Africa presidents, look in the mirror to confirm it isn’t Trump you’ll see

Last time a Rwandan president tried to lock out citizens who had been living in exile where they had even begat children and grandchildren, the victims organised and returned to their country, successfully taking over the government.

In Rwanda’s neighbourhood, a Zairean president insisted on harassing citizens whose homeland was in Zaire courtesy of Belgian and German outsiders’ sharing African territories between themselves.

The victims organised, with the help of their kinsmen in Rwanda from whom they were separated by European landgrabbers and kicked their fellow Zairean tormentor out of power.

A wiseman next door in Tanzania, retired President Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, advised clearly that if a government wants to expel a given tribe, they should let them go with their land.

Though not everyone is endowed Nyerere’s level of wisdom, it is advisable to take his advice seriously. So African leaders seem to have three options: let the tribe you don’t agree with go away with their home land; fight them to their last man or they eventually defeat you; or let them enjoy justice equally like the other tribe(s) in the country which you agree with.

Nyerere gave the example of the Maasai, saying if Tanzania kicks them out then it should allow them to go with their land to Kenya, likewise if Kenya expels them, they should take their land to Tanzania with them. Nyerere gave that advice 30 years ago, and as long as the borders inherited at independence hold, the advice should be upheld.

The independent continent’s first leaders who formed the Organisation of African Unity must have seen enough logic in the way the European land grabbers who sat in Berlin between 1884 and 1885 designed the map of the continent they were stealing and decided to keep the internal boundaries.

For while these borders divided many tribes across different states, the colonising Europeans followed some typographical features and climatic/ecological considerations. And they ensured, and put in writing, that all the grabbers enjoyed free movement and trade within the continent.

To this end, they paid particular attention to the common use of the great rivers on the continent. The independent African leaders must have decided not to upset the logical boundaries which made economic sense.

What then motivates some African leaders, after the expiry of the pioneer independence leaders, to still keep the colonial borders while not only erecting barriers to free trade on the continent but also try to rob certain communities of their land by ascribing them to other territories?

Has the time then come to redraw the borders within Africa? Is it too late to for this? The answer may not be obvious, when you consider that the mighty Soviet Union had lasted only 69 years when it was broken up just the other day in 1991.

Does it occur to African leaders that it took our fathers about the same time from colonisation to throw out the colonisers who took total control of the continent by early 1890 and were mostly kicked out early in the 1960s?

If the leaders cannot deliver African integration by now, what is the justification to continue with the current African configuration?

Whom does it serve, if not the former colonisers and their agents in African governments? Keeping the boundaries while evicting the owners of the land only ends in peril for the incumbents. They don’t have Trump’s legal clout. And he is not throwing out indigenous “Red Indians” which Zairean or Congolese rulers thought they could get away with.