Africa’s long-awaited glory of rising to a more peaceful, freer and prosperous continent is often truncated by the actions and inactions of the ruling elites.
Often the building blocks of a free society such as a limitation to what government can do to its people are ignored by the ruling elites.
Over the years, the constant neglect of engaging the citizenry, lack of consensus-building, and ineffective civil societies have led to a surge in brutal tyranny, self-aggrandizement, naked plunder, and the use of force to rule. These traits often associated with slavery and militarism have meandered their way into the continent’s democratic dispensation.
Worst, Africans are being betrayed and enslaved by their own. Suffice it to say Africans have not experienced independence from colonial rule that much since the first proclamation was heard from Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in 1957.
Nkrumah was heard saying “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus, Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!…. We have won the battle and again rededicate ourselves … Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”
Today, Ghana is not free. Africa is yet to be liberated. 14 out of the 28 countries enlisted in the repressed category of the 2023 Index of Economic Freedom by the Heritage Foundation are from Africa. 30 out of the 65 countries in the mostly unfree category of the same Index are from Africa. Clearly, “Africa is poor because she is not free.”
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Although Mauritius, Rwanda, and Botswana give a glimpse of hope with their aggressive pro-business reforms to spur entrepreneurial growth and diversified economies, that is not enough. Over 66 years of independence, the continent continues to suffer from misguided leadership, misgovernance, systemic corruption, capital flight, economic mismanagement, declining investment, collapsed infrastructure, decayed institutions, senseless civil wars, political tyranny, flagrant violations of human rights, and military vandalism.
It seems that whenever African leaders have power, there is the urge to do wrong and only a few escape from this temptation.
If not, why should African leaders destroy their domestic education institutions and then send their children to foreign schools? Why would they stifle domestic trade and then promote foreign trade? Why will they castigate their indigenous institutions and then go abroad to copy foreign institutions? Why will they persecute local investors and then roll out the red carpet to attract foreign investors? Why will they marginalize domestic experts and then spend billions of dollars on foreign experts? Why will they decimate their domestic banking system and then deposit their ill-gotten wealth in foreign banks?
Why will they spurn their own indigenous culture and then go abroad and copy foreign cultural attributes? Why will they ruin their domestic healthcare facilities, seek medical care, or die in foreign hospitals?
Just as it was in pre-colonial Africa where people saw themselves not as “Africans” but as from different countries and ethnic groups, with certain kin connections and tribal hegemony and a particular status in their society, which of course led a few to betray their people and sold them into the slave trade, that has not changed much. Africans only found out their leaders have overly been obsessed with colonization too.
For Africa to change, Africans must be more than vanguards of constitutionalism and term limits. It is time to disassemble the dictatorship.
