The social media was, again, agog, last week, over the comments of the eccentric American Billionaire, Donald Trump, on Twitter, about his impressions of Africans, particularly South Africans, and African leaders generally. He was discussed extensively in the electronic media for his tweet @ realDonaldTrump.
In that “twitter storm of controversy” on Madiba’s South Africa, Donald Trump, stated in Johannesburg, that “South Africa is a crime ridden mess that is just waiting to explode”; apparently reacting to the xenophobic attacks on foreigners in South Africa. This statement made on December 14, 2013 was reportedly repeated Monday night in The Apprentice tweet thus: “As I have long been saying, South Africa is a totaland very dangerous-mess; just watching the evening news (when not talking weather).”
Above all, Trump is said to have unleashed his venom on African leaders and leaders of African descent in the ongoing Presidential primaries in the US as a Republican candidate; thus, using the occasion to attack the $7 billion Obama Africa Electricity project, claiming that such a huge investment would be a colossal waste because of the incompetence and corruption of African leaders.
When his tweet evoked rebuttals especially from his black African fans, Trump got angry and rained more abuses and insults on Africans and their worthless leaders who, according to him, steal public funds and launder them overseas for private use in personal bank accounts; only to return back to those same countries they had stowed away stolen money for loans to run government business on which they are charged interest—loans that are finally spirited away into private bank accounts; leading to a vicious cycle of laundered funds that are given back as loans with interest from foreign countries; thus, perpetuating regimes of infrastructure deficits, irresponsible social service delivery that perpetually impoverish the people and make them weak, lazy, incompetent and utterly corrupt.
What Donald Trump has said, without mincing words, in his unrepentant diatribes on black Africans and African leaders, is that poverty in post-colonial African states such as Nigeria is self-inflicted- the product of mediocre, incompetent, nepotistic and irredeemably corrupt regimes! Recourse to blame games such as colonial conquest, imperialist conspiracy, deliberate economic sabotage and outright theft of the rawmaterials of African states by foreign invaders, are worthless alibi.
Nothing can ever excuse the conspiracy of African leaders, in an endless daisy-chain of corrupt regimes, from the merciless plunder of the African commonwealth.
It has put Africa far behind in the economic development chart of the world and made the African peoples laughable, pliant, manipulate-able and susceptible to all manners of duplicities and vices that turn representative democracy into the most corrupt, expensive and horrifying form of government.
We need more Donald Trumps to say it as it is to our African leaders; to help wake them up from slumber; to help prick their conscience; to assist in heaping shame on them to compel them to repatriate their stolen wealth back to Africa for the continent’s development and the empowerment of the African people.
No matter how insulting his diatribes have tended to be, the agent provocateur, Mr. Trump, will occupy a place in the development history of African societies.
We need more and more people like Trump to help re-shape the convoluted psyche of African state actors who glorify everything banal and anachronistic as traditional to Africa.
The law-making assembly of an African country such as Nigeria parade lawmakers who are husbands of 27 wives and scores of children; who contract marriages of under-age females; who arrogate a huge percentage of the national budgets to cater to their whims and caprices, whilst leaving the population in abject poverty; who steal resources allocated to health-care delivery, road, rail and electricity infrastructure, and the pension benefits of their retired citizens; who misappropriate funds allocated for the education delivery of the children, thus leaving millions of young people uneducated, untrained, and thus disempowered to fend for themselves and to contribute to national wealth generation.
The African youth population is left to its own devices—without adequate training, without functional education and skills, without basic social infrastructure and amenities, and without job opportunities to leverage for decent living. This is the narrative of a host of African states and the scenario of a ticking time bomb so angrily painted by the verbally brutal Donald Trump.
The people addressed by the eccentric billionaire’s tweet should be angry with themselves and their leaders, not with the man configured by nature to state it as it is and damn the consequences.
Comments