Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The More Things Change....

I wish I was smart. Really smart. So super-smart I could think up a functional solution to the maladies that ail African politics. The superbugs, XDR strains that are our inheritance from the liberation struggles of the 20th Century.

As a continent even the most-promising, the most developed, the richest countries have these people lurking around their corridors of power, barnacles even a crowbar couldn't dislodge.
Sapping the very lifeblood of the common man they posture and preen, lobby and plot, so intricately involved in their mad powerplays that they cannot smell the dawn of a new age. So rapt in their controversies they can no longer see the havoc they wreak. So lost in their faded dreams they have forgotten the ideals of their youth. No verve left in them these winded bagpipes creak out their dying notes tenaciously clinging on for the sheer sake of it, not even knowing why.

It's gotten so bad that none of the young intellectuals and visionaries want to go anywhere near politics. The image is tarnished and we live in perpetual fear of becoming like these frightsome spectres who attract sympathy at best and rancid loathing otherwise.

Free from the colonial influences that bound us (are we?) we find ourselves clogged in the muck of internecine and narcissistic ambitions.

Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Malawi... Politics, Politicians, pitiful people.

Is it all a game one wonders? A dream perhaps? Shall I wake up and find functional governments, working assemblies, responsible leaders allowed to rule in peace? Can I hope?
As one decade has melted into another and I no longer feel invincible and ageless, as I start a family and begin to consider MY legacy I wonder...

...The More They Remain The Same.