THE American Dream is a social contract based on the assurance of prosperity and freedom of the average American, in return for patriotic pursuit of collective aspitations. This spread across Europe from USA, the largest and most diverse conglomeration of White people, just as the prosperity of China is spreading across Asia. However, Nigeria, the largest conglomeration of Black Peoples hasn’t provided the template to empower Black Africans with a sense of belonging and part of collective aspirations. People come together in a commonwealth, giving up part of themselves for collective security and economies of scale of their aggregated resources to make life more abundant. The two ways politicians use to motivate and mobilize the masses is through Fear or Dreams. Hobbs in 1600s believed it was difficult to pinpoint the ultimate collective dream of fulfillment, so the fear of extinction has been the major political force in traditional societies. Across Black Africa, it is the fear of being run over by other tribes, while in Europe it is the fear of invading Russians. Contrary to popular opinion, it is the development of an economic system to fulfil collective aspirations that dictate constitutions that spell out the social contract between the government and the governed. Therefore until Nigeria can change from a neocolonial economy to an integrated economy geared towards fulfilling the peoples needs with our resources, we and other African nations can’t develop constitutions and political systems that ultimately uplift the people, like our traditional societies did with the likes of Oyo and Oyo Mesi until slavery and colonization usurped our economic and political systems, turning our dreams into nightmares.
The initial White social contract of prosperity that evolved in the early 1500s was based on imperialistic European monarchs colonizing Native American lands, which they gave immigrant Europeans, and provided them with captured African slaves to plant adapted seeds of African crops (sugarcane, cotton and tobacco), thereby creating an economic system known as the Golden Triangle between Europe, Africa and the Americas that lasted for two centuries, morally justified with the Biblical Ham story as a constitution. The colonial social contract changed with the end of the Golden Triangle economic system of African labour, American land and European Mercantilist capitalism, to an economic system that the agricultural produce of Southern USA plantations were diverted to the non-agricultural ‘barren’ Northeast USA for local processing, whose profits were to be used for the collective aspirations of White Americans. This change in economic system required a change from the colonial Christian European monarchies social contract tied to the Bible, the basis of their power, to a written secular constitution. The greatest hurdle was not the transfer of the British monarch powers to the delegates of the 13 colonies that became the federal government, which was achieved with the 1775-1776 Articles of Confederation, but the inclusion of African slaves into the new social contract, not based on the Biblical Ham Story. This resulted in intense bargaining between slaveowners/landowners and Northern capitalists/Federalists, delaying the Constitution till 1787 when it was finally resolved with the Three-Fifths compromise that accorded Africans just 60% of humanity, and voting was restricted to landowners. In Haiti, where both the French colonists and local slaveowners were forcibly removed from the economic system, the Blacks designed the first universal voting suffrage in 1804. The change in the Golden Triangle economic system and the new social contracts spread to European monarchs with the French Revolution and 1832 British Electoral Reforms.
The local adaptation of the USA slave based agricultural economic system, from being colonial export focused, led to the development of inland railways that birthed heavy manufacturing, as surplus iron and chemicals used for railways and railcars led to the development of the industrial military complex, whose profits and labour demands by far surpassed that of the slave agricultural system. This created the need for a new social contract as slavery came to an end and its labour absorbed by manufacturing in the North. With industrialization, the masses organized into Labour Unions that spread across USA and Europe, demanding for a better contract, which was initially addressed in 1903-6 with US President Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal for everyone. However this was not enough as Socialists seized power in the Russian 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to takeover collective resources for socially beneficial production and fulfilment of collective aspirations of housing, education, employment etc, resulting in a new economic system and constitution.
To avoid the spread of the revolution to USA and Western Europe, especially with the 1929 Great Depression, in 1933 President Franklin D Roosevelt brought a New Deal that involved accelerated development of a sprawling suburbia that transfered wealth to the people, and at the same time provided employment. Western nations adopted national economic planning to fulfill the People’s Dream that assured everyone a house, transport, education, health and employment, financed with budget deficits either with investment into consumer goods or war and the military industrial complex. Black Americans were initially excluded from the wealth transfer of housing, but since their labour, and raw materials from the newly independent African nations were needed, the social contract had to be altered with the 1960s Civil Rights Acts. In Africa, especially Nigeria, the source of the Indigenous African civilization, our civilizational economic system of kola, clothing, beads and food tied to Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa constitutions, was derailed with the slave for arms economic system that politically balkanized our civilization into empires of Oyo, Benin, Igala etc. The end of the Golden Triangle economic system led European monarchs to turn to Africa to develop a new colonial economic system. Before colonial political amalgamations, our civilizational economics was restructured by overriding our trade routes with the building of railways from our hinterlands to the ports. In Nigeria, two North-South railway lines were built to create a new economic system based on supplying raw materials for European factories and be dumping grounds for their manufactures.
At independence, Nigerians didn’t restructure back to our civilization economic system upon which a new social contract could evolve. Instead, a new psuedo elite took up the role of economic and political middlemen between the human and natural resources and the former colonial masters, and till date we are a nation of traders and planters.
A few genuine leaders that followed Keynesian and Socialist ideals like Awolowo and Nkrumah sought to fulfill the African Dream of making life more abundant with housing, education, employment and health subsidies, but within a decade they were swept out of power by Western engineered corruption propaganda and other political tools. By the mid-seventies, IMF and World Bank attacked the concept of a social contract based on the government fulfilling the People’s dream, replacing it with free market theories that made African nations to shirk their social responsibilities. Western global economic hegemony forced economic enslaving policies of subsidy removal and devaluation to reduce real wages and impoverished the economically dependent African nations that hadn’t changed their neocolonial economic system. IMF loans were not to be used for education, health or development, in order to stall a change of the economic system. Currently, with African nations getting back their pre-slavery global proportional populations, their economies can no longer serve as appendages to foreign economic systems, so their political systems can’t fulfill their Dreams. To avoid Russian type revolutions in Nigeria and across Africa, the political classes must urgently implement a New Deal for a Nigeria Dream, which involves an accelerated massive social housing development that would not only pass wealth to the average Nigerian, but also inspire a patriotic feeling of inclusion to a commonwealth that fulfils their dreams.
This New Deal of a Nigerian Dream must end the current neocolonial economic system of being primary producers and foreign importers, and bring about a new economic system of industrialization spurred with the development of East-West railways (Lagos-Calabar, Ilorin-Yola and Sokoto-Maiduguri) that reestablishes our civilizational economy, and whose multiplier effects will develop our iron and chemicals industries that can pay reasonable wages to millions of our unemployed, unlike agriculture that can’t absorb them and pays slave wages.
This will be sponsored with huge deficits, an 18-month reduction of imports to barest minimum to prevent leakages, use of nearly 100% local derived inputs, and organized by the Defence Industries Corporation for efficiency. This new economic system must be centrally built, but for sustainability, our political system must be immediately restructured to devolve power for competitive progressive management, and the constitutionalization of our traditional institutions that are the source of our cultural identity and moral values to stop coloniality of being, power and knowledge sources.
- Prince Faloye, President, ASHE Foundation and Afenifere National Publicity Secretary, is an economist and sociopolitical activist.
READ ALSO: Goods worth millions of naira destroyed in Ibadan fire
