Comment - Bread, Guns, Butter, And Bombs
Nuclear disarmament campaigners have stepped up their protests against the installation of American cruise missiles in Europe scheduled for later this year.
The arms talks in Geneva between the Soviets and the Americans have continued on their thoroughly bizarre and high drama ways.
For Africa, preoccupied with cassava and maize problems, such matters like disarmament talks all seem very far away. They are left to Heads of State and Ministers of Foreign Affairs to talk about and the occasional editorial writer to comment on.
The question of arms has routinely been treated as a problem for the superpowers; they are engaged in the insane arms race, they are piling up enough to destroy the world many times over; they bring the world closer to nuclear war, total annihilation every day.
Statistics abound on what percentage of the money it costs to build one cruise missile, will provide a decent meal for the whole world every day. The temptation is very great to adopt superior airs and innocent postures and deliberately forget or ignore that more often than not, it is the "poorest of the poor" that keep the big powers in the arms business.
The small arms and ammunition that "poor" African countries buy and accept as 'aid' hardly 'kill' people and less or humanely than the sophisticated arms that make the headlines daily. On the contrary, while the world still holds its breath in horror and dread for the first nuclear attack, thousands of people get killed daily with "conventional, small arms."
It is because there is such a booming trade in small arms, that it is possible to finance the big arms industry.
Countries and governments that claim not to have enough money to feed their citizens and whose entire national budgets get thrown out of gear because the rains have failed for a month, still manage to keep their armed forces and police well supplied with arms and ammunitions.
For as long as poor countries spend some of what little they have on buying arms, it is hypocritical to accuse richer countries of spending on sophisticated arms, money that could be used in feeding people in the poor countries.
Why don't the poor countries set the example by demonstrating that they put more store on the health and welfare of humanity than on the instruments of destruction. Killing on a small scale is as morally wrong as on a large scale and the rich countries at least have the redeeming grace that they are able to look after their citizens, even if it is only to fatten them for the big kill during the nuclear armageddon.
Their people can at least say that every day that they live until that day, life is worth living; hardly the same can be said for people in African countries whose everyday life constitutes a slow death.
Peace is not endangered only by sophisticated arms, and Africa has a duty to rate peace higher in her priorities. People who go to bed hungry have an even greater stake in ensuring that not a penny of the country's money is spent on arms of any kind.
In much the same way, governments who spend what little money they can find on buying guns, have no business accusing others of spending however much money on bombs.
At the end of the day though, it is up to the people of Africa to make it known to their rulers that they do not want their money or any aid given them to be spent on arms, however small. Small arms, as far as human life is concerned, are as lethal as anything in the arsenal of the super powers. It surely makes no difference to a dead person that the arms that killed him, could have killed him twenty times over.
The superpowers at least claim to be arming themselves against "the enemy" which is a people other than their own; this claim cannot be made for the poor countries whose small arms purchases are aimed exclusively at their own people.
If the people of the rich countries have decided to do something about the possibility of their getting killed one day, it is a wonder that those who are getting killed every day seem undisposed to making their voices heard at the very least.
Peace campaigners are protesting against arms that might destroy the world for their future grandchildren; when will people wake up to the fact in Africa that the danger does not lie only in Europe and that they should protest against their own current situation.
