.... when what is happening is in fact a desperate (emphasis on desperate) economic struggle between two groups of poor people, both of whose very subsistence is dependent on the limited resource that is land on a continent that is mostly arid or semi-arid.
I don't care too much about what the rest of the world thinks about our problems. The fact is, the solutions to our problems will only come from within, and sitting at the core of all of our problems is the broken and dysfunctional internal process, in Nigeria and African, of identifying the sources of problems and (by extension) the solution to those problems. When you listen to Africa's politicians and so-called "intellectuals", and (more importantly) watch what they do in practice, you notice that they feed, with their words, the worn-out stereotypes of Africa as a land of "tribes" constantly fighting each other because that is what "tribes" do, and end up sustaining through their inaction and (just as badly) their actions.
Inaction is usually excused by saying there is nothing you can do about people who just hate each other, albeit saying it in fancy, intelligent-sounding gibberish. In reality, such inaction if partly due to official disinterest and apathy, but mainly due to the fact that most politicians gain their political relevance by annointing themselves as the "defenders" of a particular ethnic or religious community, a position from which they squeeze patronage and economic concessions (for themselves and their political allies) in exchange for "delivering" the support of that community to whomever is in government. Mind you, the community does not really support the government at all, but provided the self-annointed leaders say they do, everyone (media and intellectuals included) acts like they do.
The actions of decision-makers are just as bad, because (aside from the usual clientelism, patronage, rent-seeking, waste, theft, corruption, unaccountability, lack of analysis, lack of .... etc, etc), these actions are usually based on the assumption that the problem is ethnic hate. So the so-called solutions are based on the idea that they have to get cultural communities to stop hating each other.
Ask them where this "hate" comes from, and they will start to tell you about religions that don't get along, or ethnic groups that have (supposedly) always hated each other. Neither statement is true, and neither statement is useful as a solution to any of our dillemmas.
In any case, I was reading an article in The Economist about Brazil's success in expanding their agricultural production. One particular sequence of paragraphs caught my attention.
Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd. Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months.
That is not the end of the story. Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage.
The Brazilians have improved and expanded their livestock output by adapting a variety of grass native to the continent of Africa. The import of this advancement is that you can use a smaller amount of land to increase the amount of feed for the same number (or more) cattle.
Why didn't we think of doing this?
Why didn't we do it first?
Why haven't we done it even now?
You know why?
Because we are too busy telling ourselves (and listening to foreigners tell us) that our farmers and pastoralists are fighting for religious and ethnic reasons, so we are wasting all of our mental energy on questions of religion and ethnicity!
Notice how the 2011 to-be-rigged elections in Nigeria are dominated by the question of zoning. None of the putative candidates has said anything of any use or any substance on any issue of any degree of importance.
To be frank, before Goodluck Jonathan makes the usual fake promises on electricity, he needs to explain the $13.5 million that was seized from him when he was Bayelsa Governor .... and someone needs to subject Bayelsa and Rivers State to an agonizingly detailed forensic audit, because the amount of money that was stolen from the people of those two states in the last 11 years is a national disgrace.
But I digress.
It is long past time for us to see our problems as they really are ... and not as we have been told they are.
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