Africa’s shame: When will it end?
Africa & World Politics, Headlines Saturday, January 11th, 2014
| credits: File copy
There are two related images that have hunted me most this Christmas season. One is of South Sudanese families, including children as usual, fleeing in terror as rebel and government troops unleash their murderous arsenals. The other is of young French soldiers getting set to be deployed in the Central African Republic (CAR) in another rescue mission.
The first image evoked consternation; the second image shame. Consequential as the first is, I’ll dwell on the second.
Not long after French troops deployed in CAR, I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times bemoaning rising racism against African immigrants in France. It is hard not to see the link between one and the other.
Africans as juveniles
Modern Africa has long been known for its poverty and political instability. The two are related, of course. But if I have to choose which one is most responsible for the degradation of Africa I would choose political instability.
It is the characteristic that most likens African countries to juveniles. It is the characteristic that most invites condescension and derision. It makes African countries seem incapable of growing up.
Barring natural disasters, a country can be poor with dignity, much like an adult. But a country that cannot govern itself is much like an adult child that never learns to make it on his own.
When I watched televised images of young French troops preparing to deploy in CAR, what nagged me was the question of what they — and their relatives — must be thinking of Africans. After all, it was just days before Christmas, and they should be preparing to spend happy and safe times at home.
Instead, these young men were getting ready to deploy to a distant land — and to put themselves in harms way — for a cause that has little to do with their national well-being. They were going to save other people from themselves. And they just performed a similar mission in Mali, sustaining some casualties there.
The troops and their families have to be saying (in French, of course), “These damn Africans, when will they grow up?”After all, even parents look forward to the day their children are mature enough to refrain from catfights, when they grow to be on their own.”
The inability of African countries to attain political maturity more than 50 years after independence is a failure that is even more denigrating of Africans than poverty per se.
Sure, South Sudan is the world’s youngest country, being just over two years old. Even then, its rapid descent into civil war is highly emblematic of Africa’s post-independence history.
For decades, the South Sudanese fought against the government in Khartoum for independence. The primary complaint was that the Arab-dominated government there did not give black African southerners their due. Yet, no sooner have they attained victory in the protracted conflict than they fell apart.
Now there’s more than a little irony that President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has flown to the South Sudanese capital of Juba to help them find peace. It very much parallels the sad reality of colonial powers coming to the rescue of the very people who crusaded against them for self-rule.
As usual, the warring leaders have galvanised their respective ethnic groups in a pitched battle, though from all indications this is a conflict of egos and political ineptitude.
I’ve always wondered what African leaders think about the image they project of Africa whenever their degenerate politics invite foreign rescue missions. Given the intransigence of the South Sudanese leaders so far, apparently neither the shame nor their people’s suffering matters. Apparently, their political egos are transcendent.
Challenge of transition
In fairness to the South Sudanese, it is not easy to make a transition from a guerilla fighting force of decades to a governing party. Protracted conflicts tend to create mindsets that are antithetical to democracy. There is bitterness, suspicion, intolerance, and the Machiavellian bent of attaining goals by whatever means.
The ruling party, the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), had become skilled in the art of warfare but not governance. And most of the leaders had been commanding officers during the war. Inevitably, there is a strong claim to the spoils of independence among many.
Unfortunately, they have no Nelson Mandela to command unrivalled allegiance and provide wise guidance and avoid rash actions.
South Sudanese President Salva Kiir is certainly no Mandela. Confronted with the inevitable disgruntlement and dissensions, he wielded the axe, sacking deputy President Riek Machar and several ministers. The action was without regard for ethnic sensitivities and the fragility of the young country.
As often happens in African politics, Machar’s dismissal by Kiir (a Dinka) was viewed suspiciously by his ethnic Nuer people.Machar has fanned that sentiment as he had in previous political rivalries.
The disaffection sipped into the army, which erupted in factional violence.To President Kiir, it was a coup and his reaction was to arrest several of the dismissed cabinet members. The sly Machar managed to get away.
It is hard to identify the most culpable party in this conflict. What is known is that Machar is a restive populist, who is ill-suited to be vice-president. He seems cut in the mould of Shakespeare’s Cassius, of whom Julius Caesar said: “Such men as he be never at heart’s ease, whiles they behold a greater than themselves. And therefore are they very dangerous.”
On his part, Kiir is hardly the quintessence of a democrat. Having served as the vice-president of Sudan as well as the president of the autonomous southern region from 2005 to 2011, he has had considerable experience in political leadership. But as the founder of the SPLM guerilla movement, he also seems steeped in an autocratic mindset.
Certainly his rash actions in the face of dissensions reflect the same political ineptitude that led Egypt’s short-term President Mohammed Morsi to declare himself above the authority of the country’s Supreme Court.
And so while the Central African Republic inches toward a full-blown Christian-Muslim religious war, South Sudan is descending into an ego-triggered civil war. As the people of these countries suffer unnecessarily, Africa’s image gets further battering.
-Tide
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