There’s something beautiful about the blackman. Even the scripture admitted in Song of Solomon 1:5 that”I am black but comely”. The dark skin is a divine garment with which God clothed the blackman to shield him from the harsh rays of the sun and sufficiently immune him from skin infections especially cancerous ones. In all fields of endeavour, the blackman distinguishes himself appropriately if given a level playing field. From the king of football (Pele) to the king of reggae (Bob Marley) to the king of pop (Michael Jackson) to the great athletes, scientists, freedom fighters etc, all are blackmen. To crown it all, God created the blackman and planted him in sub-saharan Africa where the sun never sets and where summer is celebrated all year round. With little food, he can achieve much. Like every other thing that is richly blessed, a lot of predators always lurk around to prey on the blessed ones. It’s the tree with fruits that receive stones from passersby. The abundance of inherent blessings gave the blackmen an erroneous sense of sufficiency and impacted on them the laziness for advancement. They were in the comfort of Africa, when other predator races identified their potentials and came down to cart them away for slavery to their own foreign lands. It is important to note that these predator races couldn’t have succeeded in trading on Africans if there were no collaborators in Africa. It is the rat in the house that informed the rat outside that there is fish in the basket.
Before the transatlantic slave trade, we must note that there was a flourishing internal black on black slavery. It was the internal slave masters who sold their fellow blackmen to the external slave traders. Famous slave trade routes in Nigeria, Ghana up to Senegal are all well known. For paltry material things like mirrors, cigarettes, wines etc, the African chiefs sold their subjects to the white men as slaves. Some people were even sacrificed and married to idols as osu. The more annoying situation was that the whites even ended slavery in their lands before the Africans ended theirs and had to come to Africa to fight against internal slavery. Till our generation, in Igbo land, people are discriminated against as descendants of slaves and osu. They are not allowed to inter-marry with the descendants of the non-slaves or take a title of the same capacity. Certain areas are carved out for them to live together among themselves to limit the level of interactions with the freeborns.
So the blackman is powerful individually but very weak collectively because of divisive tendencies. It was easy when the Europeans arrived the shores of Africa to exploit those fault lines and continue their domination of Blacks. In Nigeria, before colonization, the nations within the geographical area called Nigeria were deeply divided into Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, Tiv, Igala, Ijaw, Moslems and African Traditional Religion worshippers etc. They fought wars among themselves and spread their religion among themselves by force. The Europeans introduced Christianity to Africa and compounded the confusion. They succeeded in maintaining those fault lines and even intensified them to the extent that each nation preferred to deal with the expatriates rather than deal with the indigenes of other nations within Nigeria. Every raw material was exported to their countries for improvement and finished products were imported back for purchase in Africa. No effort was made towards refining or developing those raw materials in Africa to encourage industrialisation of Africa or even train Africans to be able to improve on these raw materials. By the time colonization ended, every blackman has become mentally enslaved.
It is unfortunate that after independence, the leaders of Africa became collaborators with the whites to continue the slavery of their citizens. They steal the money of their countries through corruption and deposit it abroad for the use of the whites while their citizens wallow in abject poverty. They fly abroad for holidays and neglect developing their tourist sites to attract the whites to their own countries. They go abroad for treatment and divert the money meant to build hospitals for their citizens. They train their doctors and other professionals and neglect to equip them or build modern hospitals for them resulting in brain drain to other countries. They provide special securities to guard themselves whenever they are in power and relocate completely abroad with their families whenever they are out of power and neglect equipping their own security forces to protect their citizens. As they are depositing their ill-gotten wealth abroad, they are borrowing the same money back to their countries as debt their countries owe to the whitemen. It is disheartening to see how the blacks in South Africa, which were colonized and enslaved by the whites in their own country for decades and were delivered by the collective sacrifice of blacks in Africa, recently killed and dehumanized fellow blacks in the country and tagged them the source of their problems. They have been manipulated by their slave masters to believe that their fellow blacks are their problems and they agreed. Citizens in Nigeria are sometimes murdered by the police for refusing to give bribe of N20. Uwaila Omozuwa, a 22-year-old undergraduate in University of Benin was raped and brutalized in a church where she went to read. She died on May 30, 2020. If black lives do not matter at home and in Africa, it may never matter abroad.
All these so-called NGOs which are believed to be sponsored from abroad and which continually publish negative reports against their fatherland to satisfy the desires of their paymasters abroad, especially with regards to the fight against terrorism, are part of these conspiracies against Nigeria. All the corrupt businessmen who will not develop Nigeria but are quick in patronising foreign business interests are part of these conspiracies. It is an open secret that our power sector has not been settled because some companies selling generators abroad are colluding with some unscrupulous persons in Nigeria to frustrate the resuscitation of the power sector. Some politicians are also part of these conspiracies. How do you explain that the House of Representatives can vote to buy 400 imported exotic vehicles for their members when these vehicles can be sourced locally. As the Ambassador of Made in Nigeria goods, I find this decision very troubling. Every 4 years, the nation’s legislature spends our scarce foreign exchange on exotic foreign made goods and vehicles. Outsourcing the production of these products means creating employment abroad to the detriment of our youths at home. Also some unscrupulous and corrupt members of the civil service and politicians have ensured that our oil refineries do not work so that we will continue to waste our trillions of naira on the importation of refined petroleum products which we have in abundance.
My heart is broken for the blackman. As Michael Jordan, the great American basketballer puts it “we’ve had enough”. Nigerians must rise against imperialism and their local collaborators. We must say no to any arm of government wasting our foreign exchange and taxpayers money on imported goods and services that can be produced locally. We must produce what we eat and eat what we produce. We must unite to fight terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, rapists as they are a threat to everybody. These terrorists have sponsors and collaborators among us that should be exposed and dealt with in accordance with the law. Terrorism is simply a quest for power and resources and not a legitimate fight for any reasonable ideology. We must continue the war against corruption to ensure that economic saboteurs are fished out and dealt with accordingly. Above all, we must create Nigerians out of Nigeria because united we stand and divided we fall.