Elizabeth,
                you asked very important questions and proffered even more
genuine answers to some of the very pressing issues you raised. After close
to 40 years of self rule for most African countries I will categorically say
that our contemporary scrooge of poverty, decease and starvation is largely
the handiwork of our leaders who as you rightly point out are only interested
in themselves and their cronies.Government is like most undertakings in life,
it functions better when the right people are in charge. African governments
in close to their totality are led by an assortment of murderers, thieves and
wholly incompetent buffoons who have neither the inclination nor the ability
to do any good. It is not true that Yahya Jammeh, Ousman Badgie, Susan Wafa
Ogo, Nfamara Jatta can  be anything in a Gambia that was on the right
tangent. Our country has and most definitely deserves people other than these
idiots but they have installed themselves for the past several years and the
results are all too apparent. Today our people are starring destitution and
pernury in the face and there simply will not be any let up in the scale and
rapidity of the decline in every aspect of our nations' life.The nations you
cite from Asia did two important things Africans have not. First they
singularly focused on investing on their people through education, healthcare
and so on and once they evolved e reasonably educated population, they
inspired their populations to have strong work ethics that often times
delayed gratification inorder to expand the pie and increase productivity.
They also evolved a system that recognized and rewarded talent so that
brilliant engineers and scientists designed and built things in a free market
system, talented politicians made the machinery of government work for the
majority of the people by nursing industry and providing a steady stream of
educated people.
    We Africans must simply change or perish. Nothing in this world functions
in a vacuum so that if you don't produce stuff that other humans find value
in and are willing to pay for and you don't organize your society so that it
functions effectively within the framework of democracy and the rule of law,
the result is a very predictable outcome: poverty and a slow but sure route
to anarchy. Unfortunately some African countries are so deep in their status
as failed states that they may have already slipped past redemption. They
have become caldrons of strive, disease and a general breakdown of even a
morticum of normalcy.
    To underscore the kind of problems we face, go no further than our small
community of Gambia and in particular our gathering here in this Post. There
are people here who will not call Yahya Jammeh and his gang murderers,
thieves and incompetents even as they undoubtedly killed scores of innocent
people in cold blood, manifestly stolen millions of dollars of public funds
and have mismanaged every gov't agency. So in our national dialogue the first
casualty is the simple basic truth and this is what clouds the entire body
politick. How can any progress come to a nation that is led by murderous
thugs? It can't and therein lies the enduring African tragedy.
Karamba

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