“SINCE the Sumer & Indus Valley Civilization established trade links in the third millennium B.C., cultures have engaged in an exchange of culture and economics. Over the past 5,000 years, this exchange has given way to wars, genocide, and disease, but has also enabled the spread of religion, agriculture, and advancements in science. Society has given a name to this seemingly unstoppable advance: globalization”. Daniel Wilson.
Globalization is said to be a method for promoting inter-cultural values, understanding and to ensure integrated development among nations, irrespective of their size or population. This principle is internationally accepted and seeks to enhance diplomacy for a sustained partnership, which is prerequisite to development and peaceful concomitant among nations. However, this much touted ideals are repulsively violated by the very signatories to this convention. Africans particularly, in their desire to travel to the west for studies, research and visits, find themselves at the mercy of merciless western missions in their respective countries.
Proscribed sojourn is a global menace of concern that every nation and humanitarian institutions will want to see an end to. There have been several resolutions passed by the United Nations and numerous international bodies that seeks to tackle this menace, however, all efforts to this effects have proven futile. The real fact of the matter has to do with the demeanour of western diplomatic missions in African countries to their respective host countries and their citizens;
Notable unacceptable posture has to do with the treatment meted out to citizens of a host of western embassies. Africans mostly the young in their quest to travel abroad, are subjected to all forms of unhealthy, and all manner of frustrations in the process of visa acquisition followed by subsequent denial of visa.
This feat by western embassies in Africa informs the decision of a good number of African youth to resort to a cheaper but risky means to get to their desired destination. Countless able cadaver of young men and women have perish by endangering their lives at various dangerous point of entry into the west for greener pasture, after having failed and been frustrated in their attempt to pass through the legitimate means of entry by reckless and deliberate bureaucratic and outrageous procedures of western embassies in the African continent. Imagine one had been refused visa without any perceptible reason stated, no refund of visa fees paid and even some relevant documents in remission.
Respective African governments have failed to confront this impudence by western embassies in their countries all in the name of a so-called diplomacy, even to the detriment of their own citizens. A system they revere so much but which their western counterparts despise especially when it has to do with the African masses.
One would struggle to understand the inequalities, in that, globalization seems to be working only for people of the western hemisphere at the impairment of their counterparts in Africa, It is an obvious fact that it takes within a matter of 48 hours to just a week or two for a youth in the west to travel to any destination in Africa of their choice. That is evident by the influx of numerous young people from the west in African cities for reasons best known to them.
In his book "The World Is Flat," Thomas Friedman, sees globalization as a phenomenon that will eliminate inequality in our societies. However, a critic mentioned that Friedman fails to recognize that corporations and powerful institution are steering globalization, building “walls” of property and class all over the world. From this alternative viewpoint, Friedman's "flatness" appears as a symptom of the absence of real freedom." (Navdanya).
This sheer effrontery exhibited by foreign diplomats in sovereign countries, which are members of the global community is an indication of the utter failure of globalization, or better still it suggests how well globalization works only for western countries, their citizens and their establishments all over the world to the detriment of those of the so-called impoverished third world.
Slavery, colonialism, imperialism and globalization all are of the same stock. The only panacea to this institutionalized bondage is nothing but a unified system in Africa as “Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah put it in his book Africa Must Unite, that,” it’s either we unite or perish”.
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