The Ruthlessness of Africa’s Power Show

By

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

hekweekwe@hotmail.com

 

 

Two weeks after the dreadful massacre by the Ethiopian military and police of 36 students and others protesting against irregularities in recent parliamentary elections in Ethiopia, no voices of condemnation have been heard from other African capitals. If the past is any guide, none is likely in the foreseeable future. This is because morbid silence, as we illustrate from the indifference in three capitals, has always been the preferred choice of response by African regimes to the atrocities perpetrated by any within their closet against the people. As President Mugabe of Zimbabwe continues his outrageous campaign of demolishing thousands of desperate homes that house 200,000 desperate people in Harare and elsewhere in the country under the dubious premise of “illegal structures”, no one realistically expects official Harare to offer any words of disgust on the events in Addis Ababa.  The scion of the Eyadema dynasty in Lome would have observed the battle field scenes in Addis’s streets a fortnight ago as some extension of his forces’ assault on opposition groups protesting his own rigging of presidential elections in Togo earlier on in the year. The only difference this time round, as he probably watched television footage of the bloodletting in Addis, was that the latter was occurring 3000 miles away to the east. The medieval overlord in Abuja would have been untroubled by the carnage at Addis. He has always employed bloodletting as an instrument of power during 40 years in public life – whether it is in Igboland, Niger Delta or the Tiv country. He probably noted, with some perverse satisfaction, that the tally of 36 students and others gunned down in Addis is “incomparable” to the figure of 20,000 people murdered in Nigeria by the military and assorted hoodlums since his current presidential phase began in 1999. Nor does 36, it must have been obvious to him, “compare” with the dreadful figure of 3 million, which is the number of Igbo people that his military and allied forces annihilated between 1967 and 1970.

 

Anaesthesia

 

Writing in 1978 on the Igbo genocide just referred to, Okwudiba Nnoli, the perceptive political theorist, noted the complete indifference shown to the victims of this horrendous crime by most Nigerians and concluded, most chillingly: “at that time, Nigeria seemed morally anesthesized.” Little did Nnoli know then that his correct reading of that state of moral anaesthesia in Nigeria towards the foundational genocide of post-conquest Africa was not just restricted to the country of the perpetrators, but was very much a feature across Africa.  By ignoring to speak out and act robustly against the abhorrence of the Igbo genocide of the 1960s/early 1970s, the whole of Africa created the precedence of the amnesiac indifference that has been the hallmark of the continent since in response to the barbaric and brutalising escapades by many an African leadership towards their peoples. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia is of course very conversant with this prevailing indifference when, in a press interview soon after the Addis massacre, he unashamedly defended the action of his troops as “prudent to stop this [protest] with forceful action.” The same premier who defends the gruesome murder of his compatriots by fellow compatriots armed with weapons the country clearly neither needs nor can afford, had in the week earlier appealed to the West for more food aid to feed the teeming hungry in his country. The irony of the intermix of Meles Zenawi’s food aid appeal and his justification of the slaughter of defenceless students and others in Addis was not in the least lost on the rest of the world: a failed and incompetent leader who is unable to feed his population asks the world to feed the same people that in the meantime he turns his guns at… The haunting strictures of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s indignant lyricism on the “power show” of African regimes couldn’t be more palpable indeed.

 

Five-a-link

 

African émigrés in the Americas, Europe and elsewhere in the world have emerged as a very important grouping of Africans presently. They presently account for the largest source of capital flows into Africa. In 2004, they dispatched the impressive sum of US$15 billion to Africa. This was three times the West’s “aid” to the continent in real terms (i.e. when the latter’s ubiquitous overheads are accounted for) in 2004 and already 60 per cent of the much-trumpeted US$25 billion “aid” that British Prime Minister Blair claims the he is attempting to “raise for Africa” over the next decade! The US$15 billion was invested directly in social areas that benefited the people: food, clothing, housing, education, healthcare, communication facilities and other familial, social and community needs. Steadily, these investments are moving into infrastructural maintenance and development.

 

There is no doubt that African émigrés would play a more instrumental role than has been appreciated until recently in the transformation of their various homelands in Africa. This would be crucial in redefining the future socio-economic direction of Africa. With the relative freedom that exile from home creates for less inhibited political expression and action, and also utilising greater access to new forms of communication such as the mobile phone and the internet, African émigrés could also focus on ways of putting pressure on the blood shot eyed and blood stained ex-generals and civilian cadres alike that parade as African leaderships currently. For every killing or mayhem inflicted on any African in any African country, African émigrés should respond in some way – send an email of protest to the consulate or embassy in addition to the ministry of external affairs and the president’s or prime minister’s office of the country where such a crime has been committed. To expand the range of the impact of this form of protest, perhaps inform four other people (relatives, friends, colleagues) and ask each to inform four others, and so on in a 5-in-a-link ever-extending network for a greater reach and effectiveness… Alternatively, if one prefers a fax dispatch or a phone call, please use either if this is deemed more convenient or effective. Never again should silence be a response by Africans to the wilful murder of any African by Africa’s depraved leaderships.

 

 

Professor Ekwe-Ekwe is a leading scholar on conflicts and change in contemporary Africa