Eskinder Nega, Gulag
Journalist Eskinder Nega
Congo-Kinshasa,
Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi, Uganda, Rwanda, Benin. Ask Robert Mugabe, Africa’s
longest reigning president, about these countries and doubt not he would beam
with pride. This is a partial litanyof African countries, whose presidents
sought third terms in 2015, the year Mugabe chaired the African Union, despite
constitutional provisions limiting them to two terms.
To those who defend presidential term-limits, Mugabe,
speaking from an African Union podium, had two-word ready-made response – pink
noses. Amazingly, his distinguished audience, amongst them a sizeable
contingent of African presidents, reacted not with disdain and outrage but
suppressed laughter and scattered applause.
Is Africa reverting to the 1980s era of cartoonish
dictators? Certainly, the portent, which places Benin, a precursor of Africa’s
democratic epiphany in the 1990s, in the same list with perennially
genocide-prone Burundi, is not encouraging.
No nation in history rose higher and faster than the Soviet
Union did in the three decades between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s. When most
African countries gained independence in the 1960s, this trajectory was still
in ascendancy, albeit at a slower rate, posing a viable alternative to the
dominant model as embodied by the West.
But by the 1970s Africa went on to retain more of the
authoritarianism rather than the developmental state of the Soviets. By the
1980s, only a handful of African countries, prominently Botswana and Ivory
Coast, both rejecters of the Soviet model, attained the annual four percent GDP
growth developmental states would be expected to register for two successive
decades. In fact, the norm was for real income to decline below
pre-independence levels.
When the wave of democratization swept Africa in the 1990s,
an essential base for its sustenance, a militant intellectual class committed
to its cause was lacking. Europe had philosophers, pamphleteers, writers,
artists, poets, playwrights, who were seriously committed to the cause of their
age. It was the moral and intellectual environment established by this creative
elite, rather than popular pressure by itself, which eventually enabled the
consolidation of democracy.
As exemplified by the backslide from democracy in Egypt
after the 2010 revolution though massive peaceful protests are indispensible
catalysts, democracy is not possible without an elite committed to its
principles. African democracy wavers because of the wavering of its elite due
to primeval tribal allegiance, politicized religion and grand corruption. But
the dismal state of democracy notwithstanding, the much delayed economic
transformation of Africa, thanks in no small part to Western aid, has been on
the upswing in recent years. Following, the 2008 US financial meltdown, more
than half of the world’s ten fastest growing economies have become African.
Even stateless Somalia’s growth rate, no doubt much to the glee of
libertarians, is hovering around the magical four percent marker.
Jumpstarting the continental economy has at last been successfully
accomplished. Only its sustainability remains as the last threshold to be
crossed.
While this is indeed welcome news not only to African but
also to the world at large, the distortion of its significance, which entangles
a nation’s welfare solely or mostly to its economic performance, is in the word
of R.H. Tawney, author of the 1920s classic, The Acquisitive Society, “the
confusion of the minor department of the life with the whole life.”
No nation has ever been defined by the good and services it
produces. No adage has ever been more wrong than “America’s business (in the
sense of its national purpose) is business ( in its commercial sense).” A
nation is sustained by its spirit and this is an amalgam of its memory of the
past and hope for the future. Only on a foundation established by this
sentiment – a preserve of writers, poets, artists, politicians, engineers or
techno-wizards – is sustainable economic growth – the preserve of scientists,
engineers, techno-wizards and business persons – possible.
Africa’s tragedies- the ravages of slavery, the lost years
under colonialism, the crippling post-independence malaise- is an untapped
reservoir of epic novels, transcendent poems, world-touring plays,
thought-provoking essays, new insights into governance and much more. It is to
tap into this real-life reservoir, which the rest of the world can only
experience vicariously, that Africa is in dire need of intellectual elite,
which is passionate about defending the truth, which is universal in spirit,
which is wary of convention, which is preoccupied with the pursuit of
knowledge, and which is contemptuous of money. Africa’s conscience, the
ultimate antidote against tyranny, is waiting to be stirred.
No leader in Africa imagined his role more indispensable
than Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, who died pitifully convinced, thanks to the cruel
cynicism of the sycophants who surrounded him that he was genius. If Mugabe and
his third-term seeking peers are apt to notice, post-Meles Ethiopia is faring
no worse than before. No leader in history, let alone a dictator, has ever been
indispensable to a nation.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
History
shall absolve democracy!
Eskinder
Nega, Gulag!
Source: debirhan
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