AN APPEAL TO HIS EXCELLENCY, PRESIDENT HOSNI MUBARAK
It is disheartening that our Egyptian brothers and sisters have had to put up with several years of oppression at the hands of its political parents and grand parents. Political repression is a "cancer" that so many of our fellow Africans throughout the continent suffer from daily. We have leaders who because of their lust for power violate the human rights of their fellow citizens by using the apparatus of the government to suppress and even kill opposition members just to teach them a lesson not to irritate the plutocratic oligarchies who govern us. But as I have argued elsewhere, in almost all polities, in all regions of the world, there comes an epochal moment when groups would examine their political, social and economic formation. The purpose of such a re-examination is to restructure the society so that it could become relevant to the character of the zeitgeist. That moment is now in much of Africa and certainly in Egypt with its inspiring civilization.
I am not a student of history, but it is very important that the leadership cadre in Africa and Egypt should borrow a leaf from the history of what has happened in other societies. In the late 1980s, I watched on television the uprising of Romanians against the regime of the brutal dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, with incredible astonishment (just as I am today watching the development in Egypt). When this despot failed to read the handwriting on the wall with respect to the anguish of his people, he was captured, tried and executed in a public square. As a tourist and student of African and international politics, I visited beautiful Bucharest—the Romanian capital—two years ago. One of the stops during my tour of the city was the spot in which this tyrant met his end. The moral of this anecdote —at least in my mind—is that I don't want to visit a similar spot when I am in Cairo in the future.
To be sure, Africans are a forgiving people. We forgave those who raided our continent, shipped our people to the Middle East, the New World and elsewhere as slaves. And this is not to mention the thousands that perished en route to strange lands. Some of these fellow Africans, as I have noted elsewhere, would have been our active partners in the contemporary development agenda of the motherland, if they had not been "stolen" away from us with force. We also forgave those who colonized our continent. Indeed, not only did we forgive them, but also love them so much so that many, if not most of our current political and economic oligarchs do boast of having second, third and fourth vacation homes in these countries. They do their shopping and invest much of the continent's wealth in these countries as if they love these former colonial countries more than they love their own and other African countries.
Africans, Your Excellency, are a forgiving people given the way we treat our despotic leaders—some of whom have killed our people all in their lust for power. We give them chieftaincy titles and other titles even when they do not demand it or deserve it either. Africans, too, are known to have forgiven their looters and corrupt politicians; our main supplication is for them to return the cash they had siphoned away and to invest it in Africa for Africa's development.
So, all I am saying to Mr. President, for the sake of our Egyptian brothers and sisters and your brothers and sisters in the rest of Africa and Diaspora, please, please, Your Excellency, do the right thing. It's not too late. You may be amazed that your admitted political transgressions would be forgiven because that is the African character!
Ike Udogu
On 2/10/2011 9:35 AM, Pablo Idahosa wrote:
There are revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, the bloodthirsty Bangura, 8,000 kilometers away, is cheerleader for blood and war at all (not his) cost in Ivory Coast, and Nigeria refuses Bil Gates.Tell me this is true and not true. Only in Nigeria, such an egalitarian state.
P.
On 10/02/11 3:15 PM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:
Bill Gates down. Next, the Pope!
Pius
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