mathukuma

While the Caucasians took centuries to grow up, Africans are expected to reach the levels of these fellows in decades!

Heck, they even want us to embrace gays NOW.

They push us to do things which are still not yet achieved in their homelands. e,g US is yet to have a woman president! Women started voting in these civilizations less than 100 years ago!

Tuko nyuma lakini we should not be made to feel pathetic

Weka helmet ya pili!!!

I agree with you but actions that you take must have a nexus with development! Causality! Cause --> effect! you cannot put fruits on a 3 year old tree and expect it to be as tall as the 20 year old tree because you fanyad Juu chini to get the fruits. if your interest is to have a big tree - seek out what needs to be done to make your small tree big not what are the characteristics of a big tree. I don't castigate the 'enemy' i just castigate the people within us who think rituals and magic words after shaking gourds full of seeds will bring development..... CAUSE ---> EFFECT!

Age doesn't really matter. There are a gazillion examples of old people who transformed their countries.

There are numerous reasons for Africa's inertia but one is the inability to chart a unique path that works for us. We try to replicate other countries but without interrogation.

There is discomfort in interrogating certain narratives. For instance, are political freedoms more important than economic freedoms? Is the right to vote more important than the right to food? Is it odd that emphasis on political freedoms is sometimes preached by countries who achieved economic freedoms under less-than-democratic governance systems? Is it curious that some countries who champion democracy appear to respect and prefer to do business more with authoritarian, independent-minded states like Ethiopia and Rwanda over democracies on the continent?

Third world countries that struggle to be mini-Americas may get the 'Mandela!' cheer from overseas but might not necessarily pull their citizens out of poverty. The death of protesters in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989 was unacceptable. But one cannot help but wonder where China would be today if it embraced liberal democracy in 1989. It would probably have been a dysfunctional mess like Thailand or as inconsistent as India. Publications like The Economist were predicting the collapse of China from the 1980s (simply because it wasnt modeled on Western democracy) before they grudgingly accepted the inevitability of its ascendancy. Today, Pew Global, a Western pollster no less, consistently shows that Chinese citizens are happier with their government than Americans and a couple of other Western countries are with theirs.

Here is more food for thought. The Arab Spring started in Tunisia. So far it seems to have worked well there. But what happened to the other countries that tried to copy-paste the Tunisian revolution? They were egged on perhaps sincerely to 'fight for democracy like the Tunisians'. Libya is now a failed and fragmenting state that has regressed 20 years. Syria is now a failed state that has regressed 30 years. Egypt toppled a military dictator, saw the slaughter of more than 1000 civilians and eventually replaced Mubarak with another military dictator.

There is no problem with pursuing a certain path. The problem is in becoming dogmatic i.e. 'this is the way and the only way because it seems to be working elsewhere'.

The problem is small things like the ones highlighted here are taken as too big, and the faulty thinking in our heads as negligible.

Isn't it surprising that few of us even on this thread wish to be parts of the solution but are rather parts of the problem?

For example, how reasonable is it to say that 'Public toilets are dirty because Africans aren't developed'? The assumption seems to be that Africans started defecating the other day.

Many of us who think they are civilized are actually suffering from self deception.