The Natural Law out of Underdevelopment

To easily understand the process that leads society out of poverty and underdevelopment, and the natural law that controls the process, imagine cooking food for a big number of people using the traditional method of three cooking stones. The food is prepared in an over-sized sauce pan, covered well and placed on three cooking stones. Firewood is lit under and the food gets ready in a relatively short period of time; almost everyone gets served (Illustration 1).

Food represents the country’s economy. Cooking fire symbolises energy of the leadership and entire society expended in moving the country out of poverty and underdevelopment. The three cooking stones symbolise the three development pillars on which every society must stand to get out of poverty and underdevelopment, namely (i) Knowledge (ii) Skills and (iii) Right thinking for the country’s development. Together, the three development pillars comprise the natural law out of underdevelopment. It was to ensure conformity to this law that formal education became a prerequisite to transforming society socio-economically, but also to sustaining that transformation.

To easily understand your country’s non-conformity to the natural law out of underdevelopment therefore, imagine again that one of the cooking stones was missing. The remaining two cooking stones cannot support the saucepan; they simply give way and the food ends up sitting on the ground (illustrated below). In this position, the food can never get ready no matter how long you cook it. The best it can become are small portions of food, in the sides of the sauce pan, getting ready while the rest stays uncooked!  Just a handful of people get served.

The missing cooking stone symbolises the missing development pillar[1] for your society. The absence of this development pillar makes it impossible to move your country out of poverty and underdevelopment, in the same way the missing cooking stone makes it impossible to cook food and it gets ready.  Just as food cooked this way ends up feeding a handful of people, the economic growth registered in the absence of the third development pillar (i.e. while we are mentally ‘asleep’) ends up benefiting a handful few in the country.

[1]The world that you and I grew up in prevents the African mind from growing attitudes that are critical to development. The absence of these attitudes in the African mind-set denied you, me and the rest of the Africans the right thinking for the country’s development, i.e. rendering us ‘mentally asleep’ with regard to our societies’ development.