STANDFIRST: South Africa’s intellectual class is quick to dissect the country’s imperfections, yet their silence on Africa’s deeper crises reveals a troubling blind spot in continental discourse. They deserve no audience from anyone who takes themselves seriously, argues the writer.
By Pule Monama :
It appears that honesty and frankness are scarce commodities amongst our modern-day revolutionaries, intellectuals, and analysts.
They also seem to lack the understanding of the technique and ability needed to look themselves in the mirror, to reflect and self-critique, which are the most basic determining factors in the field of intellectualism. They are very quick to see fault in those closest to them, but see ultimate perfection even beyond where their eyes can reach. They see all the imperfections in South Africa but not in Africa, regardless
They have been on turbo charge lately, maligning their own citizens who are simply calling for legality in the face of the inconvenience they experience daily as a consequence of illegal immigrants who are burdening their own public services to which they are legally entitled.
What they have constantly ignored is that the very people who have forced their own citizens to flee their respective countries are the African heads of state, who enjoy all sorts of public services and the best outside their own countries.
These services, which they fly out of their countries to access, are actually paid for by their respective states to the total exclusion of their citizens. Their children and those of their close relatives and friends attend schools in Europe and elsewhere in the world, while the children of their citizens suffer the consequences of these leaders’ failures back home.
Our intellectuals, who are armchair critics, seem to suggest that what African leaders are doing to their citizens, to the point of fleeing their countries (without any war by the way), is correct and acceptable.
I say this because, according to me, and indeed many objective and critical African thinkers, the beginning of Pan-Africanism is to call out African leaders who impoverish and destroy their countries and the livelihoods of their citizens while they enjoy everything the world has to offer away from their impoverished people.
It is insane for our revolutionaries and intellectuals to see fault in their fellow citizens, as they refuse to understand why and what the cause of their unhappiness is.
Anyone who calls himself a Revolutionary, an Intellectual, or a Marxist Scholar is no better than the very people they malign or ridicule and give them all sorts of descriptive labels. They are worse than the African leaders who destroy their countries and export the problems they created to South Africa.
They deserve no audience from anyone who takes themselves seriously. As Muntu Myeza once said: “These are renegades who can never be the advocates of the cause they deserted”
CLASS DISMISSED: JUST THINKING WHILE IT’S STILL LEGAL.
Pule Monama is an independent political commentator and businessman based in Polokwane, Limpopo – @NewsSA_Online
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