The futility of African elections
There are strong indications that the elections scheduled to hold in Cameroon in October could be delayed – for just a little while until eternal president Paul Biya has made up his mind which and how opponents lose. France is watching with keen interest. The French hate to pre-empt the outcome of things already known […]
There are strong indications that the elections scheduled to hold in Cameroon in October could be delayed – for just a little while until eternal president Paul Biya has made up his mind which and how opponents lose. France is watching with keen interest. The French hate to pre-empt the outcome of things already known in their eternal colonies. Cameroon would not be the first to postpone elections. Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC polls were scheduled for 2016 but Joseph Kabila declared his country broke. Not many people agreed with him. Enemies claim that the DRC has more resources per square kilometers than anywhere else in Africa. What they have failed to realize is that minerals buried under the earth do not become wealth until someone extracts them. You need a Kabila visa to extract those gems.
As far as the Cameroonian elections go, only Ambassonians are crying wolf. They constitute a negligible 20 per cent of the population and largely live in refugee camps.
Elections, why do we even bother? We should cancel them in Africa. We don’t need them. Elections are time wasting, adrenaline drenching, trouble brewing and generally disrupting charades. In those parts of the continent where they still happen, they mostly happen to confirm what people already know – despots never lose.
It shouldn’t be too hard to get a consensus at the next AU meeting. The resolution could then be passed to the United Nations so that we are respected for growing our own style of governance. Every time an election is held anywhere in Africa, neighbouring countries and the Western world put the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR on red alert for the influx of refugees and asylum seekers.
It has been confirmed that most of the loudmouths shooting their toxic saliva at dictators from abroad slipped out after fractious elections. Who wants such bilious malcontents breathing down the necks of the ruiners napping in office? After five decades of flag independence, we should have agreed by now that the incumbent always knows best.
Elections are not in our genes. Whoever heard anyone casting ballots for the Queen of England? Before there were elections, we were governed by powerful Queens and Kings. Our selected ruiners have hardly changed that nomenclature. Their motto is – things work better with diktat. All these ideas that legitimacy comes from the ballot box is not only time wasting but resource sapping. Money – that single means of exchange that Africa obviously lacks should not be wasted on silly elections whose outcomes are already known. Investing in elections is akin to preparing budgets. If you’re a Naija for instance, you realize that we have bought enough cutleries for the Presidential Villa in the past ten years to put a spoon and knife in every hand or sustain a successful gold and other metal smelting venture.
Imagine the compelling Joseph Kabila to funds shambolic polls he’s bound to win? The man inherited a mandate from his father, just like Faure Gnassingbe. Nobody qualifies to ruin the Congo or Togo better than the incumbents. Nkurunziza won’t be a candidate except the whole Burundi gets on their knees to beg him to stay on. We all know it would happen.
Elections expose the deception that the opposition has better ideas. If you ask Naija people, the only difference between the PDP and the APC is the spelling. People shouldn’t go trough the polls to learn that! Without elections in Kenya, Miguna Miguna would still have a natural country to return to. Raila Odinga would’ve remained his eternal political icon. All that changed after he left his base in Canada to return to Kenya to partake in elections. Instead of winning, he lost his bid as well as his natural citizenship when he staked everything to help Odinga establish a parallel government. At the end of it all, Miguna was deported from his own country while Odinga shook hands with his ‘brother’, Uhuru Kenyatta. Miguna is yet to recover from the shock.
Of course, dozens died as a result of believing the opposition but we don’t count electoral casualties – they just happen. Kenya’s elections cost taxpayers and tax dodgers a whopping one billion dollars. Imagine the amount of ugali that could put on the table. What was wrong with accepting that Jomo Kenyatta groomed his son to carry on where he left off?
We’re half way through the year; thirteen more countries have elections on their radar. Two of them, Mali and Zimbabwe have scheduled presidential polls while the rest have parliamentary polls that would cost more than the countries could afford. Imagine all that money buying beds for hospitals, chalk and slate in schools and books in libraries. Instead, these elections would create eternal enmity between neighbours, take the lives of idiots who stake their lives for political actors and create refugees and asylum seekers. The rest of the world would look on in horror or in applause as people die and nations burn. Perhaps we should accept that maybe we were not wired to follow democracy as a path to governance.