AFRICA’S ORGANS ARE HUGELY IRRELEVANT

THE African leadership collective, not forgetting regional organisations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African Union (AU), need to urgently reflect on and use the ouster of Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe as a mirror to look at themselves and decide if they are happy with what they see; a grim and poor rich continent beset by a multitude of challenges that are largely manmade.

Mugabe and Zimbabwe provide a classic case study of how indigenous political elites in the name of entitled liberation struggle heroes systematically and progressively ruined their countries while enriching themselves. This, to the extent that some countries fared better under colonial rule than they did after liberation. Worse still, liberation did not translate to real freedom for the people, owing to the enactment of obnoxious legal regimes that deprived them of their basic human rights while enthroning the privileges of elites in leadership. This not only nurtured but legitimised a culture of coup d’états on the continent.  

Yes, often times it takes something out of the ordinary - usually of gargantuan proportions like a massive earthquake - for a reality check to happen. Hopefully this time around African leaders will wake up to the reality that life is not just about themselves but the people they lead.

The narrative of some African countries being worse off than they ever were under colonial occupation apropos poverty and disease, a non-issue to the African leadership collective preoccupied with amassing personal wealth by looting national resources, is bound to elicit accusations of espousing neo-liberal and counter-revolutionary tendencies. This posture subscribes to and justifies a nirvana of hopelessness for the people burdened by the twin scourges of poverty and disease as a small debt to pay to the liberators for freeing them from colonialism. Yet on the dawn of a post-colonial new era, people invariably woke up to a much worse regime than what obtained under colonialism, triggering rebellion and protestations that elicited torture, persecution and prosecution leading to lengthy sojourns in jail if not loss of life from the new indigenous leadership. Since freeing people from the liberators was often much more difficult to achieve, the continent transformed overnight into a theatre of conflicts and wars and a testing ground, and a ready market for weapons developed by former colonial masters and other merchants of war.

The sad story of Zimbabwe, once a thriving economy and breadbasket of the continent, is illustrative of the destructive temperament of post-colonial African leaders who turned the continent into a basket case of poverty, disease, underdevelopment, civil wars, etc. This grim backdrop raises the question of the effectiveness and relevancy of organisations such as SADC and AU respectively. The sad truth is they have done very little to create an enabling environment for a better life for ordinary folk. A typical example is SADC’s failure to resolve the Lesotho crisis that, like a hydra, keeps on resurfacing.  Besides Zimbabwe, flashpoints are also abroad elsewhere on the continent, such as Rwanda and Burundi, the killing fields of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, etc, under the noses of regional organs such as SADC and AU. As I see it, that today an increasing number of African countries have and are corrupting multiparty democracy by amending their constitutions in fulfillment of ambitions of individuals drunk with power to serve third terms and beyond in office, is a mockery of the ethos of the AU, in the event it has any. 

As I see it, causal to the inherent paralysing impotence of these organisations is the political patronage by the leadership collective that has transformed these bodies that were supposed to be catalysts to a developmental agenda into their public relations functionaries. Consequently, some of these leaders have found comfort under the protective umbrella of sovereignty to do as they please, including trampling on human rights, persecuting, jailing and killing political opponents in their respective countries. Yet these countries are signatories to well-meaning and intentioned international conventions, such as those on human rights, but their leaders still do not allow pluralistic politics such as multiparty democracy.

For organs like SADC and AU to become effective and indeed relevant to the peoples of Africa requires radical re-engineering to champion the culture of human rights and good governance, both of which are in huge deficits, from which would accrue the development dividend. Such a transformational agenda would require empowering these organisations with real authority to monitor the domestication of international conventions and their implementation and observation on the ground, and in the event of non-compliance be mandated to censor and even sanction defaulting leaders and governments.  Yes, for Africa to rise to the helm of the next industrial revolution requires a radical paradigm shift for the African leadership collective and organs, including the AU, that will lead to the enthronement of the people as the original natural custodians of power and a mechanism ensuring that they duly exercise this power without any fear whatsoever.  

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