"We have got used to 'African time' and it will be our doom: Let's stop the excuses" [OPINION]

YOU know you are in Malawi when a highly publicised meeting that was long scheduled for 8 a.m. starts one or more hours late. The same goes for many countries in Africa.

Even the state presidential functions don’t do better. The president, officially announced with all fanfare to be attending a public rally at 10 am, would appear unabashed at 12pm, and without the people complaining about it, for they are used to waiting.

Then, you know, you are not only in Malawi but you are in Africa where “time use” is nothing a matter to worry about. You just apologise for being a bit late and it ends there.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe once excused his tardiness thus: “I want to thank you all for coming. I was disjointed, we came back at midnight so I had two hours of sleep and naturally, I have the habit that if I have something that worries my mind, my mind sleeps on it and I constantly jump out of sleeps”, he apologised in March, for being late to attend the Kutama Centenary Celebrations in Zvimba in his home country.

So Malawi is not alone in the time curse. It belongs to Africa and Africans. And maybe John Mbiti, the internationally acclaimed Kenyan philosopher and theologian was only telling a painful truth when he controversially said that “Africans have no sense of time”.

Some western literature, coming from writers such Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German thinker, accused Africans (particularly those in sub-Saharan region) of being irrational and failing to develop and make any notable progress.

Mbiti collected these fragments of accusations and appropriated the philosophy therein into a forceful argument; that in general, Africans lack the sense of future time.

Mbiti says that Africans in the sub-Sahara have a two-dimensional phenomenon of time, a long past, a present and a short-term future.

This suggested that Africans regard as important only their day-to-day experiences- the now time. He argues that by contrast, “the western concept of time is non-phenomenal (mathematical) and linear, with an indefinite past, a present and an infinite future”.

Mbiti, is widely and heavily criticised on his conception of “African time”, particularly for its broad strokes, but in reply to many of his critics, he claims that he states clearly that there is indeed a future dimension of time, but people do not project their day-to-day thinking into a distant mathematical future.

But time has come (pun intended) for Africans to get on with the business of development, and not call “African time” as an excuse for incompetence.

Credit: mgafrica.com