The West was taken unaware. They couldn’t see it coming. That Chinese and Indian once believed to be peripheral economies could within a twinkle of an eye beat the entire western economies in their own game remains the greatest shock. So shocking it is not because they played well in this unfamiliar territory.

More shocking is how they have disarmed the west, who, now have to
follow the dictates of these two growing economic superpowers. Making recovery from the shock of their lives more difficult, China has gone further to defy the once strongly held western conviction that
capitalism must always go hand in hand with democracy. In fact, China
proves the Singaporean elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yen, right, who
preached to every Asian country he visited in the early 1990s, to
always: “Restore law and order, build more infrastructure, and
concentrate on economics, not democracy.”

But how could these two countries outsmart the west in their own game overnight? What is it that China and India have done that is
impossible in Africa? Could it be their immense populations, a large
army of well-trained cheap workforce? Or could it be their ability to
fully harness their critical human capital stock? Could one attribute
their successes to their ability to build a vibrant entrepreneurial
class? Could the answer be found in their second-to-none social
contracts, highly inclusive social contracts? What about attributing
their success stories to powerful and globally well-networked Diaspora
Chinese and Indians, who today yield enormous economic and
intellectual power around the world?

To understand that there is nothing magical these two countries have
done, all we need to do is to scan through the history books of
economic development. We will be amazed to discover that what they
repeated was what was a known industrialization process, first started
by Britain when it led the first industrial revolution, later spread
around Europe, and used by America to beat the industrial economies
Europe hands-down starting from 1880. What these two countries really have done recently is mobilizing their first eleven economic team,
who, in letting loose the engine of economic growth, have mastered how to fully exploit large local market advantages. Mobilizing their
entrepreneurs to act stubbornly like the earlier American
entrepreneurs such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Gould, and Morgan,
acted, and recognizing their vibrant local populations as both sources
of production and consumption wouldn’t have, after all, put them
behind today’s aging western economies.

Put simply, the Chinese and the Indians are today achieving an
unprecedented economic growth thanks to a process that organically
involves many of the interrelated factors, from huge markets to well
educated cheap workforce to increase in inflow of foreign investments.
If it was a huge market incentive that drew unprecedented 19th century European investors to America, it is the same that is happening in twenty-first century in China and India. If it was all about taking full advantage of scale economies available in twentieth-century American manufacturing, distribution, marketing, and research
processes, Chinese and Indians are doing the same today.

In the meantime, understanding that having a large population is not
enough, led them to figure out that it is only a socially and
economically engaged population, a population with income-producing
capacity that can move their economies to the height of middle class.
So, what they have learned from the past American experience is that a large and affluent population, enjoying increasingly higher household
income distribution, is critical to enlarging and standardizing local
markets. Another is their cleverness in recognizing the fact that
dynamism in a natural economy is strongly correlated to
entrepreneurialism, and that the buoyancy of small and medium size
sector in terms of a high-birth rate is equally responsible for
innovativeness and growth in employment. There is another important
historical lesson that never slips their minds. That is that rather
than spend scarce national revenues on building world-class white
elephant infrastructure, infrastructure that can hardly sustain
corresponding capacity utilisation and growth, these two emerging
global economic superpowers, easily figured out that scarce public
money is better focused on critical infrastructure that can encourage
and expand private initiatives.

Just like earlier Americans, today’s Chinese and Indians are fully
aware that for them to be able to build new wealth they too must
imitate what others already invented. That is, they fully recognize
they don’t need to invent the mousetrap for it has already been
invented long time ago, but rather, all they have to smartly figure
out is the best ways to resend the mousetrap to the market to beat
those already in the market. It is this little steps taken that have
given the Chinese and the Indians the enormous advantage of smartly
exploiting the power of their small-firms sector. And the buoyancy of
this highly flexible and innovative sector it is that has given rise
to an unprecedented economic growth. It is this small-firms sector
that now drives their competitiveness, their high rate of employment.

Following the same American footsteps, these two emerging economic
superpowers are equally aware that low-tech could not take them too
far in the game of economic competition, particularly when it comes to
high-value based growth. Cognizance of the potential landmine ahead,
broadening their scientific and technological human capital base has
turned out to be creating more surprises to the west. To this end,
their local universities are now turning out the largest and the best
PhDs in science and engineering in the world. This, they want to
sustain by their recent embankment on building what are going to
become the world’s largest and most sophisticated human knowledge
factories.

Their boys and girls are today beating their American and European
counterparts in their own territories. Particularly in the US, Chinese
and Indian students have, without raising any public alarm, taken
over some of America’s best engineering and science schools. At MIT,
Stanford, and Caltech, for example, Chinese and Indian students now
outnumber and outclass their American hosts. But it hardly ends
there. Rather than head home upon getting their newly minted first-
class PhDs in science and engineering, these young scientists,
heading to America’s exclusive research shrines, now outnumber
Americans at such strategic scientific research centres like the MIT
Lincoln Lab and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena California,
once reserved only for America’s best and the brightest weaponry and
space science and engineering researchers. When taking an American
citizenship is all that is needed to lower public suspicion, they have
never hesitated go for it. Little wonder these two countries can
boast of possessing nuclear weapons, thanks to the efforts of their
Diaspora scientists in America, who work closely with their homeland
counterparts. They have succeeded like “generals, who, having
carefully laid their planned assault, now shoot down their enemies one
by one.”

But let me also be fair here. What the Chinese and the Indians are
doing is not unheard of because in no known human history, has there
been a country or a civilization that achieved greatness based on
moral purity. Take the British for example. In its quest to lead the
world’s first industrial revolution, not only did it copy whatever it
could and wherever it could be found. The British were equally
notorious as high sea pirates stealing what they could steal from
others as if those were their birthrights. And one way or another, the
American industrial economic was built thanks to slave labour. What
about the European colonizers, who returned to Africa in the
nineteenth century after centuries of participation in the human
trafficking of Africans, this time, to violently occupy the whole
continent and divide it as their commercial interests dictated? Is
there any closeness to what the Chinese and the Indians are doing
today to the European human cruelty?

Can Africans learn something from today’s Chinese and Indians? Can we
learn that a strong market for goods and services is a leading cause
of economic growth, and that market is itself a major cause of
capital, investment, and technological advancement? Are we now
convinced that economic growth is an organic process, involving many
interrelated factors? What about understanding that even the banking
industry and other financial institutions do not create the
conditions for economic growth, since they are only important when an
economy is sufficiently sophisticated to make efficient and creative
intermediation between savings and business?

Have we now finally realised that a continent that does not educate
majority of its young men and women in job-enhancing education
(science and engineering) to prepare them as useful citizens is not
building its future high-value carrying workforce? Are we still in
doubt that Africa having the world’s single largest number of highly
educated professionals in the US and yet they could not be made to
work closely with their African counterparts—like their Chinese and
the Indians counterparts—to help jumpstart continental economy is our
collective sin future generations will find difficult to forgive us?
Have we now come to pose the question: How come our well-trained
scientists and engineers, those that refused to migrate are allowed to
roam our streets without being fully mobilise? What about the
understanding that the future of our economic development lies in the
mobilisation of Africa’s entrepreneurs, especially our highly gifted
men and women who have the psyche of economic warriors? Put
differently, are we now fully aware that it is this lack of
entrepreneurial dynamism that today separates us from the developed
economies of the West and recently Asian economies?

What about our being convinced that it is not about reinventing the
mousetrap, since it has already built, but rather than go through the
trouble of designing and constructing a new mousetrap, we should focus on imitating what is already out there in a way that beats these
others in the market? Can we now concur that to accelerate our
economic engine, we must have some citizens willing and eager to lead
every level of the process, and others willing to prefer locally made
goods, like the Chinese and Indians? That otherwise we continue to
create jobs and build new wealth for other countries from where we
import finished goods?

What we ought to have learned from the Chinese and the Indian economic ‘miracles’ is that the solutions to our economic problems must be home-grown, driven by a large number of our intellectuals. Lamenting on the dearth of the intellectuals in our midst, one of Africa’s celebrated social theorists, Rev. Dr. Matthew Kukah, asks the question: “How do we expect this ‘pickup van’ fully loaded with more than a thousand tones of cement to move forward with such a heavy load? The message Kukah is sending is clear; that bringing home our gifted intellectuals, currently in exile should be vigorously pursued. That, it is now paramount to bring home these specially gifted Diaspora
Africans because not only are they more familiar with the terrains of
economic development but also have the clout and the secrets

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