Curse of monarchical tendencies in African politics

When in the 1960s Ali Mazrui warned of emerging ‘monarchical tendencies in African politics’, his critics dismissed it as his supposed hatred of African revolutionaries and socialists in government. The fact that he had targeted Kwame Nkrumah but ignored the pro-French Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast, and mauled Mwalimu Nyerere but had been mute about criticising Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s emerging brutal termination of the opposition, helped his critics to demand some level of tolerance in his accusations. This tolerance would however give military coup plotters the excuse they needed to terminate the tentative road to anti-colonial nationalism and the search for democracy. When military rulers turned to murder of opposition groups inside and outside the military as a tool of governance, people began to accept mere subsistence-level peaceful civilian administrations. Rulers like Omar Bongo in Gabon had the murderous antics of Idi Amin in Uganda and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire as evidence of the need to maintain their own rule under civilian one-party dictatorships. Even Kamuzu Banda in Malawi was preferable to the blood-drenched rule of Jaafar al-Nimeiry in Sudan. The longer they stayed in office the more they began to look like pre-colonial monarchies, or what in Nigeria were termed favourably as ‘traditional rulers’ by their supporters. They would soon move towards temptations of also joining the practice of passing power to their children after them.

That they remained as a minority is clear. The list of Africa’s ‘founding fathers’ who did not hand over power to their children is a long and most commendable one. Mwalimu Nyerere and Léopold Sédar Senghor left power voluntarily. Kenneth Kaunda treated Zambians to the exemplary experience of having a ruler who stood for elections, lost and yet willingly and with much dignity handed over power to the challenger who had trounced him. Ahmed Sékou Touré, Houphouët-Boigny and Jomo Kenyatta died in power. A galaxy of figures has passed by who avoided the lure of handing power to their children. The campaign to drill it into the global political ‘noisephere’ that nothing good has come out of Africa in the last four decades of anti-colonial nationalism has cynically buried this grand political legacy under the mud. In fact CBS television in the United States overdid itself in this game when they wished to cover up the historic moment when a packed stadium of Tanzanians burst into collective weeping in 1985 because Mwalimu Nyerere had turned down their plea to stay in power since his first election in 1961.

Except for Nyerere these ‘founding fathers’ had bequeathed longevity and the strategy of building networks of clients whose loyalty and support became linked to sharing out contracts and state funds handed out from state ‘security votes’. Moreover, African empires had easy lessons to teach in the running of royal courts. In places like Nigeria, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Benin Kingdom and the Oyo Empire gave the sons of new politicians and public administration officials training in patronage politics. Jomo Kenyatta, Houphouët-Boigny and Senghor each selectively turned to rooting loyalties for their regime around Mouride religious leaders, administering oaths and clan mutual-support mechanisms. They may not have handed over power to their sons after them, but they left behind lessons of holding power, which lesser minds would vulgarise into creating new ‘dynasties’.

The emergence of military rulers who held onto power with the use of the gun blinded Africa from holding up long-serving civilian rulers as models that civil society could insist on. Moreover, we lost sight of the importance of the fact that these rulers had been highly educated intellectuals without the burden of inferiority complexes. Kenyatta was a university graduate who had published a much-celebrated scholarly study of the Kikuyu political system. Senghor had been a star student in an elite French school and became a distinguished poet and scholar of French language and grammar. Nyerere studied European political philosophy for a master's degree at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland’s most prestigious centre of learning. They would not degenerate into the psychotic kleptocracy of Omar Bongo, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Sassou Nguesso, and many of Nigeria’s civilian politicians from post-military regimes.

Elliot Associates and Global Witness have recently reported that Sassou Nguesso and his family own 23 properties in Paris and hold 112 bank accounts in Paris. Sassou Nguesso, a military officer turned politician, shared with Frederick Chiluba (a lowly educated ex-trade unionist turned politician) a psychotic hunger for high-class European clothes. Chiluba was accused of spending UK£50,000 on a wardrobe. Sassou Nguesso is accused of spending US$35,000 on clothes for his wardrobe in 2005.

Omar Bongo was accused of having had 66 bank accounts and 45 homes in France. The tragedy for Africa is that such corruption has created two frontiers for the exploitation of Africa. The first, as stressed by Dambisa Moyo, is that over 100,000 people consisting of World Bank employees, European and North American NGOs and their African allies earn their living by giving and administering ‘aid’ to African countries. As James D. Wolfensohn, a former president of the World Bank stressed in a television interview, these people fight anybody who opposes giving more aid to corrupt African leaders. They keep themselves in employment by making Africa’s debts boom, while sustaining rulers in power who do not care for aid reaching their oppressed people.

The second frontier for the exploitation brought to Africa is the marauding ‘Vulture Funds’. These are groups of Euro-American pirates who at very low prices buy debts that African countries cannot repay when creditors come calling. They then haunt these countries to re-pay both the capital and interest on these funds. Elliot Associates are currently hunting down President Sassou Nguesso who, like a patriotic crook, has devised ways of hiding companies that he uses to sell crude oil exported from Congo-Brazzaville. The vultures from Elliot Associates want to fleece him. He is playing difficult to catch. Moreover, he has become usefully creative. He has shown a new frontier of mobilising politicians in the African diaspora to fight these vultures. Representative Maxine Walters, a member of the Black Congressional Caucus in the US Congress, is fending off these vultures. It would be nice if we could get Maxine Walters to fight both these vultures and the corrupt African rulers whose corruption gives birth to these international economic maggots.

As Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem would urge, we must go from mourning these crimes to fighting back. We must expose and denounce psychotic traits in African rulers and not wait to defend them when racists use them to attack Africans and peoples of African descent as a whole. We must denounce emerging monarchical tendencies that first showed their head during the elections in Togo. In Gabon the beneficiaries of Omar Bongo’s 40-year-old corrupt and dictatorial patronage network are hanging onto his legacy by cooperating with France to rig elections and impose his son Ali Bongo on the angry people of Gabon. In Egypt and Libya there are signals of sabotaging the emergence of democratic politics by the imposing of the sons of President Hosni Mubarak and Muammar al-Gaddafi while repressing opposition parties. Finally, we must create support across the continent for a legal norm on the crime against national development and people’s human dignity.

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* Okello Oculi is the executive director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative.
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