A throne of one’s own

Hence the resort to the only political currency they know: gifts, cash and petty honours.

Despite the vigour that he puts into these junkets, one is left with the sense that the Libyan leader would rather be playing on a larger stage — the Arab/Muslim world — where his flamboyance and Berber ethnicity meant he was never taken too seriously.

Hence the swing to African politics, where cash money has a more immediate impact.

An Africa without indigenous institutions will be a continent without any real political compass whatsoever.

The churches were compromised from the outset due to their close partnership with the colonial project, and have yet to fully shake off the association.

The levels of sheer venality and malfeasance at the heart of modern politics have increasingly turned it into a magnet for miscreants and not statesmen and women.

The risk now being run is of the wholesale corruption of the last place where belonging was guaranteed, and social security, however minimal, accepted as a right.

The final irony is that as we speak, we have republican heads of state who inherited their presidencies from their fathers; and others believed to be grooming their sons to take over from them.

The most notable have been the Kabila, Eyadema and Bongo families in the first category, and Gaddafi and Mubarak in the second.

Maybe all they ever really wanted in the first place was a royal throne they could call their own.

kalundi@yahoo.com