There is one thing I’ve noticed in the Buhari Administration and that is the politician’s consistency in evading responsibility for their failure in achieving national development and positive social change.
The grandmaster of this blame shifting is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria himself. He has shifted blames for the country’s insecurity situation and other woes imposed on us by his administration to the people, the political opposition, organisations and even to the deceased leaders of other countries, without proferring one solution. His friends in the presidency, governors and other staunch supporters of the All Progressives Congress have emulated and taken after him and now engage in a campaign of calumny.
One of the governor who has taken a big step in the blame game is the Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, who is popularly referred to as Gandollar, after he was caught on camera putting amounts of dollars into his “babban riga”. I was very surprised reading his statement.
What did Ganduje say?
On March 13, 2022, the governor stated that the faulty foundation of our country was as a result of the colonial masters working for their personal emoluments without any intention of ensuring the development of the country.
After 60 years of our independence from colonial domination, the corruption, the political instability, the rot in our public educational and health sector, the widening gap between the rich and poor in our society, and our poor economic policies that have averted economic growth and development in our country is still being totally attributed to the handiwork of our colonial masters. It seems our politicians have lost it. They try to put the blame on whoever they deem fit to be the cause of our country’s problems.
Yes, the British did have their selfish interests. Our resources were stolen, processed and sold out for their country’s development and not ours, but why and how is it that after 60 years of our liberation from colonial domination, we still haven’t gotten it right. Our self-serving leaders should ask themselves these questions. We didn’t elect them to lack the spirit of innovative leadership.
Relating Ganduje’s statement to the ideals of a theory of development, the dependency theory, he didn’t criticise the colonial masters because he knew the basic idea and principles of this theory but because he wanted to do the normal blame shifting of failures.
The Colonial Masters as our Problem and the Dependency Theory as a Theoretical Framework?
For long, there were arguments by 3rd world scholars on why most countries in the 3rd World weren’t achieving economic development. During the 1970’s and 80’s, there were arguments about a small number of countries dominating a larger number of countries in economic, technological, political, and sociocultural world conditions, and which resulted in these countries being culturally, politically and economically dependent on them.
One was biggest paradigm to have emerged out of these arguments was the Dependency Theory.
The basic idea of the Dependency Theory is that there are a number of factors that have hindered the socioeconomic progress of the 3rd world countries, and which emanates from the interests of a few developed nations. Some of these factors include a flow of resources from a periphery of poor countries to a core of wealthy nations, the international division of labour, giving of aids etc.
According to the Dependency Model, we have a centre, consisting of technologically advanced and developed states, such as the United Kingdom, France, United States of America, and the periphery, which consists of backward, developing or underdeveloping countries.
The International Division of Labour is like a world economic structure patterned in a way that it allows for the countries at the centre, that is the developed countries, to benefit from the periphery, that is the developing or underdeveloped countries. The price of commodities on the trade market are not determined by the 3rd world countries.
Late african leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gaddafi were opposed and even killed by the West for being radical and creating economic policies that never went down well with the interests of the West.
For Nigeria to become better, the economic policies imposed on us by the West that serve their interests must be subverted. Only a radical and innovative leader which we may relatively have in the future that would be able to achieve this.
