The Price Africans are Paying

Young Ugandans die in Budo inferno. Mugabe tightens his grip on power. Food prices shoot up. Kenya's Mungiki continues to butcher the innocent ones in their own nation. The Somali insurgents open fire on the Ethiopian backed government. And so on, so forth. It is the price.

With all this pressure and stress, one needs a peaceful mind to ponder the causes of these tension-rising matters in our Africa. Where is the root of all this disturbance, mêlée and fracas? Why particularly Africa?

Could it be colonial legacy? Or it is a result of cultural and capitalist imperialism. Whether or not true, it remains true that Africa has become more confused today than it could have been before the coming of European imperialists and their alliance with their local African partners.

All imperial tendencies were borrowed wholesale into the Black continent without sieving. The fore great African leaders like Bwana Kweme Nkrumah, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and Patrice Limumba had warned of such. But did our leaders listen to this forewarning?

Africa is now in sheer confusion as well as oblivion because the people who fell into things of leadership or rulership turned on to be self-seekers or so. African leaders conduct election, the so-called indicator of democracy, but are not prepared to accept defeat by all means. They use state machinery to tighten their grip on political power. It is democracy then!

It is almost pointless for people to go for an election and when seem to tell this leader they don't want him or she through the secret ballot they simply seat on the elction results never quick to be released. What a shame!

Personallly, I see no reason why African leaders should keep on parading their people by holding and organising for elections while they are not ready to quit and back off their claim to power. Would it not be wise to continue ruling or "leading" the people without mock elections?

While it is true that trouble and conflict are part of every society, Africa has too much of to bear. It is because of many raesons. But to a larger extent the confusion and endemic conflicts in Africa should be blamed on giving in to imperialistic forces. That is the price we, as Africans, are paying.