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Democracy 1-0 Intellectualism

Reacting to the result of the most recent referendum in Britain where they have voted to leave the European Union, I'd like to point out a positive lesson that is being ignored in the wake of the development. I am talking about the sheer honesty of democracy, albeit working against apparently superior reasoning. It is yet another example of how democracy takes power from the so called superior minority and places it in the palms of the vast and mostly ignorant majority, to do with it as they will. The people have spoken and history has been made. Whether it will be for better or worse is only a question of time.

This brings me to the issue that is weighing on my mind today. The right to Self determination is one of the core liberties of the individual as well as the society at large. If a person or people have that right taken away from them either blatantly or via proxy, such a person or people are automatically robbed of the imagination and courage required to develop themselves. In Africa, what we have in operation is a hybrid of pseudo as well as outright disenfranchisement. Consider Nigeria, Britain's erstwhile cash cow and the most populous black nation on earth. Here, institutions are no more than mere representations and relics of past and present elements of external control. Where access to quality education and government are strictly the prerogative of the rich who account for less than 5 percent of the population and for whose sole profit resources are distributed, to the mutual benefit of the external powers who dictate the tune at the very highest levels. Further down the spectrum of socio-political inequality we have the majority who mostly live in stark ignorance and fear.

Intellectuals and political critics in the western world like to lament about how the political elite employ all manners of underhanded tactics and ploys to manipulate their public into foregoing some of their rights. I laugh because the situation we have here is that the masses are practically dead to the fact that they posses these rights to begin with. What this does is to foster a truly cut throat,  jungle atmosphere where the strong conquer to rule whereas the weak wither and die, while the soul of equality is reposed in the degree of mass corruption across board.

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