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An open letter to all African leaders

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Wed, 30 Aug 2023 Source: Bobby Quaqoo

I write you as a son of Africa in the Diaspora. I have been following closely the governance activities of many of you. I salute those very few of you who have decided to put your country and its citizens first ahead of yours and those of your public servants, security, and business cronies.

May the God of Africa bless these few. Since independence time some 60 years ago, your countries have been heavily dependent on their past colonial Masters. Panhandling has had its way with you since. Meanwhile, all available evidence has shown that your countries are very much endowed with rich natural resources, but that almost all of you have been looting and stealing your countries' rich resources in collaboration with your political cronies and foreign Masters.

They have forced their hypocritical democracies on you to use you to perniciously continue their colonial exploitation of your countries, hence Africa as a whole. They look the other way when you viciously steal the people's electoral mandates or change your countries' constitutions to impose yourselves on your citizens.

You do this by surrounding yourselves with tribal people as your security guards whom you bribe heavily to protect you against your fellow citizens instead of protecting them against your lootings and thieveries which destabilize your countries and reduce your fellow citizens to miserable marginalization.

Sirs, any act of a citizen or citizens or foreigners that cause the politico-economic-social destabilization to a country is considered treasonous and the individual(s) are considered enemies of the state and treated accordingly by your laws. So why are you not facing treason trials in your respective countries or prisons for your criminal convictions? I guess that is why each of you filled your justice systems with your party members and sympathizers as well as your relatives.

Sirs, Africa has been going on a downward spiral socio-economically despite its very vast natural and human resources. And while Africa should have been feeding the world, it has been the other way around since its so-called independence. All your countries are economically dependent on its perennial foreign exploiters with whom sadly almost, if not all of you, are their willing collaborators. In addition, Africa is also mostly politically dependent.

These dependencies are most glaring in its French colonies in as much as France still pulls the rope of the continuation of the colonialization agreement that hangs over their necks. You all know about this truly repugnant enslavement but are powerless to do anything about it because you are bedfellows with France and its allies. As such your behaviors should be deemed to have disqualified you from playing any leadership role in the continent since they constitute treasonable offenses.

Sirs, we your fellow citizens at home and abroad had hoped that our mother continent Africa would realize the dreams of its independence Founding Fathers. But we had hoped against hope because you decided to be bedmates of Africa's worst foreign enemies that had vowed to keep Africa as a poor cheap raw material base that feeds their industries and maximizes the enjoyment of their high living standards.

How can an African leader who is supposed to be the beacon of patriotism that every citizen will look up to and emulate, cower to such enemies? And how did France get to assassinate leaders of its colonies that wanted to free themselves from its bloodsucking colonialization continuation agreement, and get away with it each time? And the killers of Togo's Olympio, Congo's Lumumba, and Libya's Gadhafi as well as the overthrow of many Pan Africa leaders such as Ghana's Nkrumah? Each time using fellow Africans!

It's because you allowed them to keep you divided. Right? And imposed on you their hypocritical democratic governance system that is designed in Africa to without fail bring kakistocratic and kleptomaniac leaders to political leaderships that are nothing less than their stooges! And because it allows you to insanely rip off your countries through the same lootings and thieveries with impunity, you are happy to maintain each of your pigeonhole countries within Africa as their Presidents/Prime Ministers, protected by your tribal corrupted conscienceless security apparachiks. You have collectively lost your moral and ethical leverage over your countries and the African continent.

And you have developed instruments to protect yourselves now and maintain the status quo going forward without regard for the citizens who entrusted you with their national assets and wellbeing.

Sirs, our ancestors had been eager to kill their fellow Africans and capture the rest for the profits of these foreign enemies of Africa. They took cheap bribes from them. It saddens me very intensely that your collective behaviors in 2023 are no different! Who will rescue us Africans from these behaviors and set us FREE FOREVER from these perennial internal and external enemies of Africa? As noted your predecessors had not been able to do it, you are unwilling to do it, nor will those coming after you.

And that is why most of us Africans at home and abroad are welcoming our brothers and sisters in the military who are demonstrating their unblemished patriotism by sacrificially kicking you away and wrestling the continent from its perennial enemies. Rather than joining hands with them to speed up Africa's long overdue liberation process, your opposition has proven beyond doubt that indeed you are bedmates with Africa's worst external enemies, we who are eager to see a strong, free, #UnitedAfricanstates can conclude without a shred of doubt, that you are Africa's worst internal enemies.

Sirs, can we therefore call on you to repent and unite with the forces of Africa's liberation? It will be shining legacies you will have left for your generations after you.

Please, please, please help free us fully and permanently from our colonial strangleholds. We have had enough.

And the time is now!

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Columnist: Bobby Quaqoo