If Gaddafi may be credited with one thing, it will be his foresight. How is this so, you might ask. If we go way back to be beginnings of this revolution in Tunisia, we would see that Gaddafi was one of the first to make a proposal aimed at ending the demonstrations in Tunisia. When the demonstrations began in Tunisia, it was largely about the small matter of unemployment. People had not started calling for the ouster of the corrupt Ben Ali and the world was still largely ignorant of what was going on in that country. During that early period, Gaddafi called for the Libyan border to be opened so that Tunisians may come and work in Libya. Perhaps he did this because he thought that that would be magnanimous of him. But again, if the border had been opened and had many unemployed Tunisians gone to work in Libya, Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak might still have been in power today. Gaddafi would more likely have been experiencing more peace than he currently enjoys, given that he appears to be hold up in Tripoly, the capital of Libya. The irony of it all is that instead of Tunisians coming to work in Libya as Gaddafi had hoped, it is now Libyans who are more likely to cross the border into Tunisia either as refugees or job seekers. There is a saying which I have often heard among Cameroonians and Nigerians which goes: "no condition is permanent." This saying may conjure optimism or pessimism depending on how you interpret it. I wonder what Gaddafi would make of the saying.
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