How Africa's Big Men Betray the Continent

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abujagirl

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Africa is free yet its' people are not all free as the few elites in the land have held the continent hostage. These elites who are often in government or close to the governments in the land do things only to further their personal ambitions while the the rest of the people live in darkness and penury.

Writing on Africa’s Big Men, The Globe and Mail wrote, "Two weeks ago, at the annual meeting of the African Union, 54 African heads of state quietly voted to grant themselves and their senior officials immunity from prosecution for genocide and crimes against humanity at the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. In a flash, the credibility of the nascent court, seen as the African alternative to the much-criticized International Criminal Court, vanished into thin air. Amnesty International blasted the decision as “a backward step in the fight against impunity and a betrayal of victims of serious violations of human rights.”

The decision can only be seen as a flagrantly self-serving step to protect past and present African presidents accused of terrible crimes, like those of Sudan, Kenya and Ivory Coast, to mention only three. Yet the move is simply one more in a shameful litany of betrayals of their own people by innumerable African leaders ever since colonialism ended. The struggle to free Africa of the yoke of colonialism is one of the great forgotten causes of the 20th century. Modestly launched in the 1930s, by 1956 Sudan had gained its independence from Britain, followed with great fanfare by Ghana in 1957.

The floodgates, once opened, could not be closed. By the mid-1960s, all French and Belgian colonies and all British colonies except those in southern Africa were, nominally at least, independent. The Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola followed in 1975, white-ruled Rhodesia became Zimbabwe five years later, Namibia five years after that. While in practice neo-colonialism thrived almost everywhere, in 1994 Nelson Mandela’s election victory in South Africa marked the end of formal white domination of Africa.


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SOURCE: #TheGlobeandMail

#Zimbabwe #Ghana #Angola #Namibia #Mozambique #Africa #SouthAfrica #AfricanCourtofJusticeandHumanRights

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