Editor, RE: “Why resource-based industrial devt provides the springboard for our economic takeoff” (The New Times, December 22). We are literally sitting over many, many rich and yet untapped gold mines, not only that of Irish potatoes. Our soil, our climate, and, most of all, our young, healthy, intelligent, and strong population, all contain our invaluable gold mines waiting to be valorized and exploited. The point is precisely that of valorizing our own wealth. Thus far we, Africans, have been told that our future is elsewhere, somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Unfortunately for many of us, that is where heaven is situated, where, ideally, we should end our life journey. So our eyes and entire aspirations, spiritual but also material and mental, our entire bodies, are presently all raised and projected toward the West. Perhaps it is about time we start looking down again at our feet instead, where we physically and practically stand, and by all means discover by ourselves the bounty of wealth we are standing upon and that surrounds us all around. It is about time we react against being systematically and purposefully physically and psychologically uprooted and (etymologically) distracted by the well orchestrated propaganda of paradoxically “poor Africa” in need of emergency aid, again, from the West. Very true of ‘Irish’ potatoes, but also of our traditional sweet potatoes, beans, peas, our unique Rift Valley millet and sorghum, our traditional cows, goats, and lambs…all waiting to be re-valorized by us. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga
