The scenes, stories and claims from Gabon are a testament to how heartless African leaders can be. Bags of money reportedly recovered from homes of senior officials in a country where 33 per cent of the population is below the poverty line is outrageous.
The looting in the Bongo administration has been documented in bits and pieces over their 50 years at the helm. The bags of money are just petty cash. Check their accounts and properties and you get the real picture of wanton plunder and pillage.
However, there is danger to turn our anger and wrath at Gabonese officials, Bongo family and their bags of money and forget that the forest is the same and it is the monkeys that are different.
The story in Gabon is replicated throughout Africa. We saw it in Sudan when former strongman Omar Bashir was forced out. Over 130,000 dollars were found at his residence with the same scenario recurring anywhere where dictatorship has replaced democracy.
Africa's history is one of greedy wolves pretending to be saviours when seeking public office only to sink millions of citizens into poverty through their insatiable appetite for public resources. The lives Africans lead is a complete opposite from what they envisaged as they fought off the shackles of colonisation.
Take Gabon for example. With only 2.31 million people, the country has the 6th largest deposits of oil in the continent. It consumes only a tiny fraction and exports the rest. The country has many mineral deposits such as uranium and manganese etc. With good leadership, no person in Gabon should be poor.
More importantly, Gabon has capacity to have the best road network, education facilities and an advanced medical system. That is not the case. The leadership would rather fly their relatives to their former colonisers for medical care.
We are not better in Kenya. It is also possible that we have some with bags of money tucked away in their magnificent residences. When hard-working Kenyans who have done legitimate businesses for years struggle to afford basics, someone who gets appointed or elected to a public office would need a few months to work some financial miracles.
Actually, it takes days for them to start buying expensive designer clothes and luxury watches. For sure, few wealthy public officers and their cronies can explain the source of their wealth. Fortunately for them, no one ever asks. Even during formalities of vetting, the question would always end at 'how much is your wealth'. It gets never to 'how did you acquire your wealth'. Rarely do we ask them how a salary of less than Sh50,000 would see one acquire wealth worth hundreds of millions in months, if not years. I wonder whether this kind of gluttony ever gives them the joy and satisfaction they seek in life.
-The writer is anchor at Radio Maisha
