A NEW WIND OF CHANGE, BLOWING?
“Never before in history has such a sweeping fervour for freedom expressed itself in great mass movements which are driving down the bastions of empire. This wind of change blowing through Africa, as I have said before, is no ordinary wind. It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand”. Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana.
This statement has never been alive like now with what is happening across some African countries. This time the struggle is not against the colonial masters but against our very own political establishments.
When the wind of independence blew across the continent, many African countries weaned themselves from colonial rule and the mantle of governance was now thrust upon Africans to manage their own affairs, an episode which was anticipated with a lot of hope and promise. On the contrary, some of the regimes that succeeded the colonial rule were marked by brutal repression, corruption and mismanagement, in some cases far worse than their colonial masters.
This created a fertile ground for the military to take over governance through the barrel of the gun under the pretext of purging societal ills or “house-cleaning exercise” to give back power to the citizens, leading to a sporadic surge in the overthrow of despotic leaders who were deemed to have absorbed power around themselves to the neglect of the ordinary citizens who were living in abject poverty and penury.
Do we learn anything from history? Georg Wilhelm Hegel answered it succinctly in his book, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, “What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”
Indeed, it is true that to give somebody power you’d have revealed the devil in him or her. And as the saying goes “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
In this 21st century, we are once again hit with the news of a coup in Guinea, albeit peaceful, a sharp contrast to some of the coups we have witnessed in the past.
The now-ousted President, Alpha Conde, changed the constitution of Guinea to enable him to run for a third term, an election which was marked by opposition boycott and bloodshed. This is the same posturing of many African leaders. It is not surprising that his overthrow has been epic, witnessing jubilation by the people who accuse him of running the country as if it were his personal property.
Col Mamady Doumbouya, the man who led the military overthrow announced on Guinea’s State TV that, “The Guinean politicisation of political life is over. We will no longer entrust politics to one man, we will entrust it to the people”.
It is absolutely not right to overthrow a government. Similarly, it is absolutely not right also to go beyond your constitutional term limit.
Many African politicians see themselves as “demi-gods,” untouchable, know-it-all, powerful. They forget that they were the same people who when canvassing for votes spoke in the language of the ordinary citizens and pinpointed all the problems in the society. Immediately they are elected to power, there seems to be a glass ceiling between them, and the people and they (politicians) do whatever they like with impunity.
There is an Akan proverb that says, “those who helped you climb to the pinnacle of a tree are the same people who would also pull you down” and so you should be mindful of your actions and inactions.
Citizens are not asking their leaders to give them money, but they are just asking them to make an effort on building a country not an individual for the future generation. “Give a man fish and it would finish but teach a man how to fish and he wouldn’t come to you for fish”, as the old aphorism encapsulates.
Suffice it to say, some of the politicians are also doing remarkably well for their countries and they also need to be commended for pushing the frontiers of development.
“Since my release, I have become more convinced than ever that the real makers of history are the ordinary men and women of our country; their participation in every decision about the future is the only guarantee of true democracy and freedom.” Nelson Mandela once said.
