MWANGI: Triumph of local over foreign interests lessons from Brexit

MWANGI: Triumph of local over foreign interests  lessons from Brexit

Perhaps the most important lesson that East Africans can learn from the recent referendum to pull Britain out of the European Union has to do with the triumph of local over foreign interests.

Indeed, even when acting as a bloc, the EU aggressively pursued the interests of its member states. This has informed its negotiations with other regional blocs, for instance the negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement with the East African Community.

The West has never shied from aggressively pushing its interests, to the extent of launching destructive wars. The Western public is usually manipulated through their highly patriotic media using all sorts of propaganda and plain lies.

This is what lay behind the war against Saddam Hussein, with the United States claiming that the dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction – a claim that was later proved false. Similar shameless tactics were used against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

Although these leaders may have had their own weaknesses, military intervention by Western powers was solely motivated by their political and economic interests. Thus, they have no qualms doing business with despots and corrupt rulers around the world who do not threaten their hegemony.

While the will of the British people to quit the EU ought to be respected, it is doubtful whether this will actually serve or hurt British interests. All the same, the British people have shown their extreme urge to protect what they perceive to be their national interests vis-à-vis foreign interests, even against their brothers in continental Europe.

The tragedy with Africa is that things work the other way round: Rather than protect our own national, regional and African interests, we seem preoccupied to protect foreign interests. It is a slave and colonial mentality that has been virtually impossible to erase.

Since independence, the new African elite in many countries – especially those like Kenya that adopted the Western model of capitalism – went out of their way to please foreign interests. Against all common sense, local settlers were allowed to retain their privileges and wealth that had been obtained decades earlier by dispossessing local populations. Even where these settlers moved out, mostly so that the new African elites can have something to ear, they were compensated by these new states for giving up what had been acquired by robbing our ancestors.

Even worse, local efforts in industry and business have almost always been sabotaged in favour of satisfying the interests of foreign manufacturers. In the process, local capacity has been destroyed to create dependency on the west.

Agriculture is a case in point. African countries have failed to achieve sustainable food security because of ignoring their national interests to fulfil the demands of the Bretton Woods institutions, especially the structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s. While Western countries have continued to subsidize their farmers, African leaders have foolishly listened to advice from Western capitals and ended up destroying their agricultural sectors, sending millions of people into deeper poverty.

This same narrative has been repeated countless times in various sectors. The conservation sector is still openly controlled by wazungu, who fly here for ceremonies to burn ivory and initiate ways of further controlling Africa’s resources to the exclusion of local populations. It is these local communities who took care of wildlife for millennia before the advent of colonialism, yet they have now been reduced to spectators, with the connivance of their own rulers.

But it is not only at the official level that we have lost confidence in ourselves. At a more personal level, many people are mesmerized and easily fooled by anything foreign. Is it any wonder that African girls are making every effort to get jobs in the Middle East, despite evidence of slavery? Which girl will opt for a local, hardworking young man when there is a light-skinned person showing interest?

Changing this narrative will require a change of mindset. It will require, first and foremost, the inculcation of self-confidence in local populations, allowing them to take charge of their own destiny. It will also take a change in the way we conduct politics and prioritise local over foreign interests. That will give us our own Eastexit, allowing East Africa to break away from the shackles of Western imperialism.

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