Ignore Trump, fight sharks that have spoilt the place called home

So Donald Trump the 45th President of the US is a bad man. He hates Women, black people, Mexicans and Muslims. He does not like immigrants. He wants to shut the golden gates of the US and keep all of us away from the prosperity of the land of the free and the bold.
The man is likely to cut the economic aid that the US has always mercifully doled out to the poor begging souls of the world.

The world is in frenzy at the actions of this man with his so-called executive orders. But like happens with every dark cloud, I think there is a silver lining to the ascension of Trump.
The most important one is that it grants us an opportunity to take a critical look at our countries.
There are so many people in Uganda who claim to be ‘apolitical’ when it comes to our local affairs but are alive to US politics as if all their lives depend on it.
It is so bad that they will not speak to you if they suspect that you might in anyway harbour ideas that cast Trump in any good light.

If only the intensity and scrutiny which we have amassed on Trump was focused on our predicament, this country and continent would make serious progress.
Uganda for instance is the home to the second largest fresh water lake in the world. But people just a few kilometers from its shore do not have piped water. Many of them suffer from malnutrition yet the lake is home to various spices of nutritious fish. Metres away from the hydro-electricity dam in Jinja, built in the path of the longest river on the continent, the Nile, people have no electricity and their gardens are dry.
Most of Uganda is green with fertile soils yet almost half the population is food insecure. It is still common for people to die of hunger and starvation.

Almost a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. In this 21 Century with all the advancements in science, people -better still whole regions- are still afflicted and immobilised by jiggers. Yet Africa is the home of almost every expensive and most sought after mineral on earth. Gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium and most important of all, oil. It is just there under the ground. We did not plant it. The same applies to the huge forest cover and vast eco system. It is just there, God given. Yet Africans are some of the poorest and miserable people on earth. (Ffe twalya ki?) What did we eat? As my native Baganda will ask.
For the last 50 years most of the well trained human resource, expensively instructed in the arts and sciences has fled to Europe and the US. Even the untrained have followed suit to do odd jobs and send money back home. Many will rush to marry, deliver babies call themselves persecuted homosexuals to cement their roots in these prosperous countries.

Many people are braving the hazards of the deserts and rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean to leave this continent of potential and launch into the search for a presumed prosperity in Europe and the US because they have given up on Africa.
When they get there, they spend time on social media insulting the dictator back home. But that is shouting obscenities at a padlock. It won’t open.
Lines from a moving poem titled Home by Warsan Shire a Somali-born British poet sum it up. ‘…no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’ Also, ‘… no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.’
The truth is that the luxurious option of encroaching on the prosperity of ‘outside countries’ (sic) as we in Uganda call foreign lands, is a precarious short term stop gap measure we have chosen.

We are there at the mercy of the Trumps yet the situation at home just gets worse because it is unattended to.
Trump’s vision is rubbing that in our faces. We now feel threatened that we are being excluded from what is now ours thus the anger towards Trump. He threatens the school fees, the drugs for the aging parents, the wedding contributions, money to build a home. We can only join the chorus to shout at him as we try to dissuade him from excluding us.

Even if we wanted, not all of us are going to go to Europe, US the Middle East or wherever we smell prosperity. The lasting solution is to deal with the unpatriotic and selfish sharks that have messed up the place called home.
These aging autocrats; the Mugabes, Kabilas etc. that have wasted the family silver and now have the effrontery to ungratefully boast about being ‘self made men’.
Remember, ‘no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’ Let’s deal with the shark and Trump’s ‘nuisance’ will not give us sleepless nights.

Nicholas Sengoba is a commentator on political and social issues. [email protected] Twitter: @nsengoba