OPINION: Africa Must Repudiate Paternalistic Western Lectures
By Ofwono Opondo
Uganda has now survived seven years since some European governments and the US slapped sanctions when the DGF through which they funneled illicit money for conspiratorial purposes to their local political counterfeit running dogs was stopped in the run-up to the 2016 general elections.
Last year, undone, they took on another fight over the anti-homosexual law that Uganda’s democratically elected parliament passed and slapped additional sanctions including blanket travel bans on selected government officials among them Speaker Anita Among and Prison Chief Johnson Byabashija allegedly because the law undermines ‘fundamental’ human rights.
The US in particular, the bully that it has been for over a century of its sitting atop the global hegemony further deregistered Uganda from the AGOA trade portfolio, but Uganda Ugandans are moving forward regardless contrary to what some spineless naysayers thought.
The US and European governments have owned and shoved African countries for almost 150 years now since the Berlin Conference of November 1884 when they divided up the continent into their private property whose resources they continue to exploit at will since then. Those with good eyes can see the geographical nation-state border contours, economic, political, mental, psychological, and security legacies this ludicrous design wrought on Africa, and in the heart-rending life expectancies, socio-economic indices and predatory trade relations that still benefit the colonisers.
You can see it in child mortality, people working in mines, coffee and cocoa plantations to enrich and satisfy the appetite of the colonisers so they can enjoy instant coffee and Cadbury chocolate, and that is even before you mention many of the needless warfare ravaging Africa by weapons manufactured and supplied by the western world that rip profits from them.
Britain, whose Indian prime minister Rishi Sunak now seeks to deport hapless refugees to Rwanda on a penny as a strong warning that no more people fleeing trouble in Africa will be accommodated. Rwanda, happy to receive the pennies, apparently doesn’t notice that it is demeaning as it portrays Rwanda as a threat, fearsome and deterrent destination for desperate people whom the British government wants to use as a bad example.
The Ugandan women, mentally enslaved that their looks are not good enough, have to buy bleaching chemicals and artificial long hair from corpses to mimic the looks of European women without considering the possibility of cancer in the future. African elites have wholesomely swallowed Western prescriptions for every ailment and allowed menacing and scornful lectures admonishing them over why they are closer to China or Russia as if they have no brains to know what is good and in their own interests to determine their destiny.
But to shake off the shackles Africa needs to deal a big blow to both military and civilian political conmen in khaki and suits, the inept puppets that don’t actually mean much for transformative leadership that can deliver comprehensive public goods like jobs, education, health, water, energy, roads and among others.
Standing alone, the bathroom economies of many African countries, even large ones like Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Sudan or DR Congo cannot satisfactorily deliver to their own people, and hence the spirit and aspirations of the Group of 77 plus China recently held in Uganda remain very relevant although it had been written off as a perilous punchline and a Marxist hangover.
And without nodding to the recent coup plotters in Gabon, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, and the pact among later three that upstaged France has so far prevented ECOWAS led by Nigeria from being used as a new frontier for proxy wars which is good tiding for Africa’s self-redemption.
The writer is the executive director of Uganda Media Centre
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