Too often we blame our leaders for everything for ignoring available
solutions to our misery but at the same time we adore and defend their
personal aggrandizement. They have obliged with a sucker of all time -
the rule of law. If your arm is infected with cancer, you cut it off.
Why not do the same to those known as chronic looters since the first
Republic, as drug peddlers, as 419 masters and as gun runners turned
politicians. So we expect them to alter their hot chase for loot. Stones
and sand thrown into our gari must come back, like agaracha,
to hunt these Barawo.
Most of us demand solutions instead of
another anthology of the problems ignoring the fact that Africans have
the brain and the solutions that have been intentionally sidetracked
with the help of those experts willing to compromise their principles
for booty. We all blamed looters but who were their technical advisers
who negotiated the policies, opened the treasury, lodged our money
overseas and took commission for their service as loyal economists,
accountants, lawyers, etc.?
We are full of many solutions to choose from but we decide on our
pockets first. As for the very few people who determine the leadership
we complain of daily, they can only accomplish that greed because the
silent majority is resigned to fate, obsessed with religion, the
supernatural, ethnic2 0and “join them if you cannot beat them” syndrome.
We succumbed to their interest to perpetuate ignorance, grandiose
promises hardly fulfilled and trickle down servitude. Others elect
governments between liberals or conservatives; we chose between crooks
and lesser evil.
In case you are wondering if everyone is so mesmerized, of course not.
There are many of us that are as conscientious as our counterparts
outside the African Continent. At the end of the day we either take a
flight out or stay and languish in prisons. Most of the brutalized
activist students of yesteryears have gone underground. Nearly all the
academics that were so confrontational in those days, have found their
levels. When you go on strike, starve without salary, face the barrel of
the gun, you either fight or vamoose. Many died and others
disfarahan i.e. disappeared.
It does not mean Africans were not brave enough to face their oppressors
like others. Indeed we were products of guerrilla warfare from the East,
South to civil disobedience and brain struggle of the Nkrumah in West
Africa. It seems that the old guards have never learned how to stop, so
we still engage in ethnic clashes all over the Continent. It is this
pugnacious mentality that has fed into the psyche of our armed forces
trained worldwide to bastardize the very system they swore to defend as
subordinates of civilians to protect life and property in their
communities.
It is said that the20 way a country nurtures its people creates the
leaders they get, yet Africans do not deserve these contemptuous
leadership everybody always blame. Out of all the leaders we have at
this moment, only a few of them went to Mandela University of
deprivation and torture. Most of them, especially in Nigeria, got free
school and board with free extacode. While many of us were juggling
school and gburu, they were driving fancy cars to attract all
kinds of susies that were smarter than them. They never learn
hard work then, and never will.
There was nothing a young man wanted that they never had. Fast forward
and compare them to the ones crossing the deserts today without
scholarships. As soon as they make a little money, they send some back
home to their parents, brothers and sisters just like those juggling
school and gburu in those days. One dilemma with a few of them
is their delusion with education as the ultimate. Actually many of them
were highly trained in African universities before going abroad.
Looking at these two groups of people, which of them should be more
grateful and return home to contribute and uplift Africa? The surprise
is that the spoilt brats are the worst form of human beings ever
created. They use their military discipline to despise their people,
brutalize them as “common civilians” while engaging in the highest form
of hedonism ever known to mankind.
They set bad examples for the yo uths at home. If their leaders are not
working hard to earn their keeps, why should they? Those leaders, who
went to universities at home which were as good as any other, have
refused to upgrade their Alma Mata. They have decided on their own
private universities for prestige and to make more money. The irony is
that their type of aggrandizement is practiced in the poorest continent
amongst the most deprived folks on earth. We have not yet figured out
how we can produce the most basic form of necessity for all our folks:
clean water.
Most people agree that China and Russia would not have become world
powers or been able to feed their people if they had not suspended
individual liberty and introduced necessary radical transformation that
threw out the bourgeoisie. Even then China, Russia and little Cuba
remained relatively poor. But is there any deprivation suffered in those
countries that we didn’t? For half of the years we were cowed under
military we could have eked out some common benefits. No!
To indicate our displeasure, youths now throw stones and sand into their
parties with the cry of onyeoshi, barawo and ole as
they blatantly indulge in conspicuous consumption or fiddling right in
our face all over the Country. It’s a token price of inconvenience to
pay, don’t you complain. Generally communities either encouraged or
reinforce good behavior, and punished to deter bad behavior. If the
future owners of our Country want Ni=2 0geria back, they have to wrestle
it away the best way they can.
Stone and sand throwing is the least they can do.
Our solution is in our taste for craving what we can neither produce nor
maintain. The next test is how we are going to blow our foreign reserve
the same way we parted with our able men and women as slaves, gold, oil,
cocoa and local youthful brains crossing the deserts. We constantly
blame leadership when we are the ones who glorify them with swords and
amours. Showering them with sand wherever and whenever they gather to
celebrate their loots, taking the next wife, at their children’s wedding
or parties never kills but outcast them as Judas who sold out.
The greed that feed corruption today in Africa is born out of cravings
for what Africans cannot produce. Every project and most consumption are
fed by selling our soul for foreign exchange. We cannot produce ordinary
pin without looking for outside sustenance. Embedded in all our
development programs are means to source foreign exchange so that some
people can be in perpetual luxury while others scrape for a living. It
is in our steel industry, car/truck assemblies, textile or Tinapa
project and the next steroid: Lagos Ocean City contract on foreign
maintenance