Those who blame Africans for Africa’s poverty forget that the Asian Tiger nations that they usually commend for zooming into the First World did not experience the economic dislocation that accompanies physical removal of able-bodied youths to another continent.
But that is not to say that there were no African fifth columnists that compromised the progress of Africa. For purposes of clarification, fifth columnists are people who undermine a larger group from within, to an enemy or nation.
Though it may not be an exactly accurate analogy, the idea of fifth columnists could be explained by the story of the Trojan Horse. Unsuspecting Trojans drew a wooden horse decoy, left by the seemingly retreating Greek army, into Troy. At night, Greek soldiers, hidden in the wooden horse, came out, and opened the city gate for their comrades to despoil Troy.
The expression, “Fifth Columnist,” was first used by rebel General Emilio Mola of the insurgent Spanish Nationalist Party, to describe sympathisers within the city of Madrid, as he, and fellow Generals Francisco Franco, Jose Enrique Varela Iglesias, and Gonzalo Quipo de Llano, were simultaneously leading four columns of troops that were advancing onto Madrid.
In 1936, General Mola coined this phrase to explain to a journalist that his rebel group had committed sympathisers even within Madrid ahead of the Spanish Civil War that lasted between 1936 and 1939.
Nigeria’s fifth columnists are more or less economic saboteurs, who do the evil round of compromising the economic interests of Nigeria to the advantage of their foreign collaborators, who have only come to take advantage of the good that Nigeria has to offer.
Recall the $9.6bn scam contrived against Nigeria by some unpatriotic Nigerian state actors and their unscrupulous foreign friends. President Muhammadu Buhari recently reported to the United Nations General Assembly that these scammers were “attempting to cheat (it should have been steal from) Nigeria, billions of dollars.”
It may be a bit difficult to fault the logic of Japanese management consultant, Kenechi Ohmae, who justifies the existence of multinationals with the argument that “Modern economies are interconnected… (as) similar standards of living are emerging that tend to create people with the same consumption patterns and value systems.”
He adds: This “results in a more or less natural distribution of human capital and technological resources across national borders… (while) a good product will find market in all key countries of the world.”
Well, it would be real “cool” if the companies that owned the capital and technology that produced the global brands that are being consumed in Nigeria and elsewhere belong to Nigerian citizens: Ohmae may have been justifying the existence of multinationals because Japan, his home country, and America, his wife’s country, are big players in the multinationals’ racket.
It would be interesting to know the thoughts of Ohmae if Japan and America were Third World countries, who would have no choice but to become unwilling consumers of goods produced in other climes, or become hosts of multinationals that remit huge profits taken from their weak economies back to the more viable metropolitan countries.
But back to the story of local collaborators of the International Monopoly Capital that Socialist and Communist thinkers contemptuously describe as compradors, a phrase initially employed to describe Chinese agents who acted as intermediaries between foreign business interests and their local employees within ancient China.
Perhaps, the first set of Nigerian compradors were those local chieftains, and their foot soldiers, who organised raids to capture and sell fellow Africans to European slave traders, who resold the slaves to provide cheap labour for the big time farmers who ran farm plantations in the Americas, starting from the mid-17th Century.
In recent times, the compradors of the International Monopoly Capital are of three categories: The first are members of the Nigerian merchant class whose major business is wholly concentrated on importing and merchandising foreign made consumer goods.
You also have to include those unpatriotic importers of petroleum products, and the state actors who thought they should run the local petroleum refineries at sub-par, so they could appoint and collude with the importers to run the dirty-criminal ring of petrol subsidy.
Other compradors of this ilk are those who are businessmen during the daytime, but become politicians at night. These wolves in sheep’s clothing sometimes take up positions, as chairmen or directors of government agencies in order to wreak havoc within those agencies.
Rent-a-director leeches, whose currency is influence peddling, deploy charm offensives on behalf of their multinational paymasters, who, in turn, deploy immense cash, obtained at lower interest rates from their home countries, to compete against fledgling indigenous entrepreneurs.
These multinationals market, or sometimes manufacture, slicker, cheaper and more readily available products, that are far superior to the products of Nigerian manufacturers. Someone points out that locust beans is cheaper in a certain South African retails outfit that operates in Nigeria than it is in the local markets.
The next group are those who prefer to work solely, as corporate types, for foreign business interests in Nigeria: They invest their talents, not only in promoting or marketing foreign products and services, they also find clever, but subtle, ways to sabotage local business initiatives.
But by far most dangerous to the interest of Nigeria are state actors who tweak government policies, and award government contracts, to favour foreign business interests. They are usually public servants who occupy strategic positions in government.
Their stock-in-trade is to deliberately fail to negotiate international business and diplomatic matters to favour Nigeria. A friend, who is a lawyer, reveals that some government lawyers deliberately bungle the handling of legal actions against the state, to favour certain vested interests.
Those compradors, masquerading as politicians, sometimes receive funding and logistics from foreign paymasters, who recruit and sponsor them for high political offices as legislators or even heads of the executive branch of the federal or state governments.
Section 93(1) of Nigeria’s Electoral Act, which suggests that political parties shall not accept or keep money, gift or property from anonymous sources, may be hinting at foreign business interests that may attempt to sponsor political parties and politicians who will work in their interest.
Section 137(1)(A) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which disqualifies a person who has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of, or has declared allegiance to, another country, from becoming Nigeria’s President, may have also been placed in the constitution to keep enemies within away from the most strategic office in Nigeria.
In case you have not yet guessed it, the foregoing is the flipside of the submission last week on this page that Europe (and North America) deliberately underdeveloped Africa, in order to maintain their commercial, military and diplomatic hegemony.
The argument today is that Nigerians had a hand in the tragedy that befell Nigeria: Unfortunately, the conspiracy between foreign interests and their local quislings, against Africa’s interest is not abating: It is getting even more hydra-headed and consolidated.
A friend thinks that Nigeria only needs to provide its citizens with the right education, healthcare, military infrastructure, control its food, housing and clothing supplies, and guarantee raw materials for its industries.
Another suggested the drastic sanction of taking anyone found guilty of this economic crime to the guillotine! William Shakespeare would have said a pox to the fifth columnists.
