Why so much teeth-gnashing and weeping?
By Tom Somah
Sierra Leone is on the verge of losing the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) grant. And so, what?
Sadly, the West continues to espouse a blend of subhuman, uncivilised and savage mentality of Africans. Such a claim couldn’t have been more exact. Unfortunately, Africa’s cabal of Kleptoparasitic mobs with a boundless mania for greed and the exponential growth of corruption have given credence to the West’s dismal thoughts about Africa and Africans. It all began a long time ago. The Slave Trade is a case in point.
Of course, slavery and the trade of enslaved people worldwide predates the heinous Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. With the grand connivance of our ancestors, the Portuguese began the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade when they exported about 344 enslaved people from modern-day Senegal in 1444. This trade was a trade that mirrors the West’s inhumanity meted out to Africans. How did this come about?
All the Trade masters did was to dangle trivialities (e.g., tobacco) in front of our ancestors’ voracious tongues, and they would participate and perpetrate in enslaving their kinsfolk who were brutally chained, punished with whips and branding irons and their women raped in their perilous journey across the Atlantic.
With the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the West’s clamour for Africa’s resources set the pace for the partition of Africa during the Berlin Conference in Germany (November 15, 1884 – February 26, 1885).
Sadly, the West has now partitioned the mentality of Africa’s politicians into a dependent and subservient mentality. How? By enticing the Continent’s political elites with handouts and promises of more handouts.
All the West does to entice Africa’s political elites into internal conflicts is to dangle pittances of aid in front of their unquenchable thirst for self-enrichment. Next is a cascade of Africa’s rich resources clandestinely and unaccountably transported to Western economies.
With all of Africa’s resources, the Continent still lacks the mental capacity to transform those resources into the indispensable wealth that would extricate all its citizenry from grinding poverty.
Instead, Africa’s politicians have enrobed themselves in an enslaved imaginative construct. The construct that wealth conjoined with development would come to Africa as naturally as the leaves to a tree. Hence, Africa stubbornly believes it should sit down with folded arms and wait for the International Community, the noun phrase now morphed into Africa’s famous catchphrase, to solve the Continent’s complex problems of self-imposed poverty.
Unsurprisingly, the politicians now couch comfortably in the realm of the fantasy that without Western handouts, Africa will be doomed. The current boisterous hysteria oozing from Sierra Leone’s politicians and their minions over the loss of the United States’ divine MCC funding to Sierra Leone is a case in point. Sierra Leone is on the verge of losing the MCC funding, Sierra Leone’s only LIFE SUPPORT; this is what some of Sierra Leone’s politicians think.
The Western handouts like the MCC grant replicate the trivialities that gravitated our ancestors to chain their kin and hand them over to the Enslavers.
Africa, specifically Sierra Leone, is still in tears over a pittance like the MCC grant that subjugates them to the West’s machinations and double standards.
Evidence of the West’s double standards is all over Africa. Chad is an example.
Chad has gold, petroleum, natron, uranium, limestone, sand, gravel, Kaolin and salt deposits. It’s common for foreign countries to support regimes that give them unfettered access to those minerals. It doesn’t matter whether those regimes are brutal or illegitimate.
After the death of Chad’s President Derby, a Transitional Military Council headed by his 37-year-old son, Lieutenant General Mahat Idriss, took control of Chad. Many Chadians rejected the unconstitutional takeover, but the International Community, with all their vaunted democratic credentials, welcomed the Military’s unconstitutional takeover against the wishes of the people of Chad.
Many Chadians protested; a security force crackdown on the protest allegedly led to at least nine deaths, several injuries and numerous arrests. Our heavenly International Community did not bat an eyelid but supported the Military. Is this the same international community now losing sleep over Sierra Leone’s peacefully conducted elections?
What a double standard!
A few countries are immune to claims of election malpractices. In the US 2020 elections, Donald Trump claimed that 50,000 people received erroneous absentee ballots. The Ohio County Council labelled the ballot controversy as a “Serious Mistake.” Case closed. Amen and Amen.
Did the US invite Africa’s International community to comment, let alone investigate the “Serious Mistake”? Not at all. So, why are Sierra Leone’s so-called political elites, by self-inflicted national insult, waiting on international bodies’ opinions about the June 24 elections? When will Africa’s doom-and-gloom mercenaries cultivate a minutia of self-respect and stop denigrating their own countries?
The Continent’s umbilical attachment to foreign grants has decimated its integrity. In his assertive superiority, Donald Trump once referred to African nations as “shithole countries.” His outrageous statement invited volcanic outbursts from some African leaders, such as Nana Akufo-Ado of
Ghana; the government of Botswana lamented that Trump’s language is “reprehensible and racist.” But is it more so than Africa’s complacency and reprehensible laxity over the deaths of their citizens in their fateful journey across the Mediterranean to Europe? What about Africa’s nonchalant attitude toward its nationals perishing in foreign prisons?
There is so much on which Africa’s political elites should focus. For example, in Sierra Leone, the Kush epidemic menacing the precious lives of the country’s future generation, the putid markets blemishing the country’s image in the Tourist Industry, the absence of reverse technology in which imported technology is deconstructed and analysed to obtain viable information used to reproduce a similar product.
Instead, Africa is ludicrously saddled by a political class blinded by unfettered greed and ruthless selfish inclinations. It’s time we realised the Continent’s umbilical attachment to foreign handouts is disastrous for its soul.
Yet, Africa’s specific political classes are so drunk with the joy of receiving foreign handouts (e.g., the MCC grant for Sierra Leone) that the slightest indication of losing those handouts would send those political classes bleating and baying from national TV rooftops.
Will Africa’s political elites ever learn?
Africa has visionaries with transcendent imaginations to make the Continent great again. Africa built one of the world’s seven wonders: the Pyramid in Egypt.
To stand tall and be counted, the Continent should clamour for mutual TRADE with the West, not handouts. Otherwise, Africa will remain relentlessly exploited, depleted and finally discarded.
Africa, arise and make us proud!
