Everything About Nothing: Why fuss? The World has Always Been A Shitty Place

The world is in turmoil. Or so I would like to think. My favourite nag subject . . . Somalia . . . seems so tantalizingly close to being 'sorted' into having some semblance of a central government after 21 bloody years of anarchy. Yet am not holding my breath, I resolved a long time ago (and even blogged about it) that the Somalis need not . . . and more importantly . . . they desireth not . . . the frivolous thing we like to call peace.

Just to keep in line with the subject at hand (and to do away with the mirthless optimism of the preceding paragraph) I do indeed think the world is an incorrigibly shitty place. The Somali tribal factions that the Al Shaabab  had pacified  with dogged single-mindedness (through bombings, shootings, stabbings, decapitations and deliberately engineered mass starvation) have once again began to re-emerge.

Frustratingly (haven't these idiots learnt anything yet) they are already impeding the prospects of the long fantasized peace by squabbling even before the Al Shaabab and their Islamist cohorts have been decisively routed out of their remaining strongholds in Central and Southern Somalia. 

I see no peace coming anytime soon in that wretchedly beautiful country. I feel sorry . . . mixed with a little bit of nausea, disgust, some pride and some peppering of anger. That we are losing precious Kenyan lives trying to square things out amidst what I visualize as a case study in humanity's innate need for self-annihilation . 

Somalia should be regarded as the devil's groin . . . nothing good can come out of it. Barring Mo Farah and the pirate investors at Eastleigh of course.

Right back here at home our own brand of genocidal tribalism is frothing with re-energized momentum as we get closer to the indeterminate polling day. The story is so old and lame . . . and so routine that one could easily mistake it for a devil forsaken natural cycle (God doesn't have anything to do with it, even he must have gotten bored at some point . . . the 80's perhaps?) 48 burnt and cut down in this part of the country, 50 shot dead in that other part . . . a little bit of fatal tribal fracas here . . . a little bit of farcical platitudes by the politicians here . . . some more unrelocateable IDPs . . . some hate speech everywhere. You know the script.

. . . .Someone distilling bootleg alcohol with ARVs for HIV/AIDS . . .

Regionally we are not doing any better... the two Sudans are itching for another round of 'necessary' needless war, the only thing that has changed after the secession of the South is that now Ethiopia is the country regarded as the honest broker rather than Kenya in that little eternal war.

On the other hand Ethiopia's dictator is dead . . . we all know what tends to happen when the ruthless big chief dies in Africa . . . without having deliberately prepared a successor or succession process in case of their own mortal transition. People fight . . . people fight hard. Byzantine intrigues give way to 'gorilla' tactics . . . fighting is the only legitimate recourse to  unrivalled dominance.
 
Sheer brute is what you have to have . . . staring your enemies in the eyes like Miguna Miguna and giving them a 'come baby come' dare . . .  unlike Miguna though you have to mean it! An example would be Teodoro Nguema of Equitorial Guinea who hacked to death with a machete his own uncle to take the presidency. He didn't have to say 'come baby come' to his rivals ever again.

Am not so sure though if anyone is celebrating in Ethiopia upon Meles Zenawi's death other than the Ethiopian Ogaden and Oromo rebel leagues (they provide the Ethiopian army with these funny, sporadic battle fixtures). 

The diplomatically embattled Isaias Afeworki of Eritrea, former comrade in arms and personal friend of Meles Zenawi . . . turned bitter rival . . . turned external enemy number one, could be the only person who would be supposedly grinning. Although I doubt it, without a bigger than life nemesis in Ethiopia, he is a plain washed up former rebel leader now dictator mirthlessly wringing the life out of Eritrea. He had began to seem shitty a long while ago, now he risks not only seeming shitty, but also an expired nuisance to his hungry and abjectly impoverished Eritrean subjects.

In fact the continent can be said to be in no better political situation that it has ever been. Maybe only a little bit worse. Libya, Egypt and Tunisia are still convulsing with the deadly hangovers of the 'successful' revolutions of the Arab Spring. They are all staggering towards some sort of stability, some more badly than others. Hungry, oppressed Arabs in North Africa  and elsewhere in the Middle East did indeed 'spring' on their dictators, just in case you were in Mars or were not yet born early last year.

In other matters, well Africa is still a malnutritioned, disease riddled place. Who are we kidding, we can blame the International media for stereotyping this continent's problems and overlooking the good things... but heck you must be blind and admittedly stupid if you can miss all the far much worse stories about these 'stereotypical' problems in the local media. You can sugar coat shit, but it is still shit, ain't it?

Case in point . . . The DR Congo. When was the last time you heard that rebels voted someone out of power in that country? Think, take your time. . . 

I thought so . . . never! Well when was the last time you heard of some sort of rebel attack or conflict in the Congo? I thought so too . . . about yesterday. It has been so for eternity... Congo has more paved roads now than it has ever had in it's sorry history, but what is stereotypical and non-factual about the eerie fact that it is still a shitty place? Rebels have fought themselves into tattered ragtag armies over the spoils in the Congo and there is no end in sight. What keeps changing are the leaders, compositions and names of the militia. The modus operandi and motives remain the same.
 
Morbid, grimy stories make bigger stories . . . that is the simple truth. Paved roads as a story can't hold it up to mass raping of women and men. Yes, in the Congo child soldiers rape grown men too.

In fact the mother continent is changing . . . terribly so. I mean it, we are becoming more horrible. All these things about hurtling economic growth figures and technological advancement are simply as a result of the need to keep up at the tail end of the rest of the world.

More poignantly it is the accumulative result of the efforts of ordinary folk who just want to make their living some way despite the reprehensible misgovernance in Africa. We have as a whole less water (could this be a reason why our cities are also less clean?), less arable land, less forests, less mineral resources but more hungry people, more violence, more guns, more ethnic hatred and  more sectarian polarization than we had 50 years ago at the end of colonialism. The rest of the world, particularly the developed world is too saturated with development to make the kind of quick buck that medium sized investments can make in Africa.

It is no miracle. . . we had less to nothing of everything... they can give us the dregs and crumbs . . . and everybody, including them, end up having a wild ball out of it. You should be grateful and happy that you are living at such an auspicious time in Africa (am 'dying' with joy and enthusiasm for being so lucky, 5 decades earlier and I would have died a colonized bushman), where two cents worth of know-how and just a spit of cash can make you incomprehensibly rich. Obviously I don't have this 'know-how' (yayayai!) otherwise I would be incomprehensibly rich myself... overnight as a matter of fact. But there is (swallow) . . . hope?

Look at Nigeria . . . what's so different there than it is has ever been? Secessionist movements, venal officialdom, a retarded bureaucracy, a depraved political class, ethnic violence, soaring inflation and general thuggery. Pitiful... take out oil and Nigerians right now would be embroiled in a vicious civil war . . . fighting for food and firewood.

South Africa on the other hand is a classic example of missed opportunities that continue to be woefully missed. That country's black leadership and the new black elite are so engrossed in what can only be termed as post-colonial grabberry. Grabbing to their heart's content what they can from the cowed whites who fear a Zimbabwe-like insurrection that would herald a funny black take over of their properties . . . which I still believe is a danger that still looms large in South Africa. 

Their president is a venal polygamous pervert. While their police and slum rabble still seem to refer to the Apartheid procedural manuals for general confrontation and resolution of 'black' problems. The average black citizen in South Africa is still very much engrossed in the Apartheid struggle (mentally, spiritually and physically) for some imperceptible reason. What a waste of African resources . . .  who would have known South Africa would turn into such a xenophobic pit latrine it is today.

In Kenya we have gone a full circle and now we are selling back and inviting foreigners (Caucasians, Asians and Mongoloids alike) to come take whatever they can in the country. . . only that we have sanitized this expatriation to 'Foreign Investment'. We are still a trailblazer in Africa in many respects. . . even in selling the vague 'sovereignty' we like to chest thump about. Mind you that some of these acquisitions and investment sometimes end up costing the Kenyan taxpayer billions by the bucketful in graft . . . Triton? De La Rue? Anglo-Leasing?

But that is Africa . . . we are who we are. . . the rest of humanity can come help in helping themselves or simply go to hell (no offense since I only half-believe in hell . . . but nonetheless I fully believe there is a devil. What can I say, my belief system is a work in progress . . . not a bloody doctrinal pantheon).

Who is fooling who? The NGO's are not here to alleviate our misery . . . at least not wholly . . . 'Worst Drought in 60 Years', ' Humanitarian Crisis of the Millennium', 'Deadly new HIV/AIDS virus strain now killing trees in Sub-Saharan Africa', 'FGM depopulating Africa' . . . do you think the people who come up with these catchy phrases to wring money from their opulent governments and obese compatriots are doing it out of altruism?
 
Would you gross out and guilt-blackmail everybody in your home country for decades so that you would retire in a shack? That would be stupid. Changing places with the people you were supposed to help . . . utterly stupid. If you have never wondered how come they always live in the bigger hotels, drive the most expensive imported fuel guzzlers around and half the time they are at the sandy beach resorts 'writing reports' then you must be a good hearted imbecile.

Just before I strangle this lengthening blog post to conclusion I would like to talk about the turmoil in the rest of the world. If you live in Africa and you are black you must have noticed the exponential increase of Caucasians and other races . . . well they have always been here for centuries but the newcomers are tickling my mind. I was used to the tourist, middle-aged kind . . . now there is a new breed. Fearless, enterprising, young and utterly poor Caucasians.  You can see them virtually in every slum in Nairobi, even in remote unheard of villages. Their trademark is the dusty sandal, sweaty armpits, no car and a hippy disgusting look. 

Mind you these people are not the kind to heed the dangers of African slums, leave alone travel advisories. No one would dare mug them, they just have that funny look and feel that one would find a shilling or two (about 0.05 US dollars) in their pockets. In fact they could mug you back. The dreadlocked Rastafarian kind used to be a spectacle, nowadays no one bats an eye lid when they emerge from some dingy building and head straight out to the vegetable kiosk to buy just two tomatoes.

I once saw one in a cigarette booth in the CBD recently smoking a joint . . . the place was packed with smokers but the silence was deafening . . . we were all too proud to dash out after getting in and realizing he was smoking pot at 7.30 am in the city centre. Everyone was as petrified of being robbed by him as they were of what he was doing. All I could think of was that I was going to get robbed by a solitary white man among 20 male adult Kenyans. There is even a new slang term for them in Kiswahili . . .  Wazungu Warokoti . . . literally Throw-Away Whitemen.

I need not be convinced anymore that there is an economic crisis, not just a passing financial bubble in the Western world. What in the world would make a whiteman so rugged and tattered? For chrissake they have welfare systems in most of their home countries, yet they go hungry to buy a ticket to come to Africa.

 Is it a conspiracy to scare the shit out of radical youths and thugs in the slum? Perhaps an effort to keep them from moving to the leafy suburbs/resorts to mug and abduct the more usual rich Caucasians? I don't get it. 

A friend of mine once posted an update on Facebook that some Caucasian was hawking in the matatu that he was commuting on . . . I promptly asked if he was a Jehova Witness kind, we are used to these . . . he said no, Jehova Witness Caucasians bathe. Personally I blame Hollywood . . . they have romanticized the concept of being a down and dirty Caucasian in the heart of Africa . . . remember Blood Diamonds by Leonardo DiCaprio? 

How would white people feel if we in turn bought tickets for all the Mungiki, SunguSungu and other African vigilante groups to go carry their mirthless trade of decapitating people and extortion rackets in the affluent middle class neighbourhoods of the West? Caucasians are turning our slums into a circus . . . and am outraged. Apparently they love what we loath . . . very curious and rather fascinating wouldn't you agree? Inexplicable, odd actions . . . often have bizarre motives; do we arrest and deport them or do we cheer them on?

But is this turmoil anything new? Actually it isn't. The world has had crises from time immemorial. Only that there weren't as many journalists let's say as during the time of Attila the Hun and his ravaging hordes or when Hannibal of Carthage invaded Europe. Problems were also a lot more localized.

Now everything is slightly different . . . problems are global and any instance of human tragedy is reported globally . . . to make the rest of humanity feel better about themselves I think. Besides this there is the fact that we have a lot more humans than at any other time in history. The Earth is groaning with mankind, some of whom I think we could do without . . . this also means there are a lot more human tragedies to report on. Thomas Malthus predicted this . . . he was already worried about food and hungry mouths to feed centuries ago. We are just living it, and getting to know about the tragedies he prophesied in real-time. 

Who would have thought that the Vietnamese and Cambodians would one day be more optimistic than the Americans?  Did you see how scruffy and disoriented some of the Occupy protesters in America were? The Dong (yes the Vietnamese currency is called the dong, penis in English colloquial use for those of you who threw away your dictionaries after KCPE, yes in primary) has taken a beating of late but the Vietnamese enjoy the kind of economic growth figures that make the dead American soldiers still immured there a lot more content with their gravesides.

 At least they are not buried in a broke country. America's public debt . . . the last time I checked,  was edging onto 16 trillion dollars, around 4 times the GDP of the US. America is comparatively more broke than Greece, I don't know why no one is making a fuss about it . . . maybe because the American government can still print as much as it deems necessary (Quantitative Easing) of the global reserve currency. They print the paper that materialism and capitalism are valued against. You can't beat that kind of leverage.

So the world is shitty, it will continue to get shitty . . .  more wars, more hunger, more unrest etc until we find a way better than the Chinese in controlling population growth more effectively . . . and as a matter of urgency. The problem with humanity, is that there is too much of it.

Every single human innovation has been designed to mitigate this problem without actually solving it i.e. feed more humans, educate, clothe and give more humans amenities rather than just reducing the number of humans in the first place and doing as best as we can with what is there.  What is the rush in birthing ourselves out of existence? We have finite resources, unless humans are declared edible we might just have to eat what grows on other humans.

 Think about it. You know unless we find an accurate method of teleporting ourselves onto distant galaxies, the Earth is all we have and all we will ever have . . . before the moon drifts out of orbit in a couple of million years leaving us, well . . . moonless? Multitudes of romantics would die of heartbreak, a catastrophe it will be I tell you. (A bigger problem would be what to do then with all those poems and lyrics with a non-existent moon and what-not.)

M. Wycliff
Nairobi.
PS> I don't hate white people and I have nothing against white people. But I do hate hypocrites in general . . . white, black, yellow or midget.