Ghana

MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 6 – (Nigerian Nightmare & Congolese Chaos)

~ Che ~ 12 Comments

(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)

Nigeria’s case, considering her human and natural resource potential, is especially pathetic. One of the most mineral rich countries in the whole world and probably the most educated nation-space in Africa, high hopes were pinned on her future. Before he died in 1946, Herbert Macaulay had already for more than two decades championed, stoked the fires and laid the political foundations of Nigerian nationalism. But Nigeria’s greatest strength was also her most paralysing weakness: Diversity in number. A mind-blowing total of over three hundred tribes speaking as many or more languages, additionally split between Christians, Muslims and Animists, with a long pre-colonial history of competition, are indigenous to the most populous black country on earth. As victory in the push for 1960 independence from British rule approached, politics blatantly and shamelessly degenerated into ethno-regional-religious do-or-die contests. Macaulay’s successor, Zik of Africa, eventually abandoned the national canvas and, following the examples of the other regional leaders, retreated into ethno-regional partisanship. From all sides of the federation the message was clear and unambiguous: Pan-nationalism and one-nigerianness were henceforth dead and buried. Political leaders, including the Prime Minister, were seen each by the other regions as simply representing the interests of their regions, tribes or religions. From then on, the Nigeria project became purely a treacherous, mistrustful, coalition poker, a serpentine dance on shifting sands, a volatile cake to be unevenly divided or stolen whole, a mad dash for power. Corruption and selfishness flourished. Nigeria’s stupendous mineral wealth turned into a curse. In the contest for political, economic, resource and military advantage, there was no loud, strong, unifying, pacifying, blending voice. Instead there was a deafening dearth of Will to see themselves as one great people, to detribalise and de-religionise the nation-space, to inculcate national values, to forfeit any right-to-rule mentality, to foster trust amongst one another. There was no leadership effort to awaken in the peoples a sense of being one people, a purpose to being one people, a will to become one people in an equity-based democratic independent African nation. Like an unstable atom, Nigeria wobbled and broke down. Rigged elections, violence, coups, pogroms, civil war, military dictatorships, failed democracies, tribalism, religious violence, calls for cessation from all sides, annulled elections, distrust, disunity, accusations and counter-accusations, all underlined by corruption and financed by Nigeria’s oil reserves – this would consequently be Nigeria’s fate for the next forty years after independence. Wounds and positions from the past still plague the national dialogue, unreconciled, even to this day. Great problems need great minds. Great opportunities require great courage. On independence morning, Nigeria’s leaders proved themselves unable to dream big and visionary, to grasp the spear of destiny inadvertently handed to this unique black nation and to overcome the temptations of regionalism. Nobody was willing to be the one to forfeit regionalism in the interest of nation-building. No-one was brave enough to bell the cat. Nigeria was not plagued by one lifelong dictator; she was and is plagued by one lifelong streak of power-lust and plunder.

Congo, another stupendously mineral-wealthy country, did not even make it past the first few months of independence before intense internal disunities thrust it into the path of civil war, coups and dictatorship. Lumumba, quite simply, never had a chance. Belgian interests and American intelligence were bent on his demise. In the face of outside opposition, the only chance of survival anybody ever has is the unity, support and backing of his people. But, of all the independence era African leaders, probably none was a greater victim of the internal disunity of his country’s tribes and peoples than was Patrice Lumumba. But he was not victim alone. His fiery, fearless and forthright nature – his greatest asset as a freedom fighter and anti-imperialist champion of independence – became his tragic, if heroic, Achilles’ heel once the Congo attained independence and was left to itself, with him as its executive head. Not reconciliation and de-escalation were his modus operandi – such were not in his revolutionary nature. His message was resistance, retaliation, elimination and conquest. His fazit: Congo was full of local and foreign enemies, and they all had to be eliminated or booted out. Fullstop. When the U.N. – whose peace-keeping troops had, at his behest, come into his country with lightning speed – seemed unwilling to help him squash his enemies in the manner he desired, he loudly turned to communist Russia for help, inadvertently touching a raw nerve in global Cold War politics. He was punching way above his weight. Thus, his fate – and that of the Congo – was sealed right from the start. His fellow Congolese, aided by Belgian troops, captured him, held him without trial, tortured and executed him, and hacked his body to pieces; but that too brought no peace. The rest is history. The Congo, alias Zaire, has since then been the plaything of coups, interventions and dictatorships, the most infamous – but not last – of which was under Mobutu Sese Seko. After once suffering and surviving the dark horrors of Belgian oppression and exploitation, the mineral-rich Congo today still remains a tricky multi-ethnic hotbed of internecine guerrilla activity, civil war and internal disunity.

Independence, again and again, is followed by national disorientation and national soul-searching, by disagreements, civil strife and civil war. Even after the fight for political liberation has been won, the acteurs march on in the same spirit of war – hunting saboteurs, persecuting opponents, sidelining adversaries, undermining competition, underdeveloping out-of-favour regions, and taking revenge on defeated former oppressors. In Africa, rather than triggering a united, popular, constructive march towards self-dependent development, political independence exposed and fed a glaring unwillingness or incapacity to unite, to make use of the various strengths of the various components of the nation, to apply the pragmatic common sense and make the tough sacrifices and compromises required to achieve a functional political unity. What became visible was a frightening failure to grasp the concept of the one, big, strong, united Whole, shared by everybody and not just dominated one-sidedly by a few. An integrated Whole to which, and for which, each individual is responsible and free. Instead, under the conditions as they were, all that could flourish were OPPRESSION and CORRUPTION, DISTRUST, CONFLICT and, eventually, DISINTEGRATION. Independence, in the cruel irony of the ways of fate, brought with it more challenges than colonialism ever faced us with, and we were not prepared for them at all. Just as today also, despite the benefit of historical hindsight, South Sudan too was not prepared for the internally disruptive forces that are always set free by independence.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

… continued in 7 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 7 – (Ugandan Up-n-down)

Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 1 (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 2 (Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 3 (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 4 (Sudan and South Sudan)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 5 – (Ghanaian Black Holes & Ivorian Time Bombs)

MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 5 -(Ghanaian Black Holes & Ivorian Time Bombs)

~ Che ~ 8 Comments

(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)

There is a brief moment of opportunity, in the hour of freedom and liberation, when the momentum that is presented by the formation or regeneration of a nation-state gives to its chief policy-makers, its opinion-shapers and its mass-leaders the rare chance to hammer a brave new impulse deep into the orientation-seeking psyche of the nation and shift it unto a path of mutually supportive and constructive upbuilding. It is a moment in time, a window of opportunity. If missed, a sequence of events is set into motion which makes it progressively difficult to recapture the momentum and the opportunity. If grasped, however, the same occurs, in the opposite, positive, direction. Nelson Mandela and South Africa recognised it and took a chance on it. The leaders of South Sudan, so far, seem blind and immune to it. South Sudan has simply joined the long list of African nations in which independence was followed by disorientation, dis-unification, breakdown and destabilization. Examples, as I said, abound.

In Ghana, Africa’s black star, Kwame Nkrumah weathered hefty colonial resistance and, even from within the walls of his unjust imprisonment, forced and triggered Ghanaian independence, and then came to power in a blinding blaze of glory that inspired nationalistic fervour all over the continent, further fuelling the thirst for independence in Black Africa. Nkrumah’s impact on the socio-political psyche of Black Africans then and now cannot be over-emphasized. No other African independence leader so charismatically inspired, articulated and harnessed revolutionary zeal, Black intellectual nationalistic self-confidence, and absolute disdain towards all forms of dependence and imperialism like Nkrumah did. He championed the search for innovative solutions to Africa’s economic problems and went ahead trying to implement his. He recognised the danger of tribalism and put forward policies to reduce its detrimental effects. He was the very spirit of pan-africanism, a driving force behind the forming of the OAU. But, while calling for pan-african unity on the continental stage, in his own country he banned opposition political parties, nationalised as much of industry as he could, put price controls in place, centralised power and placed his faith, like his friend Nasser did, in his own indigenous socialism hybrid. The toast of praise-singers and sycophants, he trusted no-one and placed the entire country under his personal control. He sunk huge sums into forward-looking industrialization schemes, but most got mismanaged by a dizzying number of state corporations that sprung up like mushrooms. Convinced that these and other unilaterally decreed measures would lead Ghana to the promised land, he never wavered in his fervour. The speedy decline of the Ghanaian economy which followed in the ensuing years was staggering and painful to all lovers of Africa and Ghana. Six years after independence, Ghana’s reserves stood at a shocking £500,000. Patronage and corruption flourished, discontent, division and internal resistance grew, the unwanted was ostracized, opposition elements imprisoned and silenced. There was no blueprint for an alternative solution or for a reshuffling of executive responsibilities. In Ghana, all roads led through Nkrumah. Less than ten years after his triumphant entry, in a country that had become riddled and debilitated by corruption and poverty, Nkrumah was unceremoniously overthrown in a coup d’etat, which was followed by another coup d’etat… then eventually by another… and Ghana was spiralling down a pit of retrogression unimaginable as at the time of her trail-blazing independence in 1957. It took decades before Ghana understood the painful lesson of the bitter pill of militarism and one-sided pseudo-democracy, and gradually began to build anew a new truer democracy, a wasteland of wasted decades scarring its history.

In Cote d’Ivoire, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, feeling himself to be ideologically superior to Kwame Nkrumah, made a bet with Nkrumah as to which of their two nations would be better developed within the decade that was to follow. And, at first he might have seemed to have won the bet. He avoided communism like the pest and predicted, already way back in the sixties, the Chinese invasion of Africa. He was one of the few independence era leaders who went the way of economic liberalism. Spurning nationalistic zeal, he stayed in close contact with the French, his country’s former colonial masters, and gave French capitalistic endeavours a freehand in the Ivory Coast. Apart from that, he did nothing different from all the rest. The self-acclaimed Crocodile kept a steely grip on government, permitted only a one-party state, devoid of democracy. He made no attempt to anchor democratic principles of equity, opinion-sourcing, power-sharing and broad engagement. No empowered participation, rotation of responsibility, the sharing of leadership responsibilities, socio-political unification of differing tribes and religions, the internal blending of a nation into one people. For twenty years no elections were held in Cote d’Ivoire, as Houphouët-Boigny cleverly left the country under the hypnosis of French economic control while perfecting the art of neutralising his opponents and critics by giving them tantalizing little morsels of pseudo-power in a system utterly dominated by him and him alone. For over two decades it seemed to work. When the collapse came, it was swift, brutal and sobering. Global prices of Ivorian exports like cocoa and coffee plunged. Oil prices shot up. French businesses repatriated their money to France. The Ivory Coast was bankrupt. Inspite of all his efforts, Cote d’Ivoire’s economic self-reliance never materialised; and now that the bubble had bust, the missed opportunities in true political and democratic maturation became apparent. As Houphouët-Boigny’s health declined, “heirs” to the throne began to jostle for position. By his death, in office, in 1993, as the third longest serving leader in the whole world as at that time, the long ignored internal chaos and disharmony was all he left behind. What had once seemed like a model became exposed as a mirage. It was simply a case of delayed reaction. Cote d’Ivoire too eventually went the way of Nigeria, Ghana and so many others – coups, corruption, unrest, civil war, militant dictatorship, ethnic enmities, religious rancour, and division. Neither Cote d’Ivoire nor Ghana was better than the other. They were in the same boat.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

… continued in Part 6 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 6 – (Nigerian Nightmare & Congolese Chaos)

Preceding Chapters:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 1 (Preamble)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 2 (Egypt’s Modern Pharaohs)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 3 (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 4 (Sudan and South Sudan)

MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 2 – (Egypt’s modern pharaohs)

~ Che ~ 17 Comments

(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)

History is the teacher of the wise, and Mandela himself proved to be a good student – for he had many dramatic examples to learn from. Long before South Africa’s struggles for liberation from apartheid yielded fruit, other African nations had shot out of the starting block, propelled forward by the momentum of independence and freedom, to grapple each with the daunting task of forging a modern nation-being. It reads like a soap opera, one unresolved episode after another, with dependable repetition. A few examples suffice:

In newly independent Egypt, the leader of the revolution Colonel Nasser, despite his political victories against Britain, his Suez heroism and his Sinai vicissitudes, despite his enduring popularity at home and abroad, his inspiring effect on colonised nations worldwide, his influence on the afro-arab stage and the cultural boom that his tenure occasioned, was reluctant – when it came to internal affairs – to allow or foster the blossoming of a political system in which his personal power was anything less than absolute. He crushed all opposition parties, be they communists, capitalists, muslim brothers or any other grouping critical of him. He imprisoned thousands of opponents, including some who had been his comrades in the revolution. He centralised the planning of the economy, nationalised industry and everything he could nationalise, controlled both state and government, and placed a tight grip on all types of unions and institutions, from academic, to religious, the media, to the youth. He became, in effect, the modern-day pharaoh. By the time he died, in office, in 1970, after fourteen years as president, he had written his name eternally into the history books of not only Africa, and had attempted to industrialise and modernise Egypt; but also, portentously, he had practised largely only political repression during his reign. He did not use the momentum of liberation to propel all sides of the country into the forging of a political culture of unity and inclusion. Very simply, he had omitted to lay the foundation for a balanced political system of representative, rotational, shared democracy – an omission, the after-effects of which still plague a restless, internally unreconciled Egypt to this day. Nasser was succeeded by another military veteran, Sadat, after whose assassination many years later another soldier, Mubarak, took over. In 2011 the people arose in a popular revolution against him. The Revolution culminated in the election of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mursi who, after more violent protests, was ousted in a coup-d’etat by his own head of Armed Forces Abdel Fattah el-Sisi who in turn a year later transformed from Military leader to civilian president in an election boycotted by most other political parties. Despite being one of the most ancient civilizations of mankind, and an independent modern nation, Egypt is today still struggling to find internal reconciliation, peace and socio-political harmony.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

(Continued in Part 3 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES : 3 – (Tunisian Troubles, Libyan Losses, Ethiopian Woes)

Preceding Chapter/
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: Part 1 (Preamble)

MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 1 – (Preamble)

~ Che ~ 19 Comments

(Lessons from the first (mis)steps following modern Africa’s independence)

It sounds like a myth now. They say South Africa was on the brink of civil war after the release of Mandela and the collapse of apartheid. Civil war? Really? The Zulus and the Xhosas were heading for tribal war? And, simultaneously, the blacks against the whites in racial massacre? Well, it is true that it all sounds a bit far-fetched to some people now… because it did not happen. Because Mandela opted for reconciliation and spearheaded an intense drive to find a common basis for all to live, share power and face the future together. But, as far-fetched as all this may seem today, it was actually the most likely turn that events would have taken, based on the history of African so-called independence. This is a history that Mandela, and those who thought like him, knew all too well and, like wise people do, gravely feared. It is a history replete with the educative one-two punch of the strong heady wine of independence, liberation and freedom, eventually followed by the bad-tempered and moody hangover of disorientation, destabilisation and crisis.

Independence, all too often, is followed by civil strife and civil war. On all continents, in different eras, there abound records of great and small nations who have been unable to avoid this cliff in the arch of their history. When a nation-space has been oppressed or suppressed for a long time, it exhibits the properties of a socio-political pressure cooker. Once the lid of suppression is lifted, tumultuous explosions sooner or later follow as the various agendas and sensibilities of its component parts push to the fore, each demanding fulfilment. It requires strong-willed, knowing, conscious leadership to harness the liberated energies and channel them into constructive upbuilding. The opposite would mean a repetition of the same wild implosion into self-destruction witnessed after independence in many African countries, and as is happening right now in South Sudan. It is a pity that more than two decades after the fall of apartheid, Mandela’s example has not been understood and internalised by many other African peoples, personalities and groups still trying to find the most conducive forms of post-independent co-existence.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije

Continued in Part 2 of 11:
MANDELA, LEARNING FROM OTHERS’ MISTAKES: 2 – (Egypt’s modern pharaohs)