THE AFRICAN PROBLEMS (PART 5)

#5 Poor Legacies

It was a hot afternoon and I was very hungry already. So I left the studio to go grab some lunch. One of my favorite restaurants was across the street and as usual, I quickly found my way there. As I stepped in, I could hear the owner of the restaurant lamenting. Her voice was coming from the kitchen. I stepped forward to order for my launch. She attended to me… still lamenting. As at that time, I was the only customer in the restaurant and from her mode of expression, I could sense that she just concluded a conversation with the last guy who walked out of the place before I came in. She was discussing with herself but she kept on looking at me as though I was being addressed. I collected my food
, found myself a seat and continued listening from a distance. It was then I realized she had something against the yahoo yahoo boys. “All those boys… they don’t want to work again. They just want to sleep, wake up and pick money as if money falls from the sky. Mtchewww… They don’t even want to go to school anymore.” She complained. Then she cursed. I listened a little, shook my head in pity and continued eating my food. Honestly, it wasn’t the woman that I felt pity for. It was the boys.

The ideologies instilled in us when we were children become the philosophies guiding our lives as adults.

We may complain from now till eternity about the waywardness of this generation. That just does nothing until we get to the root of the matter. People keep saying this generation is perverted, but the truth lies in the fact that we live by the legacies left behind for us. The ideologies instilled in us when we were children become the philosophies guiding our lives as adults. We are yet to be reborn. I discussed a number of things in Materialism. It is true that the whole world measures a man’s success, achievements and fulfilments by the fatness of his bank account, the grandiosity of his appearance, his academic fits or by the height of his social influence. And honestly, everyone wants to be this successful through all means. Whether by business or hard-work or fraud or bloody ritual, money must be made. People would do anything to attain this social status called success. This is what motivates the artist to sing love songs, the teacher to teach and the student to study law or medicine. It’s what motivates a man to start his business, a woman to open her trade and a pastor to start his ministry. It’s what motivates the politician in his campaign, one African man to kill another and so much chaos as we see around us. The need to be wealthy, to be well-known and to be respected is what drives us to do almost everything. That’s just the way we were brought up. That’s all we were taught to be. That’s the legacy they left for us.

Black lives don’t even matter to the blacks.

I once saw a social media campaign tagged #BlackLivesMatter and I wondered. Black lives don’t even matter to the blacks. How then would they matter to the rest of the world? We don’t cater for each other. It’s easier for us to trample on one another in order to gain upper hands. Students sent to school are expected to come back home making money. Businesses are established not to meet the needs of ordinary people but solely for the purpose of profit making. People who work in cooperate and governmental organisations fail to see their duties as services to fellow citizens. Churches are opened to exploit the poor and the rich alike. Hence, compromised sermons are preached. Our systems permit workers to get less and spenders to get more. More money motivates us. In all of these, how on earth do we expect ourselves not to raise a generation of fraudsters? Sometimes I just ask myself: What kind of homes do our politicians grow up from? What kind of lessons were they taught while growing up? Now I ask the same questions about every one of us. We’re having so many problems because here, money and power are still the best legacies that people (want to) leave for their children. Maybe there’s nothing wrong about that. However, what to keep in mind is that whatever we start doing today does not end today. It has a way of reaching to tomorrow. Children acquire from us more than material possessions. To have a better Africa that has her own identity, our elders must uphold good values and leave them behind for us. These values we must also pass down to the coming generations and so on. Our beliefs, our principles, our pride, our love, our culture, our lifestyles… whether we like it or not, children will inherit legacies from us. It is our duty to ensure they are good legacies.