After a few years of observation, one regretfully notes nowadays that notable changes in the living conditions do not take place in the countries which underwent the sovereign national conference to solve their problems. The social disturbances that continue in these countries suggest that this experiment was not the best solution.
However, it is necessary to make sure that these forums took well into account the necessary representativeness of the ethnic groups in place, and were not rather only satisfied with filling the meeting rooms with "house Negroes".
It is unfortunately common that the leaders selected by those meetings are generally either international civil servants or decade-long political refugees exiled in the West, who all often see the development only through the deforming prisms of the Bretton Woods institutions or the logics of the "planetary economy", in obvious ignorance of the country’s cultural realities yet impossible to circumvent during any construction of the State. Even though the financing promises of these institutions are not held, as in Eastern Europe or elsewhere.
Economic theories are not transposable as needed.
It is indeed illusory to believe that an economic theory can apply to all societies at any time. The theory of liberalism could apply in the Western national economies at a certain time. It fails today in a mondialized economy with interdependent markets in societies which live the mirages of modernity.
In addition to the fact that these economies are constantly bled of their riches by Western powers, the economic theories applied in poor countries did not yield the expected successes. From the planning strategies based on big public State-owned enterprises to the promotion of the policies of PME/PMI (small and medium-sized enterprises and industries) preached by the neoliberalism, the development meant as individual growth and blooming did not follow. All this has always resulted in the erection of some rich clans of individuals located in towns, certain ethnic groups or certain groups with the pay of foreign interests, away from the majority of increasingly miserable populations. The economy-world and its profit-king dig even more the separation of these social levels.
An economic theory formulated starting from the observation of a culture which has its scale of values, its leisure, its purchase practices, its ethics, its morals, its notion of the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly, cannot be transposed as needed in a different culture. Economic science will not be an exact science as long as it is not convinced of the necessary transdisciplinarity.
Sociological and even anthropological studies should not be omitted when it comes to implement an economic strategy in a given society. The "house Negroes" who systematically magnify the economic theories imported from the West, in spite of the social devastations which come with, will hardly be perceived differently than the saboteurs of the economies that they already had weakened. The result of it is that the net flow of capital related to debt and transferred from poor countries towards rich countries from 1984 to 1990 reached 150.5 billion US dollars, the double of the Marshall plan for the rebuilding of Europe from 1948 to 1952 . Isn't this a proof of naivety to ask a Marshall plan for Africa from our Western torturers as some do?
The claim of the Nigerian presidentiable Chief Abiola (mentioned by rev. Jesse Jackson during the African-Afro-Americans Summit held from last May 24-29) consequently becomes legitimate, which considers that there is no specified debt to repay the West but rather that Africa must claim the reparation of the secular damage it underwent with slavery, colonization and the vandal exploitation of its soil and sub-soil resources. We should only wish that one first recognizes that Africans are the owners of their land. It is more likely to be convinced of the opposite.
Even hopes caused by Afro-Americans - they announced in Libreville that they intend to be based within African nations by taking local African nationality in order to develop Black Africa from inside - deserve a careful step back. Beyond any sentimentalism, the speech of George Moose, the Under-Secretary of State in charge of African Affairs during this summit, did not distance him from the logic of economy-world, the economy of unearned revenues that forces of money intend to impose everywhere.
“The Clinton government is convinced that growth caused by the private sector, as well African as American, offers the best hope to benefit from the enormous economic and political possibilities of Africa. (…) Experience taught us that a durable growth cannot occur in countries where the government dominates the economy and where it is owner of companies ", he said (translated from French version).
Therefore, aren't these Afro-Americans who intend to return on their ancestral land - they insisted that they want to be called from now on African-Americans – going to finally be (according to the Moose’s own remarks) other "house Negroes" in Black African countries, primarily charged - in collusion with the IMF and the WB present locally, but also with the French neo-colonialist - to concretize the prevalence of the market over the State? It is necessary to express reservations about the good intentions these Afro-Americans show when it is known that even in the United States they are those who support the "world technological apartheid” . Liberia now torn up by war, under the scorning glance of Western powers and of these same Afro-Americans, isn’t it the experiment of a State created by freed slaves from the United States back in 1847 and who returned on their ancestral land? What did these African-Americans do in favor of this country torn apart?
The African micro-nations thus run the risk to undergo soon a double exploitation by the "house Negroes": those holding the power and protective of colonialist interests and those with the same qualifier who would come to concretize the superpower of the private sector over the State. And these nationalities’ hopes of development will be moved back as far as the eye can see.
Far from evolving towards the conquest of an independence never acquired, sub-Saharan Africa would be torn up even more than in the past by multiple social crises, punctuated with violent conflicts. The extremists of La' akam (a tribalist association of the Bamilekes) in the opposition and of Essingang (a tribalist association of the Betis) around president Paul Biya expose Cameroon to this risk. The vicious circle of misery for the majority of the natives versus the growing blooming of the minority of African and African-American "house Negroes"! That is the sad future.
It thus appears that, in addition to colonial domination, Africa will soon have to carry the burden of the economy-world’s domination. The pawns are placed. And the Africans will be even more losers tomorrow than yesterday.
The best solutions to launch any development are to be found in involving the contribution of all the intelligences of African micro-nations. Instead of granting whole sections of territories and the populations at the mercy of investors in search of production at cheap prices within the framework of the free zones, the African political leader should undergo the obligation to present, in order to be elected, a clear program of how to saving his nation from the domination of colonial powers and from that of the unearned revenues economy. To this end, it is desirable to abandon the logics of "intangibility of borders inherited colonization and recognized by UNO". The autonomy of ethnic groups, those nations and micro-States, is an opportunity towards a durable resolution of the conflicts.
The federal system appears to be best solution, which would gather the new autonomous areas (States) in a central federal government. Only the cultural force of federate autonomous States seems to be able to overcome colonial and money powers.
It is suicidal to see federalism based on imported languages and cultures, like English and French on our country. This is because germs of division will survive in our ancestral culture differences.
The choice of the individuals to manage the State, in this context washed off its parasites, has chances from now on to be freely left to these supreme sovereign communities in an actual democratic environment enriched by cultural positivities of the land. It is from there that strong nations will be born, which will result into strong States.
A development which is planned based on the enrichment of some "house Negroes" would more hardly guarantee social peace than a development which gets along with that of autonomous national communities.
Taking base on imported cultures to support claims - case of the GCE on the fact that London does not any more recognize the Cameroonian diploma - would hardly fail to leave indifferent a citizen much more commanded by his ancestral culture.
The failures of economic theories are often due to the fact that economic agents’ anticipations are poorly measured. It appears essential to become impregnated with a given community’s cultural realities before applying any economic therapeutic to it.
Our nations would hardly hold out in a race of the sheep.
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1 Expression Malcom X use to designate the "assimilated" among Blacks under slavery - See Spike Lee's film Malcom X
2 Paul Marie de la Corse – Le Monde Diplomatique, September 1992
3 Ignacio Romanet – Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1993.
4 Albert Memmi in “Portrait de Colonisé”, Gallimard, 1985
5 See tableau by Stephen Kappata "Traditional Culture", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1993
6 "The Frontiers of Global Economy", Le Monde Diplomatique, Manière de Voir No18
7 UNDP – Report on the human development 1992, pp 56-57
8 Ricardo Petrella, in Towards a Global “Techno-apartheid”, shows how a combined apartheid takes place in the Western society, which separates, starting with technology, the poor from the rich. he notes that the Third World, with the same misery, exists henceforth in the Heart of New York because of the invading ultraliberalism.
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