AFRICAN STATES NEED REFORMS IN GOVERNMENT STRUCTURES
IN KENYA:
Just after the DISPUTED General election in Kenya,the country fell into a state that none has ever conteplated facing,we saw stealing of votes and immediately after that there was an eruption of violence national wide and you might have thought it was the Bomb in Hiroshima Japan Because this violence was widespread in the whole republic with everybody saying NO! to the outright stealing of the leadership of the people,we saw looting of shops,killing of innocent people by police,neighbours revolted against each other and all that you can remember that took place....in this i see a conflict not only fueled by the election outcome but also by the incom inequality that rocks our country,for instance am seeing the man who stole from the supermarket in Kisumu never stole because he had been denied a chance of being led by the president he chose but rather he stole because he has been living without yet some people who are few have been living with plenty so to him the target was where there was ready access and so to say where he deemed right for his purposes of stealing because they wouldnt steal from fellow peasants since they have been living in the same world....They were tasting the world of the privilledged,they wanted to see whether living away from the tradition of one meal a day would give them energy to face the facts of life "loosing the presidency" then i can also add that there was need to take what was taken from the because you will agree with me that the owners of those supermarkets dont pay the locals or rather their workers well so if one got the opportunity of getting something from a person who has been oppressing him/her at work,he/she will fall for it with both hands. AND THIS IS SIMPLY BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT FIGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF THESE WORKERS BECAUSE THOSE WHO ARE SUPPOSEDS TO FIGHT FOR THEM ARE GIVEN SOMETHING SMALL TO COVER UP THEIR WRONGS.
AM TALKING ABOUT INCOME INEQUALITY AND BAD GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA.
I will give good illustrations in the next context.
IN SOUTHAFRICA:
Back in 1948, just when the Apartheid Nationalist government was coming to power, Alan Paton published Cry the Beloved Country, one of the most beautiful and moving books ever to come out of Africa. It told the story of a pastor from rural Zululand who visits Johannesburg in search of his delinquent son. Sixty years later, as I asses foreigners fleeing Cape Town's xenophobic mobs, I sense there's more than enough material to write another African epic in similar vein.
This is it;
I imagine there will be three characters, whom I'll call Z, D and W for now. Z will grow up in rural South Africa. His father will be a migrant labourer on the mines and his mother will die a slow death from HIV / Aids. As a child he will trudge five kilometres down the dusty road to the primitive school room. When his mother dies, he takes a bus to the big city where he is set down in the middle of a slum shanty town. A cousin allows him to sleep on a piece of cardboard in his shack. When the winter rains come, he pulls a garbage bag over his blanket to shield himself from the leaks.
Z is always hungry. At first he goes and stands by the roadside where the building foremen pick up labour for the day. Sometimes he's lucky, sometimes not. Maybe, out of desperation he joins a gang and hijacks a car in the affluent suburbs? When he's really lucky, he can spend an evening in the shebeen nursing a beer, tapping his foot to the local beat, watching a government minister pontificating on TV out of the corner of his eye.
Round him people are complaining. The government promised jobs and houses but nothing materialised. The fat cats with the right political connections spend their week-ends driving up and down the streets in their flashy cars, flaunting their wealth. And then there are all the foreigners from across Africa who undercut them in the labour marketplace or who own the only shop in the township and charge high prices.
D will also grow up in a rural area, only in Central Africa. He finishes school and trains to be a mechanic. One day his life is turned upside down when marauding militia shoot his parents, press-gang his brother and rape his sister. He decides to head for the peaceful El Dorado of South Africa. The journey is full of incidents. Long hours of walking along dusty tracks. The occasional lift on the back of a lorry. Odd jobs along the way. Dodging the border guards.
He reaches a South African city and finds some fellow Central Africans who offer him a spot in their lean to. His English is poor but he learns that his smile will earn an extra tip when he helps drivers to park in the centre of the city. A local restaurant owner is taken with his charm and offers him a job waitering to his many overseas guests who welcome someone who can speak French. He stands in long queues endlessly to get a work permit and is only successful when he pays a bribe. His skin is darker than that of the locals so he has to be careful when taking the train or the taxi back to the squatter camp..
W is a teacher in Zimbabwe, battling against the odds to provide children with the first rate education for which the country was renowned not so long ago. To make ends meet, she volunteers to be an election agent and is thrown into prison for a few days when the locals vote for the opposition party. She comes out to find her father has been beaten up by a bunch of thugs and decides the time has come to head South to where he can get proper medical treatment and she a secure job. They too end up in a squatter camp and she is snapped up to teach in a local school.
Somewhere in the book, of course, Z, W and D will meet up. Maybe Z will be part of the mob who, in their frustration, pick on the foreigners as the only ones around weaker than themselves and D is one of their targets? Maybe D finds W cowering behind a shack hiding from the crowd and helps her to safety? Maybe a romance develops between W and Z and it's not popular with their neighbours? The possibilities are endless but one thing's for sure, it's going to be a real tear jerker - and based on the real life experiences of so very many extraordinary Africans.
In SouthAfrica i want to believe that whoever attacked the neighbour in the xenophobic saga did not do justice to the victim,but also let us check the root causes of certain problems because if you are to sit down and evalluate these issues you will realise that it all comes to leadership and the political trends,If we want peace in Africa we should start by correcting our government structures that dont favour the common man.One day someone will write this book.
0
