Opinions of Wednesday, 17 January 2018

Columnist: Suntaa Abudu Ibrahim

‘Shithole’ is not an insult to Africa

President Donald Trump President Donald Trump

I was thinking I will not write anything on this Donald Trump statement about calling Africans "shithole" but since I am just relaxing and my pen is in my hand, I decided to also express my thoughts on it. Let me first of all try to find the reason surrounding the circumstances why this man has said this weird statement. He said this at the White House when he was addressing the issue of immigration, which is now a very big problem to most countries especially African countries, where most citizens of African countries leave their continent to other continents for greener pastures, and he Donald Trump sees this as a very worrisome issue to his country hence decided to call us (African countries) "shithole".

Let me try to see if I can actually quote him right. According to Donald Trump an American president said "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" I found it very offensive and racist as how every African will feel about it because if we all start having problems as to why people from other countries should be coming to our country just to find jobs or anything else, the world will not be a better place for us to live in and this man Donald Trump has to be called to order for such a statement.

But the other interesting part of his statement to me, as a Pan Africanist is, I have a different view about this statement of Donald Trump, which in my own view is a wakeup call to us. We have to first of all blame ourselves for giving someone the chance to insult us rather than only look at the bad side of it even though a kid can just realize it's a bad statement. I personally thought Donald Trump 'loves' Africa enough to be blunt with it. No other American president has been this frank with us. We are used to hypocritical lies like 'Africa is the future of the world' (Gordon Brown) and 'The future of the world will not be decided by only what happens in Washington or Moscow, but what happens in Africa' (Barack Obama) and then seconds after that Libya is bombed -thousands killed, the most prosperous African economy collapsed.



Let's look at the definition of shithole and see whether Africa is really a shithole or not, a "Shithole"? A collection place for one's waste. Africa has been kept as dumping site of America, Europe and China for decades with the help of our greedy bootlicking leaders and capitalists, for me I think we need to work hard towards improving upon ourselves rather than always allowing our energetic men and women to run away to other continents so that no one can call us shithole again, because shouting and making all these statements about Donald Trump is not going to help at all.

Let's sit up and depend on ourselves rather than always begging here and there for survival. Yes even though I have found president Donald Trump statement offensive but I am also in a way applauding him for telling us Africans to wake up and depend on ourselves rather than depending on them for our survival.....