…a poignant tale of developing nations.
By Segun Alade MBA, FCA, ACIB, ACIPM
If there is any lesson the covid-19 pandemic experience should have taught developing nations, it is that no one or nation loves your country more than you. The first line of defense by countries in perturbed time is usually self-preservation just as the covid-19 season has clearly shown. We can only hope that leaders & economy managers of African nations and developing countries clearly learn this lesson and speedily deviate from their grossly ‘cap-in-hand’ slavery reasoning, in favour of aggressive development of productive capacity across all sectors.
When a country refuses to develop its productive capacity such as its healthcare system, science, energy, transportation network and other critical infrastructure, you automatically set your nation on the journey to oblivion howbeit ignoble to the next several generation who will certainly continuously curse the generation of leaders & economy managers who once sat on the exalted seats but led the economy down the drain wittingly or unwittingly.
Historically and even regrettably till present day, most developing & underdeveloped nations (especially in Africa) while with their ‘cap-in-hand’ aid seeking lazy reasoning, have repeatedly allowed the western world to ferociously & clandestinely destroyed their economies through influenced inflation, ridiculous interest rate, influenced monetary control, coded encouragement of destructive fiscal policy, financing of ‘white-elephant’ projects, ingloriously discouraging currency printing to favouring continuous receiving of unserviceable loans, abetting non-coherence of monetary and fiscal policies etc, all of which have put the future of those developing nations in comatose.
Without intentionally and drastically promoting local capacity/ companies more than foreign companies/ capacity, a developing country will perpetually be a joke and a constant object of rip-off amongst the committee of nations. And like I’ve earlier opined in several previous articles, the achievement of nations’ rapid economic development is certainly not a rocket science for non-deficient leaders/ economy managers. Ironically, there already exist inside the African nations, solutions in small pieces executed by different individuals, group of individuals and private organisations, from 24-hour electricity generation to water supply, to great healthcare, to perfect road network, to good educational institutes, and the list goes on and on. While already these solutions exist under the nose of the economy managers, it has seemingly been literally impossible for them to just simply ‘copy and paste’ these solutions and effectuating them in several constituents of governing units, thus decelerating national economy & development. Rather than chasing the goose in the name of looking for big solutions, effectuating small solutions in their aggressive push in multiples to smaller units of the economy sphere will herald great & rapid development. An example amongst many is, rather than waiting for the purported big medical solutions being pushed to you by the western world and their promoters, African nations should look inward at the abundance of seemingly small solutions already in their herbs and territories whether or not it is pleasing to the western world.
Such similar examples already exist in almost every sphere of the African economies.
The critical lesson that developing countries/ African nations and their leaders should keep in mind is that, no matter how purportedly attractive the card dealt you by foreign nations appear to be, they are merely largely protecting their own interest and not yours, for they cannot love you more than you.
By Segun Alade
Editor’s Note This article is entirely the opinion of the writer and does not represent the views of Per Second News .
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