STONE PEN OR ARMED POLITICIANS/ROBBERS TO DEATH

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, ethnic and “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 the 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 youths 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 Nigeria 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