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Skin color is Not to Blame: OPINION By Joshua Mayeku about Uganda

February 14, 2007

If your school teacher said, "I do not blame you, I blame your parents", you have to rest assured that that you have escaped punishment - the blame having been laid at another door. In the Middle Ages' Rome, if one presented a school that contradicted conventional thought, he was beheaded. He would be tried and given a chance to abandon his beliefs. If he did, he was declared insane and pardoned.

Contrary to Elias Biryabarema's article (Daily Monitor, February 7), to blame President Museveni's failures, and those of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa on skin colour is scape-goating.

Museveni initially thrived on the intrinsic idealism of his movement but he deprived his tenure of the structural dynamic that comes with fully functional institutions. His failures help us to understand that a leader must shed some power for institutions to be functional. It also shows that it takes years of doing to appreciate institutions.

Like Biryabarema pointed out, it is tempting to draw a parallel between white settlers and settled slaves variously. But at closer inspection, the differences are glaring. The settlers chose where to go, in sharp contrast Haiti and its black peoples were ex-slaves. Haiti, a barren patch, was chosen for them. These were men, women and children filled with the self-pity of innocent sufferers (they are the country that is nearly 100 percent voodoo today).

A high literacy rate in a country that is infinitely barren serves to create enlightened scavengers. Like Liberia and Sierra Leone, countries constituted by former slaves were foredoomed.

For a country to develop, it has always needed human capacity to make resources count. The strides of Vietnam are an example of how not to look at sub-Saharan Africa. Vietnam came through the birth pains of a nation - namely struggles against superimposed forces. This is contrary to your black countries that can be defined geographically.

To understand this notion, Germany had a people with a common ancestry and dialect, hence a natural sense of nationhood. This makes a perfect nation-state. Your black republics were drawn by their borders to form states before they could form nations. A Luo is either in northern Uganda, Southern Sudan and western Kenya.

A Munyarwanda (no derogation intended) is a Ugandan, Rwandan, Burundian, Congolese or Tanzanian. A nation formed along this criterion (of dialect and culture) would have easily constituted a coherent republic built from bottom-to-top.

Vietnam did not have the benefit of ancestry like, say Germany; but its national struggles became the 'blooding process for a nation'. Using civil wars as a barometer, Kenya and Tanzania which fought bitter wars of independence have tended to have a greater sense of nationhood than Uganda and DRC.

However, unlike Vietnam whose struggles consumed the whole spectrum of society, the movements that fought for African independence largely enlisted partisan support.

The failed state of sub-Saharan Africa manifests a cocktail of problems. In fact every African country presents its own unique paradigm. It becomes easy to blame it on skin colour. Clearly, each state had a built-in recipe for disaster; which was compounded by the excesses of its rulers.

[Al Saqr]

Absolument d'accord : les dirigeants inventent le problème de couleur pour manipuler les masses.

Et c'est certain que le capital humain est la première chose à développer face à ce non-sens, et que c'est la meilleure arme.