A World on Its Knees: Lessons for Ghana and Africa Part 1
We have an everyday saying in our Ghanaian parlance that "the world is a small place." Indeed, increased globalisation and rapid advancement in technology have made the world become a small place. We live in an intricately connected world that calls for revaluation of human relationships, reconfiguration of the old-world order, radical changes in mindsets coupled with a new world order, if we are to survive and progress together as humanity.
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If we needed any cue for these pressing changes, the ongoing global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is a wakeup call. It has highlighted the serious malaise in the current world order. It has laid bare the precarious and frankly, desperate need for changes in national structures, governance and socio-economic development models followed in Ghana and other developing African nations.
In the ensuing weeks, under the banner of “Wisdom from the East,” I would be leading a weekly dialogue on key global and national socio-economic, cultural, educational development and capacity building issues that I strongly believe nations in Africa need to seriously address, to prepare us for the long-awaited renaissance and unleash the untapped potential of its people.
The Old World Order
The world experienced decades and centuries of global British imperial rule, followed by European global navigation, conquest and parcelling of distant lands amongst its nations. Now, we are witnessing the dwindling American neo-colonial doctrine in the 21st century. Throughout these epochs of global history, exploitation of the resource-rich south, the lack of educational and infrastructural development in the south, the limitations of high cost technology-dependent infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants, shipping, ports, intracity metro systems, intercity high speed railway networks allowed the ideologically capitalist western nations to dominate the socialist eastern and southern countries.
Impact of globalisation
Beginning from the 1980s, globalisation and market integration has brought enormous national economic, cultural, educational and global connectivity, particularly in transportation, industrial growth and business supply chain networks unprecedented in human history. According to a World Bank report entitled ‘Globalization, Growth, and Poverty, published in 2002, globalisation has transformed the lives of over 3 billion people in countries such as China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam through the development of manufacturing and service economies.
The positive effects of globalisation on these countries have been so impressive to the extent that in four decades, China through persistence and sheer hard work has lifted over 730 million people out of poverty, accounting for over 70% of global poverty reduction accomplishments. Despite the devastating impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government is still bent on lifting the remaining 10 million people out of extreme poverty by the end of this year.
Conversely, globalisation has come at great costs in other areas of life. These include over exploitation of resources in weaker developing nations without industrial base, unfavourable trade practices, environmental degradation and pollution, destruction of fertile lands through ill-planned tourism and mining for mineral resources to feed the insatiable needs of western and transitional tiger economies of the east. There has also been a widening gap in income disparities both within and between nations, easy transmission of poor business practices and deadly communicable diseases.
Recent epidemics such as AIDS, N1H1 bird flu, and the new COVID-19 corona virus global pandemic are classic examples. Also, the World Bank report talks about 2 billion people largely from countries in Africa and Afghanistan, who are in danger of becoming marginalised to the world economy.
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Need for a New World Order
Even though the west and the eastern hemispheres have been built on different philosophies, as expressed in Daniel Goleman statement: “Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product. Westerners have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there's more need for affiliation.”
The rapid changes and global uncertainties such as Brexit, UK-EU trade talks, the spreading COVID-19 virus across the globe and the unrelenting fierce geopolitical rivalry between America and China offer both opportunities for developing a new world order, as well as pose serious threats to African nations due to our weak economies, poor health and social infrastructure.
These and other complex developmental challenges, calls for all development experts and global leaders to sit up and rethink how we relate to each other as equal human beings with similar aspirations for better lives. It is time for western leaders to discard superior and colonial mentalities and sit together with their eastern and southern counterparts to draw a new global charter of humanity with shared destinies.
According to Franklin D. Roosevelt: “If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.” As indicated, the ongoing pandemic should teach us that no nation is an island, the rich and poor are related and the wellbeing of one nation is dependent on the wellbeing of others! Now, it has proverbially been demonstrated clearly that 'if China sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold.'
Our economies are so intertwined that we must move away from the myopic individualistic and bilateral relational thinking to focus on strengthening our multilateral and global relationships. We must understand that a new world order that considers the wellbeing of the weakest in our communities and the smallest nation in our intertwined world is the only guarantee for our own wellbeing. Instead of building walls why not build bridges?
Mahatma Gandhi said: “I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.”
It is high time we understood our interrelatedness and the need to care for one another. The public official, who steals funds meant for national development and training of the youth would find that he or she has to build a high barbed-wired wall for protection from the armed robber, who happens to be the young man, who has no training and opportunities in life due to the official corruption.
Till we meet again, please take care and think of your nation. God bless our homeland Ghana!
by Rev. Dr. Alex A. Appiah, B.Sc.(Gh.), Ph.D (Lond.) PGCE (York), MBA (Liverpool)