Merry Christmas Africa my lovely home. Black is gold, not negative as a few “friends” of us paint it behind our backs. We can hear, your whispers though in undertones are audible, and even if they were not, from the movement of your lips we can see the obscene names you call us- Native, backwards, savage, uncivilized. If only it were possible, we would prepare a joint forum as a gift for Africa at the dusk of this year. There, at my right hand would be the proponents of the one Africa argument. At my left, I would invite the antagonists for the argument, with their western think tanks that have been so much influential to their reason. I am sure we would win the argument, for it is what is right, but since they don’t refuse unity with facts but out of fear that has been inflicted to them, well, we had better continue the discussions here.
My second argument was to be based on my response as to why anyone has to unite anyway. What is the reasoning behind unity? I will illustrate my point with an activity. Imagine a bundle of 53 counting sticks that you would want to break each in to two pieces. The easiest way would be breaking each stick at a time. If you unite two of them with an elastic string, breaking them is possible but a little harder than breaking one. As you join individual sticks in a bundle, the task of breaking the bundle becomes harder. By the time the bundle of 53 sticks is made, no individual hand can break the bundle. It surfaces from this activity that unity is strength.
The 53 sticks represent African countries. Let us pretend, a rather ignorant pretense, that no external country intents to break us. We have nature fighting us with different calamities. We are punished daily because of the egocentric nature of those African leaders against unity. And we have read and seen it in the news, countries declaring hunger, disease, and other calamities as national disasters while others are at the same time struggling with excesses of the deficient resources in other countries. Trade restrictions of all kind hinder the movement of resources amongst brothers. Funny enough, neighbors buy excess from our brothers, and after a few days of “adding value” sell the same product to our starved brother at double the price. That is why the neighbor though in a union herself, will do her best to prevent the unity.
If you ask if it is right to deny a brother the advantages of proximity to a blessed brother, or whether something should be done so that he enjoys the benefits, I am sure someone will soon accuse you for wanting to interfere with the market mechanism. Which market, the market that has prohibited the export of khat to the European Union or the one that requires impossible healthy standards for the export of food that we eat to the states? A few of our African sticks have already been broken by wars, tell me, you antagonist of the one Africa argument, how many sticks do want to see broken so that you can rush in to a union? Trade restrictions are necessary, but no individual country can impose them well as an individual. We cannot threaten retaliation in case of an external tariff unless we are a block.
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