Suppose I could say that I’m growing increasingly troubled by the blind support democracy receives from many Africans I speak to, but I don’t think troubled is the right word. Let’s first look at the blind support I’m talking about. It is this unquestioning embrace of that axis of evil: democracy, human rights, and good governance. And before folk start springing at me as they’ve been trained to do when any of the three is attacked, give me a chance to explain.
You know how our forefathers were dazzled by beads and mirrors (shiny things) and bibles while the land was grabbed from under their feet by “the west”? Well, the axis of evil is the new shiny thing. We will laud killing and disenfranchising as long as it is in the name of the three, never mind that it portends terrible things for our future, and indicates, once again, that we (collectively) can’t think or plan beyond our noses.
de Tocqueville called it the tyranny of the majority. Here in Africa, as we kill, maim and willfully under develop our economies and ourselves over so-called democracy, what we are actually doing is sidelining (as he so succinctly pointed out) development. Now, because no masses left to their own devices will ever want to pay for the development they claim to crave (not in taxes and certainly not in sweat equity, or in foregoing ‘their peoples’ turn to eat’), we have just ensured that we will remain at the hind teat in this global economy.
People celebrate that ‘change is coming to Africa’ because “despotic” and “anti-democratic” leaders are being forced to share or to resign. No one asks who the successors are indebted to, are they really pushing ‘the people’s’ agenda, or where democracy as currently sold to us has ever worked to help an African country’s population (pole vault) clear that infamous $2 a day height. No one cares that these processes of “change” are actually fracturing society, pulling us apart and ENSURING we do not develop.
The mythology around Asian Tiger development is that they got most people moving in the same direction, development. After you have that income and that roof over your head, and that stake in the economy, then you can start singing about the axis of evil, not before. We simply want to see the bus moving, and it appears we don’t care what direction it’s moving in.
I am particularly entertained and incensed (simultaneously) by the current goings on in SA. Mbeki gets kicked out because… if we can think of it in a relationship context, he is a sober, unexciting provider; as opposed to a guy who excites your senses, promises you the moon but can’t deliver a thing. This situation simply plops another data point in the “good guys finish last, bad boys get all the girls” debate. And no, I don’t deny that there were many things seen as wrong with Mbeki, I just protest against the inability to look at the big picture and appreciate what he brought to the table, and what a waste of a superb brain this ouster is.
The revolutionaries are busy saying that once they come to power they will give a bigger slice of the cake to the poor. But they quickly ask Trevor, one of those credited with steering the country’s economic growth (whose policies are said to be extremely unfriendly to the poor), to stay on. Go figure. Guess the threat of losing their benzes and houses in the suburbs finally penetrated their revolutionary haze when the rand lost about 3% against the dollar after Trevor announced his resignation. Lesson? Get into a revolutionary tizzy all you want, but remember that we are in a global economy, and as soon as you screw with the status quo (as opposed to strategically plotting how you’re going to turn it around), your economy will enjoy a period of relaxation (aka reversed growth). Chest-thump all you want, but that’s the bottom line.
We Africans need to start seeing, thinking beyond the obvious. But until that happens, here comes the stone age. And no, I’m not alone in being anti-democratic (because of all the complete nonsense it brings. I do not forget for one minute that life was not necessarily better during the dark old days of single-party rule. This does not, however, mean that a system that pretends to represent the best interests of Africans while sowing division, discordance and guaranteeing that we shall never march to the same beat is the solution to our problems. There has to be a better system that works for Africa. Democracy as it is currently packaged and sold in Africa, is not that system), I see Asia again leading the way against this panacea.
