The hand-out charity ideology is killing Africa and must stop immediately, if we must get on with being part of world’s leadership.
A friend contacted me about her project of gathering sanitary pads to be sent to girls to her rural community and I asked her, how long have you been doing this and how long more do you want to do this? How has the many years you’ve done this changed the lives of those girls you send them to?
There are things I don’t believe in and don’t support. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for charity and helping where necessary.
But I do not believe in and do not support charity of hand-out of food and perishables. Except during disaster and emergency, it is totally counter-productive to hand-out food items, clothes, sanitary pads and other perishables.
This trend has been ongoing in Africa and continues to permeate the idea of materialism without work. It is one of the reasons there’s so much laziness, corruption and get rich quick ideologies in Africa and why Africa will take much longer to rise.
By now, Africa should have positioned itself as global leader given the many natural resources we have at our disposal. But that isn’t happening because people are not taught to see, understand and explore the values in these resources. Rather we continue to encourage the idea of receiving an already finished products which they simply enjoy and believe that out there, these things fall from trees. Then we worry that our children are risking their lives going through the Mediterranean to get to Europe and sometimes through the dessert searching for this illusive greener pastures. We must change the mind-set and do it quickly if we must start having any form of change.
The charity of hand-out especially by people in abroad continues to create the idea that, there’s a greener pasture out here and that the only survival way out is to come to another country. These are also the very idea that makes people not to value their locally made things.
We need to start adopting the idea of charity of teaching people how to feed themselves, how to develop things, how to be on their feet. Teach people to develop confidence and value for themselves. Make them see the dignity in earning something and building sustainable ways of meeting there needs. Let us teach our children that there is poverty everywhere in the world and everyone else struggles as much as they do to get on. The difference in people’s situations is how they handle themselves over a period of time.
If we don’t learn to lead, then we continue to be led. Therefore you will follow sheepishly to wherever you are led to. We cannot continue to behave like people who don’t have a choice when we have all the natural resources the world needs in our backyard.
If you want to see the extent of the damage this charity ideology has done to Africa, simply google African child on the internet and see for yourself the image that has been created for the African child. Whether you are rich or poor as an African, this image needs to worry you and be of a great concern for you because that is why as an Africa in every part of the world we are continually despised and treated like a lesser human. We must now pick ourselves up and begin to re-build and repackage the story we tell of ourselves locally and globally.
Again if we continue to pretend we don’t have a choice then we must accept whatever choice offered to us which is what we are seeing at the moment. It is sad to say, that Africa will be re-colonised at this pace we are going. If not by the west then China or India will come back to recolonize Africa. Imagine the mind-set of a government that agrees for a another country to house of parliament in exchange for trade agreement just as it is happening in Zimbabwe and Congo right now.
How can another nation build the most important structure for a sovereign nation? On this scale, we might begin to see it, but refusing to see the hand-out charity means that we have not understood the root cause of such disastrous mind-set of a government even entertaining such thought let alone discussing it and letting it happen that another nations will build your own parliament the symbol of a nations authority and power. What a mess? When exactly are we collectively going to begin to think for ourselves and our children’s future and position in this world?
Please can we invest our charity giving towards education,apprenticeship, creating employment and supporting businesses to thrive? By so doing we encourage economic growth within our communities, give people sense of value and dignity and thus create accountability. Until we can do these, people will continue to accept cash and food items from corrupt politicians in exchange for their votes. And we will continue to be led by criminals and idiots who don’t have any atom of brain in their skull. When people don’t have sense of value and respect for themselves, they sell themselves so cheaply and suffer direly. Stamping out these ideas of victimhood, pity me, rescue me mentality. This is the only way we can root out corruption in our nations.
You and I have a huge work ahead to do in rebuilding our race and our nations.
See you in 2018.
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