Sharing his
findings with compatriots in his essay, Dispatch
from China: what order, discipline did to China, Adesina quotes Buhari as
saying of Beijing, the Chinese capital: “Did you notice
the level of discipline in this city? Did you notice the cleanliness and order?
Did you see anybody throwing litter or garbage anywhere? And did you see their
security agents, how smart and dutiful they were?” On leaving Beijing
for Shanghai, as Buhari and Adesina and another aide watched the city recede,
they froze in wistful amazement at how a society’s hundreds of millions of
citizens could be so shaped as to see discipline as the first patriotic duty.
Adesina was to exclaim: “Discipline is the name of the
game, and it has done China a world of good.”
A few
decades ago, a commentator, Doak Barnett,
not known for any love for Communist China also wrote: “Some
years ago, a foreigner who had just toured Communist China came out to Hong
Kong and remarked, with awe in his voice: ‘ I never thought that human beings
and society could be reconstructed so easily. If he meant that the changes of
recent years had been relatively painless, he was very wrong. The plastic
surgery that the Communists had been performing on Chinese society for over a
decade had been painful indeed for millions of Chinese… But if, in using the
word ‘easily’, the visitor actually meant ‘rapidly’, it is easy to share some
of his awe. The Chinese Communists have dramatically demonstrated that an
effective regime can achieve extensive social change at a breakneck pace.”
What did the
trick? Following the 1949 Revolution in China, the great Mao Tse-tung who led
the movement shut the borders of the country to the outside world. He and his
loyal Communist leaders adopted a tough stance that ensured that the people and
their rulers fed only on what was available inwards, locally. The cars they
rode, however archaic, were what the “elite” Politburo (Communist Party
Leadership) and the other working classes alike used. No palatial palate was
cultivated to hunger for a billionaire’s breakfast. Since it was a peasant and
workers socialist putsch in the first place, China under Mao couldn’t be
allowed to tolerate the contradiction of a heavily moneyed class to exist side
by side with the poor as we have in Nigeria. In this huge enclosure untainted
by the unbridled spending and consumerist culture of the Capitalist Western
World, Mao began to remould China and its people.
In 1958, the
country embarked on the Great Leap Forward Programme (Walking on Two Feet),
Agriculture and Industry which saw China match the old Soviet Union and the
formidable Western powers of U.S. and UK in industrial, scientific and
technological production. The Cultural Revolution that followed disavowed the
intrusion of destructive moral values that could either retard or bring down
altogether the progress in the political, social and economic spheres of the
new China. Actually, the cultural war was what deepened the discipline Mao
sought for his people. It aided in reshaping and adjusting the mighty masses of
the population. It poised them for the gigantic solemn task of forming a new
society and freeing the people from dependence on foreign tastes.
The Chinese
nation has been described as a Spartan nation of “infinite patience and
adaptability.” This enabled them to endure the painful pill Mao gave them. It
has also helped them to survive tumultuous upheavals, all of which have finally
pushed China to become the world’s number two economic power house, after the
United States. Today, experts say in a few decades China will leap into the
number one position.
In view of
all these, we are not at all moved by the loan coming our way in Nigeria as a
result of our President’s trip to China nor are we excited that at last the
Chinese will soon be here to upgrade our derelict and Neanderthal
infrastructure. We are interested rather in what Buhari’s encounter with the
Chinese has taught: unruliness in our politics, in how we handled our wealth
when we had it a plenty, in our leadership template is the cause of all our
woes today. And it would continue this way, and take worst turns if we don’t
first battle this character drawback the way the Chinese did it.
Let the
Americans also bring in their dollars and the Britons their Pound Sterling and
Europe its Euros in loans of any tenor. This will not solve our problems if we
do not do the first things first.
We have
built a nation of wealth-worshipping citizens and leaders who view the world
through a prosperity telescope. We do not honour labour. Preferment – whether
social, economic or political – is brewed in the cauldron of corruption. Our
youth and women who ought to be our treasured capital and engine of development
are wasting because we don’t capture them in our vision. They have permitted
themselves to be caged in the pigeonhole of idleness, refusing to break out but
turning to criminality. Who cares? Everybody is a felon. Everybody plays a
smart one. We are all Smart Alec.
It is the
system thrown up by our lifestyle of indiscipline that is responsible for this
mass social decay. The system has allowed too much foul money among the
political class and their cronies. There is a surfeit of this wealth also in
the civil service bureaucracy and its contractor entrepreneurs. When everyone
aspires to join them, including students waiting to finish school, you have a perfect
setting for the emergence of the patriarch and matriarch of indiscipline. Now,
the ensuing cloying affluence of the few has as given Nigeria a pejorative
world title strange condition: We are the biggest exporter of illicit money on
the planet. Refer to the disclosure of the Panama Papers. And yet there is
poverty in the land. This reminds us of the lament of the Ancient Mariner:
water everywhere but none to drink! (Guardian)
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