I think what is up is that the lies are coming out. Some of us warned when they started pontificating about Africa. Indeed many societies in Africa are much better than these European societies which have largely ridden to prominence and dominance, on the tears, sweat and bloods of the peoples of African nations (I admit our own ignorance and stupidity too, which is still ongoing).
When the London protests started in Tottenham, they said it was a black thing. The guy that was killed by police was Jamaican, though half caste. I saw several postings on BBC and other websites, where people came out of their closets and started abusing NIGGERS and asking foreigners to return to their ‘banana’ countries. So much for modernity and political correctness, it seems we are all still savages at heart aren’t we?
But it quickly morphed. There is anger in the land. There is poverty, serious poverty in the UK. There is an ever-present air of despondency and hopelessness. I lived there in 05/06 and was depressed for most of that time. I know what it is like. People take to alcohol. The pubs are the thriving businesses. Football is thrown in the mix to make people forget their problems. But for only a while. In fact people spend the little they have on alcohol and supporting their teams. People are quite snobbish, minding their own businesses, but the furnaces in the minds of people have been seething, and recently burst open. We should have known. The last mass protest organised in Central London, easily dissolved into a looting spree, with protesters entering restaurants and fast food joints. Even the Ritz at Green Park Station was not spared.
This time in quick succession, we saw the Turks of Haringay/Wood Green on the streets. They were not fighting the blacks but the state. The Indians and Pakistanis of Walthamstow come out in great anger. In Birmingham too, with the large immigrant population. In Liverpool, English (Liverpudians), joined in expressing their frustration. Even the Hasidian Jews who dominate Stamford Hill in London, confronted the police in their Jewish garb, skirts and hats all intact!
The UK has a serious problem on its hands. So also does the USA. In Europe, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, in fact the whole shebang is in trouble. The age of lies is petering out. The mass media is still playing the hallucination game, returning so easily to their coverage of trouble (western-manufactured) in other countries like Libya, Egypt, Iraq and co, while they ignore or dismiss the ones in their backyard. And there is an attempt to give the protest an entirely black coloration. Yes the blacks occupy the lowest rung of the ladder in almost every country in the western world, but the disenchantment and discontent is not from them alone. The poor people have seen that they could discard the illusive toga of being ‘first world citizens’ – who barely survive from hand to mouth – and take to the streets to show to the whole world that their governments have been living a lie, prosecuting wars abroad at great cost, while the aristocrats pocket even the proceeds of those wars.
What is at stake is the total cremation of Capitalism. The process whereby a few people continue to acquire and acquire, is one of the greatest frauds ever invented. The ‘invisible hand’ which we were promised will ‘redistribute’ wealth once the rich have made it, has failed dismally. In fact, it is called ‘invisible’, simply because it doesn’t exist. Africa is slightly better in some ways than some of the western countries. In Africa here, there is more ‘social capital’, by which people take care of each other more. Anybody from your village is your ‘brother’ – ask the Igbo people – and could generally branch in your office on his way to Kaura Namoda, just to ‘greet’ his brother. Woe betide you if you don’t find him ‘something’. In Europe, everybody works on a budget, and many people die in their rooms, or in the open where they sleep, with no one caring a hoot!
It is therefore high time for us to elevate and reexamine our current social and economic systems, and see if there are a few things we can lend Europe as to how systems should be run, not to acquiesce and kowtow to their shenanigans and accept that our systems are inferior through and through.
Regarding our ways of life here, there are some advantages though. I know people who have worked for decades in Europe, and have little to show for it. They are still paying mortgages which they have refinanced repeatedly and many are likely to die while the mortgages are still running. How easy, if possible at all, is it to save a pound in the UK? In Nigeria you could actually save without the government breathing down your neck. Today the UK has an income tax rate up to 50% for high salaries. And when you get your balance from the government, VAT of 20% is on everything you buy – apart from maybe food. So, many people choose not to work and collect the dole instead.
In Nigeria or Africa, you are more likely to shine if you know your onions – and therefore get that self-actualisation that Abraham Maslow talked about. In the UK and the West, most people die never having been anything. A jury service may be all the limelight you can get in the USA for example. In the UK, nobody cares who you are. When I lived there, my neighbour David Cooke, told me the first day we met that I should not knock his door if I don’t see him, even in a week. I knew he thought I was just another cheap black man – which he later confessed to. He didn’t know I was a hermit par excellence, and after holing up for about a month in between schooling, David will come and knock on my door; ‘Tops, are you still alive?’. David, a poet, told me ‘Here, we live like rats’, and having been living in the same room for 30 years as a ‘live-in’ tenant, he told me when I was leaving that I was the best co-tenant he ever had.
So essentially the system here in Nigeria and Africa in general, is STILL sick. But that doesn’t mean Europe, with an equally sick system of a different hue should take liberty in bombing us in the name of freedom, or ARMING REBELS IN AFRICA AND SELLING AMMUNITIONS HERE, in the name of displacing a despot. It is totally unacceptable. If someone came to England today and started RECOGNISING those rioters as the true representatives of the government of England, what would they feel?
So the chicken came home to roost… briefly… Invariably, after causing much havoc on outsiders… Will the stubborn chicken return in the near future? What a shameless world…
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