You will surely recall me saying once that there was not a single African country that qualified to be called a republic. Nothing has happened to make me change my mind.

But more than just not having a republic among our countries, something else more worrying is becoming evident by the day. There are very few countries on the continent that can claim to be nations.

This is simply because the colonial authorities wanted to create no such thing as a nation; all they wanted to build were labour camps and exploitation sites where they could force Africans to toil for them in the extraction of as much wealth as they could siphon out of our countries.

Most of our countries were taken over by groups of people who were not interested in building nations but rather they were eager to replace the departing white rulers and appropriate for themselves what wealth was still left in our countries after decades of brutal exploitation.

Something else happened. The emerging African elites were moored in their ethnic realities, with their languages, customs and culture.

Those of a given ethnic identity who happened to inherit the colonial state in a given country, which by definition included many other “tribes,” took that as an opportunity to lay claim to bigger chunks of land than their peoples had ever possessed.

So, if your people traditionally inhabited a small area in the northwest of the country deprived of arable land or lush pastures, now you could allow your people to fan out and spread to other, more fertile land. In addition, you could support them in their agricultural or commercial activities by giving them access to financing from institutions you had already placed under managers from your area.

The logic of internal colonisation worked so well simply because our rulers at Independence could not think beyond what they perceived as the interests of “their” people.

So now they had the opportunity to offer to their people more land and greater wealth than they had ever had. In short order, an ethnic group, by dint of its son being the top dog, found itself in charge of the whole country.

Of course, a few subaltern ethnic groups were roped in to help with the administration, the military, the police, security, etc, but the overall bosses were known and their position remained unchallengeable as long as the chief was alive and in control. Of course he could be overthrown by his own security forces.

But the invariable thing would be the biological truth that some day he must die.

At that point all the forces kept in check under the “Old Man” see this as their “turn to eat” and make an attempt to take over. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t, and success or failure is attended by massacres.

In too many of these situations it’s a zero-sum game: Either you win or you lose, and to lose in African politics is to lose everything. Literally.

This has meant that the extremely fragile states that crawled out of Independence have been given no time to consolidate themselves and bring their peoples any closer. To the contrary, they have been “fragilised” even further by the greed of their rulers and the hopelessness of their subjects.

In reality, there are very few politicians in our countries that sincerely subscribe to the notion of the country they inherited from colonialism being a nation.

Their nations are back where they came from, in the midst of the spirits of their grandfathers. The capital cities of their inorganic states are not protected by the ancestors’ spirits and existence there is soulless and they cannot connect with it.

The cities are sites of plunder, and the looters are hailed by their home folks, who will from time to time receive them with ululation, knowing the chief has ordered that six oxen be killed so his people can “eat” a little of the loot.

So, how many states will still exist in 2050?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]