Nkrumah in Burkina Faso

An engineered military mutiny in Kinshasa barely one week after Congo’s independence on June 30, 1960 triggered revenge killings of Belgians; and rapes of Catholic nuns. Urged on by the United States, Belgium landed troops and violated the sovereignty of the new country; incited a declaration of secession by mineral-rich Katanga Province; and subsequently assassination […]

An engineered military mutiny in Kinshasa barely one week after Congo’s independence on June 30, 1960 triggered revenge killings of Belgians; and rapes of Catholic nuns. Urged on by the United States, Belgium landed troops and violated the sovereignty of the new country; incited a declaration of secession by mineral-rich Katanga Province; and subsequently assassination the first prime minister, the charismatic and patriot, Patrice Lumumba. All that had preceded Zanzibar’s bloodletting.
 A season of military coups saw murders of Silvanus Olympio in Togo; Abubakar Balewa in Nigeria, and peaked in the 1974 murder of colourful Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia.  Political regicide in Nigeria and Ethiopia led to conflagrations. Ethiopia saw the collapse of the primacy of Amhara aristocratic power and feudal land ownership. A Marxist hegemony fell to the current Tigre-led federal arrangement as a resolute drive to use state ‘’monopoly of means of violence’’ to prevent a resurrection of a feudal past. For victims of the present regime, Mazrui’s dictum is a cap that fits. To former serfs, he is an apologist for human degradation.
 Nkrumah’s fall from ruling Ghana in 1966; Milton Obote’s exit from power in Uganda in 1971 and the fall of President William Tolbert in Liberia in 1980 were also followed by seasons of bloodletting and economic decay. Brutal intelligence officers from North America, the European Union and the former Soviet Union feasted on African ineptitude in global diplomacy.
 Bill Clinton’s presidency was accused of planting rule by minority ethnic groups in Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia; a failed effort to put immigrant Tutsi (the ‘’Banyamulenge’’) in power in Democratic Republic of Congo. Current military backing of the Nuer in South Sudan is to ensure that such vulnerable regimes need milk-bottles from NATO even when their violence-rooted ‘’democracy’’ shames their godfathers.
Underneath these dark clouds, multinational corporations planted debts as bombs that would explode across veins of political kingdoms in each African country and cause permanent outflows of wealth to Euro-American and Japanese bank vaults. Professor Adebayo Adedeji, at a 2002 conference in Nairobi, Kenya, described this drama as ‘’social and economic warfare against Africa’’. The economic kingdom which Nkrumah had anticipated has bled. African diplomats and economists have fought back with brilliant formulas for growth.
 Angry unemployed victims escaped the engineering skills of planners; becoming weapons for entrepreneurs of violence: igniting Mungiki in Kenya and Boko Haram in Nigeria. In Tunisia, Egypt, Central African Republic, Somalia, Burkina Faso and Democratic Republic of Congo, they became diverse mass bombs.
The challenge is to re-invent the road back to the economic kingdom with the inclusion of talents of unemployed millions across Africa.  The ‘’Singapore model’’ borrowed from the Japanese model of government collecting public funds; giving it to selected businesses under intensive policy partnership and anti-corruption policing. It must, however, pull out of the civil service those with appetites for wealth through corruption; and support them as positive entrepreneurs. The civil service must be left for the brightest patriots, free from inferiority complexes; that use state power strategically to guide, supervise and discipline business groups.
As in Japan and Germany, productive business groups may frighten feudal classes afraid of losing access to easy consumption. If they fail to build social democracy, they would be crushed by manipulators of poor classes. The victory over Obama by businesses that spent 4 billion dollars on deceptive television advertisements showed that ’capitalist corporations with pro-poverty, pro-climate catastrophe impulses’ are an illustration.
As Odia Ofeimun re-states, external exploiters of Nigeria and Africa have always crushed patriotic roads to development. Priority must go to firing social welfare aspirations in angry unemployed youths into labour-intensive collective construction of massive infrastructures; irrigation systems and large-scale cooperative farming;  small and medium scale group industrial production, and age-group based collective policing of anti-corruption in business and public administration. Nkrumah must have glimpsed such potential in Burkina Faso.
That would weaken uses of this reservoir of energy as hired violent demonstrators often fed on cocaine and other mind-bending drugs; animate imaginations for industrial inventions and information technology creativities; build buying power for much needed strong local markets for other producers, including food vendors and farmers; and support social justice.