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FIRST WORD
Our Legacy
When we talk about a founding father in an African context we tend to be talking about the individual who played a central role in the liberation of a country from colonial rule , whether or not they actually fought for the said liberation .
What defines their struggle is that they knew what they did not want , colonial subjugation , but they did not necessarily know what they wanted for the country . Remember that the countries we are talking about were arbitrarily delineated by the colonist .
If the colonist had just left , the African way of life would have gone back to the way it always was but the colonists were not about to lose the economic advantage the colonies afforded them . So they propped up convenient ‘ democracies ’ to run the countries .
Note that in Africa we tend to talk about the founding father as if it is possible that one person could have removed the colonial behemoth singlehandedly . The seeds of discord were sawn into the very fabric of the independent states at inception .
By contrast when we talk about the American founding fathers we talk about a group of eminent leaders and thinkers who laboriously met for months trying to craft the type of country that they desired and how it shall be governed .
Their legacy is a two hundred year old constitution which has survived almost intact from the day it was promulgated . The document was a blueprint of the way the founding fathers envisioned the future of the United States of America .
It is interesting to also note that several of the founding fathers went on to become presidents since they were following the same script . Whether you like or detest the American style of democracy it is a fact that it aged pretty well over time .
Back in Africa , the founding father did not have a constitution and in most cases had to borrow one from the very colonists that they were ‘ chasing ’ out . We can imagine the awkward position the founding father was in at that moment .
Most of the African founding fathers were either in exile or in prison before independence and certainly did not have the time to craft an administrative manual to run a country that really only existed on a map drawn in a European country .
Africans were not amused to wake up at independence and find that the same oppressive administrative machinery that they loathed was still there , with the same administrators , with the same highhandedness but now supposedly in African hands .
CONCRETE