To Close the 'SHITHOLES' Africa Must Change

When the “SHITHOLE” incidence showed up, many of us with African roots listened carefully to the anger expressed by the media, African leaders, the Africa Union (AU), politicians in the United States from both parties, and the world at large. What’s Up Africa received record transactions. Some of us stayed calm and began thinking about the whole incident. Then, after careful analysis, the gates opened for true self-checking—devoid of any emotions to be able to stay fair to both sides. Believe us, it was not easy to hear the negative characterization of the continent, but the Good Lord had His hands in control to calm things down and open our eyes as to allow us to turn a bad situation into a good one.     The narratives in this book come out of true soul-searching, painful admissions of facts, and realistic analyses of prevailing conditions, concluding with challenging directions, so that we can turn the “SHITHOLES” into “GOLD HOLES.” Let us embrace our current situation and call a spade a spade. This is the only way we can move beyond the anger. Please, take deep breath and truthfully read on, so that you can also come to the same realization. Together we can contribute to the calling that we have so expressed in this book to save Africa from supervised impoverishment. We cannot and should not continue doing the same things over and over again. We need to open up our eyes to be able to see the truth, regardless of how painful, to get Mother Africa on the right path, so that the next generation will flourish. There will be sacrifices, some pains, and some hardships as we carefully navigate the dense cloud of issues facing Africa. But we believe that we can overcome—and we will overcome.About the AuthorOsei Badu-Nkansah is an experienced information technology (IT) architect with a deep understanding of the latest technological concepts. He is an alumnus of the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi Ghana and the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, PA.     His consulting days took him to many countries worldwide, especially countries in Africa. Such travels brought him face-to-face with the realities of the African problems.     He is the author of Audacity of Automation—Catalyst for Third World Development (also published by Dorrance Publishing) and has led many technology deployment projects in Africa.    He served as CIO for Surfline in Ghana; provided solution cases to give Ghana the Maiden LTE 4G Wireless Broadband; served as executive delivery head for Tech Mahindra, where he provided deployment leadership to support the successful Go-Live for ntel’s LTE 4G Wireless Broadband (the first) for Nigeria; and as an executive IT architect for IBM, fully participated in the transformation of Zain to Airtel in seventeen countries in Africa. 3