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Theophilus Ejorh
In the 1970s, American sociologist and economic historian, Immanuel Wallerstein developed an intellectual approach known as The World Systems Theory. It is a radical thought that changed the way the world’s societies had previously been viewed. In addition, it was a response to the Eurocentric thinking that holds that the modernisation of nations followed a five-stage model of transition, from traditional society to a modern one. Wallerstein contended that the development of the world’s capitalist economy had been harmful to large proportions of the global population.
A decade before emergence of this theory, Marxist thinkers had argued in what became known as the Dependency school of thought that the dominant wealthy capitalist nations had attained their top economic status at the expense of poorer countries. The dominant argument of this model is that the global capitalist system thrives based on its reliance on a division of labour between the rich ‘core’ countries and poor ‘peripheral’ ones, and with the passage of time, the core countries will begin to exploit their advantage of economic supremacy over the progressively marginalised peripheral nations.
Wallerstein agreed with the Dependency thinkers that there is a redistribution of surplus value from the poor “underdeveloped” periphery to the rich “developed” core in terms of exploitation and export of raw materials, which are processed into finished goods that are in turn sold back to the periphery at exorbitant prices. Wallerstein divided the modern world capitalist system into three key groups of nations: the Core, the Periphery and the Semi-Periphery states. The core states, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Germany, and recently, China and Russia, exercise dominance over the other two groups of states in terms of productivity, trade and finance. The peripheral states are historically the poor countries of Africa, Latin America and some Asian countries. These nations lack economic diversity, have relatively weak and unstable governments; depend on export of raw materials to the core states, are less industrialised, and have a high level of social inequality. In the last century, the semi-peripheral states included the likes of Brazil, Russia, India, Israel, China, South Korea and South Africa (BRICS).
Extant evidence suggests a transition of the semi-peripheral countries towards aggressive industrialisation and sustained economic diversification, and some like China and Russia have even become more aggressive in these key areas as well as waxing quite strong in international trade in recent years such that they have now made an unsurprising transition to the core groups of states. Today, Chinese goods flood global markets, from Africa to Europe to North America. India is also another country that is coming in the heels of China and Russia.
Reeling under the weight of heavy debt burden from China and the developed West, African countries like Nigeria have continued to show little or no signs of freeing themselves from the peripheral trap. Some of the states are rudderless. Political leadership is at best dishonest, polarised along ethno-religious fault-lines, confused and dysfunctional. Corruption is so deeply entrenched that it has become second nature for most of the citizenry. Most basic infrastructures needed as vehicles for progress have either atrophied or are merely standing on one leg. In all, there is absence of the political will necessary to drive industrialisation. Also, social inequalities are at astonishing levels. Economic diversification is absent. The result of these is a sustained consumerist culture, even as these countries have become easy targets for investments from the opulent multinational corporations from the core nations, who have made it their key goal to invest in these countries, exploit the omnipresent cheap unskilled labour, who produce goods that are exported back to their core home countries. Indeed, the politics of international economics is complex.
Today the world has become an endangered place to live in, due largely to the ravages of the Corona virus pandemic. As at Friday the 15th of May, Covid-19 statistics were startling, with over 4.5 million confirmed cases and over 303,000 deaths worldwide. As cases of infections and numbers of people dying from the scourge continue to rise unabatedly, nations of the world, including the peripheral poor, continue to look up to the industrialised core for a solution, hoping for when a yet-to-discovered vaccine by the big and powerful pharmaceutical companies would be launched. It is no longer news that when such a remedy is found, it will as usual be disproportionately priced beyond the reach of the common people. Many believe the big pharma companies ultimately hold the key to ending the pandemic.
Currently, a number of trials are being conducted in science laboratories across the world, most funded by the big pharma companies, towards developing an effective vaccine to treat the corona virus. The World Health Organisation has identified four of the most promising therapies – including an HIV combination treatment, an anti-malarial and a drug developed but never used against Ebola – for testing in a global trial launched last month.
The world has been plunged into a state of fear and lockdown as never before. There is terror everywhere. But for how long would the world wait before the vaccine is developed? Would people continue waiting until the virus decapitates the world economies, and takes millions of lives along the way, or even depleting the global population by three-thirds of people, as one narrative holds?
There is a need to find an effective and lasting solution for the Covid-19 scourge as quickly as possible, even as the race for developing an effective drug to combat the virus becomes marred by politics. In March this year, the Chinese reported that they successfully treated 19 Covid-19 patients with Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the same drugs used to efficiently treat patients with SARS-CoV-2. Days after this report, the United States president, Donald Trump, gave his approval for the use of hydroxychloroquine,an antibiotics, in America to treat the disease. Trump dubbed the combination, a “game changer.”
Two studies, one in France and the other in China reported some benefits in the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for COVID-19 patients. But those were patients who did not present with severe symptoms of the virus. But a recent study in France provided new evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not seem to help the immune system clear the coronavirus from the body.
In April this year, one of the protagonists in the present Covid-19 saga, American billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates, affirmed the need for an effective and lasting cure to halt the relentless onslaught of the pandemic and reopen the global economy. Such treatment should have 95% efficacy to restore public confidence to feel safe again in public gatherings and social occasions. Then, he reaffirmed the need for a vaccine, which he described as “short of a miracle treatment,” that will rekindle people’s trust that life is normal again. Aside from computer and information technology, the Microsoft boss and his wife, Melinda, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, own shares in nine big pharmaceutical companies valued at around $205 million. America’s biggest foundation, the organisation sits comfortably over an endowment valued at $24.2 billion from Microsoft Corp. Many critics – some have labelled them conspiracy theorists – now believe Gates has a hidden agenda in relation to the current scourge. He has invested millions of dollars in research for the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, which critics believe is sure proof of his foreknowledge of and instigation of the pandemic. Gates has never failed to reaffirm his optimism that a vaccine could be developed within the next 18 months, but the timeline for its emergence could be between 9 months and two years.
Gates has also been accused of sponsoring a hidden agenda towards a global population reduction. Some say he is interested in eugenics, a term coined by 19th century British scholar, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, the theorist of the survival of fittest through natural selection. Eugenicists are interested in improving the qualities of the human species or the human population, mainly by discouraging reproduction by individuals having defective genes or thought to have hereditary undesirable traits or encouraging reproduction by individuals assumed to have inheritable desirable traits. Bill and Melinda Gates have made donations of over $2.2 billion to fund population and reproductive health activities worldwide. It is believed that Bill Gates might have been exposed to population control through his father. William H. Gates Snr., a successful banker and lawyer, had served on the board of Planned Parenthood (PP) at the early stages of the group, an organisation strongly committed to population control. It is for these reasons that people challenge the sincerity of Gates’ motive in the drive to developing a vaccine for combating the Covid-19 scourge. Will the vaccine be a weapon for population reduction rather than the achievement of wellness? Also linked to this is the suspicion that the World Health Organisation (WHO) is a beneficiary of the Gates’ largesse, which is the reason the global health body has never hidden its support for the creation of a covid-19 vaccine.
Besides Gates, there are other powerful players in the present saga, people with investments or friends of investors in the big pharma corporations. These are individuals from the core states of the world, who supposedly wield the power to decide the fate of the rest of humankind. Where does all this leave the likes of Africa in the present context of the world system of things?
Only recently, Madagascar produced a remedy for Covid-19, called Covid Organics, from the precincts of one of its science laboratories. The African island country sits on the Indian Ocean, with a population of 26,262,313 people and an average per capita income of $260, making it one of the poorest countries in the world and approximately 70% of the inhabitants living below poverty line. The medicine has been produced with Artemisia annua, a popular herbal plant, locally nicknamed Wormwood and commonly used for food and for the treatment of malaria. Until Thursday, the 14th of May, the WHO had strongly advised against the use of the medicine for treating Covid-19, citing non-clinical tests of the remedy to ascertain its safety and efficacy, even as Madagascan president, Andry Rajoelina, a former businessman and advertising executive, vouches for its safety and efficacy, saying the concoction cured Covid-19 in seven days. However, South Africa’s government has promised to assist the authorities in Madagascar to test and analyse the herbal treatment.
It would seem that the WHO’s initial scepticism had been informed by its fear of the big stick of the big pharma corporations, who perceive Covid Organic as a direct affront to their power and integrity, as they continue to search for the elusive vaccine. Who is Madagascar, a poor, third-world, peripheral country of an “under-developed” continent to produce a cure that would determine the fate of the world in the present crisis? When has Africa begun to shape the direction of global health and medical care? Why should Madagascans (and Africans) be the ones to save the world, people who have historically looked up to the developed and powerful Core nations for salvation? For Africans, the development of Covid Organic is transformative. It is innovative. It, perhaps, marks the beginning of a rebirth. Perhaps now is the time for them to genuinely start looking inwards and tap into the richness of their natural surroundings, and gradually start tearing apart the dependency culture that has held them down for long. This may also prompt a resurgence of interest in alternative medicine in Africa. After all, African ancestors depended on their environments for sustenance and longevity.
But, for the Core nations of the world, if recognition is given to this poor country’s new medicine, there will certainly be a shift in thinking about health and medical care. There will be a paradigm shift, whereby people will start looking up to poor Africa and other peripheries for solution to national and global problems. The age-long pillars of psychological domination of the peripheries by the industrialised and powerful core may start crumbling. And, what happens to all the huge investments in research towards developing a covid-19 vaccine? Some people perceive a situation whereby the big pharma group may take up their arms and embark on a needless war to discredit and put Covid Organics out of existence.
So far, many African countries have enlisted their support for Madagascar, indicating interest in its herbal formula. Countries like Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, the Republic of Congo, Senegal, Central African Republic, Chad, Tanzania, and lately Nigeria (after initial reluctance), have said they plan to import or have accepted donations of Covid Organics from Madagascar.
Covid Organics is a hard lesson in appreciating what one has as much as it is in inventiveness for a country like Nigeria, Africa’s sleeping giant. Nigeria, from Yola to Ogbomosho, from Kazaure to Port-Harcourt, is richly blessed with gifts of nature, humanly and materially. Recently, former Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Bioresources Development Group (BDG), Maurice Iwu, a Professor of Pharmacognosy, announced that he has discovered a possible treatment for the Corona virus. But, no one seems to be taking him seriously, a clear case of the traditional lack of political will and self-confidence in national governance. Professor Iwu and his team of researchers had presented a plant-based patented treatment for COVID-19 to the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu. Iwu affirmed that apart from stopping the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), a drug his company patented also stopped the growth of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) and dengue fever, insisting that many lives could have been saved in Nigeria had the drug been used. But, had it been produced by a foreign country, the authorities would have taken it seriously.
Author profile:
Theophilus Ejorh is a Nigerian Irish citizen based in Dublin. He holds a PhD in Sociology from University College Dublin, where he taught for several years. He is an international award-winning poet, writer, and research consultant.