Thank God it’s Friday

Tribune Online
Thank God it’s Friday

TGIF has always had this hedonistic bent, a precursor to YOLO; You Only Live Once. Both have their roots in splurging. But the general statement may not be factual. Those with back-breaking weekly engagements but with freer weekend can say it over and over again, without a tinge of anticipatory self-indulgence. When the daily space becomes toxic, the Friday walking out such chaos of a week is allowed to be celebrated. As I pen this, of course on Friday, I can barley wait for the exiting week to vamoose. What a week! Like SuperSport usually serenades exceptionalism. It could be a Messi’s standout free-kick, Ronaldo’s outrageous back-heel, Serena Williams’ exemplary firepower or a Formula One upset. There are moments that stay with you on such extractive occasions than catching the main events, live. When it is sports, the South-African outfit is simply unmatchable on the continent.

The outgoing week also proved that the home-country of SuperSports, owned alongside other high-net worth bouquets by Multichoice, the South-African media giant, is also a hideout of hideous barbarians, clownish nationalists and generations of black men and women with black hearts and blackened brains. Thank God the rest of Africa is responding fairly well to its ugliest sore.

2020 budget: We expect early presentation by Buhari —Gbajabiamila

What the rage in Ramaphosa’s Rand(y) nation is saying to the rest of the world is that law and order, is nestling in Acapulco, Mexico’s largest and most famous beach and resort. And that is sad.

Leadership has been consistently fingered as Africa’s Achilles heel. Yes, maybe just a micro-fraction has distinguished itself since the Western emancipators/abusers subdued monarchical absolutism for rapacious totalitarianism. But an average society isn’t all about government, public-service leaderships and politics of vote and treasury looting. Incidentally, those other components, particularly the elite space, have either gone completely roguish or permanently in inattentive state, with nearly all now worshipping the same god; the devil, in different garbs and garbage.

Yes, the dregs immolating fellow Africans speak to the mis-reason being advanced that the Boers’ Afrikaner descendants should still be managing a people who produced men who piloted a business entity like Multichoice to a revenue base of 50.1 billion Rand (N1, 232,46 trillion). MTN, another South-African pride, is much bigger in revenue and income size. While Multichoice boasts of just 7 billion Rand (N172.2 billion) overall income in 2019, MTN Nigeria alone made a cool N98.9 billion profit for the South-African owners.

The successes of both firms, which also boast of thousands of direct employment and millions of indirect engagements for livelihood, will defeat arguments like the continent’s sorrow not being ripe for independence; black people can’t govern themselves, etcetera, etcetera.

Government is business, but successful people in private concerns usually run government business aground when called upon to replicate individual successes for common good. Running the society is however not business. It is an empathy enterprise and the presence of it, or otherwise, makes all the difference between saner spaces and others where insanity reigns like the South-African communities and other places in countries like Sudan, South-Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Egypt where unavoidable deaths, particularly extra-judicial murders, are now an everyday occurrence.

The continental rage against South Africa would be deemed right and nothing less would be required to get Cyril Ramaphosa and his men, thinking again of recalling law and order from its holiday. But South-Africa is a mere testament to what the African society is doing that it should stop doing to itself; seeking help in wrong places and picking the wrong scapegoats. Except there is another round of crisis, it would be off, using South Africa to shine next week as a government whose nationals are affected in the senseless killings. South-African bloody miscreants are a symptom. The real disease are the overdressed miscreants in public and private spaces, cheating on defining moments, to rob deranged killers like those South-African mobs, a decent existence.

One inescapable trend, however, since the latest killing orgy in South Africa, is the open pretence to populism by all governments involved, sadly, including Cyril’s. It is very wrong thinking the rising public opprobrium everywhere, before the S/A saga, would be permanently diverted elsewhere, playing “we-got-your-back” politics. No, when those justifiably-angry but misguided fellows are done outside, eating outsiders, they are very much likely to look inside for blood to step down the cannibal carnival, on-going, in many African countries, because the elite want to control the levers, forever.

The turning-on, I have a strong hunch, is imminent. Though all the signs are already in place, the elite on the continent, can choose to play catch-me-if-you-can. Back home, what is seen as solidarity shoulder-to-shoulder from the oppressed, isn’t bankable for their oppressors. Everybody is hollering from the same corner now because the victims in South Africa are also part of the oppressed who tried to escape domestic economic, social and political terrorism at home. Did they notice how Ekweremadu’s mobbing in Nuremberg was celebrated among the oppressed? Without sounding uncaring, a carnival would likely be on now, instead of looting and destruction of MTN and co., were the xenophobia victims, members of the ruling elite.

It is not only South Africa that harbours angry masses, only that her’s are having their head in wrong places, which when finally re-tooled, will aim the blows right. And to think Robert Mugabe also chose the same week to take his exit. Where does one even start this grief?

Thank God it’s Friday
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