IT IS IN YOUR HANDS NOW

I was unable to attend the birthday celebration of my greatest hero, Madiba Mandela, but I was glued to my television set without blink to hear the message from one of the greatest men alive. Nelson Madela has championed history and set a challenge for freedom loving people all over the world. It is with no mistake that we gather together every year to celebrate the day on which we were blessed with the birth of an extraordinary man who was not afraid to risk his life for the liberty of his people. When faced with the dilemma of being bought by tyrants against his own people, Madiba chose instead, to remain in incarceration until the wind of freedom touches the heart of all South Africans.

Instead of indulging into glorious speech about his well deserved heroism, he offered us a simple phrase: ‘it is in your hands now.’ This phrase is very important for us today as witnesses to global tyranny, disease and starvation. As Africans, we have remained passive to the ‘failure of leadership’ in Zimbabwe, we continue to witness the human carnage in Somalia, and poverty and disease are taking a severe tour on our future generation. The challenges of our time are enormous, but our refusal to act against the ‘failure of leadership’ on the continent of Africa is inexcusable. More than fifty years after independence, we can no longer cast blames on the colonialists for the wave of violence that overshadow the freedom of our continent.

Another important aspect of this phrase is that it is embedded with the implication that the onus of finding solutions to our problems rests with us. Incapacity is no longer an excuse for refusing to act when the people of Zimbabwe wail, when xenophobia leads us to raid each other, and when the hunger for power drives us to murder our own people. We cannot blame the West for doing nothing if we ourselves in our own small huts remain crippled in the face of violence, poverty and disease. Leadership is not a position of selfishness, it a position in which one should be prepared to die, ‘if need be,’ to champion the cause of freedom, liberty and the rule of law.

What about those of us who live in the more prosperous regions of the world? Should we adhere to the warnings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere?’ How much are we willing to sacrifice as democratic citizens, in the spirit of Nelson Mandela, for the freedom of others whether they live in Burma, Iraq, Sri-Lanka, Palestine, Uganda or Afghanistan? Some of us will prefer to remain akimbo, but our common humanity in the age of globalization requires that we stand up against tyranny, prejudice and threats to human flourishing. It is crystal clear that on many occasions when humanity had cried out together, the heaviest walls of tyranny have crumbled.

What then, prevents us from standing up for the freedom of our fellow human beings? Is it the comfort of our own freedom or the weight of our guilt? While things may seen deceptively normal in our immediate spheres to make us think that there is nothing to worry about, we must be reminded that it takes very little for sunshine to turn into rain. We must never relent to stand up for equal rights and justice even in the remotest of places around the world. Madiba has now passed the baton to us, and it is in our hands now. The question is: are we determined to champion the next phase of history?