'Stop thinking like Africans' Jacob Zuma!

For years I have kept an audio recording and a writing of Thabo Mbeki's "I am an African" speech and really felt proud to be an African. On Tuesday Jacob Zuma wakes up to make me wonder if there is any beauty in being an African in his "I am NOT an African Speech".

Three years back I used to work for a Johannesburg based company that required me to travel Southern Africa intensively. I have been to Blantyre in Malawi on one occasion and yes as in all other African cities I have been to, felt something touch my heart and the song "God bless Africa" really having a meaning. Africa really does need God's intervention. Poverty, sickness, hunger, malnutrition and indeed general infrastructural development are serious day to day challenges. With all those challenges everyday we, Africans, wake up with a fresh smile and a thinking full of hope for the future. That's what makes us proudly Africans. That's indeed the African thinking that keeps us going hoping tomorrow may just be better than today.

So for Jacob Zuma to wake up in some excitement and frenzy thinking that our African hope for a better tomorrow and cry for God's mercy is some kind of backwardness and or stupid thinking is extremely misplaced and uncalled for.

I quote "We can't think like Africans, in Africa, generally. We are in Johannesburg, this is Johannesburg. It's not some national road in Malawi."

How do Africans in general think that's so bad that the so unique and special South Africans or Gautengs should not think like? Have the people of Gauteng turned into some European or American people over night because they have highways and byways they must pay to drive on and then must feel unAfrican? (Reminds me of one Osofia who was already walking like an Englishman before even leaving rural Nigeria.) Do the people of Gauteng turn the freeways and skyscrapers in Joburg into bacon and egg everyday for their breakfast so much that they must stop thinking like us who have dried maize and water for our meal for a day?

Did Zuma stop to think how many Malawian man sweated and died building those very same freeways that he so compares to the national roads they left their wives and children walking on back home? Is Zuma celebrating the suffering and poverty of fellow African countries? I have always respected the South African National Anthem thinking that maybe when they sing Nkosi sikelel' Africa its a South African solidarity cry with the whole of Africa but today I see it as a scornful laugh to our imprevished poor Africa by the elite.

No matter how much Mac Maharaj may try to polish and correct what Zuma said we got the message loud and clear from the horse's mouth. South Africans must never think like us the generality of Africa and Joburg so distinct from poor old Malawi, that's the message Mac nothing else. "For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks", the President has said his general feeling of us Africans. How bad power does corrupt!!!!! Table manners never speak with food in your mouth comrade President, dlana uthule, but never forget Nkandla where you came from.