' A Note for African leaders' by Adesina Ogunlana

Dear Sirs and Madams,

Of course this letter is meant for you. You, of course, you. You are a leader, alright, yes. It's true you are not the President, or a Minister, or a Governor, or a Commissioner. You are not a Mayor or a Councillor. You are not the head of the Civil or Public Service Ministry or a "parastatal." Maybe you are not a "traditional" ruler or even a village head. But then you hold an office. You have some authority. You have some people you direct, influence or affect. So then you are leader, maybe the leader of a small club or association, or department, or station or a shop. You do legitimate work. You have a title, some souls, maybe one, maybe two, three, four, seven, ten look up to you.
Yes, you may have none of those big paraphernalia of office or enjoy any tasty prerequisite of office, but why, you have some powers, control, influence over some other people, even in your alleged rat hole. You are a leader, my dear. It is important that you the African leader exercise your powers and discharge your duties with the greatest sense of responsibility. See, the African continent and its many disease ravaged, war-torn, poverty stricken, corruption crippled nations are in a big, big mess.
And the rest of the world see and treat us as nothing but fools and dirty swine.
How do I know? I just watched a film entitled HOTEL RWANDA. Maybe you too have watched it. It's about the genocide that bled Rwanda, one of the East African countries in the early 1990s.
At the height of the conflict between the majority but historically disfavoured Hutu and the minority but historically favoured Tutsi, the massacre of the Tutsi in their hundreds was a daily affair. The United Nations sent only a few troops – peacekeepers they called them, maybe about three hundred. The massacre continued but the world just looked on. At a point the French sent some troops and the hundreds of traumatized victims, those still alive rejoiced. They thought a saving interventionist force had come. But it was a hope, sorely misplaced; the French had come for the bail out of foreign nationals – the ‘Oyinbos.’
Why so? The beleaguered head of the United Nation troops gave the reason as far as the Western World was concerned; the millions of affected Rwandans were not worthy of attention, help or rescue.
Why so? The Rwandans were so inferior in the scale of humanity that they, were in the eyes of the Western World, lower than the already despised ‘Niggers.’


Said the UN troop leader to the hero of the film – “You (referring to Rwandans) are not (even) Niggers. You are Africans.” It hurt to hear this. To know that some other human beings so very poorly regard us, another set of homo-sapiens, that our terrible suffering and horrendous loss of lives mean nothing or little to them. Why so? I guess one finds it very tempting to consider the Whites callous and barbaric cousins of the Devil himself. But that’s only one way of looking at it.
Can one heap the blame completely on the Whites for seeing us as sub-humans? Don’t we deserve the opprobrium seeing the way we ruin, instead of run our lives and our economies, and our institutions and our nations and souls and our bodies by our unrelenting and shameless thieving gluttony and shocking selfishness.
Virtually all our leaders, in both small and big positions are liars and self seekers, who take and hold public office with the grim determination to enrich themselves at the expense of those they ought to serve.
This global mismanagement of the resources of the African people by their own leaders, negroes, Africans like themselves is the reason for 99% of the unspeakable woes of the Black man and which woeful, doleful condition has made us repugnant in the eye of the rest of the world.
Who will save the African?
Nobody, except…..
Please fill in the gap.


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