Nsabimana Kanizius's Letter to the Leaders in the DRC

http://www.thinkhumanity.org/uploads/files/Jimmy.pdf

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JIMMY’S FIRST PUBLISHED PAPER.

          2009 –July_30th

TO THE DRC LEADERS! I was the first victim and accused in several hectic situations but happy to get this most historic occasion to send you this first paper. I bring with me the hopes and fraternal greetings from several well wishers around the world especially my fellow collegues from my school here in South Africa African leadership academy.  Our objectives right should be Union and understandings amongst ourselves as one people living together in peace as different races from this wonderfull country DRC. There is no minute to waste. We must come together and Unite now or perish .I am confident that by our concern, together and determination, we shall lay right here the foundation for our country DRC union....

On this country, it has not taken us too long to discover that the struggle against colonialisation doesn’t necessarily mean the attainment of people’s life. Do we mean that getting to independence got us a race PRIZE? Let’s know that we are still on the struggle of our race, running towards a final destiny which even involve those of us who have neither taken even a step forwards. Let’s imagine and think about this, what is the image of DRC? With children, parents, old people men and women, economy, politics and even social mobility.

From the first, we have been threatened with several fructuations in rapid changes down towards instability according to the histories. No sporadic act or pious resolution can resolve our present problems, Unhampered by crushing of the humiliation and neither we shall find answers in text books. Nothing will be of avail except the act of DRC Union of races. We are the problems, victims of the problems and we can only solve that by being solutions.

UNITE   or SINK.

We have already reached the stage where we MUST unite or sink much more into these conditions when they left to grow much bigger and terrify our lives and our people. I have an endlessly sheading of tears and dismayed because our people are slagishing ever beyond my understanding.

As people of one country, we have to emerge into different age with several hectic fructuating and horrible conditions growing stronger more ruthless experience, and more as we understand shaping our destiny required by each of our effort. In independent democratic DRC, we realise that we are again re-experiencing the same instability which existed during the so called the pre-history long ago days under colonial rule, even growing more than i can explain. I have learnt that political independence is not enough to ride us to our expectations and people of this country. Here we can remember Patrick Lumumba and the kind of the rivolt conditions he suffered trying to gain back the current DRC. We breathe because he existed at the time, who can say that if he wouldn’t be there, DRC would be as it is now? People of this country at that time supported in this struggle fighting for their country because they believed that their fellow people, country’s leaders would cure the ills or sickness of the past in a way which never can be accomplished under colonization.

If now therefore we are independent and can continue to allow the same situations to exist that existed before, what does everybody think of the next image of the country? .Our country is counted among the first poorest country around the world yet The resources are there sleepy. It’s us to marshal them. Re-organise them in the active service of our people. Unless we do this by our concern effort, within the framework of our combination plannings, we shall not progress at the tempo demanded by our people’s lives. The symptoms of our trouble will grow and become chronic. I am dismayed with the way we always treat each other from the same country and killing each other. It doesn’t matter whether Tutsis or the Hutus or other tribes. We should be aware of how we can utilise the fire arms properly, no one knows here in African where the fire arms are made. Other people around the world make them, sell them to us and finally we start killing each other...I will always think of elsewhere or other things and not about any tribe. I won’t buy the South African Times today. I can’t. I am sorry. But when i work into the bookstore i can’t help reading the front page and i stare at the photograps of the dead men and women. I know i’ve seen alive.

Today I don’t want to think again of -Tutsi cutting open- Banyabwisha, Hutus and other tribles cutting open. I don’t want to think of koffi and sherdepoure, weasel and Radio, nor shakira and Shayne ward. I’ve made up my mind: today i’ll write in peacock-greenish-sea-green ink i’ll write papers, and books about everything else. Everyone is equal to each other and all are people of the soil. I was the first victim, everything was in vain for me in the last few years of 1996.I looked side right and saw men, women with babies in their back, young children like me dying. In front of me the same-left side all where unthinkable and behind me very fluctuating gunshots barrelling ............. I was squeezed and just stood  at only one place waiting at one bullet for me but there was no bullet for me at that moment. Meaning I was lucky!! I must make best of it. I quess, people up to now if i can meet many others and talk, I can shut up.

Our country certainly exceeds all the others potential hydroelectric power, which some experts assess as 42% of the total beyond the other African countries and the world’s total. What needs us to remain hewers of the wood and drawers of the water for the industrialised areas of the world?

It’s said ofcourse, that we have capital, no industrial skills, no communications, pooe road constructions and network, no internal markets, and that we can not even agree among ourselves how best to utilise our resources for our own social needs. Yet all stocks exchanged in the world are pre-occupied with DRC’s golds, Diamonds, Uranium, copper and iron ore.

Our capital flows out in streams to irrigate the whole world system of western economy.52% of the gold in the Fort Knox at this moment where USA stores its bullion, is believed to have been originated from Africa and the highest is from DRC. Countries natural wealthy does never been translated into benefits of people and now should human rights and democracy be the price of admission to the world market or another continuality that burdens DRC? .....

Experts have estimated that the Congo Basin alone can produce enough food crops to satisfy the requirements of nearly half population of the whole world, and here we sit just talking about regionalism, talking about step by step. Are you afraid of tackling the bull by the horn? How long do you thing we should wait? As since past years it has been the case?

For centuries many years ago, if you recall well during the time of Mobutu and many others that are not mentioned, our country has been the milking cow for the rest of the western world and other countries and keeping our economy out of home. Was it not our country that help many of the western world and other countries to build its accumulated wealth? We have the resources. it was the colonialism in the first place that prevented us from accumulating the effective capital, yes, i agree with that; but we ourselves have failed to make full use of our power in independence to mobilise our resource for the most effective take-off into thorough-going economic and social development.

I have been too busy nursing our separate race or tribes to understand fully the basic needs of our union, rooted in common purpose, common planning and common endeavour. A union that ignore the fundamental necessities will be put a sham. It is only by uniting our productive capital and the resultant production that we can a mass capital. And once we start, the momentum will increase. With capital controlled by our own banks, harnessed to our own true industrial and agricultural development, we shall make our advance.

W e shall accumulate machinery and astablish strong steel works, iron foundries and factories; we shall link various country states with communication by land, sea and air. We cable from one place to another, phone from one place to the other around around the world with hydroelectric power; we shall drain marshes and swamps, clear infected areas, feed the under previlledged unnourished, and rid our people of parasites and disease.

A decade ago, these would have been visionary words, the fantasies of an idle dreamer. But this is the age in which science has transcebded the limit of the material world, and technology has invanded the nature.

Time and space have been reduced to unimportant abstractions. Giant machines make roads, clear forests, dig dams, lay out aerodromes; monster trucks and planes distribute goods, huge laboratories manufacture drugs; colossal factories erected –all at an incredible speed. The world is no longer moving through bush paths or on camel and donkeys.

We can not afford to pace our need, our development, our security, to the gait of camels and donkeys. We can not afford not to cut down the overgrown bush of outmoded attitudes that obstructs our paths to the modern open road of the widest and earliest achievement of economic independence and the raising up of the lives of our people to the highest level. this is the age that sees the end of human wants. For us, it is a simple matter of gasping with certainty our heritage by using the political might of Unity. All we need to do is to develop with our united strength the enormous resources of our country.