I’m Just Saying

FORGET AFRIKAN LEADERS, IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT THINKING!

Time for some quick Afrikan math:

Take your age, or the age of your youngest child.

Add to that the number of years between 2020 and the maturation date of the largest loan that your country owes some country or organization somewhere.

Sit back and reflect.

For example: Your government took a loan for a road that will be paid off by 2050. Your youngest child is 10 years old. That means that, by the time that particular road is paid for, your baby will be 40 years old and that road will be one rundown piece of ‘development’ that will need a new loan to bring it up to standard. That’s the legacy you will have bequeathed your children. Of if you are 40, you will be 70 by the time the payment is made… etc.

What I’m trying to explain to you is that Afrikans are conferring upon their children a legacy of bi-lateral, multi-lateral, foreign owned commercial and local commercial debt and therefore a heritage of endless slavery, begging and borrowing.

The recent decisions by Afrikan ministers of finance, to beg for loan repayment holidays and to ask for USD100 billion in Covid-relief is a clear indicator to you, dear Afrikan, that your government has no clue what it is doing. Already they were in a panicked state about the condition of Afrikan economies prior to Covid, now these ministers are in mental meltdown and have defaulted to the programming they learnt from their predecessors, i.e. the begging bowls are out once again. That’s not a solution either long or short-term.

The other thing that Afrikan governments have done – quite unthinkingly – is to turn on their citizens once again to extract from them, through exacting taxation, the money that they want to use to pay off these loans and run their governments. Or so they say. We all have heard the sad tales of wastage and outright theft of resources by Afrikan governments over the decades’ past. Furthermore, these are the same governments which have received Covid-19 stimulus packages from the IMF and the European Union. What are they doing with that money? Have they told you?

Here’s what I’m thinking, instead of telling their citizens what they are spending this money on, it has vanished once more behind a cloak of invisibility, making it ripe for plucking by the people who are accustomed to robbing us blind. Instead of stepping back to give their citizens a breather of six to eight months to recover from the effects of the global shutdown, they appear to be putting plans in place to ‘return to normal’ immediately.  Instead of choosing compassion towards the people as far as keeping prices of commodities, goods and services at an affordable rate for an extended fixed period, indicators are that they are intent on acting as if nothing out of the ordinary took place this year and that once again favoring their private sector cronies, in order to ensure their wallets remain fat, while those of the people are left empty and whistling. Why is this? Because they do not see the people as their people who they have a sacred charge over and thereby they do not do their best to steward their mandates faithfully, but rather they see them as people to be exploited for the long haul and to be used for self-gain and personal aggrandizement again and again and again.

Having said all that, those people who make decisions – supposedly on our behalf – are not the issue. The ones who are the issue are those who choose, time and again, not to act against the obvious injustices and illegalities that go on in our communities and our societies, small and large. Those who keep silent, who keep voting for oppressors, who allow them to continue to get away with enslaving the larger populations of Afrika with their evil snares of debt and other misdeeds… these are those who are complicit in enslaving their children and grandchildren in a system that oppresses them, rather than allowing them to grow into who God says they are meant to be. And by their silence and inaction, the deed is done. The destiny of Afrika rests with the choices that the people of Afrika make, whether or not their governments choose to do good or evil.