SI ON CRITIQUAIT NOS ROIS !

A pen in the mouth and a paper triangularly folded, I sit uneasily on a bed that i can not exactly claim to be mine, trying hard to figure out a subject worth writing about. Cracks on the pen begotten of my relentless chewing were evidence of my mental nervousness.I decline to further comment on the stress I went through before settling on this thought provoking topic (you are free to agree or disagree with that assumption though).
Another rather interesting question I had to answer was whether my constant depreciating English vocabulary base was strong enough to author an article. In consideration of all these setbacks I pray thus for a favor, (though I fear that this will be ignored) that this work be only condemned by sections and not be totally crucified.Just as the works of the Montesquieus and the Jean Jacques Rousseau’s were heavily influenced by their social and political contexts, it should come as little surprise to not only political analysts but also to millions of illiterate minds that I should be trying to give our political leaders the “hair dryer treatment” at an époque when Africa can hardly boast of 5 democratically elected governments who have not had international electoral observers refusing to thumbprint these elections as being free and fair.
Africa as at today enjoys an unenviable bank of worthless dictators and a rather extravagant wealth of corrupt public officials.On the 18th of June 2004, the BBC published an article on corruption in Africa, as I brushed through the reactions and comments Africans around the globe had sent in to the writer, I was for one part sickened by the stories I read but on the other hand I was impressed that my African brothers from all over are aware of the harm our countries are suffering because of corruption.
A few years ago a cabinet minister in Malawi made headlines when he said “everyone in Africa is corrupt”. You see, in most cases when we talk of corruption, images of some big bald headed beer bellied top government official or politician comes to mind, but the question we need to ask ourselves is how many individuals are willing to part with “a little shuiya” to get things done in their favor? Millions right? Pacharo Kayira, a Malawian lawyer once said “once you get a coin your appetite increases and you become a prisoner of the one who bribed you”.In an editorial printed by UK’s Sunday express, “warned that as long as endemic corruption exists in so many African countries then the entire western will in the world will not help solve the problems facing the continents people”.
If we as a vibrant African youth today identify corruption as one of the root causes of the continents problems, then it seems only sensible that we ask ourselves what we are doing to help tackle this robbery and try by all legal means to hold our leaders today accountable for their actions.In the Global Corruption Report released in 2007, Huguette Labelle, president of Transparency International (NGO) wrote “equal treatments before the law is a pillar of democratic societies. When courts are corrupted by greed or political expediency the scales of justice are tipped and ordinary people suffer”.This statement depicts in every direction the current state of affairs in Africa. Montesquieu in his book « L’ESPIRIT DES LOIS » wrote that « le principe de la démocratie se corrompt (….) lorsqu’on perd l’esprit d’égalité ».
Our leaders nevertheless today make mockery of the western cry for democratization of existing structures by choosing to either totally disrespect their various constitutions (documents supposed to be the fundamental laws of the land) or by making sure these constitutions carry clauses that legitimate the attribution of highly absurd powers parallel to those detained by monarchy s in the early 16th century civilizations.I am sadly being led to believe after dialogues with friends (majority being of African descent) that about 80 percent of today’s youth hold the conviction that our eye for easy money is attached to our skin colour.
We are corrupt because we are black? God save our souls then! In biblical times, God it is claimed sent Sodom and Gomorrah blazing after tonnes of fire descended from heaven to consume them because God had failed to find just five righteous men in these towns, thus I decided to take a quick headcount of our soi-disant honest leaders (past and present) to spare them of a similar fate should God so decide.Patrice Lumumba maybe? Ok, well maybe because he was slaughtered in less than a second after negotiating independence with the Belgian colonialists in an operation financed by the CIA that brought LE SEUL MARECHAL DU ZAIRE, le Pacificateur Mobutu Sese Seko to power. The rest well is history.Err…. What of Nelson Mandela? For a split second I caught myself doubting the legend to be infact of African descent. But pardon my naïveté, if an African has been able to manifest that much selflessness in leadership, then why is that deficient in all the others? I ask today that our leaderships give meaning to the word martyr by putting bullets through their skulls to put a much awaited end to the afflictions of their fellow country men.
I have decided to honor Nelson Mandela by leaving space in my article to accommodate a poem by Prof। Abena Busia in 1990 written in the immediate wake of Mandela’s release from prison,( Ghanaian writer and activist currently teaching at Rutgers University in the States) which was never published.


ABENA BUSIA’S HOMMAGE TO MANDELA
"But you were still alive,And you were still not free। The decades bring the deaths of leaders,the power and the myth that was Nkrumahlie broken, like his shattered statueOn the Accra streets
And in the same week that Jomo Kenyatta"Faced his sacred Mount Kenya" for the final time,Kofi Busia's "Challenge to Africa"in Search of DemocracyEnded. All your peers dead.
But you were still alive,And you were still not free. Yet, on a continent being "liberated" "redeemed","revolutionised",Proclaiming "Uhuru", the people were marching.
Twenty-five years after Sharpeville, we march-Ten years after Soweto, we march.And when they killed mothers and babiesOn their march through Mamelodi,Still, with them, we march,For you were still alive,And you were still not free. By the time we reached your seventieth birthday,Another generation of childrenHad learned to call your name.We carry old images of your face, in our hearts,And on the T-shirts on our backs,As an icon of a new morning.The Tembu warrior prince, the lawyer-activist,The prisoner.
Around the world we marched in our millions,Demanding your return into this troubled world,So sadly bereft of heroes,For you were still alive,And you were still not free.You disappeared from our view,in a world which had taken no small step on the moonfor man;no Apollos, no Challengers, no Salyuts.No photographs of the furthest planets,no walks in space.
The small steps taken on earth for mankindhad includedNo Flower Power Love concerts in Woodstock,No One Love Peace concerts in Kingston, JamaicaNo Art Against Apartheid freedom concerts in Sun City,No Bands in Aid proclaiming "We are the World".
That world had known no "Cultural Revolution" in China,No drafted U.S. troops in Vietnam,No "Killing Fields" in Cambodia.
No vanished Prisoner Without a Namein a Cell Without a Number, mourned by theMothers of the Plaza de Mayo- And through this allYou were still alive,And you were still not free.
And now it is the Lord's Day,the eleventh of February 1990,And it is five a.m. in Los Angeles, California,It is eight a.m. in New York and Kingston Jamaica,It is one p.m. in Stockholm, London, and Accra Ghana,And half the marching world has paused-To keep vigil,For it is three p.m. in Cape Town, South Africa,And we wait to see your face.
After twenty-seven years of fighting, marchingand singingWe keep a ninety-minute watch;To see you take these next few stepsOn this, your No Easy WalkTo our uncertain Freedom;To witness your release into this changing world,Unceasingly, the same.
For you are still alive,But we are still not free.Amandla Mandela,A Luta Continua."