Editor,

RE: "Parliament asks European MPs to withdraw biased resolution on Rwanda” (The New Times, October 11).

Our MPs should also learn a valuable lesson from this, and not allow themselves to be had so easily and repeatedly like callow youth by wily foreigners with agendas. Not everyone who comes to you with smiles and purported admiration and goodwill is your friend.

Our representatives, whether in Parliament or elsewhere in Government, should learn not to be so trusting, for it is such naivety that is the common thread which, down the ages, has allowed outsiders — especially Europeans — to take advantage of us, first to enslave us and ship us across the oceans to be their property and beasts of burden, then to enslave us in situ and continue to be their property and beasts of burden under colonialism, then to pretend to give us independence even as they really maintained control over our affairs by very successfully playing us one against the other.

Our naivety, and the canny ability of outsiders to find and use to their own ends and against us a never-ending supply of Mobutus and Campaores from amongst us, will continue to be the death of us.

Mwene Kalinda