South Sudan turmoil: Is Africa sliding back to military rule?

By Okwaro Oscar Plato 

Kenya: Recently, African leaders converged in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at AU headquarters to take stock of their success and celebrate their “unity” which has remained elusive since the death of Nkrumah but only liberating elites, rulers and dictators.

Since 1990 when African intellectuals began to describe it a “wave of democratisation” sweeping across the continent, Africa has been rapidly dismantling the vestiges of authoritarianism, military rule and satellite states.

 A conference of the AU’s predecessor for most of the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by military leaders: Idi Amin, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Samuel Doe, Museveni, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mobutu Sese Seko, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Jerry Rawlings, Muammar Gadaffi, Ibrahim Babangida, etc. Some king chiefs, one party supremos- Robert Mugabe, Daniel arap Moi, Kenneth Kaunda, Habib Borguiba, Omar Bongo, Paul Biya, Felix Houphouet-Boigny and the likes would also be in attendance. 

The end of the cold war led to the inevitable dismantling of cold war relationships. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the collapse of client states that failed to quickly realign themselves with the new unipolar world order. “Smart states” like Angola and Uganda survived the first wave of reversals by “resetting” themselves to the priorities of the West, adopting donor policies even where these policies were so disruptive and disingenuous.

In other instances, age intervened where political change arrived in the form of either a smooth transition from father to heir the path of choice for Gabon, Egypt and North Korea whose father to son political transitions have many admirers on the continent; or failed transitions like the DRC, Tunisia (where a senile President Borguiba had to be led out of State House faculties impaired) and Malawi under Hastings Kamuzu Banda was more or less the same.

In 2010, there was fear that a wealthier Africa has a real opportunity to participate in the global economy due to the growing importance of its natural resources, commodities and rapidly transforming urban populations may start to look like the lost cause of the 1980s. This fear is not entirely unfounded. The list of failed states continues to grow.

Already South Sudan has descended into ethnic mayhem as two intellectuals, Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, militia battle for power, the list of failed states, the peer leaders of the 1980s where some form of sanity will all have a serious question mark attached to them. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, (Kenya for a moment looked like a failed state after the 2007 election debacle) and now the limits of authoritarianism have been tested to breaking point in Tunisia and soon in most of Arab Africa, the cycle will be completed.

Each region will have a major failed state: Southern Africa led by Zimbabwe, West Africa led by Nigeria, Mali and the Ivory Coast, North Africa anchored by Egypt. East Africa led by Somalia. Major demographic states like the DRC, Sudan met this definition a long time ago unable to defend their borders and turning millions of their populations into “paper targets” for warlords.

The rest of the miracles left for the Western media to praise. Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Angola are such a patchwork of reality, no story can withstand scrutiny. In fact, Western largesse remains largely mobilised to maintain parasitic relationships that continue to impoverish the poor and have assembled impossible political bureaucracies at the helm to create the part cellphone- part teargas- part military state.

A Nigerian American professor friend of mine on his first trip to see economic miracle of Nairobi summed it up: “Chaos and disorganisation,” on landing in a middle of a blackout in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. My Achebe friend was marvelled at the tourists on the streets, economic ventures at every street corner but appalled at the core ineptitude of this economic miracle.

Sadly, whenever we have a “Tunisia” or an “Ivory Coast” in the news, the intelligentsia argues how this was just an exception, not a trend. Neat rows of ‘cooked’ statistics provide the “ammo” for these arguments. Only fearless, scientific, progressive and revolutionary thinkers can now save Africa.

The writer is an analyst with Quadz Africa Consulting