African Quagmire

African mentalities account for Africa’s backwardness

The problem is, so few want to articulate this truth.

There are reasons why Africa is such a backward place: why it is the beggar continent that perpetually lives off handouts called ‘foreign aid’ even as it sits on an abundance of natural resources; why most of its countries are lands of broken down infra­structure, stratospheric jobless rates, ramshackle government institu­tions “education systems” that are a sad joke, and so on ad infinitum.

There are reasons why black Africa is the continent of basket case countries best exemplified by the DR Congo, and others that are so totally off charts they do not even qualify to be called basket cases any more, like Somalia.

There are reasons, many reasons, why much of Sub Saharan Africa is the way it is. But if you want to begin to understand the main problem, stop listening to what many Africans say. These things have been said, time immemorial: Africa was exploited by Europeans, its best people sold into slavery, its countries colonized and looted…Africa continues to suffer because the West forcefully imposes its agendas on us and continues taking our resources for a pittance…“Yes!”, a Congolese will proclaim at the top of his voice, “They are taking away our gold and copper and diamonds and enjoying them while we get nothing!”…, and so on ad nauseum. There of course are many other people who do not lay all the blame for the appalling state of the continent on outsiders, asserting instead that bad leadership is the main source of problems.

As an African, you listen to all these things and after a number of years, if you are honest with yourself you come to realize, and admit the truth: central to this continent’s backwardness are its people. Pre­cisely the mentalities which most Africans approach life with. This is making a blanket statement obviously, because a hundred percent of any people cannot have a uniform view on any one issue. But by and large, too many black Africans are too willing to wallow in the blame game, to point accusing fingers at everyone but themselves. They are people who seem totally unaware that as grown human beings they (and other Africans like them) are to a large extent responsible for the choices they make, and how such choices impact their lives. They are utterly unwilling to accept facts that may contradict their world view, which is the dangerous and false idea that we are backward because other people are making us so; that these other people “will never give us a break and allow us to develop our societies so that we too can live in better material conditions…”

Whiners

These black Africans are whiners too ready to take positions devoid of objective fact, on any issue, especially issues where white people (or, to be more precise, Western countries) may be involved. All these whiners on this continent also seem to be too happy to complain about how the whites of this world, the bazungu (or wazungu in Swa­hili) are screwing us over, but never ever do anything that may in the long run put an end to that exploitation, even after years and years of the same complaint. Africans never lay out any strategies to defend themselves against the said exploitation; never devise ways to protect themselves against the exploitation they complain about. Even when they sit in so called meetings to do something, such gatherings tend to be chaotic shout fests that produce contradicting positions on any number of issues. And when the meetings are over and everyone has gone back to their home, they forget all about the resolutions and simply let the paperwork gather dust on shelves. The easiest course of action is to whine and whine and do little else.

 

 

 

The whiners may even be well-read and informed, and may very well be aware that Africa is not the only place that ever was colo­nised or exploited and enslaved by the bazungu, but that such so­cieties – China and India quickly spring to mind – are well on the way to economic and military su­perpower status while Africa is as backward if not, in certain cases, even more backward than when the colonialists left over half a century ago. The whiners seem devoid of any self-awareness, and, yes, even the educated ones seem unconcerned about how child-like they sound when they go on and on about how every­one is “picking on us,” “exploiting us,” “not giving us a break,” and so on it goes. The whiners seem unaware that with all their com­plaining and lack of sustained ac­tivity to change things, they only serve to perpetrate the stereotype that Africans are helpless dupes everyone will take advantage of, safe in the knowledge that the worst the African will do is com­plain and grumble.

There are any number of black Africans who are not whiners of course; people who are aware that we are our own worst enemy, and have been our own worst en­emy for decades and decades.

These are people who know that if anything is to ever change Africans better get off their back­sides, end their usual chaotic ways while working extremely hard, smart and purposefully. The sadly outnumbered none-whiners know we can only ever make something positive of our societies by aspiring to be punc­tual in whatever we do, be time conscious and avoid this usual, dangerous nonsense called “Af­rican time;” they know effort, in­telligence and innovation should be rewarded, instead of reward­ing tribe or kinsman; they know we should look at the long-term picture instead of corruptly plun­dering whatever little resources at your country’s disposal.

 

(Of course corruption exists all over the world; it is not in Af­rica only. But the corruption else­where tends to be the kind that does not lay waste to entire sectors; the corruption elsewhere tends to be smart, and targeted at creating even more wealth (when a Chinese corrupts an African president for in­stance, he gets a fat, juicy mining concession that will enrich his com­pany, its employees, shareholders and, ultimately, his government. In short, a big net gain for China, or whoever else will bribe the African, while the African official will as an individual become immensely rich even as all around him the wails of hungry, sick children lacking medi­cal care are to be heard, roads are in a deplorable condition, so called schools lack basics such as textbooks, and so, depressingly, on. Or for instance when an American businessman corrupts an American poli­tician called a congressman, it is because that businessman wants an opportunity to build a road in a certain district, or wants to bring a factory to a part of the city, etc. And that businessman will build that road, according to standard, and relatively quickly. Or his factory will benefit the wider community in which it is built, employing many, and paying reasonably good wages and on time. In Africa on the other hand some minister will only be scheming to siphon off about ninety percent of the budget to build a highway, and salt all the cash away in some Swiss bank account while the people the highway was sup­posed to benefit continue suffering the horribly potholed road which contributes to increased costs for businesses in expenses to repair ve­hicles…it is endlessly self-defeating and stupid, this African way of do­ing things, and it is the real source of the continent’s problems, not all the things the whiners moan about).

Gaddafi apologists

I will give a personal example of what happens when one tries to upend the popularly held notions of whiners. Last week in this news­paper I wrote an article with the headline, Gaddafi is gone; what are Africans mourning, a sort of obituary in which I describe just a few of the acts of the late Libyan tyrant that illustrated clearly, to any­one who cared to see the truth, that Muammar Gaddafi was a raving lunatic. In conclusion I lamented that so many on this continent are mourning a character whose depravity knew no bounds. Well, I can’t begin to describe the torrent of abuse that accompanied the piece. (Shyaka Kanuma “is a slave and it is slaves like this that are the real bane of Africa,” wrote an individual on the discussion thread of the ar­ticle on the website, AllAfrica.com. “Gaddafi was a great man who did much for this continent and “this raving lunatic from Kigali” (mean­ing me), should keep quiet, or something like that. Many others were writing in my Facebook account, to tell me what a fool I was, “playing the game of the West by reciting every bad thing it (West) was saying about Gaddafi.” Blah blah blah.

Implicit in all this abuse is the corrupt mindset of the average African (Gaddafi in his four-decade rule was well known for dispensing largess with abandon all over black Africa, a road here, numerous mosques there, but, most of all, the endless cash gifts he gave to individuals, big and small, down the years…and that is what probably has all the whin­ers worked up; they instead are in a frothing rage that anyone would dare mention any of the crazy activities of a buffoon whose activities (and those of his wastrel sons), set the aspirations of the average Liby­an back probably by hundreds of years).

Oh, the whiners are saying, “Gaddafi was only attacked for his oil”…“Oh, Gaddafi was too much of a revolutionary for the wazun­gu and spoke truth to them” and blah blah blah…

These Gaddafi apologists in­stead of siding with the Libyans who said “enough!” and “Get out of our lives Gaddafi!” after more than forty years of absolute, one-man tyranny will instead be shouting that the uprising in Benghazi was the doing of the whites (namely the US, France, the UK, Nato in general). It is in­credible how the whiners choose to ignore facts that totally con­tradict their version of events. Every person should be aware of events called “the Arab Spring”, which were set off when in De­cember last year a young Tuni­sian fruit vendor called Muham­mad Buazizi set himself on fire in protest at the acts of police who confiscated his fruit cart, physi­cally abusing him in the process. Enraged Tunisians rose en masse and after a few weeks toppled the government of Zine al Abidine ben Ali. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak fell next. The Libyans, looking at these events, thought now was the time to ask their tyrant to step aside. Protests began in the city of Benghazi, and how did Gaddafi respond? By deploying his air force on his own citizens in an attempt to bomb them into submission. They did not sub­mit. They went on protesting, and Gaddafi’s fighter jets kept bombing away. Libyans were crying out to the world to help. They were crying out to the Af­rican Union, but of course that is a quite useless and highly cor­rupt organization most of whose member leadership Gaddafi had long ago put in his pocket with his oil dollars. The Libyans kept protesting, and crying out for help, even as Gaddafi vowed to “hunt down the rats”, neighbour­hood to neighbourhood, door to door. Then Nato came in. The Gaddafi apologists would have you believe that no Libyan asked for help to save them from Gad­dafi’s campaign of massacre; they (apologists) instead trot out their own propaganda, which is that the wazungu were only after oil, and that any other rendering of what happened is only Western propaganda. But the Al Jazeera news network was following events closely, showing Libyans supplicating, asking for help as all around them Gaddafi’s jets reduced everything to rubble. Now, I challenge any whiner, or Gaddafi apologist to prove to anyone that Al Jazeera was not telling the truth, that it too is “an arm of Western propaganda”.

Yes, Nato may have had problems with Gaddafi (the man after all perpe­trated acts of terrorism against them, like a stupid little boy throwing stones into a beehive, for example having a civilian air­liner brought down and killing all on board in the Lockerbie incident); Nato members may have an interest in the oil, but if you are an informed person you know Libya accounts for only 2 percent of the world’s oil produc­tion. Which is no small amount, but, if according to the apologists and whiners, Western countries are so willing to steal poor peo­ple’s oil, why not go ahead and steal Angola’s as well, or Nigeria’s, or Saudi Arabia’s? ‘Oh!’, ‘But those countries are not led by revolutionaries!’ the apologists will exclaim. It is a waste of time to ask them to contemplate that maybe, just maybe, Nato came in to save a people whose cries had been going on for weeks even as the African Union took a specta­tor’s stance to the bloody events in Benghazi. The apologists and whiners seem to have no idea how ridiculous they sound, de­fending a character who was willing (and said so himself) to obliterate everyone demanding an end to his rule when they may be the same ones who claim they are fed up with the bad and long-running leaderships of their own countries. They see absolutely no reason to support Libyans aspir­ing for change, demanding for it, and dying for it. What hypocrisy. What an appalling willingness to play Judas for the thirty pieces of silver Gaddafi has been giving them for years!

Let me say this: not all Afri­can governments are led by bad leaders, in fact a two or three are pretty good leaders, men of integ­rity upon whom we can pin our hopes. And, like I stated earlier, not all Africans are whiners, or apologists of terrible rulers. They should never allow themselves to keep quiet, or to be drowned out by the ruinous chatter of the whiners. Only their willingness to stand up, and fight a war of ideas against all the stupidity will give this continent some hope.

 

This article was written by Shyaka Kanuma on Oct 31 2011