You are the richest people in Africa. You make money by raking it off the backs of your suffering peasants. You do not create wealth, but redistribute it from the poor to the powerful.
You ought to use your common sense and stop disgracing black people. I make no apologies for using strong words because, given Africa’s immense mineral wealth, there is no reason – none whatsoever – why Africa should be in such dire straits. Most Africans are fed up seeing you constantly appealing and begging, begging, and begging the international community to come and solve Africa’s problems. The incessant begging deprecates the pride and dignity of the African people. More annoying, you, with few exceptions, refuse to learn from your own foolish mistakes and keep repeating them again and again.
There are only four things that you know how to do well: Abuse power, loot the treasury, crush the opposition and perpetuate yourselves in office. Even the supposedly “backward and primitive” African chiefs provided their people with far better leadership than you do. Name one traditional African chief who looted his tribal treasury for deposit in a foreign bank. Having difficulty?
Your system of governance leads nowhere and, as a matter of fact, to your own detriment because there are certain immutable laws of African governance you cannot escape. Call them Ayittey’s Laws of African Governance.
Law 1: Your misdeeds will eventually catch up with you
In your zeal to "clean house," you often resort to draconian measures, declare states of emergency and suspend civil liberties. You start a witch-hunt for corrupt politicians of the preceding regime and brutalize those who stand in your way. A good example is the three Ghanaian judges who were abducted and murdered for freeing corrupt politicians of past regimes. The witch-hunt soon spreads to "dissidents," alienating large segments of the population. Even supporters of your new regime are not safe. In the initial stages of the "Rawlings revolution" in Ghana, university students regularly demonstrated their support as was also the case in the initial period of the late Samuel Doe's tenure in Liberia. But when Ghanaian students complained about cutbacks in allowances, the reaction of the military government was swift: closure of the universities.
But as the inscription on one of the "mammy trucks" plying Accra roads says: "No condition is permanent." Eventually the supporters of dictatorial regimes turn against them. High-ranking government officials resign or defect and start talking. Long-held secrets about looting and other misdeeds begin to feed the rumor mill, undermining the legitimacy of the regime.
Law 2: You will be hoisted by your own petard
You spend an inordinate amount on an elaborate security cum military structure to protect yourselves and suppress your people. Your elite guard, often accorded the best equipment and training is drawn from your ethnic group. But quite often, it is the very same security apparatus that overthrows you.
The Asante have this proverb: If a bed bug bites you, it is from your own cloth. In Cameroon, Mbia Meka, the senior commissioner of police and the commandant of the paramilitary Special Operations Squad, as well as Joseph Owona, and Remy Ze Meka, secretary general at the prime minister's office, were arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the Biya regime. The revelations stunned Cameroonians since the alleged coup leaders were all members of Biya's own Beti ethnic group. In Rwanda, the late president Juvenal Habryimana "fell victim to the monster he created" according to The Washington Post. His plane crash was plotted by his own allies, who saw that he was edging closer to political reforms that would threaten their power.
Although you are overthrown, the next tyrant doesn't learn. Being a product of that structure, with intricate knowledge of its inner workings, he repairs the weaknesses and strengthens the structure. Eventually he too is overthrown by the same security apparatus. The law is this: The more you spend on security, the more likely you will be overthrown by someone from your security forces. Military hierarchies often carry within them the seeds of their own destruction or instability. Most of them have been rocked by internal power struggles, factionalism, decay of cohesion and discipline, personal power gambits, and successful or attempted coups.
Recall that each year, African governments spend about $12 billion on the importation of weapons and maintenance of the military--an amount which is nearly equal to what Africa receives in aid from all sources. The futility of such military expenditures was pointed out by Archbishop Desmond Tutu who noted cogently: "Freedom is cheaper than repression. When you are a leader chosen by the people, you don't need security. All the money spent on weapons doesn't buy one iota of security." But obstinate tyrants refuse to take heed. “I bought jet fighters. I bought MiG-23s. I bought armed helicopters. And I lost the war. When there’s social unrest, it’s difficult to win. It’s the same feeling today,” said Likulia Bolongo, the defense minister of President Mobutu Sese Seko.
On March 18, 1991, angry Malians took to the streets to demand democratic freedom from the despotic rule of Moussa Traore. He unleashed his security forces on them, killing scores, including women and children. But pro-democracy forces were not deterred and kept up the pressure. Asked to resign, he retorted: "I will not resign, my government will not resign, because I was elected not by the opposition but by all the people of Mali!!!! But two days later when he tried to flee the country, he was grabbed by his own security agents and sent to jail. From there, he lamented: "My fate is now in God's hands." The same happened to Joseph Momoh of Sierra Leone, Buhari of Nigeria, and many others. They should have used their common sense.
Mengistu overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in a military coup. The ailing emperor was suffocated with a wet pillow, and his body buried in an unmarked grave. Scores of his relatives were murdered or chained to walls in the cellars of the imperial palace. Thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries were gunned down in the streets. More than 30,000 people were jailed. When a member of his own junta questioned the wisdom of such terror tactics, Mengistu shot him in the head. In 1991, after routing by a rag-tag army of Eritrean rebels, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe. How safe was he there? He panicked and ran yelling for help when a would-be assassin fired a single shot at one of his guards.
The late Samuel Doe of Liberia spent so much to keep his soldiers happy. He had crack Presidential troops, secretly trained by the Israelis. But they could not protect him from the Charles Taylor's rag-tag rebels of 1,000. Charles Taylor was not even a soldier but an ex-civil servant. The same can be said for Siad Barre of Somalia.
Law 3: The certainty of reprisals
The third law is that you will never go down alone. Because you surround yourself and award top government positions to cronies and members of your own tribe, vengeful retribution will be taken against you when you are overthrown. The victims will include innocent individuals who had nothing to do with you but will be brutalized nonetheless because of their association and enjoyment of your privileges.
In the Ivory Coast, a lightning military coup ousted the corrupt government of Henri Konan Bedie, who spent millions to “develop” his hometown, Daoukro. Fearing reprisals, elderly women and children fled into the forest. Most have now returned, though soldiers and police officials still restrict entry into town. A serious indictment of Samuel Doe’s rule was the way he was unable to see that the crass pursuit of the interests of his own ethnic group, the Krahn, would in the long run grievously damage the future of that group, as well as the whole of Liberia. There are other African countries where the concentration of guns in the hands of one group (as in Togo or the Congo) creates a grievous political imbalance, even if it can bring spurious short-term stability. Doe's efforts over the years to pack his army with Krahn, many of them brought from over the Ivorian border, introduced a level of tribal animosity not previously known, despite historical roots.
In Togo, at least 1,600 northern Togolese, especially those from the Kabye tribe where President Gnassingbe Eyadema comes from, were forced to seek refuge in the grounds of the ruling party school in the capital Lome after they had been molested and thrown out of their homes by southern Ewe.
In Somalia, former president Siad Barre not only favored his own Marehan clan but also played off one clan against another to stay in power. The Galgalo and Darod clans were armed by Barre. After Barre's ouster, almost all the men of the Galgalo clan were killed in reprisals. In Mogadishu, the Darod clan was humiliated by the Hawiye clan, from which the triumphant Unite Somali Congress (USC) drew its support. They were forced out of Mogadishu and stripped of everything.
On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed, together with the president of Burundi, in an apparent rocket attack on their plane. Their deaths unleashed a ferocious carnage that claimed over 500,000 lives. And what happened to Col. Theoneste Bagosora and his henchmen? They fled to Cameroon but eleven of the masterminds of the genocide were rounded up and held in Cameroon jails. They included former army Col. Theoneste Bagosora, who’s accused of masterminding the killings; Ferdinand Nahimana, whose Radio Milles Collines broadcast messages advocating the slaughter; former Transport Minister Andre Ntagerura; and former military intelligence chief Col. Anatole Nsengiyumva, who is suspected of leading death squads. Also detained were Col. Felicien Muberuka, a former military commander, and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, the former leader and spokesman for the extremist Committee For Democracy.
These cases should serve as a lesson to those elites, some with Ph.D.s, who, for a Mercedes-Benz, would readily sell off conscience and integrity to serve in ministerial and ambassadorial capacities under brutal dictatorships. What happened to all those top government officials in the Doe, Barre and Habyarimana regimes? Specifically, what happened to the following people who served under Doe: Senate President Tambakai Jangaba; Justice Minister Jenkins Scott, Information Minister J. Emmanuel Bowier, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Elbert Dunn, Finance Minister Emmanuel Shaw, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Kekura Kpoto?
Over a third of them, including top banking officials, abandoned their posts in July 1990 during official missions abroad and were searching for political asylum. Mr. Shaw, the finance minister, sent a telex to notify Doe of his resignation, citing "family pressures." The remaining top government officials fled. Mr. Kpoto, the deputy minister of agriculture, was discovered in hiding in Bo (Sierra Leone). A few unlucky ones did not make it out of Liberia; they were killed.
Also killed in Rwanda were three cabinet ministers in Habyarimana's government. Over 80 percent of Rwanda's 700 judges and magistrates, many of them guilty themselves of the genocide, died or fled in the 1994 fighting. Marc Rugenera, former minister of finance, and many others fled into exile. The information minister, Eliezer Niyitegeka, who incited Hutus to kill Tutsis, fled to a refugee camp in Goma, Zaire. Eliezer said in an interview in Zaire that he was so depressed that he was asking France for political asylum. Now he is depressed?
The plight of the Krahn and the Marehan clan should also serve as a lesson to the Bamileke of Cameroon, the Baule of the Ivory Coast, the Ewe of Ghana, the Kalenjin and Kikuyu of Kenya, the Basiita clan of Kyamukanga Kyamugurwa of Uganda, the Muslims of northern Nigeria, the Gbande of Zaire, the Chewa of Malawi, and the Arabs of Mauritania and Sudan.
You who exhort others to eschew "tribalism" ought to detribalize yourselves and your regimes or risk reprisals against your tribesmen when you fall.
In Ghana, Chris Atakpo, warned: At the Kotoka International Airport, all the officials are Ewes. Why? Tema Harbor the same thing. Almost all the key positions in the military, police force and corporations are Ewes. Why? I am an Ewe and from Keta. Mr. Rawlings, you should think of what is happening in Rwanda now. You should know that we the Ewes are about 9 percent of the population. Don't let we the Ewes be the victims in future. Please change your deadly ideas.
By George Ayittey
Ayittey is a Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation.
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