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Poverty Has Come To Stay Permanently In Africa Unless… By Jibo Nura
Even though I haven’t a slightest intention to either speak, talk or write on the poverty stricken Africa but I was enticed by a Neighbour who fashionably wore a shirt that carries an inscription “MAKE POVERTY HISTORY”. I then curiously asked whether he was wearing it for fun or as a form of protest to our uncompassionate leaders, who do not really care about the dangers of their un-shameful blind involvements in the Global Campaign for Action against Poverty.
Ordinarily, the West’s variety of programmes on Africa i.e. the commission for African Declaration, which is branded to eliminate corruption and improved its governance, the G.7 Finance Ministers London summit on cutting the multi – billion debt burden of the ‘poorest Africa’, the Scotland’s meeting of the G. 8 Leaders that focuses poverty on Africa and the forthcoming World leaders gathering in New York to assess the Millennium Declaration to halve extreme poverty in Africa, were and are supposed to serve and solve the entire problems of the ‘backward Africa’ had the West embraced and pursued these ubiquitous programmes and policies in good faith. But due to the lopsidedness and utopian nature, of all the programmes vis–a–vis leaders injustices, western aggressions and intimidations, external power struggles/influences, super powers invasions, coupled with the present day leaders mentality of turning leadership into family affair, will continue to mar Africans and Africa. It will continue to stop taking the continent far from the edge of poverty doldrums.
Left to me but all what is happening to Africa are as a result of our leader’s gross violation of human rights, lack of confidence and loss of moral values and failure of an African man to rise to the maltreatments that are always meted to him by the imperialists’ dominations. Come to think of it but the most popular saying of a white man especially when wronged by an African is that DON’T ALLOW ME TO PUT YOU IN MY BLACK BOOK, attaching bad deed to blackness as if it is cursed by God! He (the white man) is so fond of attributing bad luck to anything black because he considers it as inferior of all colours. He calls us blacks because we seem lackadaisical to fight him back. But why can’t he simply address us as Africans instead of blacks, is a food for thought another day. And definitely he will continue to call us names- the poorest, highly impoverished, poverty ravaged, hunger stricken etc.
Like he said in his address to the twenty thousand people gathering in Trafalgar Square London, former South African President, Nelson Mandela, threw a double Decker challenge to the so called global campaign to strike out the poverty in an African man. ‘That as long as gross inequalities, will keep on persisting in our world, as long as slavery and apartheid will be artificially created among people, then poverty has come to live with us’.
Therefore, whether we like it or not, we must rise and say no to our leader’s ridiculous campaign against the poverty that is deliberately brought and inhumanly distributed on us. And we can only do that by answering the call of all time Africa’s lover, hero, reggae maestro and ‘black’ freedom fighter, the legendary Bob Marley who with fraternity said it all in his “Get up! Stand up! Stand up for your rights! Don’t give up the fight!”
Come-on Africans let us rise and answer the call of this honorable gentleman.
Jibo Nura is a columnist with Desert Herald Newspapers, No.6 North Road, Opp. NEPA District office, G.R.A. Kaduna. Contact Nura at deherald@yahoo.com |