Page 68 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 7

ECONOMY
I AM JUST SAYING
Forget Afrikan leaders, it’s the people who are not thinking!
Chioma Phillips
Time for some quick Afrikan
math:
Take your age, or the age of
your youngest child.
Add to that the number of years
between 2020 and the matura-
tion date of the largest loan that
your country owes some coun-
try or organization somewhere.
Sit back and reflect.
For example: Your government
took a loan for a road that
will be paid off by 2050. Your
youngest child is 10 years old.
That means that, by the time
that particular road is paid for,
your baby will be 40 years old
and that road will be one run-
down piece of ‘development’
that will need a new loan to
bring it up to standard. That’s
the legacy you will have be-
queathed your children. Of if
you are 40, you will be 70 by
the time the payment is made…
etc.
What I’m trying to explain to you
is that Afrikans are conferring
upon their children a legacy of
bi-lateral, multi-lateral, foreign
owned commercial and local
commercial debt and therefore
a heritage of endless slavery,
begging and borrowing.
The recent decisions by Afrikan
ministers of finance, to beg for
loan repayment holidays and
to ask for USD100 billion in
Covid-relief is a clear indicator
to you, dear Afrikan, that your
government has no clue what it
is doing. Already they were in a
panicked state about the condi-
68 | heal . restore . rebirth . Afrika
tion of Afrikan economies prior
to Covid, now these ministers
are in mental meltdown and
have defaulted to the program-
ming they learnt from their
predecessors, i.e. the begging
bowls are out once again.
That’s not a solution either long
or short-term.
The other thing that Afrikan
governments have done – quite
unthinkingly – is to turn on their
citizens once again to extract
from them, through exacting
taxation, the money that they
want to use to pay off these
loans and run their govern-
ments. Or so they say. We all
have heard the sad tales of
wastage and outright theft of
resources by Afrikan govern-
ments over the decades’ past.
Furthermore, these are the
same governments which have
received Covid-19 stimulus
packages from the IMF and the
European Union. What are they
doing with that money? Have
they told you?
Here’s what I’m thinking, in-
stead of telling their citizens
what they are spending this
money on, it has vanished
once more behind a cloak of
invisibility, making it ripe for
plucking by the people who are
accustomed to robbing us blind.
Instead of stepping back to give
their citizens a breather of six
to eight months to recover from
the effects of the global shut-
down, they appear to be put-
ting plans in place to ‘return to
normal’ immediately. Instead of
choosing compassion towards
the people as far as keeping
prices of commodities, goods
and services at an affordable
rate for an extended fixed peri-
od, indicators are that they are
intent on acting as if nothing out
of the ordinary took place this
year and that once again favor-
ing their private sector cronies,
in order to ensure their wallets
remain fat, while those of the
people are left empty and whis-
tling. Why is this? Because they
do not see the people as their
people who they have a sacred
charge over and thereby they
do not do their best to steward
their mandates faithfully, but
rather they see them as people
to be exploited for the long haul
and to be used for self-gain and
personal aggrandizement again
and again and again.
Having said all that, those peo-
ple who make decisions - sup-
posedly on our behalf – are not
the issue. The ones who are the
issue are those who choose,
time and again, not to act
against the obvious injustices
and illegalities that go on in our
communities and our societies,
small and large. Those who
keep silent, who keep voting
for oppressors, who allow them
to continue to get away with
enslaving the larger populations
of Afrika with their evil snares
of debt and other misdeeds…
these are those who are com-
plicit in enslaving their children
and grandchildren in a system
that oppresses them, rather
than allowing them to grow into
who God says they are meant
to be. And by their silence and
inaction, the deed is done. The
destiny of Afrika rests with the
choices that the people of Afrika
make, whether or not their gov-
ernments choose to do good or
evil.
HAPPY ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY