Why We Export Our Riches Best & Brightest But Welcome The Dead

The reason the rich and powerful Africans do not want their bodies cremated after dying in those prestigious hospitals abroad is to be buried like Pharaoh at home. Their obituaries must display the country and hospitals they died in but their riches and children hardly come back home except to bury their parents. Our parents usually warn us to spend most of the money needed for burial and merry making on them while alive, not after they are dead and gone.

Those going to schools and working full or part-time are humbled when they come home and realize that no matter how much they bring home, a malam would change it without moving an inch from his car. These are hard earned money being exchanged for looted local currencies. The same local money that should be used to take care of people’s welfare and infrastructure. It is like throwing water into a basket. Even the exchanged foreign currency never stayed in the country. It is wasted outside lavishly.

However, there was a contentious debate that almost tore a community apart abroad over how wisely to spend the contribution made by Africans after one of their colleagues died. The cost of sending the body home for funeral was so expensive, some contributors wanted their money sent to his poor families at home instead of burdening them with another cost of burial and ceremonies that would follow anyway. After all, he was not a looter expecting Pharaoh's burial back home.

The Riches, Best, Brightest and some of the brains Exported out of Africa while their Dead Bodies return home will continue to impoverish Africa as our resources and people are sold in Zimbabwe dollars to Western and Asian interests. Some of us value and support more devaluation. I guess they cannot get the fact that they are selling themselves cheap. Who has devaluation into Zimbabwe dollars helped in Africa?

Russian President Putin spoke too late on Africa as a cemetery. African countries lost trillions of pounds in blind trust, banks and properties abroad. All of Haile Selassie, Mobutu, Abacha’s etc. money stolen and hidden abroad can never be recovered no matter how much is spent on legal fees. If you collude with outsiders to sell and burn down your home like a prodigal son, Judas or Esau that sold his birthright for porridge, you cannot expect it enrich African Motherland.

There is no country or continent that is not blessed with either intelligent people or rich resources except Africa that have both in abundance. It is not what you have in trillions that matters, but what you keep and how you invest for profit. Africa, the richest continent in the world exchange its riches for vanities. In order to get what others propagate and advertise in glowing praises and colored papers, Africa sells everything including the intelligence and brains of its children.

Children are encultured in foreign behaviors luring them away from their parents. Parents and children can no longer understand one another since they communicate in foreign languages they have no deep knowledge of like primary speakers. No matter how fluent is your Queen’s English or bourgeoisie Parisian, there are native speakers better than you. It only deepens the cultural shocks between children and their parents.

Ai sile ologbo, ile dile ekute as an African proverb taught us. Absence of cat made the mice flourish. They made sure those competent were discouraged and frustrated out. Politics became too dirty after the struggle and pursuit of independence. Many Africans actually believe that they should be living and making the same money those in the developed countries are making, even when they refuse to work or sacrifice as much.

Ingenuity, courage and industrious endeavors are no longer emulated. “Gifted” is the reigning vocabulary about some money-miss-road buying some foreign-made exotic car for the wife, girlfriend, daughter or son and handing it over in the full view of camera so that they could be posted on the social media for hungry-starved depraved poor animals to match them by any means possible.

They are instigating children and ladies to be jealous of one another; their husbands or parents to become armed or pen robbers. They are asking God to pick up his prayers, not work hard to afford the same. Since when have presents become a show for camera to post on social media?

Communities and parents no longer ask where riches are coming from. God’s wishes, prayers, contribution for miracles and the biggest church in the world have engrossed the masses. We are no longer competing for the best economy to create jobs but for the biggest church in the world and places of worship known as business centers on every street. If all these failed, rituals for common fraud using their blood and kin to satisfy outrageous demands by pastors, imams and herbalists became their ways.

If African cultures and languages were not exchanged for foreign cultures and languages, many of our richest, best and brightest would not have been lured outside the Continent. Our only salvation has become how to check out, especially where we are not wanted. Once they left, the incorrigibles, vagabonds and those that have given up stakes in the continent, took over politics at home. They become part-time residents and full time floater around the world.

If the money they are spending is made where they run to, fine. But they suck every living blood and cells out of Africa to live lasciviously and majestically outside. Those who claim they are sick and tired of Africa, return with their parasitic behavior to gulp enough money for their return. They are usually too lazy to work long hours, two or three jobs, even combining cerebral work in the day with buru after abroad. If they could not work and go to school at the same time abroad, they would not do it at home.

While others drop it all and come back home! Our children are willing to pay with their lives just to venture out, only to perish in the sea and desert. If they are willing to lose their lives on foreign soil, one would expect that they would take less risk and confront their oppressors at home where they stand a better chance of liberation. They would rather celebrate and worship those squandering their future. The day students and youths demonstrated and confronted impunities are gone. Impunities, conspicuous spending and outrageous behavior are emulated!