(Friday Issue, 1 July 2016)
By
the turn of the new century, the western propaganda machine had vilified
Gaddafi at every opportunity to the extent that even his own friends in Africa
either demonized him or turned against him for fear of reprisals. Now a loner, the west sent its envoy, Tony
Blair to Libya as the soft (good) cop. They managed to persuade Moamar Gaddafi
that his pariah status will be rescinded by the so-called ‘international
community if he complied with their demands. This was another success story for
them. Much unlike the man we know, Gaddafi foundered primarily for fear of more
isolation and even more so, the Damocles they held over his head was an
imminent invasion. Reagan had done it before and he had learnt the bitter
lessons of super power terrorism. Libya was disarmed and yet, his status as an
African leader became even more sullied.
Iraq
and Afghanistan were fresh and grim reminders of the brazenness of the west and
their war machines and the collective war chests that they could deploy to
eject him and everything he had established and stood for in Africa. After all,
killing a million and a half children and displacing a couple of other millions
was nothing to them …collateral damage? Little wonder why names of jihadists
and other related groups of a miscellaneous hew keep changing names and faces
all the time. They can be allies today, sworn enemies the day after, ‘can do
business with’ or ‘we have a strategic interest there’. But now we can put Mr. Kissinger into context
when in declaring official policy, said that ‘we do not have permanent
allies-‘we have permanent interests’!
But,
surprise, surprise, the worms of the past have come back to haunt them.
Lamentably,
it is their poor innocent citizens who had done nothing to deserve the
so-called terrorist backlash who bear the brunt of their adventures. , the
young and impressionable Western Muslims recruited to fight a war of not their
making, a war they cannot even fathom out and yet, this is the war(s) that they die needless deaths
for.
Now,
the whole of Africa is awash with weapons the consequences of which are already
been felt through armed groups, brigands
fighting each other for ascendancy and control of resources or just
simply for banditry purposes. Mali, Chad, Burkina Fasso, Nigeria, Ivory Coast,
Central Africa, Ruanda, Burundi!
After
Libya the stage was now set for greater dramas to unfold. Consistent with their
regular practices and procedures, their interests in Africa’s resources was
demonstrated barefacedly, without any qualms and without any scruples. They had
a grand plan for greater Africa and nothing would stop them from executing this
plan.
Gaddafi’s
agenda was still in the west’s front burner. His influence in Africa cannot go
unheeded...they mused! The straw that broke the camel’s back was when he yet
again trod on the West’s nerve by advocating that Africa should set up her own
financial institutions and harmonise their economies, trading relations and so
on. To make things worse, he offered to initially bank-roll the process of
establishment.
The
west had had a fixed gaze at the oil at Benghazzi for a long time and this was
their starting point for the invasion of Libya and where Gaddafi was weakest.
They killed Gaddafi by arming his opponents and other groups who, we know now
have turned against them. . Meanwhile,
the emasculated and divided toothless African governments were naïve enough to
believe that their intervention at the UN would prevent the western countries
from invading Libya without a United Nations mandate.
After
all who makes the decisions and sets the agenda at the UN?
Is
Libya now the hub for all African migrants to Europe? Are the chickens finally
coming home to roost? The paradoxes of this world never cease to astound the
human mind!
Let
us go back to the situation of Africa before drawing the curtain on this
discourse.
By
the 1980s the ravages of poverty began to wreak havoc, quickening its pace
during the 1990s and worsened at the turn of the century.
But
today, seventy years on, and what do we see? An Africa that has been subjected
to narrow nationalisms, pillaged and plundered by authoritarianisms set up for
use by the West, looted by multi-national corporations, under-developed by the
World Bank and the IMF and condemned to generations of dependency through
Structural Adjustment Programmes, programmes for sustainable development, I B
P’s G A T T, P I P currency floatation,
currency devaluations and so many other devious schemes, intrigues, simply designed to further impoverish and
tighten the noose around Africa’s neck, thus adding to the grief the run of the
mill African lives by daily. The cries of Harambee, Bread and butter, Uhuru,
Amandla and Ujamaa have been stilled!
The
Gambian poet Lenrie Peters asks the following question to the leaders of
Africa:
“Where
are the banners… which once we carried… when we led the people to the shrine of
freedom…?
My
reply to Peters is that the messages of freedom and unity were left to gather
dust, to decay and hopefully to atrophy in their own minds and the minds of
every one. . Others burnt the placards and let the flames guttle-up the
slogans, their messages and the spirit and force that threw their weight behind
them.
The
anti-colonial struggle was a struggle that masked the class interests of the
elite and after the attainment of independence; they re-grouped and switched
sides, left the masses in limbo and became, for want of a better word, the
comprador. The elites have Difficulty In seeing beyond colonialism, the Empire,
their greed and self-Aggrandisement. Without The empire, ethnic and religious
nationalism are the most attractive and viable forces for them. This is why
there is so much Bigotry and seething undertones of ethnicity all around us.
These fit in nicely with their opportunism and lack of imagination. They have
learnt quickly from their masters, the techniques of “divide and rule” - in
which any Intrigue, alliance or betrayal is justifiable.
Here
are some hard facts from the World Bank itself:
Africa’s
poor are getting poorer; the average daily income of those living on less than
$1 a day falling from 64 cents in 1981 to 60 cents in 2001. According to the same
source, under-nourishment is also growing in Africa as a whole.
What
is important to note here though is that the cause of poverty and its twin
brother’s hunger, ill-health, miseducation, and so on cannot be ascribed
totally to natural calamities? Other cataclysms do occur but these are the
man-made brands. Yes! Poor harvests or
a lack of agricultural inputs can stifle development and wreak havoc but these
cannot be compared to the extortion that obtains by any stretch of the
imagination. Africa’s poverty can be put squarely at the door-step of the
global capitalist economy and the mismanagement of the economies by the
ruthless, spineless and avaricious, conniving leaderships.
The
cruel irony about the state of African nations is that their leaders have over
the years become isolated from their masses to the extent that their
motivations run counter to the objectives of their peoples. They want to cling
to power by any means necessary out of the fear of their own people and the
fear of what may happen to them after they lose that power. The psychologists
have an acronym for it! It is called FEAR-future event’s anticipated
reaction!
After
several decades of independence, Development strategies were rustled up on the
basis of false premises. Strategies were
evolved that were totally alien and to say the least out of sync with Africa’s
concrete historical circumstances.
It
was precisely against this backdrop that we fashioned our institutions on
models prescribed in the main by the Bretton woods institutions referred
satirically by an African humourist as the Barons and Baronesses of poverty.
Soon enough we found out that we were made to catch fish with an umbrella or to
free a caged bird by enclosing its cage in a larger cage.
One
of the key elements of development is the institution. This is why it is
important that whatever the institution, it must be in tune with the material
conditions on the ground and importantly they must be harmonized with what they
are configured with, (to use a modern day technology terminology).
Again,
development must be predicated upon, people. People are to use a tired phrase,
the ends and means of development. It is about their organizations, their
institutions and their discipline.
Now!
Where does the foregoing lead us to in our discussion on Pan Africanism and a
future of African politics and economics?
I
want to close this discussion by drawing together a few of the points mentioned
in passing but I cannot resist presenting this quote below from a British
Foreign Office document.
“Pan-Africanism, in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need
regard with suspicion and fear. On the contrary, if we can avoid alienating it
and guide it on lines generally sympathetic to the free world, it may well
prove in the longer term a strong, indigenous barrier to the penetration of
Africa by the Soviet Union.”
They
did not only Alienate Pan Africanism but they did more by smothering the
aspirations and modus operandi of Pan Africanism and the so-called soviet
menace, (a common idiom of the time)! Britain, France Germany and their allies in Europe did an excellent
job at first by; dividing the Africans into Anglo-phones, Franco-phone,
Luso-phone and all the other Bingo-phones and groups that killed the original
unitary vision and any mock they could rake -up to add to the African disunity
and fray in 1963. The fracases that evolved at Addis Ababa between the
Casablanca group of the African nations and the Monrovia group exemplify the
machinations of the west and the capitulations of the south.
Consequently,
they succeeded in savaging the continental unitary vision. This was why the O A U was born as a
compromise. I find it difficult to fathom out as to why the leaders at Addis
Ababa accepted to maintain the borders and divisions of the continent into
nation states.
Why did they accept the balkanization done in
Berlin and France where there was not one single African present? Aren’t the
geographical jurisdictions of Senegal and The Gambia ridiculous enough? Look
what happened recently with the border closures of the two twins, sister states
whose fates are inextricably bound up together? I have not heard anybody say
that we have drawn any lessons from the standoff that caused misery and loss of
revenue from either side of the divide especially among the poor and powerless
hawkers, petty traders and retailers. (I have not also heard anybody say, what
we can do in order to prevent such stalemates in the future).
By
the way, all of these ‘small-little people’ are eking out an existence from
nothing or from little else. ? The best I here from either side is nothing but
blame, posturing, prevarication and triumphalism when we should all be hanging
our heads down in shame and lament! The borders were put there by our colonial
masters. Why do we maintain them; why do we deprive our peoples the spaces they
need to partake in movement, production and consumption? For what purpose do
these borders serve? The colonies were created by the metropole for the
metropole and not by the metropole for the colonies. Think about it!
To
be continued
