Lord, who is playing the ehtnic card?

Dear Father:
You know few years ago, I was invited to a meeting with a very big mouth politician. I was his subject of interest. Oh, yes, Father, I was becuase I was wounded and fired up back then.

In such a state where vengence was the only vocabulary running through my tiny head-this big mouth self overratted politician invited me to a meeting. After being persuaded for days by some closed friends at the time, I reluctantly gave in to attend this meeting and for the first time sat at a table with him to hear him out. It was brunch-time on a fateful Sunday.

This guy started the conversation very well with how he can help me with the cost of the printing of the New Dawn. At that time, we had just started and Father, yours truly was the hottest and newest kid on the block. So, everybody wanted to win him over quickly.

But this is where I brought the whole meeting to an abrupt end after expressing myself. This big mouth politician told me (apparently this was his own way of trying to win me over) that this village belongs to the country people and that it was time to get it back becuase if the country people don’t, the settlers will continue to rule us. They will keep the village as is, send their children abroad to get western education and come back to rule our children-a kind of viscious circle.

Father, what he was simply trying to do was play the country-congo card. Throw few decks at me and see how I respond after which he would come with higher ranking cards.
But this is what I told him: I said, first of all, I have trained my kids as little as they were that nobody is superior than them-whether black, yellow or white. They should always see themselves as equally competitive. For someone to sit and put one tail between his or her legs and blame other people for your condition is your own failure, not those you blame making.

“ If you will sit and allow your kids to be subordinates to others not mine“, I said. After that speech I told the friends that accompanied me that it was time to leave and we left.
Today in this village Father, our people continue to play a card that only exist in politics but nolonger in our village.

When ever certain individuals try to seek power in our village, they try to draw an ethnic line. But the truth is those who played the ethnic cards as trump cards for seeking elections are more class concious than those they accused.
I remembered my father and uncles telling me stories about how they were brought up by settlers and how some of them were treated with respect-though some had bad upbringing.

In our village, the educated countryman at the time will not allow his relatives from the interior to pass through his front door rather directing them to pass at the back to-their sitting rooms were too decent for the person coming from the village to pass through.

Today, at our Traditional Council, 99.999% of the Parmount Chiefs there are country people, yet as it was in those days is still the same. They want to emulate those they have accused of impoverishing our village. They fly to Uncle Sam’s village for their agricultural breaks, as if they are making farms there; Most of them have their families residing there. In fact, whenever they visit their Fiefdoms, some want to be carried in hammock. They see themselves as the comtemporary colonial masters over thier people.

They have deliberately refused to give power to the people in the villages by draging their feet to sign the decentralization bills. By now all the Fiefdom roads in our village should have been paved. But hey, they want to live like those they criticized and yet want us to believe that there still exist something called Country and Congo-Nonesense!