The PJ Effect : Inside Africa
The PJ Effect : Inside Africa
Our leaders, since the demise of the slave trade and the collapse of colonial rule, have made a solemn vow that they will remain locked in their wedlock with political power, for better and for worse, until death do them part. A number of them have succeeded in dying holding power after inflicting incredible depths of havoc. A few failed.
Today, some are on course on the continent.
That shameful vow by the ‘monarchs in democracy’ is among the reasons some white-skinned people cannot let go of their conviction that all black-skinned people are inspired monkeys walking erect, born to attract global pity, enlisted on the register of the ecosystem to entertain, assigned to the jungle to inflict sleepless nights on the globe, brought up to master smuggled tricks and trained to mimic imported ideas.
These are examples
Most of the long-serving dictators have nothing to show for their years of misrule except stolen public funds and the blood of their critics.
Mobutu Sese Seko, former military dictator of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was a symbol of embezzlement. Some called his rule “kleptocracy”, coined from the word “kleptomania” which means a mental illness that drives someone to steal things. According to Transparency International, he embezzled over 5 billion US dollars.
His daughter, Yaki, had a lavish wedding ceremony with a wedding cake worth 65 thousand US dollars, US$ 70, 000 wedding gown and US$ 3 million worth of jewels with a giant fireworks display. He established a one-party state in which the nation suffered from uncontrolled inflation, a large debt and massive currency devaluations. In 1997, rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila ousted and drove him out of the country at a time he was suffering from advanced prostate cancer. He died three months later in Morocco and was buried in Rabat, in a Christian cemetery known as ‘Pax’.
Philip Gourevitch, American author and journalist, in a book on the Rwanda genocide entitled “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families”, describes Mobutu as “the dinosaur…the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation.”
Nigeria
Sanni Abacha, another tyrant who ruled Nigeria with the worst ever iron fist from 1993 to 1998, died suddenly in office under bizarre circumstances. He wielded absolute power after he issued a decree in 1994 that placed his government above the jurisdiction of the courts. He instituted another decree that gave him the right to detain anyone for up to three months without trial.
His rule was largely characterised by looting and gross violation of human rights that included oppression of the press, hunting after pro-democracy activists and extrajudicial killing of celebrated writer, Ken Saro Wiwa, among other Nigerians. He was listed in 2004 as the fourth most corrupt leader in history. In March, 2014, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that it had frozen 458 million dollars believed to have been illegally obtained by Abacha and some corrupt officials. And in August the same year, the same department announced the largest forfeiture in the history of the department― the return to the Nigerian government of 480 million dollars looted by Abacha in only four years.
The US Assistant Attorney-General, Leslie Caldwell, noted: “Rather than serve his country, General Abacha used his public office in Nigeria to loot millions of dollars, engaging in brazen acts of kleptocracy. With this judgment, we have forfeited $480 million in corruption proceeds that can be used for the benefit of the Nigerian people. Through the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division denies kleptocrats like Abacha the fruits of their crimes, and protects the U.S. financial system from money laundering. In coordination with our partners in Jersey, France and the United Kingdom, we are helping to end this chapter of corruption and flagrant abuse of office.”
Liberia
Liberia’s Samuel Doe suffered a worse fate when his ten-year oppressive rule came to a bloody end in 1990. He overthrew and killed President William Tolbert Jr. Many of Tolbert’s supporters who failed to flee into exile died at Doe’s orders. He enjoyed some decisive support from the United States because of his anti-Soviet position during the Cold War. That support waned when the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent.
The United States grew embittered with the swelling corruption of Doe’s government. As public anger continued to mount against his rule, the United States also began cutting critical foreign aid to him. Finally, he became vulnerable. In 1989, rebels entered Liberia through Ivory Coast. He was captured…tortured… interrogated…mutilated…executed...exposed naked in the streets of Monrovia...exhumed…reburied...videotaped…and shown to the world.
Uganda
Idi Amin, Africa’s grandpa of seasoned tyrants, killed a number of high-profile and ordinary people (Ugandan citizens and foreign nationals) ranging from one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand, according to international observers and human rights groups.
He is the most pronounced unrestrained political terror responsible for perhaps the worst nightmare to have hit the Buckingham Palace from Africa. Nepotism, gross economic mismanagement, ethnic cleansing and political repression found their global headquarters in Uganda at his time. He had a long title which was announced to the world on Radio Uganda: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshall Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire.”
In 1978, the Uganda-Tanzania War broke out when he attempted to take over the Kagera Region of Tanzania. Stiff opposition within Uganda against his rule enlarged the existing scale of general aggression against him. His eight-year regime cracked and collapsed under the mounting pressure of the cross-border war with Tanzania and the nationwide armed dissent at home. He fled to Libya and, then, to Saudi Arabia where he lived for 23 years.
He never expressed remorse for how he led Uganda, maintaining in interviews he granted during his exile that Uganda needed him. In 1989, he attempted to return to Uganda apparently to lead an armed group against the government. He had reached Kinshasa, Zaire, before Mobutu Sese Seko forced him to return to Saudi Arabia.
In July 2003, one of his wives, Madina, reported that he was in a coma and near death from kidney failure. She pleaded with Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, to allow Amin return to Uganda for the remainder of his life. President Museveni replied, saying Amin would have to “answer for his sins” the moment he was brought back. His family decided to his disconnect life support and so he died at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in August, 2003. He was buried Ruwais Cemetery in Jeddah in a simple grave without any fanfare.
“His regime goes down in the scale of Pol Pot as one of the worst of all African regimes,” remarked David Owen, former British Foreign Secretary, who confirmed he had proposed having Amin assassinated.
Africa’s new presidents for life
In an era where we only find dictators from the other continents in history books, it is outrageous we still find sit-tight African tyrants in a supposed democratic government, even shamelessly speaking from behind the lectern on the podium of the United Nations General Assembly today. And only the advanced nations, because they truly understand and religiously practise civilised democracy, can tolerate the flag of empty pride hoisted everywhere by the continent’s long-time political oppressors.
The end results of the shameful and regrettable life led by some departed dictators, most of whom only specialised in dragging their countries to the slaughterhouse, should have offered some useful lessons to the leaders dangling in the grips of a ridiculous appetite for power and wealth, who parade themselves today on the continent as economic messiahs and have continued to cling to misrule for decades.
Today, there are a number of long-serving presidents whose bid to extend their grip on power for many more years has remained the centre of civil unrest and, in some cases, bloodshed. Some of them started their uninterrupted rule long before America’s Ronald Reagan was ever sworn in, yet the flames of greed in their eyes are raging more dangerously.
Paul Kagame of Rwanda took office in 2000. He is popular because of his widely acclaimed commitment to the country’s national development programme called Vision 2020, aimed at uniting the country since its rebirth after the 1994 genocide and transforming it from a highly impoverished nation into a middle income country. But Amnesty International and Freedom House among other human rights organisations claim Kagame hamstrings opposition by suppressing demonstrations and arresting opposition leaders and journalists. He has been in office for about sixteen years and is seeking a third term to possibly stay in power until 2034.
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who was involved in the rebellions that ousted Idi Amin and whose hint of stewardship accountability prevented Amin from returning on life support to Uganda in 2003, himself has ruled for nearly 30 years of human rights record stained and soaked with blood, according to Amnesty International. Term limits were scrapped under his rule in 2005 and he is campaigning for re-election in 2016.
The ambition of President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi to run for a third term in office has robbed many promising children of their lives and bright future in the armed violence that greeted his bid in 2015. Independent media houses were shut down, with many political opponents fleeing the country among one hundred and fifty thousand Burundians.
Joseph Kabila of the DR Congo took charge of the country ten days after the assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, in 2001. He has been re-elected twice since taking over about fifteen years ago amid alleged electoral irregularities. In 2012, catholic bishops in the country condemned the last elections, citing “treachery, lies and terror”. In 2015, protests led by students from the University of Kinshasa broke out, leaving 42 people dead in a clash with police. The development came after it was announced that a law had been proposed to allow Kabila to remain in power until a national consensus can be conducted.
Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville has tasted political power for a period of 31 years marred by alleged wasteful spending of state funds particularly on the part of his son, Christel Nguesso. Last October, a referendum made it legal for him to run for reelection in 2016.
Senegal’s leader sets new record
President Macky Sall of Senegal is Africa’s hero of the moment. He has distinguished himself as Africa’s new Mandela. He just did what another African Methuselah and Secretary General of modern dictatorship, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, has refused to do. He embraced the honour rejected by Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema and Libya’s iconic ruler, Muammar Gaddafi.
Macky Sall of the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), like Nelson Mandela, went through trials on the road to the presidency. And, like Mandela, and unlike the many sit-tight dictators who seized power on silver platter, he is not taking his nation to ransom. In 2007, he came into conflict with President Abdoulaye Wade when, as the President of the Senegal’s National Assembly, he called the President’s son, Karim, for a hearing in the National Assembly regarding some construction sites in Dakar for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Summit scheduled to take place in the capital. It provoked the enmity of President Wade and of his loyalists within the PDS.
He got punished. The Steering Committee of the PDS abolished his position as Deputy Secretary General, which is the party’s second most powerful position, and submitted a bill to the National Assembly that would reduce the term of the President of the National Assembly from 5 years to 1 year. In 2008, the Assembly voted to reduce the term. It was approved by President Wade, and in November that same year he was dismissed as President of the National Assembly, with 111 votes in favour of his removal and 22 against it.
He resigned from the party― automatically losing his seat in the National Assembly, his seat as Fatick’s Municipal Council and his post as Mayor of Fatick. He was also accused of peddling divisive personal initiatives within the party and reportedly committed acts aimed at undermining the image of the party and the country when he visited the Senate of France and appeared at the United States Democratic Party’s 2008 Convention.
He founded his own party, the Alliance for the Republic, in December 2008. In 2009, he was accused of money laundering by the Interior Ministry but was not prosecuted because the government failed to back its claim with evidence. He was re-elected in 2009 to his former post as Mayor in 2009. And in 2012, he defeated President Wade in a run-off, becoming the country’s fourth elected president.
Only last week, he made Africa proud by proposing to cut his term in office from seven years to five years, to “strengthen democracy” as his office said. President Macky Sall, a 54-year-old geological engineer, is known for his unselfish grip on power. When he voluntarily resigned as the country’s Prime Minister in 2007, he said he was proud of what he had accomplished as Prime Minister.
He is qualified to join Nelson Mandela, who even though was the most tortured victim of South Africa’s apartheid did not seek re-election after a successful first term in office as President, in the Hall of Fame. Nigeria’s General Abdusalami Alhaji Abubakar deserves a place in the same hall for successfully leading his country from decades of harsh military rule to democracy.
In spite of all that he endured, Macky Sall is satisfied so soon with the little he has received from life. Unlike the life-time democratic rulers whose passion is to earn a bad name for the continent, Sall has consolidated the budding trust some observers are beginning develop that Africans are not monkeys only good at robbing and pulling the trigger.
He has earned a smile from Mandela from his resting place at Qunu in South Africa, and he is a mentor to the disappointing ambassadors we have in the shameless, power-smashed dictators, the inside enemies who have refused to learn and have refused to see the large-scale havoc they are wrecking every day on the future of Africa.
Time to reintroduce democracy
Democracy, no doubt, was hurriedly introduced before the foundation of patriotism was sufficiently laid in the political wild jungle of Africa. That explains why many Africans, our leaders included, carry a distorted idea of democracy in their heads to basically mean voting in a peaceful manner through the ballot for an individual or a political party to do wholesale looting in a peaceful manner through the brain.
That explains why the misguided ‘democrats’ and the hardened ‘kleptocrats’ today far outnumber the genuine ‘patriots’ on the continent. That explains why democracy has overtaken patriotism with an overwhelming gap bigger than the distance that separates Earth from Pluto.
For too many Africans, democracy is all about individuals and parties in opposition seeing everything wrong only in unfair elections but after when they have won power seeing absolutely nothing wrong in repeating the same ills they once accused the incumbent individuals or ruling parties of perpetrating. For them, democracy is only when the electorate live under any leader not dressed in the military camouflage.
Wole Soyinka says the worst form of democracy is better than the best form of military rule. I agree. But I tell you, there are elected leaders in political suits who are worse tyrants than any successful coup plotter in living memory. There are ‘smart soldiers’ who have taken off the camouflage and have hijacked the political suits and the smocks to run a full-time military regime under the wraps of democracy.
The distorted meaning of democracy explains why the continent, for more than half a century, has remained a well-situated homeland for these four naturalised ‘investors’― directionless leadership, executive and grassroots corruption, poverty and political violence.
In most parts of the continent, democracy in practical terms is ‘demo-crises’. A distorted democracy breeds an assorted ‘demo-crisis’. And that is what we see all around us!
More than a half of Africa’s problems are as a result of bad leadership. And if its leaders simply would do the right thing, and not their own thing, and if the electorate would vote for the right people, more than half of the continent’s problems are solved already
Credit:Starr Fm
Our leaders, since the demise of the slave trade and the collapse of colonial rule, have made a solemn vow that they will remain locked in their wedlock with political power, for better and for worse, until death do them part. A number of them have succeeded in dying holding power after inflicting incredible depths of havoc. A few failed.
Today, some are on course on the continent.
That shameful vow by the ‘monarchs in democracy’ is among the reasons some white-skinned people cannot let go of their conviction that all black-skinned people are inspired monkeys walking erect, born to attract global pity, enlisted on the register of the ecosystem to entertain, assigned to the jungle to inflict sleepless nights on the globe, brought up to master smuggled tricks and trained to mimic imported ideas.
These are examples
Most of the long-serving dictators have nothing to show for their years of misrule except stolen public funds and the blood of their critics.
Mobutu Sese Seko, former military dictator of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was a symbol of embezzlement. Some called his rule “kleptocracy”, coined from the word “kleptomania” which means a mental illness that drives someone to steal things. According to Transparency International, he embezzled over 5 billion US dollars.
His daughter, Yaki, had a lavish wedding ceremony with a wedding cake worth 65 thousand US dollars, US$ 70, 000 wedding gown and US$ 3 million worth of jewels with a giant fireworks display. He established a one-party state in which the nation suffered from uncontrolled inflation, a large debt and massive currency devaluations. In 1997, rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila ousted and drove him out of the country at a time he was suffering from advanced prostate cancer. He died three months later in Morocco and was buried in Rabat, in a Christian cemetery known as ‘Pax’.
Philip Gourevitch, American author and journalist, in a book on the Rwanda genocide entitled “We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families”, describes Mobutu as “the dinosaur…the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation.”
Nigeria
Sanni Abacha, another tyrant who ruled Nigeria with the worst ever iron fist from 1993 to 1998, died suddenly in office under bizarre circumstances. He wielded absolute power after he issued a decree in 1994 that placed his government above the jurisdiction of the courts. He instituted another decree that gave him the right to detain anyone for up to three months without trial.
His rule was largely characterised by looting and gross violation of human rights that included oppression of the press, hunting after pro-democracy activists and extrajudicial killing of celebrated writer, Ken Saro Wiwa, among other Nigerians. He was listed in 2004 as the fourth most corrupt leader in history. In March, 2014, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that it had frozen 458 million dollars believed to have been illegally obtained by Abacha and some corrupt officials. And in August the same year, the same department announced the largest forfeiture in the history of the department― the return to the Nigerian government of 480 million dollars looted by Abacha in only four years.
The US Assistant Attorney-General, Leslie Caldwell, noted: “Rather than serve his country, General Abacha used his public office in Nigeria to loot millions of dollars, engaging in brazen acts of kleptocracy. With this judgment, we have forfeited $480 million in corruption proceeds that can be used for the benefit of the Nigerian people. Through the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division denies kleptocrats like Abacha the fruits of their crimes, and protects the U.S. financial system from money laundering. In coordination with our partners in Jersey, France and the United Kingdom, we are helping to end this chapter of corruption and flagrant abuse of office.”
Liberia
Liberia’s Samuel Doe suffered a worse fate when his ten-year oppressive rule came to a bloody end in 1990. He overthrew and killed President William Tolbert Jr. Many of Tolbert’s supporters who failed to flee into exile died at Doe’s orders. He enjoyed some decisive support from the United States because of his anti-Soviet position during the Cold War. That support waned when the collapse of the Soviet Union became imminent.
The United States grew embittered with the swelling corruption of Doe’s government. As public anger continued to mount against his rule, the United States also began cutting critical foreign aid to him. Finally, he became vulnerable. In 1989, rebels entered Liberia through Ivory Coast. He was captured…tortured… interrogated…mutilated…executed...exposed naked in the streets of Monrovia...exhumed…reburied...videotaped…and shown to the world.
Uganda
Idi Amin, Africa’s grandpa of seasoned tyrants, killed a number of high-profile and ordinary people (Ugandan citizens and foreign nationals) ranging from one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand, according to international observers and human rights groups.
He is the most pronounced unrestrained political terror responsible for perhaps the worst nightmare to have hit the Buckingham Palace from Africa. Nepotism, gross economic mismanagement, ethnic cleansing and political repression found their global headquarters in Uganda at his time. He had a long title which was announced to the world on Radio Uganda: “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshall Alhaji Dr. Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire.”
In 1978, the Uganda-Tanzania War broke out when he attempted to take over the Kagera Region of Tanzania. Stiff opposition within Uganda against his rule enlarged the existing scale of general aggression against him. His eight-year regime cracked and collapsed under the mounting pressure of the cross-border war with Tanzania and the nationwide armed dissent at home. He fled to Libya and, then, to Saudi Arabia where he lived for 23 years.
He never expressed remorse for how he led Uganda, maintaining in interviews he granted during his exile that Uganda needed him. In 1989, he attempted to return to Uganda apparently to lead an armed group against the government. He had reached Kinshasa, Zaire, before Mobutu Sese Seko forced him to return to Saudi Arabia.
In July 2003, one of his wives, Madina, reported that he was in a coma and near death from kidney failure. She pleaded with Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, to allow Amin return to Uganda for the remainder of his life. President Museveni replied, saying Amin would have to “answer for his sins” the moment he was brought back. His family decided to his disconnect life support and so he died at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in August, 2003. He was buried Ruwais Cemetery in Jeddah in a simple grave without any fanfare.
“His regime goes down in the scale of Pol Pot as one of the worst of all African regimes,” remarked David Owen, former British Foreign Secretary, who confirmed he had proposed having Amin assassinated.
Africa’s new presidents for life
In an era where we only find dictators from the other continents in history books, it is outrageous we still find sit-tight African tyrants in a supposed democratic government, even shamelessly speaking from behind the lectern on the podium of the United Nations General Assembly today. And only the advanced nations, because they truly understand and religiously practise civilised democracy, can tolerate the flag of empty pride hoisted everywhere by the continent’s long-time political oppressors.
The end results of the shameful and regrettable life led by some departed dictators, most of whom only specialised in dragging their countries to the slaughterhouse, should have offered some useful lessons to the leaders dangling in the grips of a ridiculous appetite for power and wealth, who parade themselves today on the continent as economic messiahs and have continued to cling to misrule for decades.
Today, there are a number of long-serving presidents whose bid to extend their grip on power for many more years has remained the centre of civil unrest and, in some cases, bloodshed. Some of them started their uninterrupted rule long before America’s Ronald Reagan was ever sworn in, yet the flames of greed in their eyes are raging more dangerously.
Paul Kagame of Rwanda took office in 2000. He is popular because of his widely acclaimed commitment to the country’s national development programme called Vision 2020, aimed at uniting the country since its rebirth after the 1994 genocide and transforming it from a highly impoverished nation into a middle income country. But Amnesty International and Freedom House among other human rights organisations claim Kagame hamstrings opposition by suppressing demonstrations and arresting opposition leaders and journalists. He has been in office for about sixteen years and is seeking a third term to possibly stay in power until 2034.
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who was involved in the rebellions that ousted Idi Amin and whose hint of stewardship accountability prevented Amin from returning on life support to Uganda in 2003, himself has ruled for nearly 30 years of human rights record stained and soaked with blood, according to Amnesty International. Term limits were scrapped under his rule in 2005 and he is campaigning for re-election in 2016.
The ambition of President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi to run for a third term in office has robbed many promising children of their lives and bright future in the armed violence that greeted his bid in 2015. Independent media houses were shut down, with many political opponents fleeing the country among one hundred and fifty thousand Burundians.
Joseph Kabila of the DR Congo took charge of the country ten days after the assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, in 2001. He has been re-elected twice since taking over about fifteen years ago amid alleged electoral irregularities. In 2012, catholic bishops in the country condemned the last elections, citing “treachery, lies and terror”. In 2015, protests led by students from the University of Kinshasa broke out, leaving 42 people dead in a clash with police. The development came after it was announced that a law had been proposed to allow Kabila to remain in power until a national consensus can be conducted.
Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville has tasted political power for a period of 31 years marred by alleged wasteful spending of state funds particularly on the part of his son, Christel Nguesso. Last October, a referendum made it legal for him to run for reelection in 2016.
Senegal’s leader sets new record
President Macky Sall of Senegal is Africa’s hero of the moment. He has distinguished himself as Africa’s new Mandela. He just did what another African Methuselah and Secretary General of modern dictatorship, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, has refused to do. He embraced the honour rejected by Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema and Libya’s iconic ruler, Muammar Gaddafi.
Macky Sall of the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS), like Nelson Mandela, went through trials on the road to the presidency. And, like Mandela, and unlike the many sit-tight dictators who seized power on silver platter, he is not taking his nation to ransom. In 2007, he came into conflict with President Abdoulaye Wade when, as the President of the Senegal’s National Assembly, he called the President’s son, Karim, for a hearing in the National Assembly regarding some construction sites in Dakar for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Summit scheduled to take place in the capital. It provoked the enmity of President Wade and of his loyalists within the PDS.
He got punished. The Steering Committee of the PDS abolished his position as Deputy Secretary General, which is the party’s second most powerful position, and submitted a bill to the National Assembly that would reduce the term of the President of the National Assembly from 5 years to 1 year. In 2008, the Assembly voted to reduce the term. It was approved by President Wade, and in November that same year he was dismissed as President of the National Assembly, with 111 votes in favour of his removal and 22 against it.
He resigned from the party― automatically losing his seat in the National Assembly, his seat as Fatick’s Municipal Council and his post as Mayor of Fatick. He was also accused of peddling divisive personal initiatives within the party and reportedly committed acts aimed at undermining the image of the party and the country when he visited the Senate of France and appeared at the United States Democratic Party’s 2008 Convention.
He founded his own party, the Alliance for the Republic, in December 2008. In 2009, he was accused of money laundering by the Interior Ministry but was not prosecuted because the government failed to back its claim with evidence. He was re-elected in 2009 to his former post as Mayor in 2009. And in 2012, he defeated President Wade in a run-off, becoming the country’s fourth elected president.
Only last week, he made Africa proud by proposing to cut his term in office from seven years to five years, to “strengthen democracy” as his office said. President Macky Sall, a 54-year-old geological engineer, is known for his unselfish grip on power. When he voluntarily resigned as the country’s Prime Minister in 2007, he said he was proud of what he had accomplished as Prime Minister.
He is qualified to join Nelson Mandela, who even though was the most tortured victim of South Africa’s apartheid did not seek re-election after a successful first term in office as President, in the Hall of Fame. Nigeria’s General Abdusalami Alhaji Abubakar deserves a place in the same hall for successfully leading his country from decades of harsh military rule to democracy.
In spite of all that he endured, Macky Sall is satisfied so soon with the little he has received from life. Unlike the life-time democratic rulers whose passion is to earn a bad name for the continent, Sall has consolidated the budding trust some observers are beginning develop that Africans are not monkeys only good at robbing and pulling the trigger.
He has earned a smile from Mandela from his resting place at Qunu in South Africa, and he is a mentor to the disappointing ambassadors we have in the shameless, power-smashed dictators, the inside enemies who have refused to learn and have refused to see the large-scale havoc they are wrecking every day on the future of Africa.
Time to reintroduce democracy
Democracy, no doubt, was hurriedly introduced before the foundation of patriotism was sufficiently laid in the political wild jungle of Africa. That explains why many Africans, our leaders included, carry a distorted idea of democracy in their heads to basically mean voting in a peaceful manner through the ballot for an individual or a political party to do wholesale looting in a peaceful manner through the brain.
That explains why the misguided ‘democrats’ and the hardened ‘kleptocrats’ today far outnumber the genuine ‘patriots’ on the continent. That explains why democracy has overtaken patriotism with an overwhelming gap bigger than the distance that separates Earth from Pluto.
For too many Africans, democracy is all about individuals and parties in opposition seeing everything wrong only in unfair elections but after when they have won power seeing absolutely nothing wrong in repeating the same ills they once accused the incumbent individuals or ruling parties of perpetrating. For them, democracy is only when the electorate live under any leader not dressed in the military camouflage.
Wole Soyinka says the worst form of democracy is better than the best form of military rule. I agree. But I tell you, there are elected leaders in political suits who are worse tyrants than any successful coup plotter in living memory. There are ‘smart soldiers’ who have taken off the camouflage and have hijacked the political suits and the smocks to run a full-time military regime under the wraps of democracy.
The distorted meaning of democracy explains why the continent, for more than half a century, has remained a well-situated homeland for these four naturalised ‘investors’― directionless leadership, executive and grassroots corruption, poverty and political violence.
In most parts of the continent, democracy in practical terms is ‘demo-crises’. A distorted democracy breeds an assorted ‘demo-crisis’. And that is what we see all around us!
More than a half of Africa’s problems are as a result of bad leadership. And if its leaders simply would do the right thing, and not their own thing, and if the electorate would vote for the right people, more than half of the continent’s problems are solved already
Credit:Starr Fm
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