A throne of one’s own

The simmering rivalry for continental pre-eminence between Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is bringing them both into company they would not normally be associated with, confirming the maxim that “politics makes for strange bedfellows.”

Colonel Gadaffi is due to hand over the chair of the African Union to President Museveni some time next year.

Ugandan officials have hinted at a Libyan hand in the September Buganda riots, as well as the woefully low turnout — just four of our 40 invited heads of state — at the Kampala October AU summit on refugees.

With the next polls just 14 months away, Uganda’s ruling NRM party seeks to secure its political base by maintaining an open-door policy on every possible ethnic potentate.

Each initiative has come fraught with difficulties: The Busoga clan heads are currently at each other’s throats, accusing the government of bias; the non-Rwenzururu people are voicing a historical objection to their neighbour’s royal ambitions; and the Banyoro are seeking to extract a high price for their loyalty, leading to proposals of some kind of electoral apartheid system in their favour.

In the meantime, Col Gaddafi makes no secret of his Pharaonic ambitions.

While addressing the UN General Assembly earlier this year, he offered the gathered diplomats greetings on behalf of the entire African continent, and not just Libya, which he was actually representing.

He has spent the past few years trawling the African interior in search of every kind of “native ruler,” whom he then seeks to court through various inducements. The most recent was his airlifting of some 22 Kenyan tribal elders to Tripoli in September.

This was preceded by the interest he had taken in the welfare and upbringing of the then boy King Oyo of Toro.

Apart from generous assistance with education and other matters, the Libyan leader also funded the complete renovation of the king’s main palace.

This is part of his openly declared strategy of outflanking what he sees as a coterie of self-satisfied elite Africans controlling the presidencies of sub-Saharan Africa who have no interest in immediately uniting Africa for the benefit of the ordinary African citizen.

In the typical fashion of the politicians of the African “revolutionary left,” the colonel correctly diagnoses a problem but only for the express purposes of exploiting, rather than solving it.

The height of his ambition was revealed at a 2008 summit in Tripoli, where, in a scene replete with irony, the various assembled sultans, chiefs, kings and princes were persuaded to bestow the title “King of Kings” on their eager host.

Gaddafi’s own ascension to power was through the 1969 overthrow of King Idriss of Libya.

More than a few African presidents have been alarmed at the idea of potentates — some of whom remain unrecognised, if not outlawed in their home countries — suddenly being given resources and a diplomatic platform independent of their grip.

Accordingly, a 2009 Kampala summit of “traditional leaders” from all over the continent that Gaddafi provocatively funded was cancelled at the last minute, accompanied by threats to arrest the local fixers.

One well-made justification was the fact that such interference could lead to inter-state “complications.”

They should know. Libya’s sustained assistance to the government of Idi Amin, culminating in troops to help counter the 1979 Tanzanian counter-invasion is well known.

Less well-known perhaps is Gadaffi’s assistance in the form of weapons, cash and training to the many armed groups that took on the second Obote 1980-1985 regime.

The now ruling NRM was one such group.

The focus on traditional leaders however comes as a new twist to his idiosyncratic diplomacy.

Many modern African leaders turn to them seeking short-term electoral support at national or continental level, while seeking to minimise what many of these traditional leaders actually represent.

Much of Africa’s land is held in trust by communities of elders, a capacity they retain in the face of rapacious state and commercial interests, as well as against outright land grabbing by well-connected individuals.

This capacity to hold on to land, and therefore for that land to hold on to its people, has prevented a more full-scale mass migration that would overwhelm Africa’s already beleaguered cities.

These communities have continued after a fashion to bridge the gap between the modern state’s promises of health, education and social security, and the reality of scarcity and exclusion.

It is for this reason that even today, most Africans receive support for their health and education costs through support networks within their extended family system, and not the efforts of the modern state.

To interfere with this arrangement, imperfect as it manifestly is, is to clearly interfere with something much more complex than the presumed penury of an individual chief.

Indigenous governance systems remain one of the last best hopes for the continued survival and possible development of African communities, the modern states having collectively failed to address four-decade old problems of endemic poverty and related conflict.

The challenge for the African Union (and East African Community) is to decide whether they are seeking to integrate the various Western economies planted here through the modern states, or the informal native ones built around common property such as land?

Unfortunately, their entrenched cultures of patronage and subornation deprive them of the ability to have a meaningful engagement with these chiefs and kings.

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