I often read that Africa’s resources are a curse to the continent and not a blessing. This is a frightening description of the resources of the continent, which puts off the African from exploiting the bounties of the land and seas and, indeed, the aerospace of the continent.
It is a large continent, the second largest in the world and the powers that be, fight over it, compete over it and scramble for its resources. The citizens of the continent are, however, scared of these bounties. Why are the natives of the continent deprived of those bounties when they can make others tap dance on air?
This is, where indeed, the first attack on the continent starts. It makes the people and leadership of the continent scared and frightened of their own resources. The continent is large and expansive, and we will only address in this article, the Horn of Africa States, which is rich and poor at the same time, a similar phenomenon for the rest of the continent.
It consists of the countries of Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan, which I call the SEEDS countries. It is a vast territory of some 3.8 million square km and a population of nearly 200 million people. It is endowed with bounties of nature of almost every sort, including not only its people but also its location but which nevertheless remains a poor region despite all the wealth at its disposal.
There is always this general trend and pattern among the people of the region and propagated by the international media that it is a leadership problem, which it is not. The people are made to focus on their own leaders and not on the wealth at their feet and around them, left and right and wherever one looks at.
Leaders are the easy escape goats that are blamed for everything bad that goes on in the lands of the Horn of Africa States. It is easy because they represent obvious targets poised in prominent positions – the head of the pyramid of authority.
They, indeed, are the obvious targets like those of a shooting facility, where the target is obvious. They are easier to target and easier to blame and easier to corrupt and easier to disrupt the lives of whole populations steering them away from their real duties of governing and directed at pursuing the most unproductive of activities – political self-preservation. The populations themselves also spend their energies belittling their leaders all the time, another unproductive........