Every now and then when Africans are blamed for the wrong things that happen on the continent, many rush to call out the Western-driven narrative that Africa is full of problems rather than challenges. The west may not like Africa, it is true. But when we, Africans, stand up against the unfair narratives promoted by the west, we should also pose and ask ourselves: is our house really in order. If you open your eyes, one doesn’t need to look hard to spot crises almost in every part of the continent. In the Sahel, coups are a business of the day, from Burkina Faso and Mali, to Niger, and Guinea, elected governments have fallen to military juntas. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), millions have been displaced and killed by rebel groups. In Mozambique, the government has been fighting jihadist insurgency in Cabo Delgado Province. Not to mention countries that have been trapped in conflicts for a long time like the Central African Republic (CAR), or rising movements of protests, especially young people across Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana, who are demanding that their governments put an end on corruption, fix governance, and improve the standards of living. President Paul Kagame was right on Thursday, January 9, when he emphasised that the problem with Africa is not the existing structures, rather the people working in those structures. Kagame, who was appointed in 2016 to lead the institutional reforms of the African Union (AU), revealed that at some point he got disappointed in African leaders who sit in meetings to plan only to go back and leave those plans in boardrooms. “We sit in meetings – leaders, prime ministers, and agree on something, in a room like this – suggestions that have come from us. We agree to put something in place and then, and in the end nothing works. Do you think it is a problem of the process” Is it a problem of the structure? I think the answer is obvious, the problem is us,” he said during a press conference. As different as each African country’s circumstances might seem, there is a common denominator: most of our countries still struggle to provide even the basic services such as electricity, healthcare, education, etc. For a continent that has claimed to have gained freedom, we cannot accept to continue failing to achieve full political and socioeconomic independence.
