Merry Christmas Africa my lovely home. Black is gold, not
negative as a few “friends” of us paint it behind our backs. We can hear, your
whispers though in undertones are audible, and even if they were not, from the
movement of your lips we can see the obscene names you call us- Native,
backwards, savage, uncivilized.
If only it were possible, we would prepare a
joint forum as a gift for Africa at the dusk of this year. There, at my right
hand would be the proponents of the one Africa argument. At my left, I would
invite the antagonists for the argument, with their western think tanks that
have been so much influential to their reason. I am sure we would win the
argument, for it is what is right, but since they don’t refuse unity with facts
but out of fear that has been inflicted to them, well, we had better continue
the discussions here.
My second argument was to be based on my response as to why anyone
has to unite anyway. What is the reasoning behind unity? I will illustrate my
point with an activity. Imagine a bundle of 53 counting sticks that you would
want to break each in to two pieces. The easiest way would be breaking each
stick at a time. If you unite two of them with an elastic string, breaking them
is possible but a little harder than breaking one. As you join individual
sticks in a bundle, the task of breaking the bundle becomes harder. By the time
the bundle of 53 sticks is made, no individual hand can break the bundle. It surfaces
from this activity that unity is strength.
The 53 sticks represent African countries. Let us pretend, a rather ignorant pretense,
that no external country intents to break us. We have nature fighting us with different
calamities. We are punished daily because of the egocentric nature of those African
leaders against unity. And we have read and seen it in the news, countries
declaring hunger, disease, and other calamities as national disasters while
others are at the same time struggling with excesses of the deficient resources
in other countries. Trade restrictions of all kind hinder the movement of
resources amongst brothers. Funny enough, neighbors buy excess from our
brothers, and after a few days of “adding value” sell the same product to our
starved brother at double the price. That is why the neighbor though in a union
herself, will do her best to prevent the unity.
If you ask if it is right to deny a brother the advantages
of proximity to a blessed brother, or whether something should be done so that
he enjoys the benefits, I am sure someone will soon accuse you for wanting to
interfere with the market mechanism. Which market, the market that has prohibited
the export of khat to the European Union or the one that requires impossible healthy
standards for the export of food that we eat to the states? A few of our
African sticks have already been broken by wars, tell me, you antagonist of the
one Africa argument, how many sticks do want to see broken so that you can rush
in to a union? Trade restrictions are necessary, but no individual country can
impose them well as an individual. We cannot threaten retaliation in case of an
external tariff unless we are a block.
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