Celebrating political engineering in Africa

We can join in by giving attention to the absence of celebration of creativity in African politics thereby, leaving open ground for nefarious advocates of murky themes of ‘’afro-pessimism’’ and even calls for the re-colonisation of the continent. Local allies have joined international NGOs in extracting funds from sponsors for the promotion of intrusive modes […]

We can join in by giving attention to the absence of celebration of creativity in African politics thereby, leaving open ground for nefarious advocates of murky themes of ‘’afro-pessimism’’ and even calls for the re-colonisation of the continent. Local allies have joined international NGOs in extracting funds from sponsors for the promotion of intrusive modes of control code-named ‘’strategic change’’. The more brazen among re-colonizers are trafficking in guns, ammunitions, diamonds, gold, tantalite, and human beings as cheap labour hungry for ‘’better life abroad’’.
There is a rich legacy of creative governing. A most glaring example – which helped Robert Mugabe in trouncing Morgan Tsvangirai – was legislation which gave 50 per cent ownership of diamond, gold, uranium, platinum and other mining enterprises to local communities where they are located. Annual earnings from such businesses would finance investment by communities in roads, clinics, schools, housing and productive activities. The anchor for earning popular legitimacy is in giving ownership of resources under ancestral lands to communities and not to influential individuals tagged as ‘’sons of the soil’’. This is a departure from state socialism popularised by Algeria (under Houre Boumediene) and Tanzania (under Mwalimu Nyerere) by which such earnings became budgets of governments and often stolen by officials.
Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni increased numbers of women elected to legislative bodies by the simple trick of allocating seats to be contested only by women. Nyerere had previously invented contests in each constituency by at least two candidates drawn from among members of the Tanzania’s universally popular political party. Museveni’s National Resistance Movement provided women candidates for these contests. The arrival of multi-party elections merely flowed into this mould. The novel focus on women’s invasion of politics drew attention away a prior appeals by religious labels and flags to draw voters.
Kenya’s politicians adopted this model for their 2010 Constitution. It ended previous scandals like that of women voting massively for Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement, yet not a single woman getting elected to parliament from his home base in Nyanza. Abdullaye Wade may have joined this love for women surging into parliament with the hope that they would in 2012 give him a third term in office. He championed legislation which mandated each political party to contest the 2012 elections with 50 per cent of candidates being women. He prepared the political climate for President Macky Sall, who trounced him in the presidential election, to appoint Senegal’s second woman prime minister and head of cabinet. She had left her job as a United Nations bureaucrat to lead his re-election campaign team.
Former Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawe, invented ‘liberation federalism’ to anchor his governing. Like all ‘liberation’ matters it drew blood from those losing power in the socio-political drama. His armed struggle had been prosecuted and won by an ethnic minority, the Tigre. At moments in Ethiopia’s ancient expansionist monarchy, the Tigre had successfully seized power from the dominant Amhara ruling class.  Their hold on power had been short in duration and failed to reach the level of grip to match signals of Amhara domination including the widespread use of Amharic as a language; its script as a tool of learning and public administration; intensive monopoly of political posts; possession of landed property, and enslavement of local populations as serfs.
Meles Zenawe’s challenge was to disentangle this labyrinth of power. Measures included creating political spaces around ethnic groups, and imposing local languages as lingua franca. As an example, road signs in Oromo ethnic-provinces changed from Amharic to Oromia. A major challenge was in ‘’forcing Ethiopian masses to be free’’ – to recall Jean Jacques Rousseau’s wit. A strong signal had been sent during Mengistu Haile Mariam’s declaration of land reform based disowning landlords and declaring peasants as the new owners. Mengistu hand sent university students eager to implement it. Their shock was meeting a stubborn wall of scepticism by ‘’peasants’’ or serfs who feared falling into a cruel hoax which would be followed by cruel tortures by landlords when they returned. Zenawe’s government needed to counter deep-rooted power of fear among the peasantry by creating a new culture of government as a conveyer of pleasure through health clinics, schools, fertilizer and better prices for agricultural harvests. Performance became a missionary for the regime.
Critics have rightly noted that ‘’forcing Ethiopians to be free’’ was midwifed by brutal treatment of opposition politicians, critical media and internationals NGOs. It was a game of playing for time. If the oppositions allowed time for the regime to start harvesting benefits of seeds sown among the peasantry, memories of their own non-democratic and exploitative legacy would become their damnation. In Zenawe’s favour was a combination of total grip on the tools of violence and a vast legacy and field of destitution; of imperial glamour without development. He built thirty (30) new universities.
Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki missed the Mo Ibrahim award because of blood in his electoral footprints. His 2010 constitution for Kenya dispersed power from a monopolistic presidency to counties in the periphery. Ethnic chiefs in ministries giving jobs and awarding contracts only to kith and kin with brutal cynicism also took hits. His regime’s ‘’Constituency Development Trust Fund’’   injected funds directly into constituencies; thereby, giving legitimacy to electoral politics by protecting funds for local projects from the greed of legislators.
Silence across Africa about moments of creative political engineering fuels debilitating cynicism.