The American Dream is a social contract built on the promise of prosperity and freedom for the average American, in exchange for the patriotic pursuit of collective aspirations. This concept spread across Europe from the USA, the largest and most diverse conglomeration of White people, just as China's prosperity is now spreading across Asia. However, Nigeria, the largest conglomeration of Black people, has not yet provided a template to empower Black Africans with a sense of belonging and collective aspiration.
People come together in a commonwealth, giving up part of themselves for collective security and economies of scale to make life more abundant. Politicians typically use two methods to motivate and mobilize the masses: fear or dreams. In the 1600s, Hobbes argued that it was difficult to pinpoint the ultimate collective dream of fulfillment, so the fear of extinction has been the primary political force in traditional societies. Across Black Africa, it is the fear of being overrun by other tribes, while in Europe, it is the fear of invading Russians.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is the development of an economic system to fulfill collective aspirations that dictates constitutions, which in turn define the social contract between the government and the governed. Therefore, until Nigeria shifts from a neocolonial economy to an integrated economy focused on fulfilling the needs of the people with our own resources, neither we nor other African nations can develop constitutions and political systems that genuinely uplift the people. This was the case in our traditional societies, such as Oyo and Oyo Mesi, until slavery and colonization usurped our economic and political systems, turning our dreams into nightmares.
The initial White social contract of prosperity that evolved in the early 1500s was based on imperialistic European monarchs colonizing Native American lands. These lands were given to immigrant Europeans, who were provided with African slaves to plant adapted African crops like sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco. This created an economic system known as the Golden Triangle between Europe, Africa, and the Americas that lasted for two centuries, morally justified by the Biblical Ham story as a form of constitution. The colonial social contract changed with the end of the Golden Triangle economic system, shifting to an economic model in which the agricultural produce of Southern USA plantations was diverted to the non-agricultural Northeast USA for local processing. The profits were then used to fulfill the collective aspirations of White Americans.
This change in the economic system required a shift from the colonial Christian European monarchies' social contract tied to the Bible, to a written secular constitution. The greatest hurdle was not the transfer of British monarch powers to the delegates of the 13 colonies that became the federal government—achieved with the 1775-1776 Articles of Confederation—but the inclusion of African slaves into the new social contract, not based on the Biblical Ham Story. This led to intense bargaining between slaveowners and Northern capitalists/Federalists, delaying the Constitution until 1787 when it was finally resolved with the Three-Fifths compromise, which accorded Africans just 60% of humanity, and restricted voting to landowners. In Haiti, where both the French colonists and local slaveowners were forcibly removed from the economic system, Black people designed the first universal voting suffrage in 1804. The change in the Golden Triangle economic system and the new social contracts spread to European monarchs with the French Revolution and 1832 British Electoral Reforms.
The local adaptation of the USA slave-based agricultural economic system, from being colonial export-focused, led to the development of inland railways that birthed heavy manufacturing. Surplus iron and chemicals used for railways and railcars led to the development of the industrial military complex, whose profits and labor demands far surpassed that of the slave agricultural system. This created the need for a new social contract as slavery ended and its labor was absorbed by manufacturing in the North. With industrialization, the masses organized into labor unions that spread across the USA and Europe, demanding a better contract. This was initially addressed in 1903-1906 with US President Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal. However, this was not enough, as Socialists seized power in the Russian 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to take over collective resources for socially beneficial production, resulting in a new economic system and constitution.
To prevent the spread of revolution to the USA and Western Europe, especially during the 1929 Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal in 1933. This involved the accelerated development of sprawling suburbia, transferring wealth to the people and providing employment. Western nations adopted national economic planning to fulfill the People's Dream, ensuring everyone had access to housing, transport, education, health, and employment, financed through budget deficits either with investment in consumer goods or the military-industrial complex. Initially, Black Americans were excluded from this wealth transfer, but since their labor and raw materials from newly independent African nations were needed, the social contract had to be altered with the 1960s Civil Rights Acts.
In Africa, especially Nigeria, the cradle of Indigenous African civilization, our civilizational economic system of kola, clothing, beads, and food, tied to Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa constitutions, was derailed with the slave-for-arms economic system, which politically balkanized our civilization into empires like Oyo, Benin, and Igala. The end of the Golden Triangle economic system led European monarchs to turn to Africa to develop a new colonial economic system. Before colonial political amalgamations, our civilizational economics were restructured by overriding our trade routes with the building of railways from our hinterlands to the ports. In Nigeria, two North-South railway lines were built to create a new economic system based on supplying raw materials for European factories and serving as dumping grounds for their manufactured goods.
At independence, Nigerians did not restructure back to our civilizational economic system upon which a new social contract could evolve. Instead, a new pseudo-elite took up the role of economic and political middlemen between human and natural resources and the former colonial masters. To this day, we remain a nation of traders and planters. A few genuine leaders who followed Keynesian and Socialist ideals, like Awolowo and Nkrumah, sought to fulfill the African Dream of making life more abundant with housing, education, employment, and health subsidies. However, within a decade, they were swept out of power by Western-engineered corruption propaganda and other political tools.
By the mid-1970s, the IMF and World Bank attacked the concept of a social contract based on the government fulfilling the People's Dream, replacing it with free market theories that led African nations to shirk their social responsibilities. Western global economic hegemony imposed enslaving policies like subsidy removal and devaluation, reducing real wages and impoverishing economically dependent African nations that hadn't changed their neocolonial economic systems. IMF loans were not to be used for education, health, or development, in order to stall any change in the economic system. Currently, with African nations regaining their pre-slavery global proportional populations, their economies can no longer serve as appendages to foreign economic systems, and their political systems can't fulfill their Dreams. To avoid Russian-style revolutions in Nigeria and across Africa, the political classes must urgently implement a New Deal for a Nigerian Dream. This involves accelerated massive social housing development that would not only transfer wealth to the average Nigerian but also inspire a patriotic feeling of inclusion in a commonwealth that fulfills their dreams.
This New Deal for a Nigerian Dream must end the current neocolonial economic system of being primary producers and foreign importers and bring about a new economic system of industrialization. This can be spurred by developing East-West railways (Lagos-Calabar, Ilorin-Yola, and Sokoto-Maiduguri) that reestablish our civilizational economy. The multiplier effects will develop our iron and chemical industries, creating jobs with reasonable wages for millions of our unemployed, unlike agriculture, which can't absorb them and pays slave wages.
This transformation will be funded by large deficits, an 18-month reduction of imports to the barest minimum to prevent leakages, and the use of nearly 100% locally derived inputs, all organized by the Defence Industries Corporation for efficiency. While this new economic system must be centrally built, for sustainability, our political system must be immediately restructured to devolve power for competitive progressive management. Additionally, we must constitutionalize our traditional institutions, which are the source of our cultural identity and moral values, to end the coloniality of being, power, and knowledge sources.
** Justice Faloye, President of ASHE Foundation think tank, author of The Blackworld Evolution to Revolution, and Afenifere National Publicity Secretary, is an economist and sociopolitical activist.
