Egypt: Don’t cry for me Africa

 The address repeated a warning that his blood would ‘’flow on the floor’’ to defend his presidency.  In a democracy contestants ‘’reach out’’ across floors of policy, not blood. On 26 October, 1954, the military faked an assassination on Gamal Nasser. He defiantly said he was ready to die for his country. It was an excuse to burn the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, dissolve the organisation and arrest and torture thousands of its members. Was Morsi stealing the legacy of the military and sending out a call to a bloody struggle?

 He warned against 23 families that control power in Egypt, urging Egyptians not to ‘’be deceived’’ by propagandists covering up social injustice.  He rambled. He was a stubborn man invoking a core strategy of the Brotherhood to win power by building support from among the bottom up.

The polarisation of Egyptian politics comes at a time when the country has decayed while Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Lilliputian Qatar, have become alternative powers with capacities to intervene in affairs as far apart as Libya, Nigeria and Somalia. As Mubarak sulked after Sudanese militants tried to assassinate him in Addis Ababa (as he arrived to attend an Organisation of African Unity meeting), Muammar Kaddafi worked resolutely to be crowned ‘’King of Kings’’ by Africa’s impoverished traditional chiefs.

Egypt drinks water and eats fertile soils from the highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Southern Sudan. Gamal Nasser, Egypt’s last visionary ruler, failed to grasp the import of this reality in the era of post-colonial economic development. He failed to transcend the legacy of barbaric invasions by Ottoman Turks as they lunged to grab the source of the River Nile. Their blind and ruthless exploitation of peoples in the Gezira flood plains provoked a furious Sudanese nationalism which swept out their European mercenary troops. An advance of troops was cut off in northern Uganda, and would later incarnate as Field Marshal Idi Amin’s Nubian ethnic troops.

General Abboud’s 1958 military coup sponsored by Egyptian intelligence operatives derailed visions of modern, economic development of Sudan propagated by Sudan’s nationalists and the Communist Party.  Successive military dictatorships turned to clan anti-Southern Sudanese racism and religion for anchor. Professor Mahmud Mamdani’s brilliant recent book on Darfur reports that power in Khartoum rotates among civilian and military power brokers from three clans, including that of President Omar Bashir. Their political blindness earned them the break-up of the largest country in Africa – with South Sudan walking away with vast oil deposits. As Sudan bled (1956-2011), Egypt remained blind to the industrial potential of the vast mineral and agricultural resources in Sudan

Further south, critics accused Hosni Mubarak of colluding with President Chirac of France to support genocide in Rwanda; oblivious of decomposed bodies of victims polluting Nile waters destined to reach Egypt.

Egypt never seems to have overcome the trap of luring oil money from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait by posing as their defender against expansionist Zionism in Israel out to implement biblical narratives of conquest. Nasser’s ploy was disrupted when Israel learnt that Nasser was using the money to achieve an industrial takeoff. The Six Day War of 1967 served to reveal Egypt’s military weakness, and to force its leaders onto a militarist road which later led to the current humiliation of Morsi’s exit being decided by the 1.5 billion American dollars given as annual pocket money to Egypt’s military. The Egypt which in the footsteps of Mohammed Ali and Gamal Nasser’s  “Arab Socialism’’ should have become the Korea and Japan of Africa, finds itself discussed in American power circles as a mere crumbling police outpost. Even Morsi’s assistants refer to the United States as ‘’mother’’.

Boutros Boutros Ghali, Nasser’s agent for conducting shuttle diplomacy across Africa, and former UN Secretary General, wrote that Egyptian diplomats consider serving in missions in African countries as punishment. They are hardly infrastructure for building regional power anchored on Africa. Morsi’s strident hostility to the “Renaissance Hydroelectric Dam’’ under construction in Ethiopia was typical of this lack of rhythm with Africa.  The dam when completed in 2017 will export power to Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan – a visionary trans-Africa project billed to spur growth across a resource- rich bite of Africa.

 Instead of a constructive dialogue, Morsi’s Minister for Water waved Egypt’s military uniforms at these potential beneficiaries. The spectre of his Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘’martyrs’’ surging forth to join hands with bruised El Shabaab fighters in Somalia, appeared in the horizon. It was hardly the rhetoric of an engineer with a vision of industrializing uplands to take Egyptian capital investment to, even as China was already building highways in Kenya; hunting for oil in Uganda; sucking oil out of South Sudan and hunting for uranium in Central African Republic.

Morsi was a victim of Anwar Sadat elation with sharing camera flashlights with President Jimmy Carter and Israel’s Prime Minister Menchin Begin. An American diplomat notes that ‘’Egypt has been crucial in the hunt for terrorists’’. Margaret Thatcher once called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Hosni Mubarak was not visited by Mandela when he came out of prison in 1990. The African Union, however, has no licence to ignore the struggle by ‘’liberals’’ for open debates with the Muslim Brotherhood over an inclusive road to nation-building. The Brotherhood would be the biggest losers if outsiders bring Syria to Egypt.