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Dear Africa — The Call of the African Dream

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As I watch the news casts it often seems to me that those who ascend to political leadership have to endure daily insults and criticism from the very people they are trying to serve, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book Dear Africa — The Call of the African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

ASK not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country — President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These simple yet deeply profound words were spoken by John F. Kennedy in his inauguration speech as he ascended to the presidency of the United States of America as perhaps the most popular president that nation ever had.
And I am persuaded that in a nutshell he summarised the sense of mission with which those who want to answer the high calling of political leadership of black people should approach this calling with.
Time and again, there rises among a people a political leader who makes an indelible mark on the hearts of his people and even on the hearts of people all over the world.
These leaders always seem to make history, yet for some reason most of them end up getting shot or assassinated in some painful way or another.
I suppose this highlights a never ending battle between good and evil, light and darkness. I am always thankful and genuinely awed by individuals whom I see aspiring to become political leaders, particularly political leaders of African people.
The political arena is by no means a comfort zone. As I watch the news casts it often seems to me that those who ascend to political leadership have to endure daily insults and criticism from the very people they are trying to serve.
And then of course you need eyes even in the back of your head because it is not only the opposition which is trying to pull you down, but even those on your side are hawkishly watching for the opportunity to find fault in you and replace you.
Yet another occupational hazard of African politics is the ever present threat of violence or death. Because democracy was never allowed an African evolution, politicians on opposite sides often tend to regard each other as mortal enemies rather than as healthy competitors offering to serve people.
Then there is the ever humiliating pontificating of powerful nations, mostly former colonial masters who for some reason seem to be continually able, no matter what recent massacre their own leaders have been responsible for, to turn the moral tables against black leaders, in spite of how much smaller the scope of the latter’s offences may have been in comparison with theirs.
As a matter of fact, these powers maintain and finance a special court particularly focussed on the misdeeds, perceived or otherwise, chiefly of African leaders, before which their own leaders are guaranteed never to appear.
I do not know what kind of modern witch’s spell has been administered on African political leaders to quietly acquiesce to this schoolmaster-schoolboy relationship.
It is heartening though of late to hear black leaders assert that African leaders who err should face an African justice in Africa.
Another gauntlet which African political leaders run is the endemic poverty of their nations, the foundations of which were dug very deep by former colonial and slave masters.
Despite never having offered Africa a Marshall plan after four centuries of plundering them, these world powers expect Africa to compete on the world economic stage, and do not hesitate when it suits them to use this poverty to incite entire African populations against their political leaders.
Watching that mighty giant which is the international press, and reading the releases of international anti-corruption watchdogs, it often puzzles me why a half million dollar bribe received by a corrupt African leader is always portrayed as being so massively more sinister than a billion dollar bribe paid by some powerful Western government to some oil rich bozo to encourage him to loot the treasury and buy armaments from them.
I often wish I could find a platform from which to tell black people that their political leaders are no worse, and in many cases stand on much higher moral ground than the leaders of powerful nations who are standing in judgment over them.
It is important to understand this lest many heroic black leaders be condemned to historical waste heaps to which these former masters have never consigned even the worst of their own leaders.
First, it is important to appreciate deeply the generation of black and African political leaders, many of whom are still alive, who navigated the perilous waters of a world which sought only to degrade and plunder black people, and led their people, at great personal cost, to political liberation.
Black people must never forget these leaders, nor should they ever take their sacrifices for granted. It is important to tell the exploits and achievements of these heroes to children and youth in every generation.
I agree that these heroes have in many cases not been perfect, but it impoverishes a people when they discard their own heroes on the basis of idealistic standards to which no one on earth has ever attained.
It is also a fact of life that criticism of leaders is often deeply flawed and all too often guided by the motivated vitriol of political rivalry.
Yet this call for black people to value their own leaders places an even heavier responsibility on the shoulders of black political leaders to fight for ever higher moral ground. Indeed, no one should ever aspire for the leadership of black people with a heart that is asking what they can do for him or her.
This has been the plight of black people — that those who reigned over them in the past tragic years of subjugation came asking only the question, “What can these black people do for me, what can I take from them?”

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