{UAH} How can Africa be rising when it has its head buried so firmly in the sand?

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/How-can-Africa-be-rising-when-it-has-its-head-buried-in-the-sand/-/434750/2406010/-/jthf3pz/-/index.html

How can Africa be rising when it has its head buried so firmly in the sand?

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By Tee Ngugi

Posted  Saturday, August 2  2014 at  12:00

In Summary

The 1994 genocide should have alerted us to the apocalyptic danger of tribalism. Increasing ethnic violence shows we didn't learn anything

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Africa loves using colourful catchphrases to describe itself, clichéd slogans to talk about its future, romanticised imagery of its past and stereotypical intellectualising about its condition: The African Renaissance; the African Century; Africa Rising; fastest growing economies in the world; Cradle of Humanity; how Europe underdeveloped Africa, etc.

This is good for poetry, but if we are to craft curative measures for the ailments of our present reality and secure our future, this habit of thought will not do. We must confront our objective conditions as a matter of urgency or be prepared for a future of strife and a great gnashing of teeth.

So what are the realities that we like to avoid discussing with the requisite brutal honesty?

The first of these is poverty. Missing from the Africa Rising and "fastest growing economies" narrative are a number of facts. The much-vaunted growth of the middle class is happening very slowly.

A very small class of the superrich (mostly politicians) controls an inordinately huge amount of Africa's wealth. Every year, more people fall into extreme poverty than move out of it.

By contrast, China and India have been able to grow the ranks of their middle class by millions of people and move more out of extreme poverty in a matter of a decade or so. The condition of 50 per cent unemployment rates is not sustainable, and the explosion in violent crime making African cities some of the most dangerous in the world is a warning of the unsustainable nature of this situation.

Clearly, the economies are not growing fast enough and wealth is not trickling down fast enough. Yet we keep repeating economic orthodoxy and sterile indicators as poverty and attendant crises close in around us.

The second is poor leadership. Since Independence, the governing philosophy has viewed political power as means to achieve megalomaniacal goals and to accumulate wealth (no wonder the wealthiest people in Africa, unlike any other place in the world, are politicians or those connected to them).

The political elite either steals directly from the public purse or facilitates huge scams by which their countries are drained of millions of dollars. In Kenya, for instance - even after the Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing scams under the regimes of Daniel Moi and Mwai Kibaki respectively almost fatally haemorrhaged the country's resources, a recent Auditor-General's report shows that the country still loses Ksh300 billion every year through corruption and misappropriation.

By contrast, in Singapore, with little natural wealth, a focused, conscientious and imaginative leadership that understood power as a means to make a difference to the welfare of the people was able to leapfrog the country into First World status in a single generation. Here, Mugabe and his ilk continue to decide our affairs.

Then we have tribalism, which nationalism taught us was created by colonialism through its divide-and-rule strategy. True, colonialism employed this tactic, but it was only exploiting an already existing consciousness. We like to forget that colonialism cobbled together our nation-states from ethnic groups that had hitherto existed as independent entities.

This ethnic consciousness did not disappear with the coming of Independence, a state of affairs that the political elite, like colonialism, has exploited to advance selfish interests.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda should have alerted us to the apocalyptic danger of tribalism, especially when encouraged by a criminal political class. Increasing ethnic violence shows we did not learn anything.

We have also begun to see the uneasy co-existence of different religions turn to open warfare. Islamic radicalisation, fuelled in part by poverty and marginalisation of Muslim youth, is now a factor in many countries: Central African Republic, Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, Kenya, etc. In Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, it now looks like a long season of death has commenced.

The fault-lines that Africa has ignored over the years by burying its head in the sand of feel-good rhetoric are shifting underneath us. The urgent situation demands a paradigm shift in the way Africa conducts its affairs.

The tragedy, due to our crisis of leadership, is that we are not reinventing ourselves to avert the impending explosion.

Ocen  Nekyon

Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb contesting the results.

Benjamin Franklin

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