Thinking Africana Continua

Times are calling for a new season of ‘’thinking Africana’’. As an undergraduate, we cherished: ‘’TODAY IN PARLIAMENT’’ consisting of extracts from speeches made by MPs. It had brilliance of wit; sparks of new ideas; ‘’malapropism’’ and bombastic nonsense; as Government combated Opposition benches. Nyerere jolted us with his view that African politics must not […]

Times are calling for a new season of ‘’thinking Africana’’. As an undergraduate, we cherished: ‘’TODAY IN PARLIAMENT’’ consisting of extracts from speeches made by MPs. It had brilliance of wit; sparks of new ideas; ‘’malapropism’’ and bombastic nonsense; as Government combated Opposition benches. Nyerere jolted us with his view that African politics must not be a frivolous civil war between two football teams; and ‘’Marxism’’ gave capitalism and class violence to end it a dignity which communal African socialism mocks as the road to collective happiness.  He, however, propagated violence against racial dictatorships in Mozambique, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, Namibia and Angola – all in the spirit of African brotherhood.
Africa’s young intellectuals are restless about lack of new theories for progress  Africa’s  legislators.  In Kenya and Nigeria legislators are bashed as greedy grabbers at war against of state funds. On 26th August, 2015 Kenya’s parliamentarians were vilified for seeking for immunity from prosecution for what they utter inside or outside parliament. They share, with their Nigeria kin, massive re-election defeats. Nigeria’s 7th National Assembly lost 70 per cent of its members to wraths among voters. Voters cannot comprehend why they expect to be commended for merely ‘’PASSING BILLS’’ while unelected civil servants have power to execute projects.
Kenya’s breed has provoked mass protests over their failure to legislate into law the 2010 Constitution endorsed by a national referendum. In Nigeria top clerics are seeking to earn more legitimacy than brawling legislators and have joined public calls for a cut in legislators’ incomes; including  ‘’wardrobe allowance’’ when  many Nigerians buy ‘’second hand clothes’’ from sky-roofed markets. A home-grown theory of legitimacy for legislators is yet to replace the colonial notion of rulers using power to grab wealth for themselves.
In South Africa, Julius Malema’s party seeks to desecrate, in televised drama, rituals of a parliament inherited from racial humiliation as adopted by new ‘’black economic oppressors’’. Their rude and loud tactics to paint President Jacob Zuma as a corrupt as impeachable lacks the status of the philosophical and historic meaning of the African National Congress. A spectacle interpreted as ‘’childish antics of barbarians’ ’inside parliament will not win votes from white racists. An alternative model of representation that is more legitimate than direct participation in village assemblies is absent here.
In Rwanda, parliament has a businesslike aura. Each member has a computer desktop. For the women who form the majority, the pain of dredging genocide out of Rwanda is too serious a business for parliament to be treated as a bazaar or beauty salon. The ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front is, however, unwilling to risk open sessions of ‘’talking bitterness’’- including reprisals against Hutus, and President Kagame’s warts.
A national consensus of Senegalese under the leadership of Mokhtar M’Bow, former Director General of UNESCO, revisited the role women played in their past, including recent resistance to colonial exploitation. The legislation they evolved in 2012 ordered each political party to field women as 50 per cent of its candidates. Consequently, the 2012 parliament achieved 46 per cent its members being women. What was vital about that legislation is that it came out of a national intellectual leap to consult ancient strategies for community survival and progress; and discarded discriminatory and wasteful practices imported from alien cultures.
Which raises the issue of the verbal combat between Barrack Obama and Yoweri Museveni over the issue of the sanctity of ‘’SECOND TERM’’ tenure for presidential power.  Museveni could argue that it was a second term American president who aided Idi Amin to mount a military coup; and, within one year, DIS-DEVELOP Uganda by 30 years – according to the World Bank.  ‘Second-termism’ is also yet to end America’s slave brutalities and income inequality against African-Americans. As Obama himself admitted, it has not produced ‘’commonsense laws’’ to end a culture of gun murders.
Museveni has a hybrid legacy of Ankole “Life Kingship’’; and longevity in power by ‘’revolutionary socialists’’:  Mao Zedung (in China), Ho Chi Mihn (in Vietnam); Fidel Castro (in Cuba) and Mwalimu Nyerere (in Tanzania). He studied at the University of Dar es Salaam where Nyerere ruled from 1961 to 1985 and actively engaged the university in debates over his theories including inventing a ‘’democratic one-party rule’’.
 Museveni might share with Obama the American republican rejection of European monarchies. A rising British business class had beheaded King Charles for monopolising trade and patents for inventions. The Jacobins in France had slaughtered an aristocracy.  They differ over Obama’s arrogant propagation of America’s political technology as a universal ideal.  In his Nairobi speech, Obama puzzled over the prospect of Museveni hiding a ‘’monarchical tendency’’ under cover of a revolutionary longevity for serving societal change.
The struggle for ‘THINKING AFRICANA’ must continue.