Charity Begins At Home

Charities like Live Aid raised a lot of awareness about the poverty in Africa; they staged a global concert in which so many celebrity artists were invited to perform. They promised to give the money raised to Africa. They televised the amount of success they have had with their charity.

All these I am very grateful for. The human in me is very thankful for any sort of help rendered to people in need, however, if they continue to give and give again, we become dependent upon their help. We as Africans can never be independent in our minds and in our economy if all we do is receive and receive.

Africa is blessed with everything; Oil, Diamonds, Intelligence, Exotic animals, wonderful weather and even the most beautiful women to name a few. 25,000 years ago, we were solving mathematical problems; we built house and pyramids with this knowledge.

The Nigerian city of Ile-Ife was paved in 1000 AD on the instructions of the ruler with decorations that originated in Ancient America. Naturally, no-one wants to explain how this took place approximately 500 years before the time of Christopher Columbus. According to scholars, the Yoruba people built numerous walled cities surrounded by farms”. The cities were Owu, Oyo, Ijebu, Ijesa, Ketu, Popo, Egba, Sabe, Dassa, Egbado, Igbomina, the sixteen Ekiti principalities, Owo and Ondo. This shows the enormous wealth and intelligence of Africans

The Nigerian city of Benin was built to a scale comparable with the Great Wall of China. There was a vast system of defensive walling totaling 10,000 miles in all. Guinness Book of Records carried an entry in the 1974 edition that described the city as: “The largest earthworks in the world carried out prior to the mechanical era.”

Autopsies and caesarean operations were routinely and effectively carried out by surgeons in pre-colonial Uganda. The surgeons routinely used antiseptics, anesthetics and cattery iron. One author wrote in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1884: “The whole conduct of the operation . . . suggests a skilled long-practiced surgical team at work conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth efficiency.”

It bugs me to know that we have all these resources and we still need help from the outside world. We should be the ones giving out and not always receiving charity, however, we have being made to be inferior, our resources have being stolen from us and our peoples’ minds have being brain washed with the glamorisation of western ideas and ways.

Africa suffers today economically because Africa was robbed and manipulated. A thief who goes into a bank to steal with guns is the same as the thief who manipulates and cons people out of their money and resources. A thief is a thief, regardless of how the theft was carried out.

Africa suffers health wise because if the economy is affected, every other thing follows. The pharmaceutical industry is concerned about making profits alone, so therapeutic drugs are not well distributed in Africa. The average pay in Africa is not enough to buy malaria tablets. This then leads to poor welfare.

I am tired of Charities(I am not against charity in any way) to Africa, though I understand they mean well, I would rather the American and European government return our resources to us, so we don’t have to always depend on what is handed down to us. We have the intelligence to make it happen, we built America and Europe, I believe we can build Africa too; all we need now is the right mentality.