�Lisbon lies in ruins, while in Paris they dance,� Voltaire wrote of the 1755 Portugal earthquake. The contradiction arrests and startles.

Barely a month into 2010, Haiti lies ruins.� President Wade of Senegal offers displaced Haitians land.� Can an earthquake succeed where Garvey�s return to Africa movement failed?

Wait a minute!� In 2009 President Wade built a 27 million dollar statue, 37% of profits from tourism will go to him, because the idea was his he says.� When did the corrupt start taking care of the displaced?

Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, Dakar wants to bury its 27 million dollar statue lie in Haiti.�

In a time of crisis when those suffering are dying of thirst, it is the thankless job of the discerning poet, writer, or intellectual to point out that the mirage will not turn into water.� It is no surprise then that, Kaasa - an African blogger in reaction to my essay on Kenya�s dire prospects - concluded that African intellectuals are a depressing lot.� And that we are in dire need of hugs.

Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissau revolutionary, once said, �Tell no lies, claim no small victories.��

The intellectual and the writer whose ear is tuned to irony have to point out that Wade�s offer for land cannot be claimed as a victory for Pan-African solidarity.� Not when he is building multi-million dollar monuments while over 50 per cent of his people live below the poverty line.�

Look, a Negro!'� a small white child exclaimed, pointing at Frantz Fanon.� I echo him and say:

Look, a Haitian child! Adopt! Adopt them all!

Look, a homeless Haitian!� Oh my dear, break open your piggy bank.

Look, a Haitian on a boat. Oh dear, close our borders! Do not free them, do not give them back their land, and do not give them back their economy.

President Obama, Look! Haiti in ruins!� Eh, Ladies and Gentlemen, We are sending in more troops, more aid, and Bill Clinton and George Bush!

The intellectual has to ask why we expect American ex-presidents to do more for the world out of office than when they held the most powerful position on earth.

Bush could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives simply by not starting an illegal war � by doing so little.�

And Clinton?� When Rwanda cried out he could have done more than argue that acts of genocide were not the same as genocide.

People change it can be said and both Bush and Clinton might have learned from their past.� I counter that it does not mean they want to engage history, or to change the present.�

Haiti has seen a history of continuous subterfuge from Western countries since the revolution that ended slavery in 1804.� In 2004, when were supposed to be celebrating the bicentennial of the revolution, a coup reminded us that history is never far behind.� Aristide, the democratically elected president was ousted.� There was smoke to suggest that the Bush administration aided the otherwise rag tag group of thugs that took power.

But the fire has been burning since 1804.

Peter Brooks in the New York Times contrasts the 1989 earthquake in California in which �63 people were killed with the Haitian earthquake in which between 45,000 and 50,000 people� had died.� Both earthquakes measured at a magnitude of 7.0.� It is the intellectuals job to ask the simple question - why the disparity?

For Brooks the answer is poverty, �It�s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services.�� Again the question, Why? We must go back, asking why until we hit the bed of history from where the past continues to act on the present.�

So when Sakorzy visits Haiti and promises French aid as he did this past February, the intellectual has to remind us of his 2007 Africa visit where he denied history.� In Wade�s Dakar, he said that while the colonizer �stripped the colonized of his personality, of his liberty, of his land, of the fruit of his labor� he also �built bridges, roads, hospitals, dispensaries and schools�not all the colonialists were thieves or exploiters.��

For him what the French did and took has been balanced by the devastation, poverty and trauma they left behind.� Sarkozy will not give back what the French took in Haiti or Africa even in the name of globalization and global equality.�

To point to this history is not to find an excuse. As Frantz Fanon wrote: �The past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today."

But to understand Haiti today, we have to go back to the French Revolution and the slaves who seized on that contradiction that �Liberty, Equality, Fraternity� was only for white men.

And what a terrible price the slaves had to pay for their liberty -� an international embargo, 150 million gold francs paid out until 1947 not to mention the productivity and lives lost. What happened then very much affects the diet of the Haitian today.

�Turn your face violently towards things as they exist now,� urged Antonio Gramsci, the Italian theorist, on the role of the intellectual.� But not in a vacuum where the solution to Haiti is simply to break into our children�s piggy banks for aid.�

The job of the intellectual is not to report happy news, or find hope, or find the truth.� The truth is for colonialists, nationalists, war-mongers and bible and Koran thumpers.

The intellectual points out the contradiction of using an earthquake to bury history because it will matter tomorrow. Because one who dreams of a mirage still dies of thirst.�

Now, Kaasa, where is that hug?

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, is a writer and political analyst, the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009), Hurling Words at Consciousness  (AWP, poems 2006),a Foreign Policy in Focus contributor, and a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, , where this commentary first appeared. Click here to reach Mukoma Wa Ngugi.