Congo Brazzaville : Slogans to justify corruption & immorality

 Mobali ya bossembo apesa a tala te, in Lingala or in English: a real man gives money to a woman without hesitation. The other is:  Ce n’est pas en admirant une femme qu’elle deviant enceinte, il faut agir, French or in English: it is by admiring a woman that she becomes pregnant. You have to act. The author of this last proverb is Ernest Claude Ndalla, aka Graille, a famous politician and proponent of Marxism in Congo Brazzaville. “Aide au pays amis” or assistance to friendly countries. This is a code word or an allegory, used during exams, mostly by weak and lazy students to ask or request, hardworking students to allow them to copy from their exam sheets or cheat.  Then there is: “lire pour comprendre et tricher pour reussir” or “study to understand and cheat to succeed”. This is used by almost all students at Marien Ngouabi University, who think that, there is nothing bad in cheating during exams.  There is this other slogan, mostly used by female students attending the School of Communications of the University (IST): “seule la cuisse libre” or in a word for word translation: “only the thigh renders academy freedom”. 

It is a euphemism used by female students to justify: sex for marks, which is generally accepted in the University and also within a section of the society as being normal. It is not surprising why Congo no longer has brilliant female journalist since Solange Samba Touyo and Arlette Soudan-Nonault left the profession. It is also common to see male University lecturers in Brazzaville brag openly how he has slept with number of female students and in return give them pass marks.  And worse, some even go the extra mile of marrying their female students as second or third wives. This is also perhaps the only country in the world where its future elite: male and female are not afraid or ashamed to cheat or say that, they slept with their lecturers to past to the next class or obtain their diplomas.