Need we run away from third world tag

By Stephen Sah

TWO inspiring statements relating to the current state in which the continent of Africa finds herself, which are attributed to two fine Ghanaian brains, as well as the reactions they generate, make interesting reading.
First, it was a Justice of the Court of Appeal, Mrs Henrietta Abban, who admonished Africans to reject the third world tag because it was debasing and intended by the richer countries to further exploit the continent.
The substance of her argument is that Africa has great potential and opportunities that the developed countries are interested in exploiting, if they can keep Africans perpetually inferior. The learned judge was reported to have urged Africans to not accept the third world tag, which connotes being second rate citizens (Daily Graphic, May 20, 2006).
Second, Mr Ishmael Yamson, the Chairman of the Council of the University of Ghana, also has stated that Africa does not have any excuse to be poor, since the continent is endowed with natural and human resources.
“We Africans should not be talking about poverty now because Africa has more natural resource than any other continent in the world and God has endowed the continent with people with brains”, he was reported as saying (Daily Graphic, May 22, 2006).
It is obvious from these two poignant statements that the destiny of Africa is in the hands of Africans ourselves and that it is only Africans who can redeem the African continent from this mentality.
But the learned judge’s admonition was beyond the point and the responses from Kojo Smith and my senior colleague, Kofi Akordor, go to fuel the situation. The fact is that the third world classification/taxonomy is not about capabilities/ abilities that make people in the third world inferior to any race in the world. Should we run way from the fact that we are a third world country? Should we not be ashamed that in spite of our enormous natural and human resources, our continent is the least developed in the world? The third world tag is about a state of affairs which we cannot run away from. It is and can never be about the capability or capacity of the people of Africa or other third world countries because there have been countless occasions that Africans, or to come home, Ghanaians, for that matter, as Kojo Smith wrote, have out-classed their counterparts from the so-called developed countries in various endeavours.
There is no qualms about the fact that poverty exists and some people are poor, while others are rich. This scenario applies to the classification of worlds into first (developed), second (developing) and third (least developed or developing) countries.
Adam Szirmai (2005) in “The Dynamics of Socio-economic Development” traces the genesis of the third world to after World War II, when the term came into vogue as a designation for developing countries. This third world was contrasted with the first world of the advanced capitalist countries and the second world of the industrialised socialist countries in Eastern Europe.
So, in effect, what this means is that in the third world countries development is nothing comparable to that of the advanced countries. Most of the third world could be found in the entire of Africa but Africa is not alone in this exclusivity - countries in Latin America and Asia are also inclusive of this category.
The patent or common characteristic and interest of these countries have to with the widening gap between them and the rest of the affluent industrialised world. The same is implied by such terms as “North” and “South” divide.
And these characteristics include the ineffective bureaucratic structures in operation, the inability to provide the basic necessities of life such as food, clothing and shelter, how to handle disease, epidemics and any natural disaster when they occur, impoverishment and malnutrition, poor health, illiteracy, living in environmentally degraded and filthy areas, little political voice and political participation and the lack of personal and political power.
This is not to say that these do not occur in the developed countries such as the USA, UK, Canada or France. They do but in those countries, the predictability of and attachment to these phenomenon are excellent, whilst the reverse is what prevails in the third world generally.
Should a natural disaster like an earthquake occur in Africa and the US, for instance, the difference will be the structures and institutions put in place to tackle the issue.
While the structures will be non-existent in the third world and for that matter Africa, they will be readily available in the US such that the impact of the disaster there will be minimal and might not be felt as much.
It is a truism that conditions of poverty are particularly desperate in Africa, for instance, where real income on the average is abysmal. The real income of the average American is more than 50 times that of the average person in sub-Saharan Africa and the amount of food that go to waste in the US can feed famished people in the world’s poorest countries like Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Therefore, what we must admit is that we are what we are just because the necessary structures to tackle the basic necessities of life to make things better for us as a people are lacking in our part of the world. However, if all of us have been graciously endowed with those resources or the same structures and institutions, the difference will not have to do with capacity or the thinking ability of us as a people. Maybe, we would do much better than people in advanced countries.
We need not hammer the classification and all that but rather critically look at how to ensure that this predicament does not ensnare us forever. Fortunately for us, we have made some gains, as far as ending the scourge of poverty is concerned. We are blessed with the enormous human and natural resources, as Mr Yamson rightly pointed out.
We are also aware of the basic facts about the predicament that faces us. This is supported by an anonymous poor man (a Ghanaian), who was quoted by Stephen C. Smith (2005) in his book “Ending Global Poverty” as saying that “ Poverty is like a heat: You cannot see it, you can only feel it; so to understand poverty, you have to go through it”. For me this is a strong indication of our awareness and a starting point of fighting the scourge.
The story of poverty so far is one of both good and bad news; the progress so far made and what remains to be done.
In spite of the enormous human and natural resource, we need to have visionary leaders, as Kofi Akordor rightly wrote, who will be transparent in their dealings and be accountable to the very people who put them at the helms of affairs Our leaders should let the people’s well-being be cardinal to their policies. Without good leadership to harness these resources, nothing better can happen in the lives of the people in the third word.
Our leaders should eschew parochial and selfish interests. They should fashion out policies that will not gag and suppress the people but make them active participants in the governance programme because suppression can breed revolution or conflict, which have become hallmarks of our part of the world.
Since most of the third world are emerging democracies, they need to nurture these paths with care and patriotism devoid of corruption. We should take advantage of globalisation and forge closer regional relations among ourselves. The existing regional barriers to free trade, movement of goods and people should give way to a common socio-economic and political ties to fight external hegemony.
Besides, education of the highest quality should be our priority and it is incumbent on our educational institutions to ensure that our people are provided with the best of education, which is not interested only in making graduates pass out of schools without benefiting the country. I mean practical education which develops critical and analytical minds for solving pressing societal problems.
Our educational institutions should encourage more researches from students and use some of these in lieu of written examinations which create the “chew, pour, pass and forget” syndrome. When a student conducts a research, he would always remember the substance of his studies more than the lecture notes he has to cram to pass an examination and forget everything thereafter.
With improvement in education, the stage will then be set for catching up with the advanced countries in terms of narrowing the gap between us. The patient-doctor ratio, for example, will be reduced and our people will be enlightened about the way to go about things concerning the environment, job creation, new techniques of farming, sanitation, media freedom and pluralism and existence of fundamental human rights, fighting corruption and making very informed decisions that will affect our lives positively and these, hopefully would let us out of the poverty trap because we are 200 years behind the advanced countries.
Of course, we should not expect these to happen without recourse to changing our ways of doing things, but since to be poor, according to Nobel Laureate Armatya Sen, is to lack the basic capabilities to function, development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. That is what we need and we should aspire to achieve this for our people. This is what will bridge the gap betweeen us and the rest of the world.