power has limits in a democracy .
In the meantime the British are discovering that what was a brave show of independence has a heavy price tag and it is becoming painfully clear that the process of extrication from Europe is not what was touted to be by the prime sponsors .
It is worth noting that none of the front line leaders of Brexit are currently in the limelight . They lit a fire , fanned it and surreptitiously disappeared to let others figure out the details . That is always the problem with demagogues : their mouths are already moving before their brains are engaged .
We would like to believe that the French had the benefit of seeing the dramas unfold in Britain and America and were brave enough to resist the wave of nationalism even though they had credible and actionable issues with immigrants .
It is also worthy of note that immigrant issue is a result of lopsided colonial policies that left many countries raped of their natural resources and the related brain drain but kept artificially in a dependency mode , all that has now backfired .
The colonialists mastered the art of keeping the indigenous people unstable by fostering ethnic or religious rivalry that enabled them to exploit the people . When they eventually left they did not mend the mess and we are now witnessing the repercussions of those ill-advised strategies .
Across in America , they needed cheap labor to develop their vast continent and sponsored the inhumane and dehumanizing slave trade that destroyed and stultified growth in large swathes of Africa . Even after slavery was outlawed , America still needed cheap labor .
So the founding fathers crafted an ingenious method of letting in a controlled inflow of immigrants to ensure that the economic juggernaut did not stop . They were able to cherry pick the skills they wanted from anywhere in the world with a promise of a better life .
The resultant global inequality in both incomes and opportunity , the developmental gap and the harsh divide between the first world and the third world is what has created the economic refugees who are looking for a better life . But this type of refugee was always manageable .
The crisis has been caused by war refugees , those displaced and chased out of their countries again by political intrigues of the first world . To underpin their economic agendas the first world has continued with its policies of divide and rule . The world chaos is created by the first world .
It is only fair that if you create a problem you solve it and not by complaining that your countries are being invaded by immigrants . Use your vast resources to stabilize those countries and nobody will want to leave their villages for the streets of Europe and America .
The populist and xenophobic tirades against immigrants are symptom of underlying issues with the economies in question . Even if the immigrants were repatriated the problems would still be there as the historical injustices have not been addressed .
This similar reaction is not confined to Europe and America as we have seen it raise its ugly head in South Africa . It is always a political expression of an economic problem and when frustrations boil over the hapless outsider is always the first victim .
This should serve as a warning to our local politicians who are adept at sugarcoating their personal ambitions which have nothing to do with the
‘‘ It is worth noting that none of the front line leaders of Brexit are currently in the limelight . They lit a fire , fanned it and surreptitiously disappeared to let others figure out the details . That is always the problem with demagogues : their mouths are already moving before their brains are engaged . ’’
voter wellbeing and whip up their emotions with impractical hate mongering which leave them in a lurch of bitterness .
So long as our political parties are prostitutable vehicles to power and not ideologically value based and driven then populism will always be the mode by which we choose our leaders . We will not choose what he believes and what he stands for but who he is from a purely ethnic perspective .
What we call nationalism in Europe and America we call tribalism here in Africa . It is the same emotion with the same motive , to whip up negative energy to rally people to behave irrationally in the serious endeavor of choosing leadership .
Beware of the ‘ it is us against them ’ rhetoric which surfaces every five years during elections !