Can Africans Really Save Africa? -By Jeff Okoroafor

Something is wrong with both the leaders and the led in Africa. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with me on this, my submission however, is made and adequately reinforced, perhaps until I see otherwise.

Africa, a continent with a bold population of over 1.3 billion people, very talented and highly skilled. A continent sitting on an envious position, not just as the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both bases, but extraordinarily blessed with unimaginable amount of mineral resources. Talented, young, enterprising and highly energetic population but now seen as worthless, despicable, contemptible set of racial extraction that does nothing but cause problems for other continents.

Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Haile Selassie, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba, and a few other notable African icons, are men who were in their time, willing to put everything on the line to face the unknown and activate change in Africa. Great African leaders who are well known to this very day and who helped shape the history of the land many of us call home today. These men were pioneers in their own rights. When they speak, the world pause to listen.

The same can’t be said of the African leaders we have today. These current crop of African leaders are greedy, self-centered, proud, extremely corrupt, have zero interest in building an enduring continent where the next generation of Africans will be proud to call home.

Today, when truth is spoken to an African leader he gets irritated, not the irritation that comes from a place of reflection and desire to push to do better, but one that comes from a place of anger and “how dare you?”.

This is the problem. This is why Africa is retrogressive. And this is why it is at the moment, apparent that Africans cannot save Africa, at least not with the Africans we have sitting in positions of authority today.

Thirty-three (33) currencies exist in Africa today, but not one is capable of concluding a trade/transaction in any African country. Take the Naira to Kenya or Ethiopia and they’d ask what is that? Show them the dollar or the pounds or the euro, and watch them smile with you and welcome it with joy and gracefulness.

I think it was Mali that I saw a video of its people, young and vibrant Malians, jubilating very gleefully in the street of Bamako, how they have succeeded in driving away the French mercenary and replaced them with Russian mercenary – a slave, celebrating the departure of one slave master and the arrival of another.

Africa and Africans are so disunited today that even their own blessings are working against them – today there’s conflict in almost all the 54 African countries. There’s conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo, there’s conflict in Mali, conflict in Nigeria, conflict in Ethiopia, conflict in Sudan including South Sudan, conflict in Central African Republic and the list goes on. The gas in Northern Mozambique cannot be produced because of the conflict that exist. But we are talking about African Continental Free Trade Area.

I recall the days when Nigeria was looked up to by other African countries as a source of hope – the days when Nigeria was feared and respected even by the Western nations. Today, brain-dead politicians have made Nigerians a laughing stock and a targeted specie.

African can become the leading continent in food. It can become the leading continent in technology – it has an army of talented young people, gifted and highly skilled in technological innovations and creativity. It can become the continent to look for when it comes to medicine – more than half of the great doctors and nurses, chemists and physicians in Europe as well as the West, are Africans. Africa can actually rule the world, if only she can get leadership right.