adminStanely Mushava
THE keynote mandate of politics is to abolish poverty. Cornell West contends that politicians can neither claim to lead people they do not love, nor to save people they do not serve.
The founding template for most African liberation movements was to foil unequal development and the skewed distribution of resources.
It was the realisation that Africa’s vast resource deposits were above the reach of masses at the base of the class pyramid which flared revolutionary moods across the continent.
The effacement of mankind’s inherent dignity by instruments of mass disenfranchisement oiled the formidable juggernaut of liberation, till self-government was secured from Accra to Pretoria. The agenda has since been entangled in red tape and the simple obligation to share our wealth equitably has been buried in a mounting sophistry of isms. Poverty and ubiquity are unduly juxtaposed while stillborn lip-service to life and death problems is becoming political staple fare in the continent.
Imperialism has been incriminated for a monopoly in the creation of inequality but the argument, which has grains of credibility in it, has been overstretched as an apology for elected representatives to major in the primitive accumulation of wealth and identify with the capitalist minority while their people brave the grim realities of poverty. Pro-poor activists in the US have often audited their society against a series of ostensible epochs, notably abolition, the civil rights movement and the accession of the first black president.
“The Rich and the Rest of Us,” a masterly expose on unequal development by Cornell West and Tavis Smiley, demonstrates that the rift between the real and the ideal has never been wider.
The majority of poor blacks are still at the back of the bus while the leaders expend their strength on useless red herrings such as gay rights and abortion.
Africa’s great epoch was decolonisation, followed by the current Pan-African awakening and economic growth but the poor majority has little to show for these feats because their gains have been derailed by unequal development.
As writer Charles Mungoshi notes in ‘Walking Still’, the customs and costumes have changed but the conditions remain the same. The emergent wave of Afro-optimism has put paid to the rogue characterisation of Africa as a dark continent and posited the continent as the cradle of a new economic renaissance.
Africa has turned out to be a rugged edge in the rise, with international attention revolving around the continent a force for the future in the wake of Wall Street’s fiscal cliff and the Eurozone crisis, with the hype swelled by the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the (OAU) under the tagline “Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance”.
Chinua Achebe decries a cargo cult mentality among the underdeveloped that a fairy ship will dock laden with goodies they have ever dreamed of without any exertion from their part. What is happening in Africa that warrants the fresh upsurge of Afro-optimism? Poverty cannot remain an overt reality while the continent is a dump site of strategic resources. We must share our wealth.
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