Politicians in Africa are orphans trembling in a tumultuous 21stCentury. In the early 1980s, Governor Sam Mbakwe of Imo State cried out for British colonial officials to return to clean up Nigeria. Prime Minister David Cameron later lavishlycharacterised Nigeria as ‘’fantastically corrupt’’.
In 2020 several leaders of Nigeria’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), called for intervention by the United Nations, United States and International Criminal Court (ICC) to discipline President Muhammad Buhari’s administration. Bobby Wine, Uganda’s main challenger to President Yoweri Museveni in the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections, called on the same foreign powers to curb Museveni’s violence against opposition politicians.
In Sudan and Algeria, mass protests followed the 2011 fall of military dictators in Tunisia and Egypt to topple Al-Bashir and Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika from decades of rule, respectively.Angry unemployed youths became huge pools of relentless demonstrations. Young women stepped forward as vibrant protesters, often provoked by politicians cynically invoking injunction in Islam to deny women rights to education, jobs outside homes, and participation in politics.
In Algeria the ruling National Liberation Front, FLN, had in1992 accused Islamists of deceptively using rituals of democracy as cover for winning elections at local and national levels in order to establish domination by a religious fraternity similar to what occurred in Iran. The ruling military elite and the Islamists fought a bloody war of mutual destruction. In 2020, huge demonstrations demanding a total purge of FNL’s ruling elite had echoes of this legacy.
As angry unemployed youths that would not be intimidated by deaths of colleagues demanded governance that serves the welfare of the people (from Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt in North Africa to streets in Lagos, Khartoum or Nairobi), Africanpoliticians were silent; farming in shadows.
In South Africa and Kenya, politicians are being bashed withaccusations of corruption. Against widespread cynicism,President Uhuru Kenyatta has sworn to clean what critics view as political and administration pigsties. President Cyril Ramaphosa is being challenged to fight corruption by throwing into dungeons top leaders of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Some have diverted vaccines for combating a raging COVID-19.
The offending leaders of the ANC have apparently not learnt from the corruption which gripped Ghana from Kwame Nkrumah’s government from 1957. Jerry Rawlings executed five of his corrupt successors. In Nigeria, a cabal shamelessly kidnapped the mother of the Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to stop her anti-corruption flames in Nigeria.
Africa’s politicians have watched their models in Europe and the United States of America in tumult. President Donald Trumpet matched their sordid records. In the November 2020 elections,he threatened to refuse to leave office if he lost to candidate JoeBiden. He repeatedly claimed that the opposition Democrats were planning to rig the election; exposing wounds hidden by America’s Cold War lies.
President Trump intimidated and bullied officials from States controlled by his Republican Party to award him fake votes. On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of his supporters invaded the highest legislature in the land, ‘Capitol’’, shouting ‘’HANG MIKE PENCE’’, Trump’s Vice-President for enabling Members of Congress to endorse Biden as the newly elected president. His appeal for a military coup was blocked. Their model was wading in political sin and filth.
Trump’s African heroes have used tactics ranging from chasing people away from voting sites; snatching ballot boxes and either declaring that the incumbent had won by gaining 99 per cent of votes; not counting votes from areas where opposition partiesare popular or murdering opponents. In his youth, two Kennedy brothers and Governor George Wallace of Alabama were shot inpublic view.
In Germany and France, measures by governing elite to deny the middle classes and working classes social welfare benefits previously used to lure them away from supporting socialistparties (friendly to communist China and the former Soviet Union), provoked massive protests. Demagogues rushed in to arouse violent hatred of immigrants; scaring ruling elite with the prospect of Fascists winning power. Democrats terminated mass demonstrations with ‘Virus Terrorism’.
Donald Trump’s “America-First’’ tribalism was already discredited in Africa. The 1994 ethnic genocide in Rwanda; post-election violence in Kenya; horrendous ethno-religious military violence in Idi Amin’s regime; kleptocratic and nepotistic majority ethnic dictatorship in Cameroun, Togo, Guinea Conakry and Zimbabwe had provoked either secessionist rebellion. Economic or religious militias rose from Mauritania to northeast Nigeria.
Tayib Saleh, a Sudanese writer once lamented about a “Season of migration to the North.” Politicians who produced visions, notably: Kwame Nkrumah proclaiming a United States of African; Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure,Amilcar Cabral, Abdel Nasser and Obafemi Awolowoadvocating socialist Africa, have all gone. Nyerere vented a novel “Democratic One Party” electoral model. Kleptocracy grips the orphans: a season of vision looms.
Professor Oculi writes from Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
