Think about this. This week, results of Cameroon’s presidential elections held on October 12 are expected to be officially announced by the Constitutional Council today, October 27. Opposition leader Issa Chiroma Bakary is claiming victory in an attempt to pre-empt what he sees as a predetermined outcome. There is no doubt, however, that President Paul Biya, who at 92 is the world’s oldest Head of State and has ruled Cameroon since 1982, will be declared winner for another seven-year term. Opposition leaders have already been arrested ahead of today’s confirmation of result.
Not only Cameroon. The people of Cote D’Ivoire went to the polls at the weekend, but all four of President Alassane Ouattara’s rivals, Laurent Gbagbo, Charles Ble Goude, Guillaume Soro and Tidjane Thiam, were thrown off the ballot paper. Ouattara, who is 86 years old and has ruled the country since 2011 when French Foreign Legionnaires intervened in a civil war and helped him to oust sit-tight President Laurent Gbagbo, is himself sitting tight. He controversially amended the constitution to enable him seek a third in 2020 and he is now seeking a fourth term, prelude to a life presidency.
What African men can do, African women can do even better. President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania, who accidentally became president in 2021 when President John Magufuli fell sick and died, is set to seek re-election on Wednesday, October 29. But it is a foregone conclusion; she has jailed, exiled or banished all her opponents including Freeman Mbowe, Tundu Lissu and Luhaga Mpina. Victory for her and her Chama Cha Mapinduzi [CCM] party is certain after a very flawed process.
I once thought, naively, that the bag of sorry African rulership record was long ago filled to the brim and that there is no more space in it for anyone to aspire to. I was wrong there. It is the bag of saintly, visionary, patriotic, philosophical, poetic, thoughtful and anti-imperialist African rulers that was filled up long ago and has been gathering dust in African basements. We no longer have philosopher-kings like Kwame Nkrumah; no more great poets like Leopold Sedar Senghar Senghor; no more fierce patriots such as Hoary Boumedienne; no more saints such as Julius Nyerere; no more gentlemen such as Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; no more leaders who fought colonial and UDI rule in the bushes such as Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Agostinho Neto, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo and Sam Nujoma; no more men such as Kenneth Kaunda who devoted everything to end colonization and Apartheid; and certainly, no more men such as Nelson Mandela, the world’s greatest conscience of the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Instead, there is an ongoing race among African rulers to surpass the dynastic record of Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema, the Army Sergeant who seized power in a bloody coup in 1967, ruled his country for 38 years and whose son, Faure Gnassingbe, has been ruling it for 20 years now. Some African rulers of today aspire to exceed the personal violence of Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam. Not only did his colleagues and himself line up 60 top officials of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government in 1974 and executed them in one night, but Mengistu was said to be so temperamental that he once drew a revolver and fired at a colleague during a meeting of the military council, the Dergue.
In one sense, former Ghanaian President John Jerry Rawlings will count among the patriotic African rulers of old, but there was no forgetting how, as a young Air Force Lieutenant in June 1979, he lined up three former Ghanaian rulers, General Akwasi Afrifa, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and General Fred Akuffo, together with eight other military officers, and executed them in one night. Only exceeded perhaps by Liberia’s Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, who shot President William Tolbert when he was the sitting Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity [OAU, known today as AU]. Doe then lined up thirteen top officials of Tolbert’s government at the Monrovia beach, including Senate President Frank Tolbert, House Speaker Richard Henries, chairman of the ruling True Whig party Reginald Townsend, Supreme Court Chief Justice James Pierre, Justice Minister Joseph Chesson and Foreign Minister Cecil Dennis, and executed them in front of cheering crowds.
There is even an ongoing competition today to surpass, in repressive potential, Uganda’s Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, who in 1975 sent agents of his secret police, Bureau of State Research, into the campus of Makerere University to shoot students for embarrassing his guest, Muammar Gaddafi. Not to talk of the killing of Ugandan Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka in 1972, and the driving of a six-inch nail into the head of Archbishop of Kampala Janani Luwum in 1977.
Some African rulers today are in the race to surpass Central African Republic’s Jean Bedel Bokassa in illusions of sheer grandeur. Bokassa, who started out as an Army Sergeant, seized power from his own cousin David Dacko in 1966, declared himself Emperor and renamed his country Central African Empire. He set out to model himself after the early 19th century French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte; he even imported horses from France to stage a grand coronation but they died in the Bangui heat.
In sheer breaking of the African heart, some rulers are trying today to do better than Blaise Compaore, who in 1987 shot and killed the darling of African youths, President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. Even French President Francois Mitterrand, when he heard of it, said, “What a waste!” Weeks earlier when West African leaders gathered in Abuja for an ECOWAS meeting, thousands of young Nigerians abandoned every other leader and shouted, “Sankara! Sankara!” No wonder they killed him.
Apart from 92-year old Paul Biya and Uganda’s 81-year-old President Yoweri Museveni, who has been ruling his country since 1986, some African rulers are in hot contest to surpass President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who in the 1980s was reported to sleep for 15 hours a day. Even Bourguiba could not match the sleeping record of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, who was born in the 19th century. When he was removed from power in 1994 after ruling his country since 1966, Banda did not even know because he was completely senile.
Banda set more sorry African records that some rulers today are trying to emulate. In 1985, he was asked by an interviewer why, 19 years after Malawi’s independence from Britain, most of his permanent secretaries were Britons. He said, “Our African civil servants must learn to be patient! They must wait and learn!” Kamuzu Banda had no wife but he created an institution in the State House called Official Hostess, which was occupied by Cecilia Kadzamira. That office was First Lady, Chief of Staff, Minister and Deputy President combined.
To our north here in Niger Republic, President Seyni Kountche locked up his predecessor Diori Hammani in underground cells for 15 years until he went blind. Colonel Kountche was so repressive that his country only understood why when he died of brain tumour. They said, “So he was mad afterall!”
African rulers today who are ready to fracture and destroy their countries due to power struggle, as we are witnessing in Sudan, have many wannabes around the continent whose reckless gambits could easily endanger their countries’ survival. There are some rulers whose ambition is to surpass Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, to see a million people massing at Tahrir Square and demanding their ouster after three decades in power. Clearly, Uganda’s Museveni’s aim is to surpass Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in sheer longevity in power. Museveni has ruled for only 39 years and still has three years to go before he can catch up with Gaddafi. All of Uganda’s revolving-door rulers since the fall of Idi Amin in 1979 are long gone, including Professor Yusuf Lule, Godfrey Binaisa, General Tito Okello and President Milton Obote. Unlike Gaddafi, Museveni has not issued a Green Book containing his political philosophy, and he has not trained 200 young female bodyguards a la Gaddafi. He might need them, in case rebels one day pursue him into a gutter.
Even the gory end of Gaddafi might be preferable to what happened to Liberia’s Samuel Doe. When I saw a video of his capture by rebel leader Yormie Johnson in 1990, who cut off Doe’s ear and shoved it into the president’s mouth, I couldn’t sleep that night. I suspect that many sit-tight African rulers believe that posh guest houses are waiting to accommodate them in Abuja, just as Chad’s General Felix Malloum, Somalia’s President Siad Barre and Liberia’s Charles Taylor were all hosted in Lagos and Calabar guest houses after their overthrows. Only that Nigeria is not a reliable host. Despite guarantees of his safety by a host of African rulers, we seized Charles Taylor near our Chad border and handed him over to International Criminal Court at The Hague. That is why Benjamin Netanyahu will be reluctant to seek shelter here.
