Date Published: 07/28/09
Wake up to our infectious addiction or sink Africa with sorrow
By Farouk Martins Aresa
The first step in curing any disease especially mental addiction is to wake up to the fact and work on it. When an addiction controls and destroys your family, your environment and the very existence of your being, it is time to check into rehabilitation. An Infectious addiction to what we are not, can never be and we do not produce is worse than cancer.
If Africans want respect at home and in Diaspora, they have to earn it. You get what you negotiate for not what you deserve. Anyone who waits for the graceful hands of equity, justice and fair play without concerted effort on our part to respect ourselves first, lacks bargaining power. Until some countries in Africa lead the way to lift other Africans up, no African, his family or his descendants will be treated equally anywhere.
Unfortunate suggestion by any African that black people should go back to Africa to turn some of the countries into Israel know little Liberian history. It’s an insult that Africans in Africa cannot help themselves unless made in replica of Europe and America. They were ahead of us by a mile stone with their modernity and will not play catch up. In the early 80s before Nigeria got this worse, a sister who was married home exclaimed: if Nigeria could not save itself, how could it save Africa and those in Diaspora?
If the Japanese, the Chinese or the Russians were waiting for Diaspora to come to their rescue, they would still be on the waiting block. Each of these countries can, if they want to, use their unique bargaining power to demand equity, fair play and respect for citizens and descendants anywhere, not Africa. Indeed, we treat ourselves worse than they antagonize us. All you have to remember is our civil and ethnic wars in Liberia, in Sierra Leone or the way Lumumba was humiliated and slaughtered in Congo.
We spend all our effort not to redeem our kingdom, our realm, or even our families but to satisfy addictions creating worldwide markets to worship foreign idols, products and services. We disdain same if home made. It is an unsustainable addiction that sooner or later breaks families, states and country into pieces. Our addiction is so strong, deep and damaging; we lose our bearing like a cocaine addict who does anything to steal from - our children, one another, the poor and the wretched to support ostentatious habits.
Some of us have almost given up on ourselves, our families, our wives/husbands and children. If not, you do not know of some children growing in Africa with foreign taste or addiction, who cannot speak or understand their parents’ language. We must thank our people for the children in our hinterland, otherwise our culture could have disappeared. While some in Diaspora succeed by making frantic effort to teach their children our culture and the language, the peer pressure at school and work make it an uphill battle.
Those who cannot cope are called cowards because they run out of the country. Some run out only to return with enough cash to enjoy a holiday. Some spend six months in, six months out. Others come back to reestablish as others are home to retire. Whatever the case, home is the only place they know and the only place many want to die and be buried. Many with less money, refused to be daredevils. They can neither manufacture plastics, cocaine nor are they brave enough to loot. They cut their coats to their sizes.
What is good about Europe without Europeans, America without Americans, Ghana without Ghanaians, Zimbabwe without Zimbabweans, or Nigeria without Nigerians? A fish out of water or a king out of his kingdom is out of base. Those who turned Africans into political and economic refugees as their forefathers, are cursed by children, kin and neighbors they sold into slavery in return for mirrors. It is easier to cure cancer of the hand, by cutting it off than a psychological addiction that goes viral into generations.
Persecutors taught our descendants to be grateful in their rescued from Dark Continent, berate them to point to one successful Black Country anywhere, dragged the men-pillar out of homes so that families can crumble. They do not want family to identify with that Continent or with that man that cannot support a home or manage a country. Yet, they are the ones that gave us structural adjustments, Paris Club odious loans and employed our brothers and sisters to implement their fiscal policies, trained military brothers for political take-over and Swiss banks to keep loot to pay for more foreign addictions.
Any government that does not give financial and tax incentive to “greedy dog eat poor dog principle”, has not created the type of environment suitable for profit to be made in options, leveraging and gambling in stock markets. Even when they choked on excessive bonus and salary, those who manufacture the products they trade on, live on leftovers. A mixed economy with sound orientation (or re-branding) towards home made products or manufactured goods is better than the false sense of security, gratification, hedonism and delusion we get from addiction to foreign taste from one generation to another.
The cure for psychological addiction to what we do not manufacture or create can be protracting and difficult in the age of window shopping, aggrandizement, conspicuous consumption and laissez-faire. In Nigeria, those in uniform who were suppose to show restraint became the proponent of extravagant living to the highest order. We can no longer tell the difference between those in agbada or uniforms. Before losing argument to slogans like communism or socialism, there must be our African-ism.
Define it anyway you want but remember to include what our parents taught us all while we were growing up: cut your coat according to your size. If Nigeria had no oil, we would still exist because we did on ofada designer rice. Most families lived from one pay day to another when salary was constant, apart from book-me-down. Our problem originated from families who lived above their means just as the Country did. If they never learn to sustain a family, there is no reason to trust them to manage a country.
