AFRICAN DEMOCRACY
http://uniaf.org/USA-aims(1).htmOur great ancestors and Afrocentric scholars like John Henrik Clarke, Marcus Garvey, Amos Wilson and Chanceller Williams gave us clear blueprints for African development, yet today we are still limping in the dark blinded by chains of social, political and economic imperialism.
How can the wealthiest continent on the planet be starving and waiting for aid, because the wealth of a people is untimately not in the ground but in their brains.
The key element to African social, political and economic progress is "African self definition" as a bases for nation building rather than an attempt to duplicate Western or Eurocentric models.
Most of our problems in Africa are to a large extend a result of African Governments using 'vampire capitalistic', materialistic and non-holistic, Eurocentric principles to govern our affairs in economics, politics, education, health and law. Its is time for Africans to know-ourselves and embrace our humanity and latent genius and express that self-knowledge in governance and stop beings victims of the West as well as political pimps who exploit each other and even worse kill each other needlessly.
The development of Africa today comes at a crucial point where we have the advantage of observing and studying what the developed countries have done right and what they have done wrong. The meaning of African development is not the duplication of the whole Western civilization but the birth of a development according to our needs and environment.
We have to aspire to go way beyond the developed countries, our social, economic and political system has to better and more efficient and balanced.
We can never have a better society emerging to produce better individuals and citizens unless it is deliberately planned and has specific programs for this purpose. African societies have to be organized and function that they provide the conditions necessary for the development of finer human beings.
African Democracy is a modernization and activation of basic traditional principles and traditional concepts of life. This system of democracy differs from capitalistic democracy on basic principles and practices. It rejects individualism as a doctrine and practice that places the interests, rights and privileges of the individual before and above the interests of his or her society. This individualism, born of the dog-eat-dog theory of evolution, is a central faith of capitalist democracies, a faith which the African Democracy should reject outright. The African is to be a citizen first, in a society of built-in freedoms, and his freedom is unlimited until its exercise threatens or is against the interests of his community as a whole.
He is to be neither an instrument nor a servant of the state. The states is his instrument and servant, for in African Democracy the nation is conceived of as a vast cooperative society of which the government is its executive committee, existing for the express purpose of carrying out the people’s will, and removable if and when it fails to do so.
The individual should not have the freedom- either acting alone or in combination with other individuals- to exploit the community for purely personal gain, or to dominate the entire economic life of the community, or, more specifically, he should not have the awful privilege of holding in his hands the very lives of the people by the private control of jobs and job opportunities. The right to work should not rest on profit and loss considerations. The right to work is the right to live, and it should be a first principle in our African Democracy and one of the main reasons for our opposition to capitalism as a dominant economic system in Africa.
Here is involved what should be the greatest economic principle, if you please: the right to work as the right to live, and the right to live even if no one makes a profit on basic needs. For the capitalist criterion for starting an enterprise in the community is not the community’s need per se, but whether or not the undertaking will be profitable for the promoter. To be profitable, the promoter must be given a god-like free hand in fixing prices, wages, hours of work, and conditions of work.
Working for the “state”, as under communism, is a still greater evil from both a social and individual viewpoint. It is a two-way evil because in destroying individual initiative, individual freedom and self-reliance, the dynamics of the society itself are inevitably destroyed.
This is why we stress a balanced and cooperative system of life with “built-in” freedom and initiative, a society in which the people are given light and left to find their own way. Their Central Government will be the chief lighthouse and it is to divest itself of power and responsibilities just as rapidly as the people of local communities become able to assume them.
This system that actually puts the people in control of things is the reason why there should be so much emphasis on ongoing programs of basic education. Universities have to be directly linked to communities. The chief role of the Central Government should be active leadership and expert guidance in preparing the people as a whole for their responsibilities, leaving itself free to perform, with higher efficiency, those national and international tasks which the local communities could not be expected to perform.
The united drive should be for the Good Life, a conscious program for the Good life. The good citizen should be one who unites his initiative and talents with the initiative and talents of others in all-out efforts for the common welfare, not only willingly but anxiously. The one sure route to fame and personal security will be through the community’s social and economic improvement.
Our African nations should substantially embrace and practice the African ethical principles of "MAAT" which include truth, justice, propriety, harmony, balance, reciprocity and cosmological order as well as the values of "Nguzo Saba" or Seven Principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.
hotep
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