May-June-issue

SOCIETY
organizations for a period; say thirty years.
The leader is excited that he or she has
a new catch with a wealth of experience
and so puts the new catch close to him
or her. What the leader does not realize
is that the so called ‘new catch’ doesn’t
have thirty years’ experience, but has one
year experience repeated thirty times. I
mean he or she has never had a simple
improvement and a single innovation for
twenty nine years. You see the leader has
already made a determined decision to
associate himself or herself with a small
minded person who ends up busting the
leader’s dream and in the course of things
rob the nation or institution’s opportunity
from moving forward.
It is unfortunate that it is people
in our inner circle who are the dream
busters. Not that they are trying to be
mean-spirited or discouraging, but they
just have “possibility blindness”. They
figure that it will be too difficult and too
painful if they do not achieve these big
dreams.
So they fear. Fear in fact is a very real
human emotion that occurs when you
anticipate or expect that something may
hurt you. Therefore fear has been one of
the dream busters that have kept many of
the African leaders from achieving the big
dreams. Franklin Roosevelt said, “There
is nothing to fear but fear itself ”. I have
said that fear is real. Therefore, I do not
agree with the old cliché that some clever
speaker came up with which says, “Fear
is false evidence appearing real”. I know
this has become so popular that people
Niels Bohr,
Nobel peace
prize winning
physicist
think it is true. But that is not what fear is.
Noah St. John said, “Fear is the emotional
effect of absence of personal control over
your situation”.
The vilest impression on the African
young minds during the colonial period
was that they were born to serve and
worship the empire and that they were
not capable of leadership. They were
conditioned to depend on the colonial
powers for life and value, trained that they
could not determine their own destinies
and chart out their own future plans.
This has contributed to undermining the
fulfilment of the African dream to date.
African leaders might just find that the
words of ralph Waldo Emerson were
eminently true, “inside of us, we all know
that on the other side of fear lies freedom”.
The last major dream buster is settling
for mediocrity. Many of the countries
or institutions at the top started at the
bottom but rose to the top. Why? This
is because they refused to settle for
mediocrity. They pursued excellence and
began to rise. It is the crème de la crème
principle - the cream will rise to the top.
So Africa has the power within itself to
change the narrative.
One day my mother spread wimbi
(millet) outside our house. At that time
I was seven years old. She told me to
take care and prevent any intruder. All of
a sudden, I saw birds of different colors
eating the wimbi and was enjoying the
entire episode. My mother reprimanded
and accused me of standing there
watching the birds finish the only stock
of food we had for that day. I was indeed
sorry and remorseful. But the question
that lingered in my mind was, “where did
the birds come from because I never saw
them in ordinary times? I learned a great
lesson which was, “you will never know
the number of birds in your neighborhood
until you put birds’ feed outside.”
The moral of this story is that African
leaders will never know what they are
capable of doing until they put the
African dream to test. Also, they should
not behave like me who was given food
stock to protect but let the birds feed on
it: but instead must jealously guard the
resources bestowed upon them for the
benefit of the African people. Through
this way the African dream of eliminating
poverty, illiteracy and disease will be
achieved.
nyanchamajoseph@gmail.com
The heading of this article is in the form of a
question. I have intentionally done so because
when you ask yourself a question repeatedly,
your mind must search for an answer to your
question. I hope African citizens’ minds can
seek an answer to my question.
MAY - JUNE 2018 39