Why Does Human Dignity Elude the Cradle of Humanity?

 

What can grow in Ukraine but  can’t in Africa? Why is a continent whose strategic assets power global wealth unable to feed its own people? 

What kind of peace could the African Union broker between Russia and Ukraine but couldn’t in the epidemic of terror & carnage raging in its birthplace & permanent abode of residence? 

Why has human freedom utterly forsaken the abode of first humans? It has gone where? Where has it found asylum and permanent home? The teeming youth perishing in the inhospitable Sahara or being entombed alive in the dark depths of the Mediterranean and Red Sea in droves are going where? The African youth are chasing what in their desperate and endless journey up north? 

It’s true that Africa is a vast and immensely variegated Continent. There are some bright spots where credible and demonstrable signs of stability, democracy and accountability are evident. However, the plight of the vast majority of countries and peoples across the Continent remains bleak. 

A quick look at the origins and life stories of young Africans fleeing the Continent and heading north would confirm this sad and deeply distressing reality. Many of them hail from countries seen as the biggest or fastest growing economies or the pioneers and most reliable anchors of stability and democracy in Africa. 

Why does human dignity elude the cradle of humanity? 

Surely, something is a amiss. Something is missing or utterly broken. 

Surely, something ought to be in the works murmuring and rumbling in the deep and expansive bosom of the sleeping giant. 

Africa’s threshold for pain, self-inflected or otherwise, is unmatched. It’s resilience legendary. But it has been too long and too hard.

Something ought to be in the works to broker the breaking of a new dawn. A dawn that will give the cradle of humanity a break and a chance to scramble for a new beginning.

Hassan Keynan