By Pearson Mbendera
Visit America and I’m sure you will meet a guy in a strip club, throwing ones at a naked lady and screaming that he is living the American dream. But what is the American dream? And do we have our own equivalence of that, the African dream? The American dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work. The idea of the American dream is rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But here in Africa we don’t have a dream like that. We don’t live in a continent spoiled with opportunities. Not everyone will make it big in Africa. Success is for the few, and they pass it down to their children and in turn their children. Success in Africa is more like monarchy; it is passed down through bloodlines.
We don’t have an African dream. What we have instead is a nightmare. We have natural resources that don’t benefit us in any way because they are being used to fund wars. We have diamonds but we don’t walk around wearing diamond jewelry because all we do is mine them in their raw state, sell them oversees and when they are processed we can’t afford to buy them. We have executives getting hefty salaries while their subordinates go for long without getting paid. Worse still, there isn’t much production to justify such large salary packages.
We have enough resources to go around. In fact the vast supply of our own resources have helped other countries grow their economies while we starve right here at home. There are wars bought and paid for by the natural resources, thus instead of communities prospering out of the abundance of natural resources God has graciously given us, people die because of it. The proceeds of the sale of those resources fund civil wars; money is just being spent buying arms which don’t bring food at the dinner table.
In his yearly letter, Bill Gates predicted there wouldn’t be poor countries by the year 2035. But at the rate we are going, it doesn’t seem likely. Maybe this may be achieved in other poor parts of the world like South America and Asia but surely not Africa.
What we need is just a simple dream. A dream that will see children getting quality education and healthcare and college graduates getting jobs and earning a decent salary rather than selling tomatoes at street corners. A dream that if a person spends the better part of his life working he or she should get a good retirement package that will see them well off to their grave. A dream there will be medicine and enough doctors in our hospitals. Is having such a dream for Africa too much to ask?
The fighting spirit of Africans seemed to have died with the wars of liberation that some African countries fought with their former colonial masters. Now we are our greatest enemies.
Under black African rule, things haven’t gotten any better for the average African person. My country Zimbabwe fought and won a liberation struggle against the British, reclaimed land from the whites but still we import food from South Africa, we can’t even afford to purchase goods manufactured in our own country. And for that reason we have provided a good market for Chinese products, many of which are substandard.
Maybe we will get there maybe we won’t. But until we a dream of our own, an African dream, we will still be in the situation we are today. With an African dream, we can align our system towards the attainment of this dream, only then will everything fall into place.
Maybe we have the African dream after all. And it’s just that, a DREAM. To live it we have to close our eyes. The moment we open them it disappears, reality sets in and it’s not a pleasant one. Maybe that’s what it means to being African. But we all need a real dream, one that can unite us, and the one we can all work together to achieve. I know I need one, how many of you are with me on this one.
Comments
About Author
