A video of our Ghanaian brother berating the U.S. for its threat to sanction Ghana for passing its anti-LGBTQ legislation is making the round on African social media and we are all applauding it as if it was the Geiysburg or the iconic MLK “I have a Dream” speech.
Our obsession with LGBTQ as our legislative priority speaks volumes about the African mindset of focusing on the mundane when the rest of the world is engaged in the race for the dominance of space and AI. It is the reason we are building mega-churches while our national economic infrastructure and manufacture crumbling. Misplaced and misguided priorities all around. Empty Aluta countia speeches and deflects the responsibility for our self-inflicted dysfunction to others.
I know I have already lost half of the audience for appearing to support LGBTQ. That’s not the point. Are we, in fact, paragon of sexual morality or morality period with the insane looting, corruption, and the inhumane pauperization of the poor by our kleptocratic political class and their crony capitalists?
The Bible tells us to remove the moral log in our eyes before pointing at the speck in others. Shouldn’t we care about putting food on the poor’s table, clothing the naked, and housing the homeless before focusing on who sleeps with who in the privacy of their adult beds so long as they are not engaged in pedophilia. By the way, the same Ghana has a video of a twelve year being sexualized and given away in marriage. Why does our culture often turn a blind eye as pre-teens are sometimes married off to septuagenarians in some of our countries? Talk about sexual and morality hypocrisy.
We Africans need to know that the world does not respect or react to empty talk unless you can back it up. Our Ghanaian brother talks the good talk about Ghanaian sovereignty and economic independence and how Nigerian and Ghanaian are the best doctors in the U.S. The question is, why are our best doctors fleeing our continent while disease ravages our land? Can we walk our talk. It is absolutely the truth which many of us can attest to, that the whiteman is no more intelligent than us. We routinely wipe them with the floor in academic grade, but the world economy is not built on your ability to regurgitate facts to score well in tests. It is built on building the system that allows intelligent, creative people to use their intellect to build things, to transform academic knowledge to technology that adds value to productivity and quality of life and into consumer goods the world absolutely depends on.
You are irrelevant to the world if you must sell your raw material to survive, if you are stuck with Stone Age farming system like your cave-dwelling ancestors did with rudimentary, back-breaking hoe and cutlass in a world where robots, AI and genetic engineering are revolutionizing food production. The world has no respect for a people nor respond to the empty word of a people who cannot do the most basic thing of adding value to their raw materials, who denigrate their own culture, their own food, their own fashion, their own language, their our religion while we embrace and serenade the foreign and worship their gods.
The Bible is very explicit about the power dynamic between the rich and the poor. Prov 22:7: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is slave of the lender.” Just like a poor man no matter how intelligent he is, has limited idea and voice when the family is talking money, our bravado and high valuatin talk have no meaning in the commity of nations until we put our economic and political house in order and become strategic players in the global economy and in world affairs.
The West will look the other way when the Saudi crown Prince dismembered and vaporized the American based journalist because the U.S. economy depends on Saudi oil and its sovereign wealth to survive. Biden knew his political goose was cooked as soon as the Saudis started to squeeze the global oil market with her massive power to control the supply and demand curve. He had to swallow his pride and rhetoric about human rights to visit and pay homage to the Crown Prince with the iconic fist bump the world saw on TV.
We must understand that the world economy is not the papacy. We have, in fact, just discovered that not even the papacy is squeaky clean. The world affair has never been based on morality, fairness, or justice. Even our cave-dwelling ancestors invaded, looted, plundered, and laid to waste the caves of other ethnic groups. So did the Aztecs, the Romans, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Othman Turks, the Brits, the US, and now the emerging Chinese power. The powerful always dominates and exploits the powerless. It is the law of the survival of the fittest. As it is in the animal world, it is with humans no matter our pretension of moral and intellectual superiority.
The world has always been a dog-eat-dog: the winner takes it all world from antiquity.
The story of the harmonious world in the Garden of Eden, if true, died a long time ago. Didn’t Cain kill Abel in the Garden?
We must stop talking and get to work to compete in the cut-throat world. Great speeches about how the west underdeveloped Africa (which is true, by the way) does not cut it. Masterminding our own development is the best revenge against an exploitative world.