�A future life is a chance to live the good life, or at least, the acceptable life. This possibility of a good life can be secured only if the self is guaranteed a consistent access to the internal needs of the body. There is no self without these internal needs. Surely these are not the only needs of the self. But these needs are necessary conditions for the future of the self, including the future cultivation of other needs, other than the internal needs of the body. Where these internal needs are absent, however, there is (a) no future (b) no life chance and (c) no future with meaningful life chance. (a) (b) and (c) are anchored on the availabilities of fundamental goods.� 

The fundamental needs are food, shelter, clothing and health. 

Put syllogistically, the argument is this: 

The human self needs fundamental goods to maintain its selfhood. 

Famished bodies are deprived of these goods. 

African bodies are therefore denied of a future with life chances.� 

Justice, a cardinal principle of MAAT, ought to address the deplorable conditions of injustice manifest in a scene that I described in, Dekialula, �Waiting for Change,� November, 28, 2007.

�Pain. Death. Tears. Cries. Rocks and stones. Desperate mothers parting from their dead sons and daughters; priests chanting peace; the young impatiently throwing rocks and stones; the police responding with excessive force; leaders commanding away from the comfort of the palace; the rich and powerful dancing at the Sheraton; the desperate and alienated sharing a pot of tea and whisking away flies in tea shops; sexual diseases spreading in the shanty towns inside dark tin houses, these scenes are the features of contemporary Ethiopian lives. 

�These scenes were the marks of primitive regimes in pre-political times. Contemporary Ethiopia is indeed moving backwards towards a pre-political era.� 

Armored with MAAT, and most profoundly mediated by Justice, African future leaders, extracted from the citizenry, ought to internalize justice as a living feature of their heart as they address the perennial needs of the citizens. On this level, Justice can be articulated in several ways. I modestly suggest two modes

(1) Justice could be worked out textually by a writer/thinker. An example of the first is the world famous Plato, author of The Republic, who gave us a vision of a just polis; and in our time, John Rawls, the American philosopher, gave us his theory of Justice. These two are examples of justice from the top. 

(2) There is a mode of addressing justice as propelled by the heart. This mode takes place on the streets of the polis, where thousands and millions of people, should they so want, flood the streets, until after justice is served, and the pangs of hunger, the pereniality of poverty; deplorable inequalities, and the deaths of protestors are protested against, and people remain on the streets, facing death, until their demands are met by the powers to be. This is an example of justice from below, from the trenches. 

Change under the tutelage of a just leader, or better still organized by a social movement, must be tenacious, resolute and populated by numbers. Consider the following example. In the Ethiopian condition, millions of people live in tin houses, millions go without food and clothing, and yet 1% of the population dances away and eats away at fancy hotels. By the standards of MATT�s comportment, this pre-political condition is so unacceptable that it must be protested against by the people in revolt. The just way of responding to this condition is marching on the streets in millions and refusing to leave the space of revolt, unless a policy of transferring wealth from those who have it in excess to those who have nothing is readily enacted. Justice must be put on the march, lead by Just leaders of the people. 

A functional state lead by a leader with the organizing principle of justice must attend to the demands of the people and change their condition. ⌂ 

Teodros Kiros, PhD

August 6, 2007