Confucius Institutes across Africa are nurturing generations of pro-China Mandarin speakers
ON Facebook there is a lot of discussion about the mess in Nigeria. Could China be a model for success in Nigeria.
Nigerians I meet on Facebook actually get angry at this idea. They are proud to be democratic. They see Chin as a totalitarian state. They are not quite right. China today is NOT a traditional totalitarian state, though it has been one and my become one again. China is better seen as the world’s first national corporation .. as Deng said, “socialism, Chinese style.”
When Nigeria became independent it seemed to be the great black hope. A nation of very bright people who had, in some ways, become more Brit then the Brits. Nigeria had adopted a Brit legal system … down to the wigs and robes. Nigeria was (and is) wealthy with one of the world great petroleum resources. Nigeria had wonderful writers and thinkers,
Then Nigeria suffered a civil war between the Igbo nation, largely Christian, home of the oil reserves and many very well educated people, and the two Muslim peoples of the Brit mandated state .. the Hausa and the Yoruba. The war was epic and bloody, millions were killed and the fight for an independent Igbo state, Biafra, failed. Of course, Mao and Chiang Ki Check also fought a monstrous civil war.
Since the civil war democracy has never really worked in Nigeria . Efforts to build a great state have foundered on differences Americans see as tribal … as if the peoples or Africa are less peoples the the French, Catalans or Bavarians. Worse, there has always been massive corruption despite a clear desire of many Nigerians to be Nigerians and to see Nigeria as a wealthy prosperous, multiethnic state.
Mao’s effort to build a communist state in China also failed ,,, until Denx Xiaoping came to power. Since Deng, China has been run as a new sort of state, a corporate state. China is much like any major corporation, General Motors, Exxon, Shell, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, etc. Like any of these, China is not a democracy because it has only one party and it is run by committees within that party. These committees make decisions that are assumed to be in the interests of the corporation .. in this case a state.
The motivation for the Party is that its interests are to make the state run well.
We do not really know if this model can work in Nigeria because underlying China Inc is the 300 years of Confucian tradition. Once demeaned by Mao, Xi has brought Confucius back in a big way … with the idea that leaders should respect the people and tradition and the idea that the people should respect the leader … pretty close to how Google or Goldman Sachs works!
Can that work in Africa? Is there an African tradition akin to Confucianism?