Young people must unite and rise up against Dictactorship in Africa!

What binds us together as young people living in Africa? Are we just a collection of individuals stuck in a continent? 

By Prince Gora

It was in early December of 2018 when I first had a real appreciation of the need for African youths to cooperate in their struggles. We were camped

at Africa University in Mutare for a Southern African Freedom Regional Advocacy Program (SAFRAP) meeting organized by Youth Empowerment and Transformation Trust (YETT). 

Until that point in time, I had lived with the false belief that Zimbabwe had a unique struggle. It quickly became clear to me that despite the physical borders imposed by the imperialists in the 19th century, Africa is still one big village and all our struggles are but an extension of the other as I watched in awe as one speaker after another narrated the challenges they were facing back home and the struggles they were fighting. 

The barbaric shooting of civilians in Nigeria a few days ago was frightening but it is by no means an isolated case. We had a similar thing in Zimbabwe in  January 2019 and in a style similar to that of Buhari's government switching off street lights while shooting people, the Zimbabwean government switched off the internet while it butchered its own people. Th

e South African government massacred workers at Marikana in 2012, the likes of Magufuli and Museveni are persecuting young people in their countries on trumped up charges everyday and millions of young Africans leave the continent yearly because their homelands have been made uninhabitable by filthy dictactors.

As young Africans, we must not sit back & hope that this will go away on its own because of the very simple reason that it won't. However, it will also be folly to act alone. We need to work together and cooperate. If there's one thing we can learn from these old dictactors, it is their ability to cooperate and to have each other's back. With the madness going on in Nigeria right now, that association of old dictators - the African Union - will most likely, to the surprise of noone, not speak a word against the barbaric actions of Buhari and his government.

Young people must rise up against DICTATORSHIP in African politics. Like young Africans who won independence for mother Africa, we need to cooperate and work with each other. Perhaps we need something in the form of an Organization of African Youth (OAY) inorder to fully cooperate. Our chances of winning are very slim when we are as divided as we are and fighting a group of united dictators as the AU.