This week’s Africa Day passed by without much fanfare. In Namibia, we consider ourselves proud Africans. We fly the African Union flag next to ours. We sing the African Union anthem with ours. We are full, active and proud members of the AU. Hell, we even celebrate Africa Day as one of only 11 official public holidays in Namibia in a calendar year. Only 12 countries on the continent mark the day as a public holiday.

However, all these experiences are almost distant and you have to make no effort to participate in or acknowledge it. A public holiday on payday is certainly not frowned upon.

But many Namibians didn’t do anything to celebrate the day or being African. Some probably even didn’t know it was African Day.

But can we blame anyone who argues that the accident of being born in a certain locality should not be celebrated or be seen as an achievement?

The Afro-pessimists are many and continue to point out the reasons why not to celebrate or be proud of your Africanness.

The problem is they have almost an unlimited supply of things that have gone wrong, that are not working and or failing, to point at and laugh at.

But it’s easy to be an Afro pessimist.

It’s much tougher to find, often buried under mountains of hardship and obstacles, the hidden talents and the few things that have gone right. The opportunities are limitless and the ability to exploit those opportunities is growing.

If we can hold on to the energy, sense of direction and ability of our young people to find solutions for our challenges, we’d soon be out of the woods. 

Unfortunately, we can’t seem to give our youth enough reason to stay in Africa. African youth are literally dying to get to Europe. They embark on dingy boats in treacherous conditions to reach Europe. Experts estimate around 600 000 young Africans bide their time in Libya to escape the cycle of poverty and hopelessness.

Africa is, for most of its inhabitants, not a walk in the park. It’s tough.

Coup de tats had raised its ugly head again on the continent. Colonial powers, in the guise of multinationals, continue to hold vast power over our resources and communities rarely benefit from the resources in their ground.

If they try to move to other African countries, they find that African solidarity and brotherhood are just things African leaders say when they are on the international stage. Often, these African ‘brothers and sisters’ in need find rampant xenophobia and just more misery.

Those with world class skills and education leave as soon as they can.

We’ve found little incentive to stay. In fact, we find every possible obstacle to throw in their way. 

Whether it is offering a questionable level of primary school, to subjecting them to unaffordable tertiary education, we stack the odds against them from early on. 

If they manage to clear that hurdle, we can’t seem to garner our abundant resources to create job opportunities. Most unemployed graduates try to establish a business. There too we stand in their way.

Establishing and registering it take too long and cost too much.

Thereafter, we take roughly a third of their income with very little to show for it.

Further, African leaders who make disappointing their citizens a weekly performance make it difficult to celebrate being African, especially when the very people droning on about how proud we should be to be African are the ones stripping the continent of its resources so their offspring can flash their bling in our faces on social media. 

Celebrating being African goes hand in hand with acknowledging that many of us, had we been given the choice, would not have chosen to be African and are always called upon to make the best of a terrible situation. Often these calls come from politicians who don’t have the political will or acumen to make being African a source of pride rather than a burden.