Editor, RE: “Organise or die: A cry for Burundi” (The New Times, November 10). The statement “organize or die” is very right, but I don’t think it should be for Burundi alone. Africa must be organized or it dies. The international community will always have divided opinions on African situations. It’s only Africa that can afford to be united on itself. Africa is sailing on the same boat in the same stormy waters. They will choose to survive or perish together. It’s only a matter of time. It’s such a shame that we’re always placing our hopes in New York for the salvation of Africa, yet history has shown that those hopes are just illusions—Africa have never gotten better and crises are never showing signs of abating. Country after country has been reduced to ashes before they woke up from their morning sleep. I can’t understand why the African Union (AU), in general, and the EAC in this particular case of Burundi can’t do anything. Are these African bodies really so helpless or they simply lack organization? It will be such a shame for a far away country like France, for example, to come in to intervene in the crisis in Burundi when all the surrounding countries like Rwanda, Uganda, DR Congo, Tanzania, and all Africa, have both the means and the will to help save the situation in Burundi before it spirals out of control simply because the AU or the EAC cannot provide the necessary leadership. They don’t even have to compel changes in leadership in Burundi necessarily, but the senseless displacements and murders can be made to stop in my opinion. Donart ************* Those who push the ICC as an answer to the crimes of misrule or political contestation remind me of Henry Louis Mencken’s warning: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.”You do not solve a problem by transforming it into another. And the ICC has amply proved it is far from a solution; rather, it compounds the existing problems by, once again, confiscating the sovereignty of African peoples and transferring it back into the ‘gentle’ hands of those who created the dysfunctionality of our states in the first place, and have had a hand in perpetuating that dysfunctionality from which they profit at our expense. Mwene Kalinda
