By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
It is frighteningly frightful when you realise that some of the chapters which you read in your Secondary School Government textbook, when you were sixteen or seventeen-years-old, have suddenly become a frighten reality like waking up in the middle of the night and finding a starved untamed lion crouching on your bedroom door.
Those of us who used Oladipo H.B Venn’s “Essentials of Government For ‘O’ Level Examination” as our Secondary School Government textbook, whilst preparing ourselves for the GCE Ordinary Level exams, might now be frighteningly reminded of Chapter 21 in that textbook. That Chapter is titled: “The Military in African Politics.”
As teenagers then, our only aim was to memorize and pass (“kog en pass”) the exams. But few months before writing our West African Examinations Council (WAEC) exams in 1992, one Lieutenant Julius Maada Bio and his cohorts in the Sierra Leone Army staged a successful coup. Nonetheless, never had any of us thought that a time would come when Chapter 21 in that textbook would be torn from it and transplanted into an African reality again. What we had thought was only an academic exercise then, aimed at testing our basic knowledge in basic governance issues, is now an exercise in reality in some African countries.
The military, in few African countries, has reentered the theater of politics. Africa is now experiencing a contagion of military coups in countries where Democracy has been experimented or is in experimentation. From Sudan to Mali to Burkina Faso to Guinea to Niger, and now Gabon; the military-coup contagion has become so contagious that some of Africa’s “democratic” leaders, who have filled the top echelons of their militaries with their tribesmen, believing that they would be safely safe, are now feeling unsafe in their safeness.
I would have been very jittery if I were they simply because most of these recent coups were, or are, being carried out by the elite units of those countries (mostly units very close to the presidency) whose exclusive aim was, or is, to protect their presidents and their immediate families. The lesson is simple: even if you fill your national army with your tribesmen; even if you blatantly and shamelessly rig elections; even if you narrow the democratic space by consistently harassing and intimidating members of the opposition; even if you declare some parts of your country as no-go areas for opposition parties during election campaigns; even if you spend half of your country’s budget on buying military weapons and equipment for your army, and even if you increase the salaries of senior personnel in your national army and security sector tenfold, the military will still intervene in politics if the national heartbeats are for a democratic change of government which was denied in the ballot box.
But why has the military reentered the theater of African politics at a time when the Continent is experimenting with multi-party Democracy? Why in most of the countries where the military has recently intervened in politics their citizens are welcoming Democracy’s obituary? The answer to those questions could be hypothetically seen in Chinua Achebe’s proverb which says: “a man who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain if he is visited by lizards” (Arrow of God).
In most of these African countries where the military has recently reentered politics; the “democratic” leaders themselves created the oases for such interventions. From Sudan to Mali to Burkina Faso to Guinea to Niger, and now Gabon; one notices that those overthrown “democratic” leaders had been blatantly lording over systems which exuded rigged elections; arbitrary use of executive powers; tribalism and regionalism, and the heavy use of the security sector to stifle the fundamental Freedoms and Rights of ordinary citizens.
In these African countries, where Democracy is now in the mortuary, the Heads of State did not create strong democratic institutions that would have oiled the spinning wheels of Democracy. Instead, they weakened these democratic institutions by diluting them with either their strong and unrepentant party supporters or their tribesmen. The Supreme Courts or Constitutional Courts in those countries are not only shamelessly partisan but are dispensers of injustices where rigged elections are legitimized! And the parliaments in these countries are known for rubber-stamping everything and anything that will further the undemocratic-ness of the ruling political parties.
So, it’s déjà vu. Some of the reasons which one Lieutenant Julius Maada Bio and his cohorts in the Sierra Leone Army gave in 1992 for staging their successful coup are some of the same reasons given by the coup leaders in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon. Now, I’m beginning to believe what his wife, First Lady Fatima Bio, once allegedly told a gathering of SLPP faithful in the United States of America during a fundraising event that President Bio holds a “PhD in coups”! But that is one of the ironies of the SLPP propaganda. For how can “a Father of Democracy” holds a PhD in planning and staging coups? And how can “a Father of Democracy” commit Democracy-cide (Don’t dash for your dictionaries or Google it; it’s another One Dropian coinage.)?
Now coming back to the contagion of military coups in Africa. How can those countries which are yet to be infected by this infection immunize themselves against the infection? The partial answer could be found in a speech which the former president of the United States of America, Barrack Obama, delivered in the Ghanaian parliament in the July of 2009. In that speech, he noted that, “Development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places [in Africa], for far too long….” He stated that, “Repression takes many forms, and too many nations are plagued by problems that condemn their people to [abject] poverty”.
And Barrack Obama dropped the lines which are now religiously being quoted: “….No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end…Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions…”
Indeed. But in Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon; their former Heads of State had wanted to create strongmen than strong democratic institutions. They had repressed their citizens which had led to majority of them being condemned to abject poverty. They had presided over governance structures which had given way to the rule of brutality and bribery. And they had created situations in which, paradoxically, Democracy could only be saved not by elections but by killing Democracy itself!
It is on that note that I will end today’s One Dropian dropping with a quote from the preface in Wole Soyinka’s book, “The Man Died”, that “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”
[email protected]/+232-76-611-986