AFRICAN LEADERS, NOT PEOPLE, DESERVE TRUMP’S DIATRIBE

I guess it is politically correct, indeed attractive as it is self-serving, to malign United States President Donald Trump for his ‘shithole’ reference to African countries even if there is a ring of truth to his hate-fuelled diatribe.

Of course it is common cause that Trump is an ultra-racist of the Ku Klux Klan mould - a prejudice for which he must be left to freely burden under its weight until the end of his miserable life. And since his toxic offensive was, besides Haiti, directed at Africa it is only instinctive that we should all collectively condemn his posture towards Africans for its racist overtones. But in doing so we should be guided by civility, a feature that is probably alien to the civilised Trump’s psychological architecture, lest we descend to his level.

The wave-after-wave of condemnation of this highly temperamental and a natural for the lunatic fringe activists emanating from within the continent and the Diaspora was not at all surprising. Trump had touched a raw nerve!  After all Trump’s utterances were an attack on all Africans and in such circumstances it was only instinctive for the African collective to unite in the name of honour and self-respect to defend the motherland and her inhabitants.  

It is still befuddling how Americans imposed this megalomaniac on the world as if they had run out of decent men and women that could be at the helm of the world’s only superpower. At least here in Africa such erratic leaders impose themselves on the people with the backing of the military. Notwithstanding, no one from around the globe descended to the gutter and termed Americans dimwits owing to their failure of judgment in electing, as the leader of the free world, a man who ordinarily should be spending his time in front of a mirror falling in love with himself over and over again if not detained in a psychoanalysis facility.

But, as I see it, the paradox in all this is that in condemning Trump we are unwittingly and unintentionally defending the ruinous tin-pot despots and dictators who have reduced post-colonial Africa into a wasteland of moral decay, misrule, rule of law crises, etc.
Of course the outrage and patriotic fervour whipped up by Trump’s toxic utterances were a balm on the inflated egos of our eccentric and authoritarian leaders responsible for reducing the rich African continent, with some help from the West and former colonial masters, into a basket case and home to some of the poorest countries in the world.

The grim reality is that after the anarchic rage triggered by Trump wears off and you peel off the layer of racism from his diatribe you are confronted by the ugly reality of a strife-torn, diseased and poverty-stricken African continent. While some of the cheerleaders responsible for reducing Africans into perennial beggars are former colonial masters and other external powers whose singular objective is dispossessing the African continent of her natural resources for the benefit of their countries’ economies, central to this outrage are her coterie of corrupt leaders whose penchant for turning their central banks into personal private bankers precedes them.

Yes, African leaders are responsible - outside natural disasters - for the tragic story that is Africa. As the saying goes, in Africa the path to wealth is defined by political power and leadership and corruption being the currency of choice hence a leader’s wealth grows exponentially to the increase of people afflicted by poverty.    
Empirical evidence of this abounds hence the phenomenon of third-termism and, in the words of Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza, God’s plan (for Nkurunziza) to stay in power forever became vogue in the African body politic. As it were, at the time Trump riled the world with his racism-fueled diatribe, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was following in the footsteps of Nkurunziza and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame in panel beating his country’s constitution to make it possible for him to stay in power beyond the 75 years age limit it imposed.

Elsewhere, Africa is beset by strife, which often manifest itself in the suffering of the ordinary people – genocide, mass rapes and killings of women and children, child soldiers, poverty, migration to Europe in search of a better life and lately slavery – that is externally fueled with the support of despotic leaders to create instability as a smokescreen for raping the continent of her natural resources.

Paradoxically, the tsunami of condemnation elicited by Trump has never been directed at any of the continent’s errant leaders. In the event, if anyone is responsible for Trump’s diatribe, it is these self-serving leaders – with the help of blind loyalists of praise singers, bootlickers, sycophants, etc. - who have leveraged on their political clout to acquire obscene levels of wealth for themselves and their cronies having  elevated themselves to God statuses and now believe they are above their nations. In the face of this damning indictment, chastising Trump becomes hypocritical ostensibly because it is based on the notion that an outsider has no right to condemn the evils of our leaders in the same way that African Americans take umbrage to anyone, least of all Caucasians, referring to them as niggers because some of them believe it is their exclusive preserve to call each other niggers.  

In turn Trump’s putrid diatribe should not have been directed on Africans per se, themselves victims, but to the African leadership collective – with an exception of a small minority – responsible for impoverishing their people. After all they are responsible for shipping abroad Africa’s raw natural resources for their and cronies exclusive benefits. The intra-African regional trading regime African leaders often pay lip service to in their many expensive summits remains elusive because African leaders are fixated on their own and the welfare of their cronies propping up their political hegemony.
African has a discernible deficit of strategic, intelligent, honest and ethical leaders and is not deserving the present crop of leaders responsible for fueling racist diatribe by bigots like Trump. It is these current crop of leaders that are responsible for the exodus of Africans fleeing their countries in search of a better life elsewhere.

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