By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
January 02, 2007
During the heyday of European colonialism when the colonized were denied adult suffrage, the European colonizer arrogantly and automatically assumed that he knew what was best for the colonized. The European colonizer also assumed that it was his Divine Right to assign all policy decisions of governance unto himself. This represented the parental and condescending nature of Euro-colonialism.
Continue reading Government as if people don’t matter
By Linda E. Edwards
Dated: December 26, 2006
Your Excellency
The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria
Sir:
I e-mailed a Nigerian friend the article from the New York Times this morning, with a brief comment, “O God, Again?”
Again, because I am tired of seeing articles about a ruptured pipeline, with people stealing gasoline, which explodes and kills them. Another few hundred are dead, in Africa’s most populous country. Maybe that is less than the children who will die of AIDS related diseases today, scattered across the continent. Maybe that number, two hundred and sixty and still counting, may have starved to death by the time I am finished typing this letter, and so, maybe, that is a small number. None of the people to whom I sent the article, however, thought that two hundred and sixty city dwellers in Lagos were so dispensable that they behaved as if these people were not to be missed. The sounds of the mothers wailing because their children have died, the sounds of the girl looking for her brother, and getting only the ring tones of his phone, would not go out of my ears.
Continue reading An Open Letter To President Olusegun Obasanjo