Emeka Anokwuru
The Vice President of Liberia, Senator Jewel Taylor, has called on African leaders to be humane in all their activities to curb the myriads of challenges facing the black continent.
Taylor made the call on Sunday in Calabar while kicking off the third and final dry run of the 2019 Calabar Carnival, with the theme: “Humanity.”
She said the carnival’s theme was an issue of concern to the world explaining that with humanity, Africans will be loved, provided and cared for, so that the young generation will no longer hike across the desert in search of greener pasture.
“Where is our humanity when we allow our young men and women to be taken into slavery and trafficked across the Sahara desert?
“Some of them die on the high sea trying to cross to Europe and the Americas; and once they get there, they are locked out and kept in detention camps and are sometimes treated like animals.
“Where is our humanity when people live below a dollar per day and some families cannot find food nor afford to send their children to school”, she said.
She lamented the fact that women were not given opportunities to add value in their respective communities.
According to her, even in the animal kingdom, humanity exists, hence, kindness and love should be a priority in the minds of all: “If one animal ever dies in the animal kingdom, the whole forest shakes. I must thank Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River for choosing this theme.
“We must turn around from our path, else it will lead to annihilation. The strongest survive and continue to harass and suppress the weak and that is not how we should behave.
“We should use this Carnival and showcase those societal ills and put our humanity back in terms of how we behave, in terms of love and concern.
“If we do this, the table will turn around and we will find out that they are more who are cared for and loved; especially in a continent like Africa with all the resources that we have”
Earlier, Cross River State Governor, Ben Ayade, said that the 2019 Carnival was designed to tell the story of humanity and oneness around the world.
Joining the Liberian Vice President to call leaders and followers at various levels in Africa to see themselves as One, Ayade said Cross River is using Carnival Calabar platforms to draw global attention on the theme of the 2019 edition of the carnival: “Humanity”. If you imbue humanity in everything you do, be it politics, business and others, you will be a better person, society will be a better place and no one will need unnecessary protections as we have today among the elites and the affluent in the society, after all, we are all human, that is the message we are passing from Cross River today.
“Unlike the way it is today, human being has become more animalistic in our dealings and animals are becoming more humans, increasingly it’s obvious that man has degenerated to an extreme level of atamism and primitivism,” he said.
Different bands were dressed in their colourful costumes as they danced around the streets, with security along the 12km carnival routes.