Losing the plot

A lot of African countries today have lost the plot through the focus of their leadership. It is not surprising that everywhere we are turning, nations are finding themselves in uproar and upheaval

Just look at Kenya, once the darling of the west in its show of democracy and governance, now a nation reeling from tribal conflict and disdain. Then there is beautiful Zimbabwe, crippled by intrigue and now on its knees as he economy crumbles to all time lows.

Issa G Shivji, in his Silence in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs In Africa raises interesting points about what he terms the failure of African countries to adopt the plot of Pan Africanism in favour of territorial nationalism which was based on the old colonial context, already perilous.

It was the same kind of territorial nationalism which spurned African leaders to consider what they termed developmental nationalism over the democratization processes, already absent during colonial regimes. As Nyerere, justified, “We must run while others walk”. New African countries we beholden by the great desire to make developmental progress that power was retained in the executive and governments had to do all the work, including the thinking,, on behalf of the communities that they were meant to serve.

One could argue, as does Sihivji, that the concentration of power in the executive was nothing more than the government’s responses to the expectation that people had. However, it led to the assumption of control based primarily on ethnic dominance. The leading party would focus and champion the needs of its ethnicity at the expense of the others, and the initial cracks were made on the basis of what ethnicity ruled the other, and for how long.

Independence in many of our countries is just an old word signifiying nothing. We lost the plot the minute we assumed African leadership was anything different from what we had before.