Writer: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
In the good old days, I used to thank the Americans for being very forgiving. Any bigwig could insult them at a public rally today and take to them his begging bowl the following day, assured that they would not want his people to starve.
Mr Donald Trump was probably irritated by this relationship. You could not pair the indignity of begging with so much disrespect.
So, as part of the ffujjo he has unleashed to rock the world that many ordinary people were carelessly taking for granted, Trump pulled the USAID rug out from under our feet. With or without a clear plan, he must have been eager just to see what happens when all these tin-pot despots suddenly wake up without American money flowing into their banana republics.
Hitherto, African bigwigs have successfully played the card of historical White guilt to corner different Western governments where they would look inhumane if they did not give money to Africa to plug gaps in healthcare, education, sometimes food and even garbage collection.
The standard narrative is that we are underdeveloped and poor because our ancestors were enslaved and colonised. Their natural resources were plundered. Their energy and ingenuity did not go to Africa’s development, but to the White man’s world. It is now time for the White man to compensate the African for that exploitation; so the argument goes.
There is another angle our rulers sometimes add to the picture, especially if they started off with calling themselves revolutionaries. They condemn many African chiefs of those bygone times for collaborating with the White invaders instead of fighting them.
In short, African traitors helped White exploiters to plunder the continent and keep Africans back.The White people took away any minerals and farm produce they could, and their chiefly local collaborators got huge parcels of land and whatever luxuries were on offer at the time.
In this blame game, the current rulers and their chiefs carefully avoid discussing their own tilted reward schemes, or their corruption, both of which have given them the financial muscle to enjoy whatever perks are on offer today, and to accumulate wealth at a pace and in volumes never witnessed before.In this current plunder, it takes hundreds of wild horses to drag the powerful natives out into the open and force them to show the criminal mineral and procurement contracts they have signed with their White and not-so-White foreign collaborators.
So, thank you, Mr Trump, if you can make today’s African plunderers grovel and lick your boots and beg you to forgive them for insulting or otherwise disrespecting America in the past.
Instruct them to stop blaming dead people who had power centuries ago. Force them to take responsibility for failing to love and make Africa great.
Tell them that if they have serious minerals, whether locally sourced or smuggled from other countries, deals can be struck, but the days of free American money are gone.
Remind them that you have exactly four years and not four days more, let alone 40 years, in which to deliver on your promises to the American people, and after that you will take your dance to wherever you want, but without lingering at the White House.
Tell them that if they are not calling urgent Cabinet meetings to assess a dramatically changing world, or reshaping their attitudes, the fate of their citizens is sealed. They are damned. They will be re-enslaved and re-colonised more nakedly than yesterday, unless perhaps they rise in a wave of new revolutions.
Mr Tacca is a novelist and socio-political commentator.
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