Africa has failed to take off because of total inability of we Africans to apply reason within the prevailing realistic circumstances and available resources. For generations we have failed to exploit and explore the available resources for our prosperity yet blaming everyone else everywhere for our failure.
We are counted among the living but we merely survive generation after generation. We are never patient with life, lack focus, vision and hate risking so much that we prefer short term simple fast soft survival to long-term generational prosperity, we are too careful to succeed.
We prefer short term modernity to actual long-term development which has kept us as mere consumers not developers. We would take or welcome any idea or offer for as long as it has a short-term immediate gain regardless of its long-term cost implications. We are too narrow minded.
We are limited to knowledge but never wisdom, we speak out with knowledge, fully informed, talk with a lot of sense but never wisely practically apply such knowledge for prosperity just like teachers and professors always stand out as the most knowledgeable but least successful in the societies where they live. We always hold unutilized or misguided knowledge. We tend to know more than university professors but do less than a blind man.
We desire success as a continent yet refrain from the hardship path required. We lack the ability to take responsibility for our lives blaming everyone around us for our failure. We hold a short-term survival syndrome that limits our ability to thinking never reasoning, assumption never reality, we pretend to focus on long term formation strategies but never address our minds to actual substance yet the end always justifies the means, we embrace modernity never developmental strategies.
Majority of our African brothers and sisters including leaders look at the path of prosperity as never an obligation but rather an imposed burden yet prosperity imputes an intention to fulfil an obligation that’s why Africans want to be praised for fulfilling their obligations or merely doing right.
Inability to reason is the major factor that has frustrated development of the African continent. reason enables us fully comprehend and appreciate our position to gain the ability to forge a way forward within the prevailing realistic circumstances. Life is basically a challenge and our ability to solve our problems is what amounts to prosperity but how can we ever find a solution to a problem we have failed to fully address our mind to and understand.
Majority of Africans are ignorant which frustrates our ability to move forward as a continent. Ignorance is when someone presumes, they know something as a fact. Inability to identify the fact that you don’t know is the very first element of ignorance so the pain is that an ignorant person shall never know. They know they know so they never give themselves a chance to ever know. So, the only cure to ignorance is application of reason.
We have failed to reason and appreciate our natural status; we have failed to identify and appreciate our identity as Africans like appreciating the color of our skin, how can we then move forward to bigger issues like development. We judge our integrity by foreign imposed standards like who speaks a foreign language better.
Failure to value our natural status and all we naturally hold, fully understand our past and appreciate our present renders us incompetent to determine our future as Africans based on reason and reality.
In Africa we aim for survival not prosperity. We tend to think alot when things are realistically obvious and direct, like exploitation of our availed abundant resources towards our prosperity. We would rather sell crude oil than build a refinery. We export raw agricultural products for peanuts and spend billions on imported processed products at 10 times the price instead of promoting Agro-processing and value addition right here.
Our natural values, cultures and reasoning capacity have been diluted and dissolved in foreign cultures. With education systems that are totally foreign, out dated and inapplicable to the realistic prevailing circumstances in our societies.
Our very existence is fading away with our integrity totally compromised all due to our inability to invoke our natural given gift of reason that every human holds. To a large extent poverty is a choice we have made in Africa.
Based on reason and reality once one is mature and able, their achievements or financial status is a direct reflection of their reasoning capacity. Life looks at what is done rather than that opt to be done, it looks at substance rather than formation. Reason and reality amounts to prosperity. Our inability to reason as Africans is the main reason why Africa has failed to develop.
For as long as we Africans fail to apply reason, fully appreciate our natural values, fully comprehend our past and appreciate our present, we shall never have the reasoning capacity to determine our future within the prevailing realistic circumstances or steer this continent to its full potential actual prosperity on top where it belongs.
We always introduce would be unrealistic short term disguised developmental foreign policies and forcefully for generations fight with their implementation in our societies when all we need to do is attack the African mindset right from our family up bringing, improve culture and society values based on reason and totally reorganize our outdated foreign education systems to meet our current needs.
With the right mindsets based on reason and reality; development, unity and prosperity shall prevail over Africa at individual levels, society level, country level and the entire African continent at large.
Africa never gained independence and our former colonial masters never left this continent but instead colonised the mind which realistically is the highest form of human exploitation in life at all levels in the human circle. Without free and reasonable mindsets Africa shall never take off.
Whatever we do is a direct reflection of our reasoning capacity so are our achievements and failures as a continent.
Hamis Kiggundu is a Ugandan businessman, investor, real estate and property developer, country loyalist, philanthropist and the CEO of Ham Group of Companies a general conglomerate in Uganda directly employing 2900 people.
Credit: ugandatimes.ug
