Dar es Salaam-based political and social commentator
In this calendar year, 2025, the following countries will be holding parliamentary and presidential elections: Burundi; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Comoros; Egypt; Gabon; Ivory Coast; Malawi; Tanzania; Togo.
In most of these countries, there exist constitutional arrangements that require the people to commune periodically around an exercise that has been dubbed as elections, and most of them have adopted very well-written texts extolling the virtues inherent in a system that places its governing structures and personnel under the scrutiny of those governed by them.
However, these have over and over again — in most African countries that we have observed — proven to be empty words with no relationship to the realities on the ground.
The history of this reality has been as long as it has been painful. At independence back in the 1960s, it is true, most of our countries had absolutely nothing one could have considered as a system devised by the departing colonial powers to tutor the nascent African nations in matters democracy.
Indeed, in practically all our countries, anti-democracy was the rule of the thumb. In fact, the very fact of colonialism was in itself anti-democratic, because that is what it was all about.
It indeed would have been counterintuitive to expect the plunderers who came to divide our countries amongst themselves for their own aggrandisement and enrichment to be also the ones who would teach Africans how to govern themselves “democratically”.
In fact, in most of our countries what obtained was a slave system in which free labour was extracted to dig out the free natural resources that were being squeezed out of our lands to be externalised to the West.
Examples such as Belgium’s rapacious king, Leopold II, are the most egregious in the history books, but though it is clear that he was mentally ill, he was not the only one in the practice of brutal enslavement.
At the moment of their departure, the colonial administrations left behind ghosts of their very selves, Black men for sure, but only darkened silhouettes of their erstwhile masters.
It is thus that we saw the Black colonialists lording it over their peoples and nations in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, with the result that our very neo-colonial armies saw an opportunity to join in the plunder, since they had been the instruments used by the new African elite to keep their peoples in slavery, and they began to see no reason why they should not partake in the lucrative orgies for themselves.
The trend went on into the 1990s, when something happened in Europe—the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the East-West “cold war”— whose effect was to scare a number of African countries into good behaviour, because now they realised they could no longer play one superpower against the other as a way to thereby secure protection.
In this period of “sovereign national conferences,” even Mobutu Sese Seko, the African reincarnation of King Leopold, held a “national conference” of his own, in which he waltzed and feigned, and bobbed and weaved, with cunning and stealth, until the Congolese Banyamulenge, with the help of Rwandese and Ugandan troops, eased him out of Congo and sent him to a death in exile, sad and broken.
Many single-party structures around the continent came to an end in this era, whose high point was the ouster of Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and his UNIP in 1991 (felled by Fred Chiluba), who in his turn was electorally bested by another party and its leader, and Zambia soon became a musical-chairs setting of parties and leaders emerging, doing a strut on the stage for a moment and then disappearing.
But that initial euphoria of those seemingly transformative years is now gone, and in its place a new business-as-usual atmosphere has installed itself in which those in power will commit foul murder, literally, to eternalise themselves in power.
They will rig elections, beat up and kill opponents, steal votes, stuff ballot boxes in the most brazen way, just to stay in power. In many instances they do not even trouble themselves to do a credible rig, something an intelligent person might mistake for what it is not: they do it in that nonchalant, in-your-face way, and if you do not like it, there is the police to make you change your mind!
Well, sometimes this does not work. A few years ago, for instance, we had a Malawi case in which the police got the idea to beat up people who were demonstrating against an unjust clampdown.
The police came in to beat up the people, but soon the military showed up to beat up the police.
Right at the end of this week, large numbers of the people of Mozambique received the man they believe won their election against the incumbent party, Frelimo, and that country will maybe not see peace for some time to come.
This may be the harbinger of grim times ahead, that people are not going to suffer the indignities meted to them by their neo-colonial (yes, that is the word) rulers without making noise.
Just watch those countries in the opening paragraph.
Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]
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