03/03/2026
The great Liberian footballer George Weah was a Ballon D'Or winner in his own accord in a foreign league, yet his own country, for whom he was helping to qualify for the World Cup provided no funding for the national team from government nor sports institutions. Weah paid out of pocket for the entire national team's training and travel, including kits, accomodations, allowances et al, and even acted as player-coach, while still balancing his job as a striker in the Italian League.
A majority of African countries are really only mock states, monkey-see-monkey-do entities that exist for outward-show purposes only, and who never bought into the concept of nationhood or statehood as a community-first organism. Government to us takes a stomach-first approach.
That's why Kenya for starters, has a ballooning wage-bill second only to the USA. People go into political office to win a five-year term that will earn them a lifetime of pension and gratuity. These same people while in political office, will also be made political appointees in charge of national interests in various ministries that are bloated with all forms of manpower and all manner of irrelevant activities.
You will find sports bodies and now 'authorities' duly registered and instituted, with office buildings, budgets and officials, and 95 percent of expenditures going to their salaries, insurance, allowances and per diem's, stationery, photocopy, fuel for their guzzlers, entertainment.... and the list is bottomless.
We don't govern. We regulate, mistaking such posing for governance.
The problem starts at the top, where appointees are made based on cronyism, not qualified professionalism, setting an example that propagates the problem top-down the food-chain, where employees of The Regulation are sourced based primarily on nepotism and other affiliations to the people in charge of sections and departments.
This is the ecosystem from which you are expecting support and cooperation.
Mr. Weah later became President Weah of Liberia. The same skills he was training while taking government responsibility on his own shoulders as a young sportsman, handed him leadership of his country's government on his second elective attempt.
Now here lies the moral of this tale:
Most of darker Africa is ungovernable, because we do not practice the discipline of governing ourselves without supervision. The majority of 'darker' Africans don't care much for self control. They prefer to be regulated, but only to an extent, meaning we cannot fully allow the authorities we manage to fully enforce all the regulations that our elected government and all its regulatory bodies put in place at our behest.
On the other hand we are self-deceiving to imagine that regulations are solutions. We are a subcontinent that is now caught in a cycle of regurgitating regulatory body after regulatory body, never digesting the fact that we are not creating results but only compounding the public burden.
Politics cannot provide the answer as long as our public culture is not founded on individual self-control. Since we don't like governing ourselves at the individual level, we delegate that responsibility to an entity that will regulate us, and then we mis-name it government.
We prefer to cut corners, take shortcuts, bribe, forge, lie, deceive, pretend and disobey public order laws. Then for conscience-sake we make pristine laws, and institute second parties to regulate us at a fee called tax. We forget that a regulator cannot regulate us then regulate itself, then provide us with a regular report on its activity and conduct. Kenya and South Africa are daylight proof that even the best of new, glittery constitutions cannot 'make us great again'.
Our conduct and outcomes are mirrors of our character, on which the need to cover our exposure with regulatory systems comes from.
Even the politicians we elect as heads of our 'Regulatorial' nations are powerless to change us and the systems we institute. A nation of 60 million Kenyans cannot convincingly say it is at the mercy of 400 legislators.
As President of Liberia, one of Weah's son's followed in the footsteps of his father's golden boots. He competes in the world's premium soccer leagues. As for the country he represents in nationals, it is the USA.
This is the son of a sitting African president, but he understood that for the sake of the gift he bears during the short time he has a hold on it, he must chose order, not regalia.
