No head, no tail to the politics of our day

One of the most notable features about the current revolutions rocking North Africa and the Middle East is that the revolutions do not appear to have yielded - or indeed been led by –‘charismatic leaders’ eloquently urging the people on to sacrifice their blood to achieve specified goals for the nation.

There is no fire-spouting Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) in sight. Nor a rifle-wielding Fidel Castro. Beautiful posters of a Che Guevara who has conquered all in death, are not being held aloft by the crowds. The revolution, in the words of someone I once knew, is ‘crawling like a worm’. It has no head. It has no tail. But it is accomplishing its mission.

Those who talk impatiently about the slow pace of achieving constitutional advances, and the lack of concrete plans of action to implement socio-economic goals, are being wrong-footed by the new reality of politics that is being born. This seems to be that with freedom, these matters can be ironed out. But freedom is the thing of the moment: let us enjoy real freedom and we can discuss, amend, and plan. So many plans and manifestoes have been transmuted into instruments of oppression in history. Let us not repeat the mistakes of history.

The situation reminds me of a poem I once wrote that took its imagery from a mysterious denizen of the Ghanaian anthills, known as the nni-ti-nni-fo (no head, no tail).

Mushrooms growing on an anthill,
They will make a nice meal
But in the anthill
Lives a snake
Which has no head
But can make
Your foot swell.
You cannot tell
It head
From tail
But step on it and you won’t fail
To draw poison
Into your person!

Kai! - Nni-ti-nni-fo
No head, no tail.

HEY! Nni-ti-nnifo
‘Waben sen Amfo!’
(Nni-ti-nnifo –he’s more potent
Than the trap fetish sent
To catch it!)

I hope that captures the magic of a political moment that is making nonsense of political theories and puzzling so-called ‘analysts’ who tend to believe that human action, and inter-action, can be reduced to certainties programmed into modules long ago and put into labels, ready to be retrieved, re-labelled and applied.

Where is Egypt heading? Why are there still no recognisable new faces in the political game-plan in Tunisia, one month after Ben Ali was handed his chips?

No answers. And yet, now comes Bahrain. Libya. Yemen. Iraq. And Iran.

The mighty United States is politically flailing all over the place - supporting revolution in Iran, yet counselling caution in Bahrain. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sends former ambassador Frank Wisner to Egypt; the Obama White House denounces Wisner’s views.

Political mayhem; policy schizophrenia; asymmetry of intelligence. Here too, in an arc of power where the future of nations have been tele-guided generation after generation, there is no head, no tail.

This becomes known in the ‘target areas’ of the crawling revolution. And sheer fear is felt in places where, hitherto, money had been thought able to buy safety for those in power. Why fear?

Well, why wasn’t Hosni Mubarak able to use some of the $70 billion he is alleged to have salted away, to buy three or four divisions of the Egyptian Army? Couldn’t Ben Ali have imported a couple of thousand mercenaries from among the murderers hiding from the ICC in caves scattered around Central Europe?

And note this: the Americans have a mighty fleet based in Bahrain, and yet the government there is so panic-stricken it is shooting people who are lying asleep on the pavements of Manama. Does it make sense?

Yes. So was Egypt, you see. And also, Tunisia. The revolution crawls. It thus falls under the radar of the sort of big guns mounted on ships. And the revolutionary crowds are too thick on the ground to be targeted by drones, either.

In years gone by, when the Chinese used almost to monopolise the coining of pithy revolutionary slogans, this situation would have been described by them as illustrating their dictum that ‘the US and its allies are all paper tigers’. But now, how can it be invoked now without also arousing memories of the Tien-An-Meng Square incident on 4 June 1989, when the Chinese army used the ‘barrel of a gun’ to impose its power on thousands of student demonstrators? Aw! No head, no tail. No?

The mystery of all this accounts for the fact that, as they wheeled me away in early February to operate on me at a hospital in London, the nonsensical thought flashed through my mind that it would be very disappointing to leave this world without knowing how the Egyptian revolution ended (it’s mad isn’t it - of all the things one should miss in this life).

Anyway, thanks be to God - within two hours of being totally anaesthetised, I was again following what had become an amazing ‘theatre of the absurd’. On 11 February 2011, I could again hear the noise made by the hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered at Tahrir Square in Cairo.
The people had massed up for a solid 18 days, baying for the blood of Hosni Mubarak.

‘Leave! Leave!’ they cried.

But there was Mubarak behind a microphone, stubbornly uttering inanities about the ‘constitutional reforms’ he would undertake before leaving the scene in September.

I said: ‘This chap is quite stupid. He doesn’t read history. At certain stages in a nation’s life, you cannot fool the people with words any longer. If he knew his history, he would be aware that words didn’t work for President Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, when his people turned on him on 25 December 1989. And he would run with his life, instead of annoying the people some more, with all this legalistic verbiage.’

Truly, at sunset on 11/02, up popped on Egyptian national television - and the world networks - the cold-eyed intelligence chief who had overseen Egypt’s nasty torture machines for nearly two decades, Omar Suleiman. He was forced to announce that his boss, President Hosni Mubarak, was stepping down.

Mubarak was going right away, Suleiman said. Not in September, as he had earlier intimated.
I had lived to see the day Suleiman’s cold eyes had been forced to think one thing, while his lips said another.

An erupting Cairo now boiled over. It must have been utterly humiliating for Mubarak supporters to watch the pictures - on whichever world television channel they tuned to, but especially on Al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN - that told them that his three decades of rule had turned him from a respected air force commander who steered Egypt out of trouble after the assassination of Anwar Sadat on 6 October 1981, into a heap of sand on the rubbish heap of history by - his own, once ‘adoring’ people.

Well, retiring to Sharm el Sheikh with the $70 billion (think of it – seventy thousand million dollars) he is supposed to have stashed away, won’t be so bad, will it?

Now, of course, we cannot believe everything we hear when a dictator in sole charge of a nation’s finances, is finally overthrown. But there really is no smoke without fire, in many such instances.

For example, when the late President Sani Abacha died in Nigeria in 1998, it was widely reported that he had amassed a fortune worth over $4 billion.

And despite the murky and intricate routes through which such funds escape to hide in cosy, sacred corners in very respectable bankers’ vaults overseas, at least a third of that sum has since been traced, and staggering sums have in fact been retrieved. At one stage, the Swiss, masters of the art of hiding dictators’ loot, turned on the banks of Great Britain and accused them of being unwilling to help trace Abacha’s loot.

When I read that, I said, ‘This is rich. The Swiss, whom the British used to deride as “the gnomes of Zurich”, have turned on the British?’

The Egyptians will probably be finding out soon enough that if they are serious about trying to trace Mubarak family assets, they had better spend more time in London than in Zurich. The Swiss have tactically scored a point: they very promptly announced that they have frozen Mubarak’s assets. (Of course, what that means is only know to the Swiss).

However, in the City of London, a loud silence reigns. If asked, I am sure the bankers will answer: ‘Mubarak assets? What Mubarak assets?’ I don’t think one needs to be a seer of great perspicacity to forecast the size of bankers’ bonuses in Britain next year. Small gains for the people themselves so far, eh?

Let’s recap: Tunisia’s dictatorship, was, of course, the first to bite the dust in North Africa. Then followed Egypt. Next was to have been Algeria, but there, the government, which can teach a thing or two to anyone who advocates democracy, managed to stave off planned demonstrations with armed might.

But for how long can a few people at the top, who have inherited power and wealth, fought for at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives heroically given up by the people, withstand the people’s wish to determine how power and wealth should be distributed in their country? Algeria is just postponing the ‘People’s Day’. With blue murder.

Power does belong to the people. ‘Leaders’ often believe that the people are ‘with’ them just because they happen, at certain moments in history, to say a few things which the people ardently want to hear. But words alone cannot remain magically meaningful to all people all of the time.

In my own country, Ghana, I personally witnessed the word ‘freedom’ - which sent our hearts racing when uttered against British rule - change after the Preventive Detention Act was passed and used in 1958, and come to mean, ‘freedom for some Ghanaian and Nsawam Prison for others’.

Again, in 1982, ‘accountability’ came to mean two systems of justice: one [normal] court for those favoured by the ‘revolutionaries’ and another [revolutionary] ‘tribunal’ for those determined beforehand to be ‘enemies of the revolution’.

Who was making those determinations? Thus, a perfectly valid popular aspiration encapsulated in the word, ‘accountability’ became an empty slogan that built up resentment because it was used to deny - rather than accord - true justice to all Ghanaians alike.

Similar sweet-sounding slogans have passed the lips of African leaders, and have equally been savaged to rob them of their original intent. Words have been seized upon as the facile means of achieving a radical transformation in the living standards of individuals, while the rest of the people are largely left behind, and forced merely to take note and wait for an opportunity to raise questions of their ‘leaders’ in future.

Well, that future is here - to a large extent. I mean, the WikiLeaks cables, for instance, describe a situation that is still relevant in many of her countries where the cables originated from.

Yes - in the modern world, where information is now easily within the reach of many millions of people, at the mere click of a mouse on a computer, ideas do get exchanged at a very fast rate and those who have benefited from words in the past, can equally well perish by the force of words.

Indeed, if I ran an educational course for world leaders, the juxtaposition of what was happening in Tahrir Square on one side of the television screen, with what Mubarak was saying in his last speech on the other side of the same screen, would be my number one project of intense study. It was a classic example of the disconnect between reality and fantasy in a relationship of power.

Ruling countries has never been easy. Again and again, we see in history, humble people rise on the shoulders of the people to become great. But for every Alexander The Great, you get an ‘Ozymandias’; for every Gaius Julius Caesar, you get a Nero Claudius Caesar.

What matters is this: leaders must always remember that they came from the people, and must serve the people SINCERELY or they are lost.

I put the word ‘sincerely’ in capitals because that is what matters. A leader may think that because it is sometimes possible to hide information about his private life and business dealings, he can go on for ever pretending to the people that he is still their servant. But it doesn’t work.

I was lucky enough to discover the meaning of true disconnection in my early years as a journalist. In 1958, a mere one year after Ghana’s independence, I visited the Soviet Union for the first time. I travelled by TU-104 – the world’s first successful jet airliner. Its speed was very, very impressive, compared to the turbo-props flown by Western airlines.

But in my hotel room in Moscow, I found the soap to be inferior and the toilet paper much worse than what I used in Accra. And my mind told me, ‘There is a disconnect here. Nothing in Accra should be superior to anything in the mighty USSR.’

I had hit on the Achilles’ heel of Soviet power, but the Soviets themselves couldn’t see it - they achieved symmetry in big things, and asymmetry in small things: the small things that concerned consumers.

Hence, later on, as our relationship grew, sophisticated Ghanaian students, utilising their foreign exchange allowances from home, evolved the idea of travelling to East Germany and using their international passport to go to West Berlin, and loading themselves with Western consumer goods, especially ladies’ nylons and cosmetics. When they came back to their hostels in Kiev and Moscow, they showed off their purchases - adding immensely to their desirability as potential dates to the prettiest girls.

In Tashkent, young Uzbeks told me they went into the ‘bush’ to dance to smuggled rock and roll music.

It was the attitude of nonchalance within the Communist Party leadership towards consumers’ yearnings - often tossed away as ‘superficial’, signified by fragmental asymmetries, that created the cumulative situation that eventually led all the way to the climatic moments in Berlin in 1989. Then, the attraction of the consumer goods that lay beyond The Berlin Wall proved mightier than the concrete blocks and bricks that held The Wall together. Even the deadly razor wire and machine guns that guarded it proved to be an insufficient deterrent. And The Wall had to fall.

Even so, the triumphant Cold War ‘Iron Lady’ of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, lost power when she too ignored the true welfare needs of her people and imposed a market-devised ‘poll tax’ that caused some of the most furious riots seen in London in generations.

So the message of the people remains: ‘Serve our interests or quit. If we tell you to quit and you won’t go, wait and see. Your guards are people, too, you should know.’

Nothing, as I have noted, is settled yet in Egypt, or even Tunisia. But as the people stumble, rise and steady themselves, seeking a better way out of their misery, they see that whatever lies ahead of them in the future, is preferable to the inane stupidities they have had to endure in the past.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a journalist, writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.