By Zik Gbemre

…No one could have expressed the bitter truth about Africa’s self inflicted backwardness more convincingly than President Putin puts it

..Africans, especially Nigeria should rather blame selves than blame Putin or anyone else over the piteous reality staring at them

…The continent of Africa has a choice to make the difference or remain backward.

As the bitter truth, President, Vladimir Putin’s mockery of the African continent as only fits for cemetery for Africans may not be pleasing to majority of Africans, but who can fault the Russian President?

Certainly no one can controvert the President’s dramatic picture of the failure that is the continent of Africa, especially, Black African countries.

Read Putin again. “When an African becomes rich, his bank accounts are in Switzerland. He travels to France for Medical treatment.

He invests in Germany.

“He buys from Dubai. He consumes Chinese. He prays in Rome or Mecca. His children study in Europe. He travels to Canada, USA, Europe for tourism.

If he dies, he will be buried in his native country in Africa. Africa is just a cemetery for Africans. How could a cemetery be developed?”

For us, the situation has been degenerating so much that today, Putin’s impression has become just an understatement.

Many Africans not only regret being born on the continent. Rather, many more who have settled abroad no longer wish to pay a visit to their continent or nation of birth, talk much of being buried in the “cemetery” that is Africa.

Many Africans in diaspora, Nigerians in particularly do not want to return home. They die and ask their children to bury them abroad.

This disposition is induced by a paradox of our existence. Hardly any country of the world compares to Nigeria in terms of natural endowment. We have all it takes to develop like modern global destinations of choice, be as great as Dubai, New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Toronto.

All it takes is the commitment to allow merit and excellence to prevail in the choice of who manages the abundant resources in governance and investments and the sky will be our limit.

Because we allow sentiments, clannishness, ethnicity, paper qualifications of unmerited certificates and partisan inclinations to override merit, performance and excellence, even with abundant crude oil, condensate and gas reserves, we are dependent on foreign nations to refine it and sell back to us at cutthroat imported price.

We import almost all the necessities of life because we chose to depend on others for everything we need. Even to import already established technology and manage it efficiently to improve lives, we can’t sustain any.

Be it automobile, refineries, health, processed food, clothing, housing and what have you, we import everything once it involves secondary or tertiary production. How can we grow like that?

Because we are non-productive and perhaps numbered on the global chart of consuming nations, our Nigerian Naira currency becomes trash, unable to compete in forex.

Because we are not productive, we live on unending borrowing, to pay for just about anything. We borrow to pay civil servants salaries, borrow to buy rail network that has been outdated in China.

Yes, the fact remains that we are helping China to dispose their obsolete locomotives that have become nuisance in their country.

So, to interpret Putin in another way, Africans are the proverbial people who live by the river and still wash hands with spittle.

Putin said the bitter truth. Cursing and swearing over that bitter truth won’t change anything. The Africans have a choice to remain backward, or change the narrative.

Zik Gbemre
September 8, 2021


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