Democracy
in African Color (What I think)
By
Mohamed Awaleh, Publisher (African-renaissance.com/Online Magazine)
Nation-state building must start from the nation to state instead of the state to nation. African countries have practiced the opposite. Because of this there is now instability within the regions. African countries have inherited tribal and religious rivalries. To save the nation-state, African leadership must accept the new process of decentralization in order to diminish tribal or sectarian politics in the country. African countries must begin to study their own traditional cultures and societies in order to better understand their circumstances. Each and every indigenous community has its own institutions that sustain and protect individual rights: kingdoms, councils of elders, nomadic pastoral democracies, and other progressive variations of common social structure.
Ever since colonialism and the first commercial Contact s with Arabs, the Africans have been confused by the new values, rules and systems which were introduced to them. The old ways of barter and trade no longer served the new relationship between nations more economically and militarily advanced. Most African countries today have abandoned their old social ways which take into account African environmental realities. They simply imitate their colonial masters' old ways, and institutions which have nothing to do with their way of life and background. To make bad matters worse the governments are blindly copying institutions alien to a sense of African well-being.
No system is perfect, and abuses occurred in traditional cultures and societies, but the mitigating circumstances reflect the life and breath of the society. Tribal warfare indeed undermined any hope for building a nation state. Unlike Europe in the Dark Ages.
In the midst of the democratization of African countries in the millennium, it is only for the sake of appeasing the donor countries (the West). However, there's a big loophole in this whole process. The main weak point which African leaders continue to accept is bringing a genuine democracy that indeed enhances solid development and serves justice for all.
With all due respect regardless of the rhetoric out there, one must realize that there is no way African countries will truly democratize under this current system inherited into former colonies (West Europe), particularly imposing these unrealistic, alien imported ideologies.
The question is how nearly 52 African countries would economically develop when there's no separation between politics and judicial systems. Free press, freedom of speech and respect for different or opposite opinions. In respect of these countries they are collapsing one after the other due to lack of institutions to enrich the political stability, not satisfy one man's ego, but create balance of powers between executive, legislative and judicial power. Yet, they don't even properly emulate their European counterparts' models of government. Countries in Europe, or the West in general aren't countries run by one man anymore, but they are governed by thousands of men and women. Well! Did African governments appropriately at least emulate their former masters? In the West, there's constitutional superiority, but in Africa there's one man's superiority.
If those leaders are sincere about democracy, they must search first the answers through their cultural values, social history and understanding the ways of life of their people.
Lastly, here's my suggestions:
Separate
politics from the courts.
Freedom of thought, speech, press, etc . . .
Give greater autonomy of local governments elected by the people.
Give the civil servant power to initiate policies, and refuse to do something
illegal asked by their cabinet ministers.
Stop limiting the progressive oppositions political parties.
Respect the people's will.
Encourage national, stimulating debate with various individuals and institutions
in the country.
Demilitarize the police forces in the country and allow them to exist under
the local administrations.
Expand the educational systems. Educate the people. Invest more in universities
and colleges.
Open to the people the work of the government.
Mr. Mukazo Vunda's opinion.
Half baked theories, vague descriptions, insufficient information and clarification for the points made, and fallacies are the hallmarks of Mr. Awaleh's letter. The letter is wrought with mistakes, and barely makes the consistency test.
The first error in Mr. Awaleh's rendering appears in his first statement. Though this is indeed the way that the nation building process goes, he is wrong to accuse Africans of doing the building the wrong way. In the west, the move towards the nation state has followed natural patterns. It has grown out of circumstances that existed within their own societies, which gave support to the birth and existence of the nation-state phenomena. Africans on the other hand, have had no such conditions exist in their society. Totally unprepared for the new system, it is wrong to suggest that they could have had a say in this matter. They, after all, inherited their new republics and systems strait from the arms of their conquerors. As is always the case when one inherits a system from one's conqueror, the element of force is involved, otherwise the African would have simply gone back to his own way of doing things. It can not be disputed that African societies would have looked very different today if acculturation had been left alone to do its thing.
A transition from simple or complex African societies and their social systems (if they had any), to the western or Arabic ways of doing things which Mr. Awaleh hints at, could hardly have been desired if the results were seen as catastrophic, and believe me, it is well within the powers of perception of the African, or any race for that matter, to see this negative eventuality by simply reading the signs of the times. The Africans never designed, nor were they consulted in the making of the systems or republics they took over at their respective independence dates. They therefore cannot be held accountable for the way, or path that these have taken, or the results that have followed. They cannot also be accused of dumbness. As a defeated folk, they had very few means by which they could change things to their advantage. The interests of the conquerors presided over theirs, and the colonial masters used every trick in the book to ensure that this was, and is so. This pattern of events has followed to date.
Mr. Awaleh is definitely wrong on this matter. However, even if he is wrong, it would do Mr. Awaleh some good to be less cryptic in his descriptions of such important points as he puts down in his letter, for his own good, and for the good of his public. People need detailed clarification and not riddle like prose. My advice to people on the issue of the nation-state is that they do their own research on the subject. There is a lot of material on the development of the nation-state as it is known and experienced today. It makes a smarter person of you to educate yourself on this topic, but it is rather irrelevant with regards to the African question. This is the reason I wouldn't go into the topic now, unless you want to know more about divide and rule, which is where the nation state begins, and I hope that it will also end. Africa is in the grips of divide and rule, but diagnoses the condition wrongly. Check out divide and rule as practiced by Napoleon on the Germans. Find out how his underestimating the power of nationalism led to his downfall, and get wise on conflicts like the one in Ruanda, or the Baltic's. Find out why the lessons learnt from the mistakes of Napoleon made men sow tighter nets around their victims, whose breaking has caused so much misery in our time.
I also deal with the above topic in detail on my web-site If you want to forego your research on Nation states and would like to be spoon-fed, then click on the links below to read the following pages on my site:
You can also read the excerpt from the book "Black Fathers, White Fathers", or buy the book, and you will not be the same after you have read it.