African Integrity Magazine – African, gay campaign and neo-racism

African, gay campaign and neo-racism

Sep 28, 2013 Samuel View 0

As I have argued from the beginning of my position on this issue, Africa, the centre of the world, by geographical location; Africa; the whipping child of the world. Its historic antecedents and lofty places and the centrality of its location have all added up to just a little in terms of current standing.
After the white man had failed or lost in enslaving his kinsmen after some revolutions and enlightenments, he shifted his experiment to our soil. They made a good prey of us because we lazily watched them and consented to the injury they inflicted on us. Till today, we have not extricated ourselves of the indolence that retarded us and made us their pawn.
At a point, some Africans with great awareness and pride for their identity stood on their feet and resisted the predators and managed to pull us free from their grip. But because they never felt like letting go their slaves, they made sure they left but with the shadows and ghosts of the awesome masters still lurking around. In places like Nigeria, the white man left, leaving behind his tricks to ensure the nation would never know peace.
But apart from what they did we have been under the spell of the worst of leadership in any part of the world. And some attribute it falsely to colour or location or vague destiny. But none of these caused us the crass leadership that keeps us down. It is all in our hands we have bred the laziest and most cowardly citizens who have been crippled by the antics of the ruling class to remain helpless forever.
It is not known to history that any ruler ever changed to favour the people if the people never made moves to show they are averse to their predicament. The ruler is naturally and definitely an exploiters. He enjoys and cherishes plundering and dispossessing the subject, and not ready to change from that until such a day the victim decides to pull himself free.
Henry F. Jackson wrote in 1985 that: “But the foreign debt represents the long-term danger to the African countries’ economic viability because it looks their return to steady economic growth and locks them into greater dependency on the outside world. Without a solution to the debt crisis, the African nations can either gain the agricultural self-sufficiency that is needed.”
In the late 80s, the foreign debt of all the 50 member-states of the then OAU was less than those of Brazil and Mexico alone. But while the two Latin American nations deployed their debts to development, such was not the case in Africa.
It later got so bad for Africa that even Brazil; the highest debtor’s nation then extended loans to African nations, a sign that it managed its own borrowings well. And not done yet, Brazil at the end of May this year announced its cancellation of debts of $900m owed it by 12 African nations Brazil’s President Dlima Rousseff announced that in Addis Ababa at the last African Union summit.
In 2005, the G8 nations announced debts forgiveness for 18 countries in the world, 14 of them were African nations. These are debts owed the IMF, World Bank and even our ‘own’ African Development Bank.
With 24 non-African nations in the membership of the African development Fund, a major and controlling organ of the AfDB, with US and Japan having highest and second highest controlling shares and voting powers, it boils down to the glaring fact that the AfDB is just African in words. Poverty, occasioned by bad leadership has denied Africa the ability to manage herself and exposing it to the vagaries of external bullying and commands. That is the reason David Cameron or Barack Obama would forever talk down on Africa on what to accept or what to discard, as it is the case of gay right, or there would be no food on our tables.
One might ask many questions on why the rich nations that love Africa so much as to do their best to impose gay rights and sane sex marriage on us would not do anything to ensure Africa, the only continent without a representation in the Security Council of the United Nations is enlisted.
With all the membership of the UN, six nations decide what holds and only Africa has no representative there. So what controls Africa and indeed the whole world is decided without Africa’s input. We have lacked leadership all these years that no African head of government, not even the docile African Union could champion that cause. They feel too inferior to champion such cause because they are powerless, just because they are bad leaders or not even leaders at all.
It is in Africa that so-called leaders bully their citizens and take all they have to themselves and family and no one raises a voice about it. Mobutu Sese Sekou looted about $7b from Zaire, and the money is hidden and invested in Europe. General Sani Abacha stole from us almost the same amount. His is also hidden in Europe. Form one government to the other, the story of looting by government officials in Nigeria is endless. It is not out of place to say that every year, at least since 1999 when a form of check started, 50 percent of the nation’s budgets end up in private pockets or people in power. And because the rich nations have seen the emptiness of those that parade as our leaders and also known how much they steal from us and hide in their nations, where they lubricate further their economies and impoverish further ours, they lack the boldness to stand up to the rulers that assist in making sure Africa does not grow.
That person who feeds you has the right to tell you what to do. He that employs you also dictates to you what to do. In Africa the major thing African so-called leaders do is to run to Europe and America, and lately China and Japan every other week. They go cap in hand with inferiority written all over their faces begging for alms and the proceeds also mostly end in the pockets of the leaders.
From one generation to another, Africa remains down with hunger, diseases, wars and no leader does anything about it, of course because there is no leadership. It is all protocols everyday. This week President Goodluck traveled to China with a bevy of officials who signed a million papers and agreements. It has been the same ritual every year in every nation of Africa. All motion, no advancement, and at last don’t see any result to justify the spending of travelling all over the world. President Olusegun Obasanjo made history as the most traveled president in the history of Africa, just next to or almost at par with Somalia leaders.
From the West to the East, to the South and up to the North, it is the same story Africa tells and re-tells about leadership. Our poor leadership exposes us to perpetual ridicule that everybody who extends food to us decides for us how to think and behave and threaten us with starvation and freeze of our food supply if we say no. of course that it what it should be even as we have no plans to liberate ourselves from the shackles of endless leadership-made poverty.
I recall again that I have never heard the West of America go to any Arab world and bully them over forceful gay rights and same sex marriage. Even the north of Africa is immune to the terror of Obama and Cameron on compulsive gay right. Where as Obama accepted that he cannot enforce the same gay rights on all states of his US, because they are human beings deserving of their rights, the reason 30 states in his domain still say no, he wants us to have gay right at all costs.
Cameron can never in all his brashness go to talk to China, not even persuade in veiled world that Japan, India, Indonesia, Korea or others tow the gay rights path. He can’t contemplate suggesting that to Russia, a fellow EU nation as UK to do that because they stand on their feet and feed themselves. But he can travel all the way down to Sub Sahara Africa to scream at us because he feeds us from his crumbs and holds in custody money looted from our public purse by our men that parade as leaders. It is our fault for being too cold and helpless, and it would continue so.
Culled from Sun Nigeria.