The Tunisian President’s recklessness has spilled over his country’s borders and triggered unenviable diplomatic furore in especially West Africa. He is called Kais Saied and his recent manipulation of his country’s constitution appears to have affected him negatively after mammoth street protests. His unguarded incitement to his country men and women to rise against West Africans in Tunis and beyond is unbecoming of a President in modern times.
Seething with anger over the influx of black Africans specifically from West Africa, President Saied after a long spell of backlash from his compatriots over bad governance punctuated with constitutional breaches, dropped this inflammable remark about his unsubstantiated fear that the West Africans were going to change the demographic balance of his country as a vent.
Only a racist-thinking fellow would think along such a line and even spew unedited remarks thereof on the public space.
As if waiting for such a subtle go-ahead to his already frustrated compatriots to unleash xenophobic attacks on the West Africans from Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and of course Ghana, Tunisians are reported to have unleashed an unspeakable reign of emotional and physical terror on blacks from our part of the world resident in their country. Tunisians and some Arab countries in North Africa prefer not to be associated with Africa; it hurts to watch such discrimination when it is being played out on us by persons we have long believed were our brothers.
This subject might not please our diplomats, especially those who have something to do with the North African Arabs, but truth be told, these persons consider themselves as non-Africans. They only belong to Africa when it suits their purpose, as when Morocco was playing against European countries during the World Cup and other international sporting engagements when they particularly need the support of Africa. Under such circumstances, they consider themselves as Africans. Outside this sphere they revert to the backward-thinking of their black slave owning forebears.
The average Arab is a racist in their thinking, and this resonates in the manner they treat Ghanaian workers, especially ladies who go to their countries to work as domestic hands.
The rapes and use of contemptuous language on them are known to many who have been associated with the subject.
If the Tunisian President has behaved so irresponsibly and contemptuously, we must be able to tell him in the face that “to hell with him.”
As we compose this commentary, even black Tunisians who by circumstances of their birth and history have found themselves in that country are not exempt from the racist attacks of their fair complexioned compatriots. Shameful and despicable.