We are witnessing how African leaders use their country’s land, resources, infrastructure as collateral for Odious Loans which both lenders and borrowers know are impossible to pay back. Humans are in a mental siege between wars and corruption of indifferent men who devise all kinds of ways to stay in Power to distract us, by any means necessary.
Lenders do not give loans unless it will be used to create jobs, materials, goods and services in their own countries. Even when International lenders like IMF or World Bank is involved, exorbitant fees to foreign accountants, lawyers not to mention kickbacks paralyzed poor countries because the money is laundered back into foreign banks. When caught and confiscated for foreign violations, it is paid back to those that would launder it again.
Men have sacrificed fellow men for dead kings to serve them after life. They have castrated slaves to watch over their wives. People have gathered to watch lynching of human beings. There is no limit men would not go to justify their gory uncivilized ambitions. Some of the victims have been blessed and consoled that they will reap rewards in heaven. No power can repress determined people from one generation to another forever. Violence beget violence.
Africans remember Patrice Lumumba humiliation and public execution in the hands of his own people remotely controlled by outside Power. Powerful countries do not get their hands dirty directly anymore in Third World politics, they participate by proxy achieving the same goal and in some cases worse than in the days of colonialism. Who can change the governments of Russia, China, America, Korea, India, Israel, Germany etc for their bad leaders?
When we realize that the world is ruled by brute force, most civilized people that want to live and let live, wish there is a place where we can peacefully remain on our land to recover our sanity. The Non-Aligned Nations were funded so that as the world resorted to cannibalism, there would be a peaceful place on earth to rest our spirits. What if the places that set others on fire are the very countries our Politicians, their families and cronies prefer to waste everything Africa has ever earned or produced.
African politicians celebrate the “beauty” of hell fire overseas to distract our Youths and push them out from disastrous failure at home. Africans are used as cash mules to launder foreign income in a more injurious way than the devastating effects of drug mules that attract the death penalty. They loot African Central Banks, jockeying out of their countries at every opportunity. But claim they are in search of Foreign Investors, when in fact, they launder more money out than most investors can bring in.
African insatiable obsession with foreign money is so devastating, it has crippled our budding industries. The way drug addiction neutralizes intelligence and kills motivation are the same symptoms Africans have over foreign money. While laundering fortune, they are paying exorbitant foreign cash in hospitals and colleges they refused to fund at home. When you take children to a toy store, they want everything the way Africans love foreign readymades without thinking or blocking production of the same goods and services locally.
Local currencies are meant to replace trade by batter and not to buy foreign goods and services. Africans know the worth and price of local goods and services. The moment we value foreign goods over our own is the beginning of madness not seen in any continent or country except in Africa. We must ask ourselves who in his right mind devalues his own natural resources and currency without local production for export.
Africans were prudent traders exchanging goods and services for ages. Even when Africans traded beyond North Africa into Greece, so called Middle East and Asia, our Continent was reputedly rich. Until we went through the madness when our chiefs exchanged gold for mirrors and suffered from the devastating consequences by selling themselves into slavery.
This started the foolishness when we thought we were so rich, we could be generous to the rest of the world. They saw our weaknesses and exploited them. Right from the days of the Queen of Sheba and later Mansa Kankan Musa, we depressed the world price of gold by lascivious, conspicuous and imprudent generosity that spills into a false sense of security and still pervades our mentality today. Hungry and desperate men could not satisfy their greed for African riches in resources and people; they were exported into sugarcane plantations abroad.
It is demonstrated in our liberal culture that we welcome strangers and treat others better than ourselves; at least during the honeymoon period. Like the American Indians extended kindness to Columbus rescuing him from the sea. Ironically, it was the same way we rescued Mungo Park. When Africans extended their generosity, we were taken as slaves by the Arabs and later by the Europeans in exchange for Islam and Christianity.
Their religions pacified and drugged us like opium to forgive and wait for our rewards in heaven. This is how foreigners dictated what they want to pay for our natural resources, what to grow and the price Africans pay when brought back as finished products. They fish in our seas for free. It is packaged and sold back to us as sardines at their dictated price. The same way they dictated market prices for Cocoa, tea, gold, diamond, uranium etc.
Indeed, Africans have been conditioned to trade with foreigners at such dictated prices of export and import; losing our sense of value and worth for local goods and services while accepting their value system. As Africans lost the values of local goods and services they heightened the dictated prices of foreigners to buy and sell. They reduced local trade within.
Though, leaders on all sides appeal to our primordial instincts for suzerainty to get the majority of us on their side. When you deal with Nigerians individually, you find out that many of them are just carbon copies of the leaders they complain about. After all of those leaders come from our individual families.
Farouk Martins Aresa @oomoaresa
