Countries aflame, homosexuals
Countries in Africa may be divided into those which enjoy perpetual calm and those which suffer perpetual conflicts. How do people of certain countries manage to live peacefully with one another though they are divided into ethnic and religious groups.
Similarly, why is there conflict in countries like Egypt and Somalia where people are ethnically the same, most people belong to the same religion. Why must we find answers to these questions? Mainly because when you have diagnosed the cause of a disease, you have found the cure.
How nice it is to live in a country where people go to sleep in the evening sure to wake up alive in their own houses tomorrow? In other African countries, people are perpetually on the move. They are displaced here and they are displaced there. On television, we see them evaluating their homes, bundles of portable goods on their heads or shoulders . This is the life that Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher and author of Leviathan described as “nasty, brutal and short”.
One cause of internal strife is discrimination on the basis of tribe, region or religion. People who suffer discrimination try to improve their lot by getting rid of those in office or taking out their part of the country and setting a State of their own as in the case of South Sudan.
It is surprising how those who want to arrogate to themselves maximum wealth appear to assume that the victims will not bother. One day I was in a taxi when I expressed the view that Malawi President Joyce Banda had done a good deal to put women in positions formerly held by men and wondered if the male civil servants will vote for her. The taxi driver agreed with me by saying the worst President Banda has done is to put in high office people of a certain tribe. I was shocked and gave up the conversation.
So there are people in Malawi who cherish the idea of keeping some of their fellow citizens out of plumb jobs so long as the numbers of such people are growing. One day there will be an explosion, a social one.
Quoting events in Egypt nearly cost a university dean his job and resulted in an eight-month long strike of university lecturers; yet I cannot help but refer to Egypt as a continuing lesson of what should not be done.
The Moslem Brotherhood had been kept at bay in Egyptian politics for so long that when they won the election, they decided it was their time to do the best for themselves. They forgot the principle that in a democracy the whole is more important than the majority. They set about ignoring the interests of too many non-Brotherhood, and soon the famous square in Egypt was packed with demonstrators demanding the resignation of President Mohammed Morsi. Fresh wounds and deaths followed the gunfire.
Former president Hosni Mubarak, now a house prisoner, his health not at its best, must be saying there you are Morsi, you were saying you could handle the Egyptians better than me!
Once you are in the position of president, the whole country is your constituency, all the tribes are your tribes and all religions your religions. Refuse to be drawn into partisanship by those who feel you are closer to them than to other groups. The conflicts continue over a long time because foreigners supply weapons to both sides of the conflict.
A different kind of conflict is over some sex relations. Let us compromise by asking homosexuals or someone to invent a new term for this unorthodox relationship. From the time of Adam and Eve, people have talked of marriage referring to the officially or customar approved relationship between a man and a woman. That between a man and a man or a woman and a woman has been seen as aberration, the religious have called it sinful.
Once a new term is invented for relationships between people of the same sex, they may register it under that name and not under the Marriage Act. Why does someone among the wealthy not offer a prize to anyone who can invent the best term to describe people of the same sex in a relationship. Those who are eating snakes should not say they are eating fish.
