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BEYOND REBUILDING YORUBAI: THE TAIWAN MODEL
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order the world." - Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain / UK, October 2001.
A kaleidoscope is a toy made up of a tube containing many shards of differently coloured glass or plastic. Every time the tube is shaken, the pieces resettle into a new mosaic. The colonial-countries in Africa are in flux. Sooner or later they will be shaken vigorously, and may not settle for some time to come, and then almost certainly in new mosaics that might not please current national interests. In mid-west Africa, incipient nations are restive within and across the borders of remnant multi-national countries. Yorubai or Oduduwa or Yorubaland is one trans-country nation-in-waiting onto whose roots the British grafted the much-rejected trunk of Nigeria, and the French, Benin and Togo.
Yorubai will be. When we do not yet know. Here, we consider how Yorubai can prepare by learning from lessons and observations of Taiwan, itself a subsumed nation but within China.
SOME LESSONS AND OBSERVATIONS
1. Taiwan is a semi-sovereign island-nation with a largely homogenous (majority Chinese culture and people) population in a globally competitive country with one of the world's largest populations; Yorubai is a marine-facing incipient nation with a largely homogenous (majority Yoruba culture and people) in a trade-deficient country with large settlements of heterogenous populations. Taiwan has economic policies that are coherently pro-Taiwanese people, and based on merchanisation and digitisation, state-sponsored infrastructure, and export-oriented merchantilism; Yorubai and its encapsulating colonial-countries have anti-people policies that are incoherent (in all spheres), and based on mining rents and favours from primary production, as well as import-oriented consumption.
2. Taiwan has focussed crucially on subsidizing basic, rather than advanced, education, along with an active effort to network with the Taiwanese diaspora and promote its return. Yorubai should heed this lesson. Historically, the Yoruba have focused on heirarchical (advanced) education rather than on basic vocational and technical traiining, practical research, and trade shools. We seem to be happy if the educated ones among us migrate. The colonial-countries have been happy to oblige. While abroad, Yoruba intellectuals have limited trouble-making impact, and are less powerful to influence policy back home.
3. Brain drain generated a great deal of political anxiety in Taiwan, but did not stop the country's economy from growing at a remarkable rate. Yoruba and African brain drain does not generate political anxiety at home because the colonial-country politicians have no need for home-grown talent. By hiring foreigners, the politicians get two-for-one: (a) Foreigners have the requisite knowledge. (b) Foreigners are also interested in getting "harvested" funds outside the nation, so they are discreet and do not ask "foolish" questions. Yorubai needs to manage brain drain into brain gain because the Yoruba people are losing thrice over (a) We are exporting investment and social capital with every skilled emigrant. (b) Yorubai has business opportunities and public services that only home-grown investors will find useful to pursue. (c) Asking questions help to bring about public debate and planned activities.
4. The expertise that diaspora Taiwanese brought back on return to Taiwan fueled a boom in the domestic high-tech sector. Many Yoruba and African diaspora are NOT influential actors in the high-tech sector. Even when employed in the relevant industries, it is uncommon for them to be in core management or applied knowledge roles. Yorubai needs to be globally competitive in economic and social productivity. The lesson is that to uplift local capabilities, rather than relying on foreigners, in so many of our technical projects. It is crucial to develop local capabilities in important technologies. There are entire new fields of knowledge and industry in which we must build local capability, such as nano-technology, psychology and persuasion, genetic engineering, remote sensing and control, space industries, and more. We are unlikely to enjoy the collaborations and knowledge transfer that Taiwan accessed from its domain in Asia and from abroad, so we must explore alternative mechanisms for knowledge acquisition and information security.
5. Taiwan's industrialization began with low-tech, labor-intensive export manufacturing. Capital and the majority of the technical expertise came from foreign investors. Yorubai started within Nigeria with this same industrialization model, but there are subtle yet significant differences. The outstanding majority of Taiwan's “foreign” investors were and remain the Chinese diaspora who found the mainland too restrictive and migrated to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, USA, EU, Africa, etc. Most of Taiwan's exports is via trading links established with these fellow Chinese across the world. Yorubai is encapsulated within colonial-countries but has an international Yoruba diaspora built up, inadvertently, during the Maafa of European and Arab slave trade in African labour. The Yoruba diaspora is strongest in Caribbean, South and North America. In time, Yorubai nationhood was halted by countries gaining political independence from Britain and France. The new countries promptly began to attempt industrialization by seeking to “leapfrog” the technical advancements of the colonial exploiters and other nations with “import-substitution” strategies. Nigeria, for example, imported high-tech, capital-intensive factories; imported technical advisers who then refused to transfer know-how and refused to let Yoruba and other Nigerian technicians learn the technologies; and imported foreign capital to pay for the factories and the technicians. Even now, the world continues to enjoy hearing functionally illiterate politicians promote “foreign direct investment” as the means to domestic socio-economic progress. Yorubai should combine high and low technologies, without fear or favour. Efforts should be made to reach to the Maafa diaspora and the more recent post-independence diaspora to be the "foreign" investors in Yorubai projects as well as the key facilitators of international trade. The Yoruba should become more active investors in communities outside the African continent. Abroad, many African heritage diaspora communities will welcome a re-kindling of authentic Yoruba connections, capital and cultural contexts.
6. The competitive weakness of Yorubai domestic economy is derived from the contemporary Yoruba policial situation. The flood of low grade imports and dubious electoral candidates results from the same low grade of political and economic completeness. The current crop of colonial-country political actors are unlikely to lead any radical changes in the economic arena. It is up to private sector businesses of every encapsulated ethnic nation to engineer a marked turnaround in its economic outlook and political prospects. Opportunities are available for building domestic production capacity that can win consumer favour over from imports. Similarly, threats have subsided to those seeking greater autonomy in political determination. But the years of failing to plan are now apparent.
7. Taiwan's relatively positive experience with high-skilled migration was built on education policies launched in the 1950s, when the country began to invest in public and private education at a rate that far outstripped most countries with similar resources. Yorubai has been strongly dis-investing from education and skills development since the 1970s under the federated education system of Nigeria. Even as the rate of knowledge investment is falling, ever more of our meagre national earnings are going toward payment of debt and interest. Not only do we spend less per capita on education, we are spending on the wrong type of education. With the trojan horses of foreign capital well entrenched in the public and private spheres of African countries, there is need to evolve a hybrid community-owned structure to engage in the much needed investments with as much flexibility in pricing and public accountability as is feasible.
8. Taiwan in 1991 awarded only 165 doctorate degrees in engineering, a strikingly low figure for a country where 29 percent of exports were in the high-tech sector and over 10,000 patents were being registered every year. We have not learnt this lesson yet. In 1991, tertiary institutions across Yorubai awarded more doctorates than Taiwan. Advanced degrees are all the rage in our title-cracy education systems. The failure of the education system is the same across the country and the continent. Can't get a job with schools certificate? Go to university! Can't get a job since leaving campus? Go get a Master's! No jobs for M.Sc? Go get a D.Phil or MBA! Yet, Nigeria is estimated to have one of the lowest per capital number of practising engineers in the world. Even more damaging, hardly any of those engineers are or can apply what they have learnt. The missing skills appear to be risk assessment and management, entrepreneurial courage, and conviction. For example, rather than start businesses that mechanise the works done at roadsides all over our nation, our intellectually-challenged engineers prefer to migrate into overseas to where they settle for flipping burgers or end up in dead end jobs as “Vice-President of Stationery”, “Senior Consultant on Diversity”, “Assistant Director on Urban Affairs”, etc. Meanwhile, back home, Nigerians are drivers and umbrella-bearers for a new generation of colonialist foreigners involved in house-building or road works.
9. The Taiwan government provides financial incentives and planned infrastructure for companies. This is what is meant by "government creating an enabling environment" - providing incentives and infrastructure, co-ordinating private sector businesses towards coherent national goals. Yorubai will need to define coherent development plans that engage not only the heritage area, but also two important communities: the Yoruba diaspora and then, neighbouring Africa including our compatriots in Nigeria. As an incipient nation, Yorubai has no goverment to coordinate policy. At state level, sufficient autonomy exists for economic activism within the federal structure. However, the various state governments seem as unlikely to form right-thinking collaborations as ever, and have little visibility beyond the country borders. The needed doctrinal thrust may come from socio-cultural movements such as reactivations or restructuring of Omo Oduduwa, Oduduwa People Congress, Reformed Ogboni, or entirely new Egbe societies that go beyond current geographical or religious borders.
10. Taiwan tries to subsidize education only up to the level actually demanded by the national economy. This is the proper role of subsidies provided by a government. It stimulates and supports educational demand by the national economy. The colonial remnant countries have proven expert mainly in supporting consumption of a foreign educated workforce, thereby subsidizing education in those nations that produce the goods and people we consume. Even more incredulous is the export orientation of the domestically educated workforce, which is essentially trained to seek work abroad, thereby further subsidizing training in those countries that go on to under-compensate our emigrants and over-tax their migrant remittances.
11. Migration can provide a "brain reserve" but should not the brain bank. Yorubai should do more to support diaspora networking and recruitment. The Yoruba are a trans-national tribe. There is need to plan for and encourage a critical mass of returnees. One or more Yoruba states can start by awarding people of the Maafa diaspora and post-independence emigrants 'freedom of the state', and setting up trade facilitation offices to address enquires and provide information. Yorubai is at the core of the emerging pan-African nation. Yet, it has still to efficiently organise its engagement with its economic producers, whether locally resident or in diaspora. Given the paucity of ideas from the local banks and business community, more effort can be made to bring people together at home or in the diaspora in order to pursue initiatives for economic reform. If federal and state governments are handicapped by foreign intervention in sovereign affairs, then policy officers should at least encourage the domestic private sector and facilitate creation of knowledge communities. Already, many diasporians send their children back home for a "proper" education. They bring their families home for a “proper” holiday. They bring their themselves back for a "proper" wedding and funeral. Why not get together to sponsor more of those "proper" schools, a "proper" health centres and then "proper" housing developments?
12. Countries suffering from severe political or economic instability have little hope of attracting the immediate return of high-skilled emigrants. Yorubai is shaking and being shaken by Nigeria, and given Nigeria's pivotal role on British ambitions, is by extension affecting the new world order being engineered. For the Yoruba as with the Taiwanese, there are economic opportunities and threats with great uncertainty of risks and returns. All economic persons, skilled or not, emigrant or not, now face severe political or economic instability and are highly uncertain of the outcome in risks and returns. At least Taiwan is planning and implementing, and is succeeding in being attractive to skilled people. Yorubai can attempt to break the vicious circle only by tackling the twin causes of the instability that causes its children to flee and its diaspora to stay away. The two causes are the insecurity of the haves and the powerlessness of the have-nots. What they have or have-not is power (knowledge, ability, connections, resources) to make opportunities into rewarding work. If Yoruba people are able to kick-start the reformation process, all people of African heritage worldwide will be better off.
To conclude, it is important to bear in mind that adequate planning, education, health and housing are necessary, but not sufficient, to create a progressive community. These are useful investment instruments, but are not in themselves, productive. To attain socio-economic progress, the Yoruba and other African heritage people will need investment in self-worth bolstered by domestic wealth creation. For many people, this means creating “proper” businesses that provide employment and living wages while meeting a customer's demands for a better life. This effort at self-improvement will need to counter the efforts of those who are determined to freely partake of such investment, by force of arms or diplomacy.
Luckily, there are many economic opportunities across Yorubai and Africa that demand investing a little capital with lots of intelligence (applied knowledge). Some opportunities will support a substitution of labour intensity for capital intensity, at least in the early stages. This is fine so long as workers receive a living wage and are trained on the job into learning and using higher skill levels. Entrepreneurs should aim to pay well so employees are incentivised to perform diligently and intelligently. Even as we hold at arms-length politicians who must parrot the convention of free markets for foreign exploitation, we should aim to make products that can compete with the best imports and market same through a trade network of the diaspora to mutual enrichment. In the new order of community of nations, Africa will never get anywhere by following "poverty-alleviation" policies that condemn it to be a "low-cost, low value-added" nation.
The use of the word "Yorubai" is a liberty taken by the author to be the name of the incipient Yoruba nation.
This material submitted to Nigeria Village Square website on Odunde, 3 Okudu 2008. Available in Yoruba and English.
This material is copyright © Remi-Niyi Alaran 2008. It is originally published on Ayekan.com.
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Posted by Robot| 05.06.2008 09:01