Africa And The Esau Mentality

It’s not shameful enough that we produce crude oil and import petrol , we produce cocoa and import chocolate , diamonds are mined in Africa, but Switzerland is the diamond capital of the world , now we are importing cooked egusi, ogbono, jollof rice and yam porridge into Africa .

Proverbs 12:27 says “The lazy man roasteth not that which he took in hunting”.

Isn’t this part of the bible a little bit of an oxymoron ? I mean how can you say a man who went hunting is lazy ? Hunting is a very physical activity which entails running after animals and killing them. Why does the book of proverbs declare such person a lazy man?

This bring to mind the popular story of Esau and Jacob. We recall that Esau was a man of the field , a hunter and an apparently hard working man. And Jacob was described as a mild man. Yet, we recall that Esau came back home one day and had to depend on Jacob for food. And of course Jacob made him pay a high price for the food. His birth right .

In the second incident which is very significant, their father calls Esau to bring him food so that he can eat and bless him. While Esau heads to the forest to look for game, Jacob first of all employs the use of a consultant . Who is the person that has constantly produced food for their father for many years?

Her name Rebecca. The wife of their father Isaac. So while Esau is running to the forest, Jacob is consulting and strategizing. Then he finds the answer . He produced one of his animals . Not from the bush, but from the backyard where he has been cultivating them. Isaac was blind . He will never know the difference between animal gotten from the bush and animal raised at the backyard .

So while Esau was still in bush working hard , the strategist had produced the desired satisfaction for the clients effortlessly.

This is the difference between muscle work and brain work .

There are two types of nations on earth . There are the Esau nations and the Jacob nations . The Esau nations produce all the resources and passes to the Jacob nations who transforms and sells it back at a higher price to the Esau nations.

This is the reason why a country like Belgium, with 11 million people and 30,000 square kilometers , no mineral resources can have a GDP of 500 billion dollars and per capita income of 45,000 dollars , 21st in the global human development index.

On the other hand, a country like Democratic republic of Congo, with a total size of 2.4 million square kilometer has a population of 85 million.

Congo has 70% of the world’s coltan, a third of its cobalt, more than 30% of world diamond reserves, and a tenth of its copper. Congo is arguably the worlds richest country with an estimated minerals value of 24 trillion dollars. But, Congo pitiably has a GDP of 68 billion dollars and a per capita income of 816 dollars while sitting 176th on the global human development index rating .

History shows how the British, a tiny island colonized almost half of the population of the entire world. From the United States to India, South America and The Caribbean, almost 70 nations and 2 billion people fell under the colony of a tiny island of less than 30 million people as at 1900.

What did the British do that gave them edge over the world ? Time management . The British people actually triggered off the industrial revolution when they began to use machines to make clothes and steam engines to run the machine. Jacob mentality.

Up till today , many African women still believe that pounded yam, pounded by hand in the mortar is sweeter and better than machine grounded powdered yam. I’m told that Egusi broken by hand is still more expensive in Nigeria than the ones broken by machines. Esau mentality .

In Nigeria, we still attach value to things due to how difficult they are produced. That’s why we still move files from table to table in our ministries and processes that will take few minutes through the intranet and iCloud will drag on for days at the ministries. This still happens despite the fact that the civil servants themselves all have internet enabled phones which they use for only Facebook , Instagram and chatting .

It is this same mentality that made an elected President squander a whopping six months before he could form a cabinet while we are clearly seeing a Donald Trump appointing almost all his ministers and a 16 man economic advisory team almost two months to his inauguration.

Until we begin to put efforts towards producing with ease and speed ,reduce the bottlenecks and bureaucracy in government regulatory agencies, create an environment that will improve our ease of doing business and generally take the private sector more seriously, we’d continue to see manufacturing plants shut down in Nigeria, while they spring up abroad and manufacture our egusi soup which we’d gladly buy at a higher price …..