When we last visited the Republic of New Afrika, Mississippi, things weren’t going so well.

 Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba ran for office promising to make Jackson, Mississippi, “the most radical city on the planet.” The son of a radical father who had declared himself a leader in the Republic of New Afrika, a separatist black nationalist breakaway country located in Mississippi and four other states, Lumumba was eminently qualified for the job of radicalizing Jackson.

Even Lumumba’s last name came from Patrice Lumumba: a Communist black nationalist.

“I plan to make Jackson, Mississippi the most radical city on the planet,” Chokwe Antar Lumumba told a cheering crowd while his supporters chanted, “Free the land!”

“By any means necessary,” Mayor Lumumba responded with RNA’s secessionist slogan, and concluded his speech with Karl Marx’s quote, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

But it would turn out that people in Jackson had plenty to lose.

A few months ago, the water went out in the city for a month after a winter storm wrecked the decaying infrastructure.

Mayor Lumumba blamed it on white people. “I do think that if we’re being honest, it’s a matter of race.”

While people spent weeks hauling water in buckets to flush their toilets and boiling water when they did have it, the media turned on the outrage and blamed racism, but no one asked the socialist black nationalist mayor why he let it happen. Or why he kept promising radical change for years while pregnant women and children were told not to drink the water in Jackson.

Meanwhile the water treatment facilities were only being staffed at 50%.

While Lumumba was planning a socialist makeover for the city, the actual civic infrastructure was being neglected because it was much less glamorous than socialist cooperatives.

You’ll never guess what’s happening now.

Staffing shortages, system issues and multiple equipment failures have led to a crisis where Jackson, Mississippi, residents have lost running water for an indefinite amount of time, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Lumumba attributed the city’s water crisis to a lack of maintenance over the last few decades, adding that it will cost billions of dollars to fix the issue.

Lumumba estimated it would cost at least $1 billion to fix the water distribution system and billions more to resolve the issue altogether.

“The residents of Jackson are worthy of a dependable system, and we look forward to a coalition of the willing who will join us in the fight to improve this system that’s been failing for decades,” Lumumba said.

Maybe this should have been Lumumba’s priority instead of his black nationalist nonsense? But why bother? No one’s going to hold him accountable. They’ll just blame systemic racism. Much as they did in Flint.

Even when the EPA’s own people say that it’s Lumumba’s fault.

However, Carol Kemker, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, told the Mississippi Free Press in an Aug. 26 interview that the facility’s system were likely to fail, in no small part due to the Lumumba administration dragging its feet on efforts to recruit qualified water operators.

“They could be reaching out to technical colleges, they could be holding recruitment events, they could be scheduling interviews, they could be putting in advertisements,” Kemker told Nick Judin. “(This is) what we do when we recruit. We’re not seeing those types of things.”

All hail New Afrika.