The third India-Africa Summit was concluded in the weekend at the Indian capital of New Delhi. Officially scheduled for 29—30 October, the two-day event drew more than 2,000 delegates. All the 54 member countries of the African union were represented. King Mohammed VI of Morocco was also in attendance, although his country is not strictly a member of the African Union. The first summit took place in New Delhi in 2008 as an initiative of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The second was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopiain 2011. The first two summits were comparatively modest affairs that brought in only 15 selected African nations. The third and latest was a far bigger event, marking a major push by India and its new Prime Minister Narendra Modi to consolidate its influence in our continent and to broker new deals that will boost trade, investment and development between India and Africa.
Interestingly, only last month I was discussing with a Nigerian diplomatic compatriot who only just returned from a five-year stint in India. Previously, he had been posted for four years in Beijing. I became curious. I asked him what he thought of the two nations in relation Africa and Nigeria in particular. He said that China’s developmental prowess was extraordinary. He had only superlatives to describe the Chinese commitment to hard work, technology and industrial development. But he said he found Beijing to be a lonely place for an African diplomat. India, on the other was a commercially less vibrant place than Beijing, but he found the Indians warmer and generally more welcoming to Africans. It was an eye-opener for me.
Let me say it straightaway: I have never as yet been to China – I long to do so one day. I have, however, been an assiduous student of Chinese civilization and economic development. I have followed with great interest the development of science and technology going back to ancient times in China. As an economist and development banker, I am intrigued by the fact that the Chinese were the first inventors of paper currency as legal tender. No mean achievement, if you asked me. It is a big thing that China is today our biggest economic partner in Africa, in spite of the fact that we do not speak Mandarin and the Chinese have never pretended to be an aspiring democracy governed by the rule of law.
I have always been a big fan of India. My wife and I visited that country during 2010. We spent some memorable days in Mumbai and in the idyllic mountains of Udaipur. India impresses me as an incredible mosaic of cultures and civilisations. As a lonely graduate student in France, I spent a whole summer poring through the great Hindu epics and sacred Sanskrit texts during breaks from my studies in economics and public administration. I have been fascinated by the remarkable political career of Asoka and his political adviser Kautilya during the Chandragupta period circa 3-200 BC. I have pored through the tomes on Mahatma Gandhi written by the Rhodes Scholar and political philosopher Raghavan Iyer. I followed all the twists and turns of the great Indian cultural and political renaissance: poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore, nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru, philosopher-Statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the great mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujam, Nobel physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The work of the Nobel economist Amartya Kumar Sen has influenced my economic thinking in more ways than I would care to acknowledge.
I have dreamt of Shantinekatan, Visvabharati, and the sacred waters by the shores of Benares. Goa, Chennai, and the ancient churches of South India fascinate me. By far, my greatest Indian influence has been the extraordinary life and ministry of Sadhu Sundar Singh, missionary, evangelist and mystic who disappeared mysteriously at the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains on his way to Tibet in 1929.
The Social Question in India has always bothered me. There are 160 million black Indians, most of them tracing their origins back to Africa. That’s almost the entire population of Nigeria! I have followed the tragedy of the horrendous discrimination and structural violence they have suffered and the heroic efforts of black leaders such as Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar to get justice and equity for his oppressed ‘Dalit’ people.
I have some wonderful friends from India, some of them from my graduate days in Europe, others from the course of a rich and fulfilling international service career. For better or worse, India will always be a part of me.
During his welcome address last week, Prime Minister Modi noted: “Our histories have intersected since ages. Once united by geography, we are now linked by the Indian Ocean. The currents of the mighty ocean have nurtured the ties of kinship, commerce, and culture through centuries”.
Indeed, India-Africa relations go back to the mist of classical antiquity. During the turn of the last century, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi launched his civil rights movement in South Africa before returning to India to lead his people to independence. Although his focus in South Africa was mainly on the plight of his Indian people, he was to influence a whole generation of oppressed Africans – even influencing the creation of the African National Congress (ANC) and inspiring leaders such as Z. K. Mathews, Albert Luthuli and, much later, Nelson Mandela and the unforgettable Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.
India’s independence in 1947 was to influence an entire generation of Africans in their efforts to throw off the colonial yoke and to attain sovereign nationhood: Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Julius Kamparage Nyerere in Tanganyika and Obafemi Awolowo in Nigeria were all deeply influenced by the life and ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. As a leader of the non-Aligned Movement and a major pillar of the Commonwealth of Nations, India has been a strong partner and role model to many of our countries in Africa. There are millions of Indian Africans in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Mauritius and Malawi who serve as a cultural and commercial bridgehead between our two continents.
Three areas have been central to the dialogue between India and Africa: trade, investments, development and political diplomacy. During the last two decades, India-Africa trade has increased by 14 times, currently valued at US$70 billion. While this is outstrips by China-Africa trade which currently stands in excess of US$200 billion, India is making rapid progress in capturing Africa markets, especially in the facing of the more recent Chinese slowdown. India’s investments in minerals, oil and infrastructures in Africa are making major inroads in Sudan, South Sudan, Mozambique, Egypt, Libya and Morocco. The government controlled company, ONGC, has put aside a war chest of over US$12 billion to invest in the African oil sector alone. The Indian government has also announced a soft loan window of US$7 billion for Africa and scholarship funding for 50,000 African students to pursue further studies in India.
An important consideration for India is also politics and diplomacy. India and China belong together in the BRICS group of countries. But they are also economic and military rivals. There are unresolved border disputes between two Asian heavyweights. During his whirlwind visits to the Seychelles and Mauritius early this year, Prime Minister Modi signed strategic agreements with the two Indian Ocean nations for naval and maritime cooperation. This will allow India to gain a major role as a player in securing mastery over the southern Indian Ocean and also enhance its geostrategic influence in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Our own President Muhammadu Buhari went to New Delhi with a strong delegation. India and Nigeria have always enjoyed cordial diplomatic relations. There are an estimated 1 million Indian nationals currently living in our country as against 56,000 Nigerians in India. Our trade and commercial relations have continued to grow from strength to strength. India recently replaced the United States as the number one importer of Nigeria’s sweet crude, estimated at over US$10 billion annually. Nigeria is a major importer of Indian rice, generic pharmaceuticals and industrial machinery. Indian companies see Nigeria as a destination of choice in Africa. I recall Prime Manmohan Singh’s historic visit to Nigeria in October 2007.
With a GDP of US$2.382 trillion in nominal terms, India is the seventh richest nation on earth. Its economy has been growing at a remarkable annual average of 9 percent since 2001. Indian satellites and spacecraft have long been in space. Its submarines are a formidable match to those of the great world powers. India is a leader in IT, precision engineering, automobiles, pharmaceuticals and machine tools. For decades India closed itself to the world. Decades ago, Western economists parodied their snail-slow growth as a classic example of what they termed “the Hindu equilibrium”. In those days India was afflicted with many woes. There were famines in Bihar and Bengal. Millions died of hunger, disease and malnutrition. If truth be told, poverty and destitution still afflict a sizeable population of Indians.
The resurgence of this great country that had been asleep for centuries is one of the astonishing developments of our twenty-first century. India exports food to Nigeria. The remarkably brilliant students of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology are gobbled up by the world’s blue-chip multinational corporations as soon as they graduate. The All-India Administrative Service, with its merit-based approach to recruitment and promotion, is world class. It makes the Nigerian public service look like what it truly is: a fourth class, backward Byzantine bureaucracy.
What are the lessons that India has for Africa and Nigeria?
First, democracy matters. Indians have enjoyed uninterrupted democracy since they gained their freedom from the British Raj in 1947. India has had its fair share of the travails of war and civil service: the war of partition with Pakistan, strife between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; violence with Pakistan and tensions with Bangladesh and down south with Sri Lanka. There have been awful political assassinations – Indira Gandhi and her Ranjiv Gandhi, both of them Prime Ministers. There were dark moments when soldiers were tempted to seize power. But they never succumbed to that temptation. They allowed the politicians to make their own errors, learn from them and self-correct. The army remained a highly professionalized group under civilian command and political guidance.
Secondly, national cohesion is central to long-term stability. India is a diverse nation of 1.25 billion people. It comprises of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists and Christians. There is an ancient and invidious problem of caste that refuses to go away, casting a cloud over the dignity of millions of so-called “untouchables”. It is part of the mystery of iniquity that has afflicted India for millennia. To be sure, there has been internecine strife between the various communities. But through it all, a vision of India as one nation with a common destiny has emerged. In a Hindu-dominated India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was appointed President of India during 2002—2007. Having retired from office, he died only recently, in July 2015. Kalam was one of the most renowned scientists India has ever produced. Despite the ethno-sectarian divisions, the Indian people have a deep sense of India and their common destiny in it.
Thirdly, a strong civil service is important. The Indian public service has, sadly, not been shorn of corruption. But it is not the kind of grand corruption where politicians and civil servants can squirrel away billions of dollars as though there is notomorrow. The civil service in India remains robust. Despite the existence of pockets of rent-seeking behaviour, the Indian bureaucracy has proven to be effective and highly professional. Indian democracy and political stability have been a great boon to India’s social and economic progress.
Fourthly, there has to be a strong dose of economic nationalism. Of course, in the choice of projects, in the formulation of economic policy, due account must be given to how you balance the books. The public finances must be placed on a sound and prudent footing. But it is important to have a healthy dose of national pride. Indians built the technological foundation of national greatness not only to promote welfare, but of pride in their nation and their civilization. The Indian Renaissance inspired by their poets, philosophers, scientists and statesmen, was linked to their national quest to become a great and prosperous democracy. The earliest nationalist leaders –Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, Vallabhbhai Patel, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Babasaheb Ambedkar and others – were also renowned intellectuals. They had a high and noble vision of what India is and what it could become. Economic science was deployed as the handmaiden to make India great. While learning from Europe and the rest of the world, they made sure their economic ideas were homegrown and were rooted in their traditions and civilization.
Fifthly, India went through a period of domestic consolidation before opening up to the rest of the world. They built up their own agriculture during the years of the Green Revolution in Asia. Without food security there can neither be prosperity or national honour; boosted their own infant industries as the foundation for industrialization. India invested heavily in human capital, especially health and education. The family planning policies that were imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi were considered highly controversial. But they worked. A new Indian middle class is emerging. India today has more scientists and engineers than the whole of the European Union.
Sixthly, economic planning was implemented with vigour and discipline. Indian leaders always treated visitations by IMF/World Bank mandarins with courtesy. But they never deferred to them if they did not have the superior argument. Indian economists are world-class and the Delhi School of Economics as good as that of Cambridge.
Seventh, economic liberalization needs to be properly sequenced. It is when you have gotten your economic fundamentals right and set your home in order that you can now open up your economy to the cold winters of global competition. The Indians have done it with wisdom and panache. While many advanced industrial nations’ multinationals are investing in India, Indian global firms are gobbling up deals and markets throughout the world: the Tata Motors, Aditya Birla, Vedanta Resources, Infosys Technologies, Aurobindo Pharma and others are taking over the world in both a metaphorical and real sense.
And eighth, it pays to leverage on diaspora capital. India’s modern economic resurgence was partly fuelled by capital from the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe and Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. When Idi Amin drove away the Asians from Uganda in the 1970s, most of them were absorbed into Britain. Coming with nothing but their hand luggage, within a generation a good number had become billionaires. Lakshmi Mittal, estimated to be worth US$13.5 billion is a leading Indian steel magnate. Then we have the Hinduja brothers, the Arora brothers and the likes of Jasminder Singh and Swaraj Paul.
I once had dinner with Lord Swaraj Paul in London. He revealed to us that he came to England in the seventies as a gangling youth with no more than UK£15 in his pocket. By the 1990s he was a multi-billionaire steel magnate. He spoke with great gentleness about how the sacred fables of the Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata inspired him to have both discipline and clear goals in life, and to link the quest for wealth and moneymaking to great compassion for humanity. It is such people that pooled their capital together to supplement what was available in the home country to make India the world power it is today.
Obadiah Mailafia
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