Ochieng's critical analysis of poverty and the way we perceive it have ignited some deep thoughts in me. Africans must take this debate everywhere and must start reversing the false trend we have institutionalised in the name of poverty alleviation. Just see how we have condemned ourselves to perpetual enslavement even by accepting the fact that what we should do is just alleviate poverty! As Ochieng says, eradication (a word strongly opposed by the beneficiaries of our poverty) would deliberately be geared at eradicating the poor.

The capitalist version of development is becoming a zero-sum game (it has so been everywhere) and thus a developed Africa would entail 'large holes of poverty' in the developed world. I once argued that if there were a way to secure a patent right for air, Africa would be suffocated in a twinkle of an eye. With the millions of plant and tree species that are being tested in Western pharmaceutical laboratories, no single African country has a patent right. Let this generation of Africans rise up and claim what is theirs before it is too late.

* Takwa Suifon is an 'Africanist' and Conflict and Peace Analyst from Cameroon