Nigeria: The New Thabo Mbeki School - the United Spider Webs That Tie Up the Elephant

27 October 2020
opinion

It is a privilege for me to have given the Inaugural Lecture at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, the University of South Africa, today Tuesday, October 27. I would like to share some of the thoughts that I generated and the positive responses to them with the broader public. I do so with the understanding that two eyes are better than one, and a finger cannot lift a large basket to the head: these are two African proverbs that illustrate our collective responsibilities to communities.

Over the last couple of weeks and from one country to another, Africa has been going through many protests. In South Africa, there is a protest against Gender-Based Violence with the hashtag #EndGBV; Nigerians have spent the last two weeks on the streets and through their smartphones to protest police brutality with the #EndSars trend. The Nigerian situation became even worse when people were being killed during the protest, the peak of which culminated in a massacre by the same people paid and assigned to "protect" them. Elsewhere in Congo, Africans are suffering a substantial humanitarian crisis with people being brutally exploited for inherent mineral resources on the one part, while another community called Ituri had several indigenes massacred in retaliation for the death of a soldier. They protest with the hashtag #CongoIsBleeding.

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