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Hankering over the ‘glorious’ past as we confront our present struggles is not really helpful. Rather we should dare to invent the future, as Thomas Sankara challenged us

Too often our people look to the past thinking it is better than now

Thinking that the era of military dictatorships had no corruption,

That things were better in the past, that things worked,

There was no inflation in the idealised past.

Too often our people only look at the now in the struggle to survive,

To eat

To pay expensive school fees

To buy expensive medicine

To bury a relative

The future is a luxury they dare not invent as Sankara heeded them to do.

Some dare not indulge the future

Some have no time for the future

Yet others dream for a better life for their children as Cabral once said.

Our people must no longer live in the past but seek to control and determine the future for there is hope in the future that things can be different

*Ama Biney (Dr) is a scholar-activist and Acting Editor in Chief of Pambazuka News

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