Burundi’s struggle with governance

The thought that the lad could with equal decorum and swift certainty slaughter her under the cover of her diplomatic immunity made her demand for urgent transfer out of Burundi. When in 1974 Hutus killed 10,000 Tutsi civilians, the Tutsi military retaliated by killing 100,000 HutusThe root of the violence was the determination of a […]

The thought that the lad could with equal decorum and swift certainty slaughter her under the cover of her diplomatic immunity made her demand for urgent transfer out of Burundi. When in 1974 Hutus killed 10,000 Tutsi civilians, the Tutsi military retaliated by killing 100,000 Hutus
The root of the violence was the determination of a minority Tutsi ruling class to use their monopoly of the army to suppress the democratic aspirations for power by the majority Hutu population. The ‘’tyranny of numbers’’ – as Kenyans call it – was in favour of the Hutu: being 85 per cent of the total population. The Tutsi ruling class were determined to bleed the Hutu into sullen surrender. The Hutu turned to armed struggle. They had heard of it in Algeria; in Zimbabwe; in Angola, and beyond.
The spiral of violence drew mediation from Nelson Mandela. When his sacred halo of defeating apartheid failed, he was succeeded by Mwalimu Nyerere, former President of Tanzania. It is in this vortex of violence as a tool of ‘’armed discussion’’ that Nkurunziza’s father was murdered and he himself escaped to Tanzania as a wounded young graduate with a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother. Nkurunziza played a leading role in hammering a peace in Arusha which guaranteed the Tutsi minority against fears of vengeance by sharing the structure of the army – from officers to foot soldiers – on a 50-50 basis.
It is important to sketch out this context in discourse about the current crisis in Burundi.  The hero in this discourse is the ‘’Two Term’’ formula for holding elected presidential office. This formula has come to Africa from the American political tradition. The American historical record is given a sanctity and philosophical dignity it does not deserve. The Americans have been happy to claim to be democratic even if the southern states have been run as racial one-party dictatorship. The British parliamentary system has refrained from embracing the ‘’Two Term’’ ritual in determining presidential tenures.
Africa has emerged from diverse traditions. As Amilcar Cabral argued, the Balante. (in Guinea Bissau); the Nuer (in South Sudan) the Tiv and Igbo (in Nigeria), etc rejected power being accumulated in the hands of a monarch. The Jukun and Yoruba (in Nigeria); the Baganda (in Uganda) forced a king to commit regicide if his rule brought epidemics, drought, famine and foolish warfare.  Above this diverse formulas for legitimate governance, colonial wars imposed silent military dictatorships often disguised as ‘’indirect rule’’.
It is interesting that Leopold Senghor (in Senegal) and Mwalimu Nyerere (in Tanzania) combined records of vigorously trying to return to pre-colonial African forms of governance with voluntarily leaving power after long years of rule (1960-1980) and 1961-1985), respectively. By contrast, long incumbency of Daniel arap Moi (1978-2002) and Mobutu Sese Seko (1961- 1987), were marked by repressive rule strongly supported by Euro-American power.
The longest lasting regimes came into power through revolutionary armed struggle (Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Eduardo do Santos (in Angola); while Museveni (in Uganda) fought against post-colonial governments. Mugabe is still fighting economic warfare against entrenched white economic power. Dos Santos fought a civil war which ravaged the country and delayed his party’s delivery of the dividends of revolutionary armed struggle. Museveni saw himself as dredging out a barbarism of economic and political governance inherited from Idi Amin; and inventing new politics which also includes women in power.
The African Union, subsequently, midwifed an imaginative road to good governance based on African leaders assessing each other’s performances based on ‘’Country Reports’’ crafted by highly talented and experienced experts. Former colonial powers have rushed in to overshadow it by giving superior visibility to terrorism by the ICC; and to the slogan of ‘’Two Terms’’. The primacy of Africa cleaning its own affairs through vigorously entrenching and celebrating the ‘’AFRICAN PEER REVIEW MECHANISM’’ (APRM) is under threat.
The APRM should give Burundi a road map to deep-rooted legitimacy to its governance. Fanning conflict in Burundi has grave risks for Rwanda’s anti-genocide social engineering based on eroding ethnic identities. It is vulnerable to expositions of unequal incomes and sharing government jobs. A Dutch scholar, for example, claims that out of 17 permanent secretaries, 16 were Tutsi. That is incendiary data.