The underworld of conspiracies is perhaps the most ‘comfortable’ zone of existence on earth. It is hard to believe that things just happen without a reason. Imagine a person travels by train across the United States and checks into a hotel with a cache of firearms where the President of the United States, would be attending a grand function the next day. Completely no suspicion!
That is not a security oversight, it is a serious security failure. For like it or not, the United States President is the world’s most powerful man, and arguably the most highly protected. Videos on social media showing security agents springing into action after gunshots were fired at the Washington Hilton Hotel and President Trump and his wife, Melania, evacuated to safety are plausible.
But sadly, they do little to dampen the sense of the security failure surrounding the entire fiasco, especially for a man with a history of several attempted assassinations. Anyway, that is America, the land of mega games of political power play for which it is safer to stay away.
The current wave of xenophobia in South Africa where blacks target fellow black Africans from other parts of the continent, allegedly for taking over jobs and businesses that belong to them, is one of those things that are hard to understand. It becomes even more so when a person clearly emerges as the champion of mobilising fellow citizens to attack, maim and kill “foreigners” for taking over opportunities that belong to “us.” She walks freely and takes pride in her work.
It defeats the imagination as to how fast black South Africans have forgotten their immediate past. South Africa is free today because the rest of Africa paid a very heavy price to liberate their country. In Tanzania, for example, we lost a most beloved prime minister, the late Edward Moringe Sokoine, because of a reckless ANC freedom fighter.
Young Dumisani Dube, a freedom fighter belonging to the ANC, driving carelessly from their bush training camp at Dakawa, Morogoro, rammed into Sokoine’s car in a highway motorcade on that fateful April 12,1984 day, killing our beloved prime minister instantly. Tanzanians never demanded all camps belonging to South African freedom fighters in their country be closed as a result.
But I think, South Africans should do us one last favour now. They should come and dig up the graves of their fallen fighters buried in our country to go and bury their remains in their “homeland paradise.” All Africa should now respond to South Africa’s xenophobia with the same united spirit that the continent demonstrated and marshalled in the fight against apartheid.
Failure to do so would be clear demonstration of double standards. Discrimination against blacks by White South Africans was bad but discrimination by black South Africans against fellow Africans is a cherished right. I refuse to ride that bandwagon.
