| Ken Saro-Wiwa, “The World Bank And Us” |
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| Written by Uchenna Osigwe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Saturday, 10 November 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Would Ken have supported the recent debt deal Nigeria struck with the Paris Club, the World Bank, and their affiliate institutions? The answer, for those familiar with Ken’s writings and his afrocentrism, is most probably no. But for the avoidance of doubt, I think Ken would be the first to rejoice at the fact that Nigerians have by sheer hard work become senior members of the World Bank. He would most likely be among the first to celebrate it as a sign of the competence of the said Nigerians. But that celebration would not go beyond the shores of the country. This is because Ken was one of the most strident critics of the World Bank and the IMF. In an article titled “The World Bank And Us”,( an essay in his similia column in the Sunday Times of Lagos between 1989 and 1990), Ken challenged the bank to show one country it has lifted out of poverty with its policies. That article was published decades ago. And the World Bank has not yet taken up that challenge. If anything, the opposite has remained the case: countries that have taken the World Bank prescribed pills have remained in economic coma with little hope of coming out alive.
In the article, Ken narrated how he was invited to a party at the Indian High Commission in Lagos, celebrating the Indian National Day. He was genuinely surprised at the unsolicited invitation. Once at the party, he ran into a diplomat who happened to be a “High official of the World Bank”. For Ken, both the World Bank and the IMF were the same and so he was using them interchangeably. To make it clearer, both the World Bank and the IMF belong to the organization “Known collectively as the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), after the village in New Hampshire, USA, where they were founded by delegates of 44 nations in July 1944, the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are twin intergovernmental pillars supporting the structure of the world's economic and financial orders, The "World Bank" refers to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and its affiliate, the International Development Agency (IDA). The IBRD also includes the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). The World Bank, the IFC and MIGA are commonly referred to as the World Bank Group”. —South Africa Department of Foreign Affairs. This meeting between Ken and the World Bank group representative took place in the context of the infamous IMF and World Bank induced Structural Adjustment Program of the IBB regime. Recall that the Buhari regime refused to take any loans from any of those neo-colonial institutions. (As an aside, some analysts think that if the official west was not responsible for the toppling of that regime by the IBB junta, it was clearly a welcome relief to it. I certainly am not an apologist of the Buhari junta. But I think the regime was right in refusing the poison from the IMF, the World Bank, and their affiliate institutions, overt and covert ones included. On that point the Buhari junta did the right thing by going after the Nigerian monies Nigerian public officials, like Umaru Dikko, stole and stashed away in western banks. Even as I write this, such monies are still being unscrupulously kept by those financial institutions and their off shore fiscal havens. It is an open secret that Nigeria can give herself more than any lending institution can give her if she could bring back her money stolen by her own sons and daughters and stashed away in mostly Western banks and institutions). But I digress.
Ken clearly relished that meeting and saw it as “an opportunity for me to send a message to the Fund through one of its representatives in Nigeria”. But as it turned out, the representative had no lesson to learn from him about the devastating effect of their policies in Nigeria. He had visited all but two states of the country, mostly by road.
Here is Ken’s verdict of the World Bank Group:” Forty years of the World Bank experiment in turning the economies of debtor-nations round has not resulted in success in a single country. Yet the Bank persists in its folly. Which makes you believe that their mission in debtor nations is not to heal but to rub salt into wounds. To collect debts and to send the nations into even greater debt so that the World Bank can remain in the nations forever.” All I have to add to this damning verdict is that it is no longer forty years but well over 60 years (counting from 1944), and the story is still the same.
Ken also spoke of the political angle to the World Bank trap. The representative told him, when he complained of the horrific consequences of their policies in Nigeria that they would not be in the country if Nigeria had not gone on a borrowing spree. The World Bank accepts that some of its policies are faulty and that it pays its employees incredible salaries and allowances. But they kept blaming the governments, charging that they are corrupt, autocratic and oppress their own people. For Ken, what this means is that “the World Bank and its Euro-American mentors will stop forcing incompetent rulers and brutes upon third and “enth” world societies in the belief that such men will brutalize their peoples and compel them to accept the bitter pill which the World Bank means to force down the nations’ throats.”
Ken, of course was under no illusion that all that was needed to turn the economy of Nigeria and other developing countries around would be just to drive away the neo-colonial financial institutions that have been financially enslaving them. No. He was well aware that in addition one needs to work very hard. He did not just talk the talk, he also walked the walk. He worked very hard in every endeavour to which he was committed and despite his enormous economic and social successes, lived a very simple life and practiced thrift.
Ken was a very prudent manager of resources. As he said in the article in question, “I believe that all Nigerians, indeed, all black people, must work hard, think hard, practise thrift and show dedication to progress”. This stance was corroborated by one of Ken’s attorneys during his farcical trial by the Auta tribunal that sentenced him to death. In his article in The Guardian four years ago to mark the anniversary of Ken’s judicial murder, Sam Amadi recounted how he was surprised at the meticulous manner in which Ken scrutinized all the expenses made by his family during his incarceration. He was once dismayed that money was spent to buy the water that he was drinking. Amadi, who knew that Ken was a millionaire, asked the latter why he was so concerned about the pittance used to buy the water. According to Amadi, Ken looked at him as if with pity and then said, “My friend, if you save those pennies, they add up” or something like that. For good measure he added, “Why buy water when you could boil it?”. In his book of tribute to his father, Ken’s first son said that one of the counsels his dad gave him was this: “If Jesus saves, so must you”. Put simply, he was advising him not to spend his money drinking and partying. This is an advice Nigerians need to take to heart. I think the amount of money Nigerians and successive Nigerian governments have been wasting in useless parties to celebrate all sorts of trifles would run into billions in all the major currencies of the world. Yet we hardly have enough to eat.
Ken knew quite clearly that the amount needed to clean up his native land of oil related despoliation will run into tens of billions of dollars. He said in his prison diary, A Month And A Day, that they would have to find that money. Was he going to turn to the World Bank group? With his conviction, based on facts, that those institutions exist to ensure the perpetual underdevelopment of the so-called third world countries, the answer is obvious.
A year ago, after we coughed out over $12.5bn to pay some phantom debts (President Obasanjo admitted the debts were of dubious origin but still went ahead to pay them), we were told that the money saved would be used for development, but development we have not seen. On the contrary what we have seen is underdevelopment: lack of amenities, lack of jobs, empty libraries, empty hospitals and empty stomachs. The debt deal also ties Nigeria to an economic restructuring program monitored by the IMF and designed to attract foreign investments. To put it in a nutshell, as a direct result of the deal, our economic and financial policies are simply being dictated from Washington. We were also told that we were “debt free”. But in less than two years, our foreign debt is already close to $5bn and counting. When shall we be freed from that vicious economic cycle?
From the World Banks website, one reads the following: “As of August 31, 2007, the World Bank is helping to improve living standards for the people of Nigeria with 23 ongoing IDA and 2 GEF projects. Project objectives range from providing access to education and health services, to restoring transportation networks, to connecting more households to piped water. Together, the commitment value for the active projects in Nigeria is approximately US$2.67 billion.” Nigeria is also already heavily indebted to China in a railway contract deal to the tune of $1bn. There are many we don’t know of yet. Thisday of Thursday, 8 Nov 2007 reported that “Nigeria currently owes about $3.5 billion to multilateral institutions”. The exact figures are already in dispute again. Notice that the World Bank says “approximately”. Goodness!
It is over two decades since Ken wrote that scathing article about the enslaving policies of western financial institutions in developing nations. It is twelve years since Ken’s live was snuffed out by a murderous Nigerian regime.
I
believe it is time for Nigeria,
and other economically oppressed countries to take their economic destiny into
their own hands. And, as Cardoso, a former
president of Brazil,
counselled us in our own country a few years back, we need to free ourselves from
the tenterhooks of these neo-colonial institutions. If we don’t free ourselves from those
enslaving policies, we will continue , as Ken said in his final statement, to “empty our classrooms, denigrate our
hospitals, fill our stomachs with hunger and elect to make ourselves the slaves
of those who ascribe to higher standards, pursue the truth, and honour justice,
freedom, and hard work.”
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Posted by Robot| 10.11.2007 09:50