19/01/2007
Africa - A Lost Continent
As an African I believe Africa needs to come up with her own solutions to the problems that bedevils many of its nations and rid the confusion that the African leadership has cultivated for a period spanning over decades. The core of the matter is to change the mindset of the general populace. Many people in Africa still fear colonialism and still hold on to communism as a savior. The truth of the matter is that all these things have gone and are history. No nation with sane people will attempt to propel colonialism in the 21st century; it is a barbaric piece of history that no one wants to repeat. The era is gone and rest assured that it would not ever happen that Africans or even any other race would be treated as less human and inferior. We are now global citizens and should as such endeavor to harmonize our way of life. Africa is still a lost continent despite the much-publicised independence. The rise of independence in Africa came with many problems that will need a new revolution to solve them. Africa suffers from the politics of antagonism and self-aggrandizement. Most African leaders lack the basic qualities of a simple leader - Integrity. Some of these leaders have a misconception that people should serve them when in reality the opposite is true in a real democracy. True democracy involves each and every party playing their roles to achieve a common goal. Africa is now haven for dictatorship. I attribute the poor political situation in most African states to lack of clear foreign policy. The political leadership seems not to know what their countries need in a global community. The concept is not to fight democratic principles so that one can stay in power forever because that cannot ever happen. Leaders come and go but nations are here to stay and power shall in this sense therefore be a shared responsibility not a personal right to enrichment. On the other hand the general impoverished populace do not clearly know what it really needs or expect from the people they chose to represent them. In Africa the politics of tribes still play a role; it is a reminiscent of the colonial divide and rule tactic. People identify their leaders as ‘one of ours’ and will vote that person to power even if they clearly know that s/he is not credible. For wrong reasons some people end up being presidents, some after terrorizing the poor villagers and being invited in some peace deals and some after being acquitted of raping poor girls etc.
Liberation struggle political parties in Africa have also become a liability to the continent. Some leaders of these political parties think that they are the only ones qualified to be leaders because they liberated the masses from colonialism when in actual fact every citizen played a role. No one can win a war alone, a battle maybe, but it does not necessarily mean that when you liberate a people they lose their rights to make their own decisions including the one to differ with those one who helped them gain freedom. Continuously holding on to the old school of political thinking has seen many African leaders trying to resuscitate an already dead system of socialism and communism. Communism is a failure and everyone knows that even those who started it have since come to their senses and abandoned it. The once poor communist bloc is now a growing economy. African leaders are good at setting goals and targets they cannot meet and forming many useless organizations in the name of Africanism, a form of brotherhood that is fast destroying the continent. There are some organizations in Africa that are struggling due to lack of funding and I personally do not really know why these organizations exist, e.g. African Union (a mordernised OAU), and the so-called SADC. Amongst such numerous organisations, I am inclined to place the SADC on top of the list of gross uselessness and loss of focus at a time when bad things are happening in the southern part of the continent. Since the infiltration of the OAU by Modern African Communist and its subsequent modernization and renaming to AU, the organization has been reduced to a club where the African elite periodically meet and just pass the paperwork, change helms and leave secretaries to file the paperwork. The AU has failed to solve a problem close to its HQ, the Somalia crisis and African leaders expect the entire world to take them seriously. I give credit to the Americans for driving out the Islamic warlords who had invaded this poor country. There are times when I am tempted to think that conflict is what African leaders love so that they can retain leadership and get bloody deals at the expense of peace. The SADC does not respect basic principles and diplomacy is what they promote at the expense of reality to the point of endorsing undemocratic procedures. There are many cases of human rights abuses in Southern Africa and not any single leader can stand up and publicly declare that this is wrong and something has to be done. Instead these leaders divert people’s attentions and blame the West and the USA in particular for the continent’s ills. I have now come to realize that African leaders are the same. They are a team, a brotherhood of doom. They suffer from the same disease and aim to be the richest citizen in their respective countries. These people are authors of books with black pages written in back ink and only the author can read the book and the listeners cannot verify the facts, its only the author who knows and chooses what the listeners have to hear. Unless African leaders start to come in the open and boldly tell some of their colleagues that they are destroying the continent and reputation of the other leaders, they remain the same. Because one bad egg can spoil the whole basketful there is no need to cover the egg and bear the stench from the bad egg. Considering the fact that it is difficult for a few people to convince a great number, I am finally tempted to conclude that the majority of Africa’s leadership is made up of non credible people otherwise the bad ones would have found it so difficult to survive in a clean environment.
09:00 Posted in African Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: politics, africa
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