Que Sera Sera

(My 14th Radio Christian Voice Commentary for 2015)

Woman weeping during the Garissa University College massacre in Kenya

I have been thinking this week about how we can make Africa a safer place. We are losing too many lives. It is almost as though we have made a death wish. Every day we are waking up to the news of hundreds being swept away by death. What has gone wrong?

The whole of last year was spent battling Ebola in West Africa. Thousands of lives were lost as a result of this epidemic. The number of infections is now going down but we must still sorrow with the many families that have lost loved ones due to this virus.

Then it was only a few days ago when we heard about the massacre of students at Garissa University College in Kenya by the Al Shabaab Islamic terrorist group. The pictures we saw of some of the 147 students who were murdered in cold blood were traumatising.

Well, that is west, north and east Africa. Further north, we have continued to hear of boats full of illegal immigrants trying to make their way from Africa into Europe capsizing in the Mediterranean Sea and killing almost all the hundreds who are on board.

Now closer to home, we continue to experience road carnage that is robbing us of thousands of lives. Just this week we received the news of a truck in Mazabuka that crashed into Shoprite killing over twenty individuals on board, including the driver.

My concern is that in Africa we seem to have become immune to these tragic events. We seem to think in terms of,

“Que Sera Sera
Whatever will be will be
The future's not ours to see
Que Sera Sera
What will be will be”.

Surely, that is wrong.

Visit our hospitals—especially our government ones. They have become a highway to the grave. Most deaths are clearly preventable but they still happen due to insufficient and unmotivated personnel, lack of medicines, and out-dated equipment. It is terrible!

In the West, one human death is one death too many. If one car malfunctions, they take thousands of cars back to the manufacturers for testing and repairs. If one airplane goes down due to a suicidal pilot, they immediately enforce new rules for pilots in the cockpit.

That is the way it should be. God has given us the cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28, which calls us to subdue to earth. This was given before sin and death came into the world. There is an even greater reason for us to subdue the earth now. We have death to deal with.

We know what is causing these deaths among us—religious extremism, poverty due to selfish political policies, drunken driving, poor roads, corruption, etc. God expects us to address these “yesterday”. One human death is one death too many—even in Africa!