The utterly senseless devastation that terror visits on its victims is horrendous to behold. Scenes of women, children and babies dead or dying, some screaming and wailing, covered by others’ body parts, are bound to remain etched in the memories of those who behold them for the rest of their lives.

These are blind and indiscriminate acts that target no one and everybody at the same time; they are the handiwork of a diseased ideology that would see itself as a divine mission but in reality is a pathological political enterprise through which its authors hope to control the world for their own gratification.

That ambition is intricately interwoven with a jumble of religious hallucinations that intoxicate young minds that have some reason or other for being disillusioned by the here-and-now and thus seek solace in a hereafter of unmitigated bliss. It is a lethal cocktail of fanaticism, illusion and explosives in the hands of unscrupulous political masters of manipulation who imagine they can control the world someday.

For them to succeed – not in controlling the world but in sowing terror – they need certain conditions in their chosen areas of operation. Embedded corruption in any given society is fertile ground for them, because they can buy their way at every turn, and, as we know, for them money is no object; they have principals with deep pockets.

A dysfunctional political space, which may itself be the outcome of the corruption I’m talking about, is another helping hand.

Uniting these two conditions together produces phenomena like we continue to witness in East Africa (Al Shabaab) and West Africa (Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). And in Belgium (Islamic State).

You do not have to be Belgian to be singled out by terrorists, but it helps. Consider that at the end of last year, in the wake of the Paris attacks, it was widely known that Salah Abdeslam and his comrades had hatched their plans in Brussels and that that is where they had repaired to after the attacks, and that Abdeslam himself had on a couple of occasions slipped through security fingers, until at last police literally stumbled on him two weeks ago in Brussels!

Had this been in an African country, this would have been taken as being emblematic of the deep-rooted corruption and inefficiency on our long-suffering continent.

But Brussels has an African DNA of its own. Ever since a royal bandit called Leopold II, king of Belgium, took over the Congo as his personal estate and committed all types of unspeakable crimes against the people of that country in his plunder of its natural resources, Congo and Belgium were united at the hip.

The rot that Leopold incubated in the Congo has since matured and been repatriated back to Brussels, where cops on the street take petty bribes, like their counterparts in Kinshasa, and where glaring crimes are committed serially while a whole community and law enforcement look the other way.

Even the security agencies, we are told, don’t speak to each other, torn as they are along tribal lines – again just like in Africa – and much intelligence has not been shared.

The labels on the backs of their security force jackets as seen on TV — “Police” and “Politie” — give you the flavour of what it is like. All the streets have double signs, one in French, one in Flemish. It’s a dysfunctional state.

Calls for the dissolution of Belgium will not be heeded any time soon, just as we are not considering doing away with our tired, failing states in Africa. However, we may see the opportunity to get together – Belgium and ourselves – to see how we can help our fragile states to at least face up to the threat of terrorism.

We are all of us in trouble as the attacks on our countries have shown. The attacks on Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were effected with the connivance of some of our people, and “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite could not have gone round Kenya as if she were some pop star without some security agents taking “kitu kidogo” to allow their people to be massacred.

There is a lot of Belgium in Africa, and much of Africa in Belgium.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]