For a continent like Africa whose modernisation has been such a painful process for the majority of the populace, the continuous re-examination of each and every proposition is at the heart of Afrocentric consciousness. This is the sense in which Professor Issac Olawale Albert’s recent Inaugural Lecture, impressively titled, “Pinched, Ditched or Jinxed? The Mantra of African Solutions to African Problems” should interest all of us.

When is a problem African and what constitutes Africanity?

Prof. Albert’s is an interesting voice because he is coming from the University of Ibadan, about the only one still standing, with respect to minimum attributes of the university. Most universities in Nigeria have been bastardized. This has nothing to do with the students or their lecturers but a consequence of the devastation wrought on the university system in Nigeria by the World Bank and its local ambassadors. It is such that the value system has totally collapsed. At the last count, for instance, one of them announced over 100 First Class Degrees and probably thought it was doing something great when it was actually embarrassing the universe of inquiry.

The second reason Prof Albert should attract our attention is, having just got his professorship, his Inaugural Lecture gives Nigerians an idea of the professorial capability of the average academic in Nigeria. For, the culture of Inaugural Lecture died a long time ago in the Nigerian university system. Only in a number of them is the culture just being brought back from the graveyard or observed but mostly in a manner anti-thetical to the very idea of the culture.

But then, what did Albert say? First was his basically discursive expose of the ideology of ‘African Solutions to African Problems’. His account is that it is the Western world’s adaptation of the logic of battlefield medical science by French medical team in deciding which casualties to attend to during the First World War. There were those who were likely to live regardless of what care was given, those who were going to die regardless of what care was given and those for whom immediate care would mean much. By the 1990s when the Cold War was over, Africa had become, in the Western mind, a case of a dying casualty irrespective of what care was given. Hence, the notion of African solutions for African problems, a way of telling Africans that they were on their own, with particular reference to containing Africa’s numerous wars and violent conflicts through African based Preventive Diplomacy, Peace Keeping, Peace Making and post conflict Peace Building. In other words, ‘African solutions to African problems; is not an innocent phrase but a contextually loaded one. 

Second is the lecturer’s interrogation of the concept of African problems. What, for example, do we make of an Obama saying to Africans, “your future is up to you”? Is this a home truth or a case of Obama’s escapism into sound bytes?  Will America’s endless search for ‘regimes we can call our friends’ allow Africans to really decide their future? Or do those who say here and there that the future of Africa is in the hands of Africans imply the possibility of a future when the Africans and their political leaders would be tired of their sufferings and decide to get angry at the local and international system which accounts for the drudgery of their existence? Or does the slogan mean the pinching, ditching and jinxing of the Africans by the international community?

Reduced to whether Africans are the origin of their own disconnect from modernity or some extra-African forces, Professor Albert’s answer is that the Africans share the blame to a greater extent. What this means is that he disagrees with Walter Rodney and co who argue that European imperialism underdeveloped Africa, saying in his own way, that Rodney’s position suffers from Marxist mono-causality. And that after all, Asia and Latin America equally experienced Euro-American imperialism but over which many Asian and Latin American countries have transcended. For him, the political rascality, the hereditary democracy and permanent presidency that define the African leadership landscape must be uniquely African problems for which we can’t blame outsiders. He isolates the amorality of leadership in Africa, particularly the syndrome where a leader rules as long as he lived only to be succeeded by his son, as has happened in Eyadema’s Togo, Omar Bongo’s Gabon and Kabilla’s DRC.

With a leadership like these, Africa found herself buying into the ideology of ‘African solutions for African problems’ but in a different sense from that of their white patrons. For the African leaders, According to Prof, ‘African solutions for African problems’ is a framework which can help keep international community from pressuring these local dictators. In inter-African relations, the slogan, he says, helps African leaders to support each other’s illegalities, a case he illustrates with South Africa’s endorsement of the 2007 elections in Nigeria as a case in point.