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Libya slavery scam: Africa has killed its own sun

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The recent events in Libya are not just disgusting but utterly dehumanising.

While Africa thinks it has made tremendous progress against black enslavement, slave trade in its most savage of forms rears its ugly head once again from its own backyard. It’s shameful. It’s retrogressive. It calls for paradigm shifts.

That in this age and time, when so much effort, time, resource and lives have been lost, invested and commensurate gains achieved in terms of human rights, slavery can happen and especially within the continent that has suffered most, is shameful and calls for deeper introspection.

The expose showing men and women, who have braved harsh conditions and are willing to risk their lives to cross Mediterranean to pursue at least a honorable life, are being traded for $400 to serve as sex and sweat slaves is the epitome of the lowest form of human scam.

This needs to be stopped pronto!

Ever since NATO invaded Libya and toppled its leader Muammar Gaddaffi, Libya has been on a free fall. Descending from one of the most developed and promising countries in Africa to a dysfunctional and completely insecure state.

Libya now poses a great threat not just to the region but to the world at large. The humanitarian crisis in Libya is unimaginable.

NATO owes not just an apology but an obligation to ensure a reset to normalcy happens in Libya. Its invasion of the northern African state is the seed that pushed Libya to degenerate into a rogue, lawless and mad state.

Of all African states, it is perplexing that Libya, once a shining light on African unity, rise and promise, has fallen into the darkest of times.

But African states are also not without blame. They have played a key role in this tragedy.

First, they failed to proactively prevent the toppling of Gadaffi.

Secondly, African states have created the environment in their home countries that have made their citizenry so desperate and hopeless to want out.

This has created a crisis of catastrophic proportions borne out of the fact that; a majority of youth who form Africa’s largest population cohort are unemployed, those trying to question the powers that be are branded unpatriotic deviants and the presence of needless civil strife, political unrest across the continent resulting in stagnating or dead economies.

Thirdly, the African continent has failed to leverage its resources, youthful population and cheap labor to its advantage.

READ: Youth turn to sex to soothe election pain

Rather it has created crony capitalistic systems that thrive on extortion and exploitation, redacted pieces of its history to suit powers that be and sought to create and propel blind sycophancy rather than intellectualism.

In a nutshell, Africa, to paraphrase the late Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, has killed its own sun. Thus, Africa needs to get its act together and craft its own hope, future and destiny.

The world powers, despite their direct or indirect contributions to the crisis, have given this gross humanitarian crisis a wide berth in terms of proactive engagement. They have instead dwelled on “..condemn. utterly dismayed..” and other polemics which add no value towards stopping this humanitarian crisis. Thus, its time the world woke up and faced these tough realities of dehumanisation.

This Libyan horror story needs to end. And now!

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MWANGI WA IRIA
MWANGI WA IRIA
The writer is the Governor of Murang'a County.
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2 COMMENTS

  1. What NATO and the west does is to topple regimes in the third world that are growing fast and could pose a competition to them. Coz for the superpowers to thrive, they must destabilize the rising economies, they did it in Somalia, Iraq, Libya and they can do it even in East Africa, we better watch out.

  2. When you say Nato owes us an apology for invading Libya I think you are speaking out of ignorance…do you know why they invaded? Kindly go and research at the time of the air invasion…what was happening to Libyans. Do you think it was just peaceful and then Nato hit…Gadaffi had turned against his citizens. I just hope you didn’t form an opinion from a documentary you watched.
    Sometimes we in Africa have a ‘protect your baby syndrome’ when talking about our leaders and forget the atrocities committed that warrant their intervention.

    When the west stood aside and watched as Rwanda burn(genocide)-we complained, when they intervened in Libya-we blindly complain.

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