter Henriot rightly captured the whole gamut of this contact. For him and rightly so, “today’s globalization is actually the fourth stage of outside penetration of Africa by forces, which have negative social consequences for the African people’s integral development.”^[6]

The first stage of this contact with outside penetrative forces yielded the abomination of human desolation, which was the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. In this era, the forces of European mercantilism, armed with the flawed supremacist, and arrantly racist anthropology resident in European idealistic philosophy, as was perversely and notoriously championed by Hegel and his apostles, essayed to spin a web of deliberate dehumanization of the African; the demonization of his culture and the denigration of his colour; all in order to quieten Western consciences, before they bring up their fellow human being to the slave auction block for sale.   This faulty anthropology coloured all their transactional relations with Africa even to the present day. During this time, the most precious of Africa’s resources; namely the cream of African young men and women, were marked with the red hot iron of slavery and auctioned off into an uncertain future, cut off from the comforts of home, adrift in the sea of eternal disinheritance.  Both the Arab slave driver, their Western counterparts and the college of African middlemen, they co-opted in their unholy commerce are guilty of this decimation of Africa, which left social, economic and psychological consequences that re-echoes into our present collective reality, and exerts subterranean influence on the conceptual schemes harboured and peddled about Africa till date.

The second stage was the era of colonialism. Suffice it to note that colonialism was simply an instrument in the empire building antics of imperialism, but we would never fully appreciate the negative impact of this contact, unless we understand fully what colonial imperialism was all about.

Imperialism is metaphysics of exploitation that was authored in blood, plunder and pillage^[7] Wherever imperialism visited, cultures tend to vanish and disappear in astonishingly incredible proportions. Its avaricious hunger to feed imperial greed off the resources of virgin lands sets the stage for despoliation of nations, and depopulation of lands. The Incas of the South American Amazon Basin or the Aztecs of Mexico, the Pygmies of Congo for example, needed nothing of Western  imperialism survive save its absence.

Imperialism is synonymous with mindless exploitation. It is a psalm of oppression composed by a powerful rogue nation against a militarily weak and technologically inferior country. In this relationship, an arrangement is hewed out of the dark crooked woods of imperialistic deceit, which ties the colony to the pseudo-legal apron strings of the colonialist. Here, the resources of the colony are the primary and only factor informing whatever the colonialist does in the colony. The resources and labour of the colonies are recklessly exploited to cause rivers of wealth to flow in the mother country, while the colony reels in underdevelopment and poverty^[8]

Colonialists were excited by profit and seduced by adventure. To satisfy these greedy gods, they engendered chronic chaos, advertised brutality and consulted their avarice, more than their humanity. Their governance, nay maladministration of their colonies was vulgar in its opulence, convulsively ugly and malodorous in its negative flamboyance. In many instances a grand racist and supremacist ideology, as well as a denigrating anthropology of their colonial subjects informed colonial policies. This accounts for their pathologic highhandedness in dealing with opposition, either real or imagined.

The Soweto massacre, The Shooting of Striking coal miners at Enugu in 1949, the deposing of Ovaremnwen Nogbaisi of Benin and the exiling of Jaja of Opobo, the pyramid of human hands created by King Leopold II in Congo, the near extermination of the Herero of Nambia, and a long line of  other criminal indignities, are all historical examples of this. In reviewing the whole imperialistic enterprise, Jean Paul Sartre, while prefacing Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, confronted his imperialist brothers with their hypocrisy and urged the world not to be deceived by their affectations. He spoke for himself in the following words:

Let us look at ourselves, if we bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it's not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggression…You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the new continents', and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was a threat of a slump the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism since all of us without exception has profited by colonial exploitation.[9]

In this epoch, Africa was balkanized along artificial boundaries, among competing imperial economic interests. In this regard most of the states or geopolitical constructs they arbitrarily created in Africa paid due disregard to African sensibilities, and was simply effected to conduce to the imperial exploitative convenience of the colonial powers. Here according to Peter Henriot, whatever minimal benefits that might have come to Africa because of colonialism were far outweighed by the many negative consequences of economic exploitation, environmental degradation and social dependencies. Indeed many of the ethnic conflicts which attract international attention trace their origins back to the colonial masters.^[10]

The third epoch of this contact has been described as the era of neo-colonialism. This flowed directly from the second epoch. With the clamour for independence in the late 1950s the colonialists knew that their sun was setting. To this end, they set about engineering an exit strategy that would grant them a cryptic but actual unimpeded access to the control of the resources of these former colonies. This era created the fundaments for a diffusion of the morphologies of poverty, upon which Africa’s future will always capsize. Here political pressure and economic suzerainty were brazenly deployed to tie Africa to the apron strings of western financial and economic dominance. Today thanks to this era of tele-guided contact,

The African continent is (now) littered with failed states. Most of these states are economic backwaters, social apologies and political ruins… Most of these states true to type were the creatures of imperial convenience. To that end, they were meant to serve a purpose after which their ontological legitimacy or raison d' etre would then expire. At this expiration; the states, naturally not designed for self-propulsion; were condemned to tether on the brink, and finally implode upon the inglorious weight of their inherent contradictions. Colonialism designed and inspired the problems. But the decadence was then driven along by a horde of native pirates; trained in the fine art of piracy.[11]

Now we are at the fourth epoch of Africa’s continued assault by outside and external forces, which have variously sabotaged the trajectory of her integral development. This stage popularly called globalization, is characterized by a comprehensive integration of the economies of the world through trade and financial mobility, technology and the information superhighway, as well as the mobility of goods, people and services. The dominant consideration in this stage especially on the economic front is free market. “The globe is considered one huge market dominated and driven solely by the profit motives of private enterprises, which according to Henriot, know neither national boundaries nor takes cognizance of local allegiances. Henriot aptly described the African situation under the welter of this globalization dynamic, thus: “In this stage, Africa experiences both minimal influence and maximum consequence”[12] This is a very pithy historical expedition into a phenomenon we have entertained variously in our history with traumatic consequences for our development.

4.      The Impact of Globalization on Africa: Views from the Peripheries!

For decades have the voices from below been neglected and treated with formalized disdain in the arena of development discourse. Almost all the major voices dominating the globalization debate are as usual mainline ultra-specialist champions, peddling and propagating their insular wares, with inspired mediocrity, around the major crossroads of ideological discourse, from the narrow pedestals availed them by their specific disciplines.  The narrowness of ultra-specialization comes in handy to endow them with the necessary blindness, that seduces theory with gusto. This empowers them to becloud and magnificently misinterpret the issues at stake in the deepest possible way, while empirical evidence writes itself into prominence daily in the lives of the people at the receiving end of the policies, which their verbal darts strenuously evade. 

Scarcely are views from the peripheries entertained or allowed admittance. Though, “local peasant uncontaminated by scientific orthodoxy knew better”^[13], the experts always claim to know how the patient is supposed to be feeling, with the kind of certainty which only profound ignorance breeds. Mainstream thought and expert opinion essay assiduously to eclipse and becloud the realities.  Never are the voices of the victims of history, who are sitting on the sidelines of major historical processes; those who are on the frontiers and frontlines of the circumstance, even those that affect them, their destiny and their posterity considered. Even in those areas where their local knowledge supersedes and makes the loftiest armchair theorizing, look carelessly pedestrian; they are never given the attention their competence holds out in crafting solutions to their predicament. To this end, the experts keep on advertising the sublime ignorance, born of the alchemic crosspollination of arrogance and paternalism, which neither ameliorates the situation nor provide credible solutions^[14]. But succeeds abundantly in creating, fostering, and reinforcing negative stereotypes about those on the periphery as fundamentally helpless. Little wonder that almost all developmental programs designed by Western theoreticians have succeeded in failing woefully in Africa, when they face the litmus test of African realities. Scathingly underlying the indispensability of the views from below and critically deflating the arrogance of expertise, Graham Hancock summarized both pedestals in this example he drew from a practical situation, as he reflected on the conceited, patronising, and condescending quip attributed to Magareth Thatcher during the Ethiopian drought of late 80s. On that occasion, Thatcher said of the Ethiopian farmers: “We have to try teach them the basics of long term husbandry” In a fitting repudiation of that attitudinal prejudice to which many experts are enslaved, Hancock wrote as follows:

The truth is that there is very little we can teach these tenacious and courageous people about the basics of their trade that they do not already know far better than we do; they have been extracting a living-and often a surplus from the harsh eroded mountainsides of their homelands for millennia.[15]

Today, thanks equally to the persistence of the disadvantages, dissent have proliferated prodigiously, to the chagrin of the proponents of unregulated globalization. The banner carrying protesters have compelled the appearance of the views from below on the tables of discourse. We, in the same vein, have elected to present the views from the periphery. Long have our concerns and voices been considered an irrelevant non-essential in the socio-cultural broth of a globalizing world. But we shoulder the maximum of the consequence, while sharing little of the influence. We can never fully assess the impact of the market and globalization solely in terms of its impressive results and luxuriating profits it funnels to the winners and those privileged by it. We must always ask the ethical question in relation to how these results were achieved in terms of means, and how it impacts on the lives of those it essays to exclude from the epicentre of its gains.

Educated experience from the sidelines of major discourse, in relation to globalization in Africa has exposed worrying dimensions. Space and time is collapsing at alarming velocities. Multi-national corporation are roaming across border and global markets integrating production, effecting cross-border mergers and acquisitions. High skilled labour is highly and unpredictably mobile. But all for who? This process viewed from the peripheries is simply benefiting the global professional elite. They face low borders or unrestricted access to all countries and all forums of privilege and consideration. But billions of others, majority who are living in Sub-Saharan Africa, face insurmountable walls and borders that dwarf Everest in the heights, and scorn Fort Knox in their impregnability.  Yash Tandon summarized the whole situation when he wrote:

Anybody with any degree of intellectual integrity would see that globalization of Africa or the integration of Africa into the global economy from the days of slavery to the contemporary period of capital-led integration has on the balance of costs and benefits been a disaster for Africa, both in human terms and in terms of the damage to Africa’s natural environment. There is scarcely anybody in Africa who would talk of the last three years, including the last forty years since the first African country gained independence, in language flattering either to colonialism or to governments that have taken over power since political independence. World Bank and IMF officials who may be even genuinely concerned about Africa, but see only wrong in the policies of African governments choose to forget that their fingers have written the various documents on which these policies from import substitution to now export orientation were based. It is also a measure of their intellectual dishonesty or ideological brainwashing that they cannot see the connection between globalization and African poverty[16]

Globalization could work in Africa, but it still does not work, despite what the paid cheerleaders would have us believe. Globalization itself as a phenomenon is neutral as we reiterated earlier. But globalisation as it is driven today, by a neo-liberal capitalistic ethic, which bends the knee only at the altars of mammon and profit, can never be configured or appropriated in the quest for a birth of a new dawn for Africa. The Structures under girding this phenomenon, has rendered it inevitably imperative, for Africa to be pushed to the periphery of the gains of globalisation. We would never know if this is a global village or a global pillage.[17] We at the peripheries participate little in the process and even less in global governance or the formulation of global policies. Most times our futures have been bought and sold. From our compromised positions, we see that the globalizing process in Africa is simply stabilized by its instabilities, by its impurities as well as by the calm and anxieties it simultaneously generates. Not because of its functionality or positive impact on the lives of those at the periphery.

We were told that globalization will open up the markets, liberalize trade, and facilitate movement of people and goods across borders and other artificial obstacles to free access. We were presented the picture of a world were poverty will be consigned to the museums of history. We were told to open our borders to fresh goods baked in Western stoves and imported into our countries. But when we baked our own goods in the spirit of globalization, and exported them to Western nations, we were told that our goods will flood western markets and destroy local industries. We met protectionism, while liberalization was forced upon us. We were told that our own industries should be liberalized, privatized and sold off to moneybags from aboard, who like loan sharks are only interested in their profit, and never in environmental impact of their business decisions on the African ecosystem and the sustainable livelihood of the people. We were then arm twisted into opening up our ports, abandoning the necessary tariffs that would have protected our local industries, from strangulating competition; which also would have encouraged the growth of local alternatives, because we thought that we are participating in a global village square, where fairness and justice is not a luxury for the poor, but a given to all. But the denigrating poverty and the debilitating debt burden that facilitated the effortless and total hijack of African economies by IMF, World Bank and Western Debtor Clubs are footnotes to the voracious appetites of rugged capital.

Today equally, many of our cultural safeguards are mercilessly washed away in a sociological tsunami generated by an idiom of decadence, at the instance of unexamined and un-moderated adoption of cultural un-specificities from amorphous sources; all without the capacity of filling the socio-cultural vacuum, this leaves on our cultural psyches.

In folklores we heard of the Robin Hood who took or rather who stole from the rich and gave out to the poor. Not minding that his crime can not be justified by the aims of his charitable mission, his was an action from below; from the view point of the disadvantaged. Today, globalization politic has catalyzed the transformation of corporations and big trans-nationals  into modern alternatives to the Robin Hood of old. Here, they are politically empowered to rob the poor and give it to the rich. And this process is called Globalization.

The toxicity of their operational farts is the worst in human history since the end of the slave trade. Africa economies are ravaged. African resources are cheaply sourced, by trick, by crook and by open consultation and mongering of war, in order to keep open their access to these raw materials-Example here is the inhuman decimation going on today in Congo over Coltan, which powers the key technology in computers and mobile telephones. Over 3 million Africans have become uninvited guests to the great beyond, since this war started. Evidence abound how trans-nationals, fund, finance and feed these war by actively cultivating and equipping fragmented armies, and robber barons, who control the area, where those resources are concentrated.-African cultural realities are washed away in the flood, our markets are unprotected; our labours finance the servicing of odious debts, etc.

Against this backdrop, globalization today, represent for many Africans, the process, whereby, and through which the strongest rob the weakest and the poorest, to fund their scandalous luxuriance. It is the robbing of the poor, by the strong, for the rich. It represents the systematic decimation of the poor, manipulating them into a socio-economic puerility that conduces to their envisaged role as perpetual vassals to the caprice of the rich. Globalization for Africa today is slave trade in polite clothes. It is slavery baptised. It is enslavement by other means. And it is the most effective form of enslavement. You can convince a people into becoming unwitting partners or collaborators in their own decimation or destruction, when you manipulate or convince them, that their painful decimation, is a necessary invasive surgery that would be painful at first but is all directed to conduce to their long term advantage and good. That was what was done to African economies by the World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs, which adjusted African economies into a cycle of financial slavery, where they yield their resources in servicing unholy and odious debts, many of which were contracted by illegitimate governments, installed as puppets by Western nations, and as proxies and pawns to fight their cold wars.

Today structural adjustment has enabled armchair World bank technocrats to hijack and run African economies to the extreme disadvantage of African peoples, who have been pushed into the extremities of poverty.

For much of her history, Africa has played host to forces of global dominance. She has always been at the receiving end of the radioactive fallouts from the global epicentres of imperial import. She played host to the slave raiders. She took the blunt blows of the colonial masters. Her future was compromised by neo-colonial designs. Today Africa seems to be the perfect synonym for poverty and underdevelopment. It has arisen to become a continent where nothing novel, except bad news is expected. In the conceptual schemes of the Western media, she remains the disaster capital of the world

4.      A Stranger in the Halls of Globalization Gains

Portraying the exploitative bent of Western economic prescriptions and the global economic imbalance that impoverishes poor countries of the world, Mofid Kamran tried embarked on a pilgrimage into the roots or origins of the economic machinery and financial institutions driving globalization. He recounted that:

In 1944, at a UN conference in Bretton Woods, the World Bank, the International Monetary fund(IMF) and a global free-trade agenda were launched...this was to stimulate 'the creation of a dynamic world economy''[18]

Continuing along the same lines, he mourned the corruption of this pristine mission the founding fathers envisaged for their brain child.

Given what has happened since, it seems that a prime purpose was to ensure American corporations increased access to new markets and raw materials. More recently the World Trade Organization was established in 1995 to continue the corporate agenda...Once again however, given what has happened since, it appears that the real purpose of WTO has been to engineer the elimination of all barriers to trade, for the benefit of the strongest[19]

Stiglitz  saw the same forces at work, having had an intimate contact at the highest level with these institutional framework that propels economic globalization as we know it. For him globalization despite its benefits, both cosmetic and actual, seems ontologically crafted for the sole and exclusive economic benefit of the rich Western world. Joseph Stiglitz had this in view when he went straight for the jugular vein of the whole argument.

The critics of globalization accuse Western countries of hypocrisy, and the critics are right. The Western countries have pushed the poor countries to eliminate trade barrier, but kept up their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income. The United States was, of course the prime culprits...even when not guilty of hypocrisy, the West has driven the globalization agenda, ensuring that it garners a disproportionate share of the benefits, at the expense of the developing world[20]

In the light of these strangulating structures crafted to scuttle the growth of the poor economies, one then wonders how poor countries could ever engineer an escape from the impoverishment imposed and actively sustained by this kind of economic architecture. A critical study of the evolution of the key players or major Western financial and economic institutions driving globalization, all existing concentrically around Washington[21] consolidates the conclusion that "globalization is another window, which the West hopes to perpetuate economic domination, which in the case of Africa began with slavery to colonization and now neo-colonization"[22]

The other debilitating dimension to globalization is that it has enthroned raw capitalism and the naked drive for profit, as the new Leviathan; unfettered by the burdens of any social contract, on humanity. This is because,

…in all, in this globalization a handful of big corporations are ruling us, controlling our minds as well as our bodies. Globalization for them means giving big business access to a global market, to produce as cheaply as possible and to make huge profits for their shareholders, with no regard for the rest of us. In their greed they show no loyalty to place or citizens. They come and go as they please. What happens to a society or community as a result of their actions is of no interest to them[23]

One then need not search further for why the global environment now lies close to catastrophic destruction[24] or why Africa continues to wallow in poverty.

It is seriously distressing that the modern world has been cleverly seduced by profit, into replacing democracy and self determination with a "government of the big businesses, by the IMF and World Bank, for the share holders". This is the huge behemoth that has almost always torpedoed Africa's resurrection from poverty. Many big businesses have been fingered in the destabilization of many African governments in their bid to gain an unrestrained access to Africa's raw materials. Many of them with the active collaboration of some Western intelligence agencies supported and stabilized many kleptocratic regimes across Africa.

5. Globalization and  African Destiny:  Sold, Negotiated, or Purchased Futures?

With the reconfiguration of the world order at the instance of globalization, a conceptual and actual re-colonization of Africa future seems inevitably to be becoming a reality.  This re-colonization of futures is evidenced in the fact, that there proliferates, major forums, where major world corporations, governments, international institutions, banks, concerns and monopolies compare notes, create coalitions and set agendas, that is imposed upon the rest of the world, most times without consultations. This globalizing force subsists on futures that have already being planned and negotiated. It is dangerous for Africa, because the horizon and agendas according to which futures are planned and designed reflect limited interest and agendas. Many of them were not matters of broad public awareness. They were never part of any civic reflection. It was a future already planned, bought and sold several times over, before Africans even started to think about them. And this is to say, that left at this, Africans would spend their entire existence, reacting to futures designed, prepared and communicated piecemeal by world governments, lecherous corporations and puerile African collaborators. These decisions determine the fate of millions of people from less advantaged regions of the world without their consent or representation; thereby including them while excluding them. The question then becomes: where does Africa feature in all these with her compromised position? Where do African interests intersect with the avaricious and amoral interests of rugged capital? How does our plight fare in the radar screens of self-interest of the developed economies and capitalist corporations, whose sole driving motive is profit?

Today, on the throes of globalization, as Jan Niederveen (2000:1) noted; governance is increasingly a matter of international politics, supranational institutions, international treaties and law, in the process involving macro-regional bodies, trans-national corporations, trans-national citizen groups, and media interacting in a complex, turbulent, multi-centric ways.[25] And since most of African countries are still husbanding compromised economies, ontological sabotaged by colonialism, and lately ravaged by the scourge of Structural Adjustment, which unleashed and liberalized poverty all over Africa, she stands no chance of negotiating for her welfare in this globalized forum, on an equal footing. She is burdened by a strangulating debt profile. This weakens and enfeebles her position. She can therefore, afford to allow IMF and World Bank armchair technocrats, to engineer a take-over of her economies, as we have continued to witness today. She can afford to swallow policy prescriptions forced upon her by these technocrats. Most of these prescriptions are discredited developmental models, as Joseph Stiglitz has authoritatively shown, which lacks a clear vision for leading Africa out of her predicament. They are alien concepts that take no cognizance of the African socio-cultural or geopolitical realities. And they were destined to fail, as recent history has affirmed.

This is made clearer by the fact that Africa’s compromised position, does not intersect, interconnect or meet with the agendas set and dictated by the league of developed economies and capitalist Mega-monopolistic conglomerates, which are only in business to maximize profit.[26]

Globalization has been termed the grand ideological war of the 21st century. This is a war that has been joined by so many ideological, philosophical and epistemic kingdoms and conceptual schemes. All the epistemic perspectives in this ideological war have converged on two perspectival divides; namely, the proponents and the opponents of globalization. We would not claim ignorant of the fact that there are a lot of spectators in this arena, who are safely sitting on the fence. It is of interest to note that our experience of the opponents of globalization, does not betray a rabid or ribald rejection of globalization as a phenomenon. The opponents are mainly of the view that the way globalization is being driven today lends much to be required as it violates all canons of decency and ethical considerations. This school argues that globalisation as it is driven today, by a neo-liberal capitalistic ethic, which bends the knee only at the altars of mammon and profit, can never be configured or appropriated in the quest for a birth of a new dawn for Africa. We share this view totally.

It is therefore, our belief, that globalization as it is presently driven, constitutes an ontological violation of human solidarity, in as much as Africa is concerned. Here, we are of the view that no man should be allowed to die, because he cannot afford to live. To this end, the needs of the poor must have priority over the wants of the rich. That is an ethical imperative. Furthermore, we reiterate that development must be about people and business must be about ethics[27]. In this regard, human beings anywhere, especially in Africa, should not be sacrificed at the altars of profit maximization. Human beings are ends in themselves and should never be configured as a means to any end whatsoever. Furthermore, we advocate the dismantling of any system that marginalizes human beings based on class, race, sex or social status. The participation of marginalized groups has precedence over preservation of a system that excludes them.

6.  How Globalization Can Work from the Peripheries

Majority of humanity existing at the peripheries of relevance live in sub-Saharan Africa. How could Africa deploy the globalization process to her advantage?  Fundamentally, Africa must seek her own future. She does not need to essay to overthrow a process that is in progress, as that would simply being an anachronistic waste of development time. Any canvassing for the dismantling of the globalization process, or a reversion to the status quo ante, would amount to entertaining an unattainable nostalgia for an era that has expired. This is because the Africa of today is almost on all fronts profoundly wired to global centres in politics, trade, finance,  market, exports etc. And African development project today can only make contemporary and better sense, and stands a better chance of success, if it is a regional development project that is part of a global dynamic, which is not discriminatory. 

The advent of an African renaissance may have a nostalgic purchase, and could ideologically kick-start a process of development. But the parochial exclusion of both historical and modern globalizing realities would be insufficient and notoriously inadequate to generate relevant progressive developmental scenarios. Here we share Petersen’s view that regional projects should both inform and be informed by global futures, because this view essays for “an interdependence and balance of local, national, regional and global engagements[28], which is the reality embosoming us today.  But be that as it may, we are advocating for a modification of those structures driving globalization, which harbour in their blueprint, an exploitative equation that creates and consolidates poverty and inequities in Africa. Here we have in mind, the debt question, which paralyses every African attempt to be a meaningful participant in the globalizing process. We equally have in mind the unfair trade balances. These are economic.

We have not equally lost sight of the cultural and sociological implications of this process, which sacks cultures, irreversibly eliminate values and erode ancient traditional realities, developed over time; which have shielded peoples and cultures from the historical vagaries of social entropy, and which added value and variety to human existence and history. We do not wish to make much fuss about this dimension of it, because culture is forever dynamic, and we believe in the resilience and elasticity of veritable human cultural practices to recover or re-bounce to a new vitality, assimilating innovations, to build up their values. To this end, the threat of many cultures staring extinction in the face; with the threats of being replaced by a quasi-orchestrated cultural uniformity of a McWorld, would not receive much attention from us in this expose, because we share  Paul Valadier’s views that

without being overly optimistic,...there are enduring features in moral values , modes of thought, myths and beliefs. And these features are not biodegradable, and are not subject to the world of the animal laborans-that is the world of the constant renewing of life which constantly destroys itself, the world of utility and consumption. The cultural world is never a product of utility of consumption, but comes from the realm of meaning and freedom[29]

But we equally do not lose sight of the fact, that globalization is dangerously mimicking the evolution towards the construction of an empire, which we have seen in historical instances of the rise of empires. This is because empire, as rightly recognized by Hardt & Negri (2000):

...is a machine for universal integration, an open mouth with infinite appetite, inviting all to come peacefully within it domain (Give me your poor, your hungry, your down trodden masses...) The Empire does not fortify its boundaries to push others away, but rather pulls them within its pacific order, like a powerful vortex. With boundaries and differences suppressed or set aside, the Empire is a kind of smooth space across which subjectivities glide without substantial resistance or conflict[30]

And for our authors, “the power and mechanisms of imperial sovereignty can be understood only when confronted on the most general scale, in their globality”[31]. Be that as it may, Africa must at this point repudiate voluntary servitude and embrace liberatory politics in her international relations. She must create circles of influence around herself, through regional co-operation, which would enable her to subtract herself from relationships of exploitation imposed on her from without. African leadership must realise that power depends on how you view it, because weakness can transform into some new form of strength depending on how you view[32] The Walk-out and the break down of the Cancun Talks is an example of how under-privilege could be harnessed as a great bargaining chip. The European Union has succeeded in this, the African union must transcend being a mere conglomeration of kleptocratic amphictonies, who have constituted themselves as the waterloo of progress in the continent.

Here we advocate principally, the tackling of the leadership problem, since we have recognized today from below, that the problem with Africa, as Chinua Achebe and George Ayittey would contend, remains squarely the failure of leadership. Africa has spent much of previous decades fighting for her servitude as stubbornly as if that is our salvation. We must band together even in our poverty to create a coalition of non-collaborators to our exploitation.  Though we inherited a lot of historical, socio-economic and geopolitical disadvantages, which have been dogging our march to development till today. But we must not hide under the excuse of these disadvantages forever.

From below, we know that at the centre of globalization process lies its economic dimensions which revolves around the ideology of markets. We name capital flows, global financial markets etc. But we equally recognize that markets forces are powerful which could be for good. But the deleterious outcomes we are facing today have continued to show the dangers of allowing it an unrestrained and unchecked leeway. This powerful market forces are not omnipotent. They must be regulated and directed toward achieving social felicity for all and sundry, and to narrow the chasm between the haves and the have not.

The regulatory and juridical structures are necessary, but we believe that African governments should not pontificate excessively in an area that mocks their incompetence. Governments should not try to pollute markets forces and its incentives with unnecessary politicking or social engineering especially, where they lack the capacity for such a venture. Similarly African governments should not be arm-twisted by foreign Creditors into auctioning off its destiny to the rugged capitalistic liberalizations, which expose the citizens to the unprotected hammer blows of profit. The social interest must be a paramount consideration.

World Bank and IMF’s discredited structural Adjustments mantra, saw African economies being hijacked by socially amoral liberalization and deregulations, and created a band of oligarchs that crippled and privatized the Russian economy to their private estates. So a purely market driven economy will translate into a jungle, and though a possibility, is a practical monstrosity. The question then is: Why has the IMF and World Bank being imposing this model on African economies

Finally from below, we are of the view that globalization should be driven by human solidarity, and not solely the motive of monetary and financial profit, which masks plain greed. Here we find a workable refuge in the concept of “Preferential option for the poor”. This is to the effect, that the needs of the poor should never be sacked in favour of luxuriance of the rich.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a common belief of all men of goodwill, that only a fundamental change of heart, a reacquisition of humane values of empathic solidarity, and an ethical re-evaluation of the poverty question in Africa, will realign Africa into the groove of globalization, and save our world some ecological, security, and geo-political embarrassments.  I believe that you are all men and women of goodwill.

Thanks for your time.

Endnotes

About the Author

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh is on the Faculty of Social Ethics, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany