THERE is something all together depressing about politics especially African politics and the politics of Africa.
It is the playground of super powers.
A continent that should always obey for the ‘big brothers’ have nuclear.
A world in which there is perpetual distress that sees no end.
It is a place where the paymasters do as they please.
Where they have the power to raise and arm a noisy puppet guerilla in the form of Afonso Dhlakama.
Have you ever stopped to consider what the rest of the world thinks when they think about Africa?
A land marked by poverty yet its communities who have not enough to eat can have ammunition to start a civil or ethnic war that goes on for years.
The adverts run by international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) depict a malnourished child with flies buzzing around the head, dry land and hopelessness.
Africa a place of gold and exotic things yet with the world’s poorest citizens.
Africa the dumping ground of the world’s waste.
In 2008 a UN envoy confirmed that European and Asian companies are dumping toxic waste, including nuclear waste, off the Somali coastline.
In 1996 an American company conducted a drug trial in Kano in Nigeria.
By the time the trial ended, 200 children were disabled and 11 were dead.
In the 70’s depo-provera was introduced and forced to women workers on white-run commercial farms.
It had severe side effects and was eventually banned yet today it is still distributed and sold cheaply.
While there are drug trials throughout the rest of the world, most participants are informed, aware and even paid for it, but not in Africa.
Between 1994 and 1998 AZT testing trials conducted on HIV-positive African subjects were not performed with proper informed consent.
It included testing of over 17 000 women for a medication that prevents mother-to-child transmission of HIV and AIDS.
The subjects did not fully understand the testing methods, the effectiveness, the possible dangers.
They were also told about the trials under duress.
As a result, an estimated 1 000 babies contracted HIV and AIDS although a proven life-saving regimen already existed.
The trials ended in 1998 after they announced they had enough information from Thailand trials.
Africa a place where there are little consequences for those that break the law.
Mining companies and multi-nationals have more rights than citizens in Africa.
In Zambia some copper mining companies were dumping their waste in rivers from which the local citizens and workers drank.
The same mining companies refused to pay tax to the government.
The Western world is yet to ‘forgive’ Zimbabwe for taking back the land of their forefathers a century after it was taken by force and those that had taken it had built mansions for themselves.
There are 54 states in Africa yet they cannot agree on what defines a hero and who is the enemy in Africa.
We wait until the ‘big brothers’ tell us in the 21st century, decades after Kwame Nkrumah’s death that he was an African hero.
We are cheated by European monetary institutions who give us recommendations that they themselves will not implement.
They tell us not to bail out key productive companies with public funds and yet today they are doing the very same thing.
We are given loans they know we have no hope of paying back in the process selling off the future inheritance of our children cheaply.
Throughout history whenever the West is in crisis they have always looked to Africa to bail themselves out under false, shady deals through their Breton Woods institutions.
Now they are in crisis again and there is yet another scramble for Africa and we are helpless in the face of it all.