Africa desperately needs a Mandela
THERE are those who adore Africa; they are enamoured and committed. I cannot join them. In younger days I prowled the Dark Continent from north to south, east to west. But I simply saw too much blood, death, suffering, poverty, cruelty and above all staggering waste. I would put good money on the table not to have to go back.
The last fortnight has seen two more African nations convulsed by struggles for power – a riot-racked election in Kenya (again) and the toppling of the mass-murderer and billion-embezzler Mugabe in Zimbabwe (at last).
If there is a deity, He poured his blessings onto Africa during the act of creation. It has vast prairies and savannahs, rivers, mountains, lakes and forests. Yes, it also has deserts and swamps.
Beneath all these it has deposits of every mineral and jewel known to Man. Even partially developed, its cereals could feed the entire world, its crops and mines could make it the richest continent on Earth. Yet everywhere it is racked by poverty, hunger, disease, famine and war.
The teenage and Left-wing mythology will have it that white imperialism did all this. No, 90 per cent has derived from the postindependence half-century. It is impossible to know Africa and not to ask over and over again – why? With so much, how could you fail to prosper? Is there a single word, or even two, that stand out far above the others, and even as causes of the others?
Why the tribal loathing, so conveniently ignored by Western luvvies, when there is so much land to share in harmony? Why the heartrending appeals on our TV screens for donations to procure clean water for kids when the rains fall sweet and pure? Why the civil wars that cost a million children in Biafra (50 years ago) and cause death and misery in South Sudan (right now)?
If I had to choose my two words they would be, far above all others, corruption and its offspring embezzlement. These are the scourges trendy westerners prefer to overlook. There is money, generated or donated. Trillions of pounds of it. Not visible as the hungry starve, the children drink animal urine and the peasants toil. Why? Because it has all been embezzled by the so-called “leaders” whom we fête and court at international “conferences on poverty”. That is what the “leaders” fight and squabble over. This is why they rig elections – to control the treasury. This is how they can order in fleets of super-lux limos in a poverty-patch that is provably bankrupt. Africa could be the richest continent on Earth instead of the poorest.
If the West, basically the white man’s world, has a guilt it is indulging and condoning murderers from Gaddafi in the north via Idi Amin midway down to Mugabe in the south. I know that privately the European and American politicos and diplomats despise the killers and robbers who have defaced Africa for so long even as they beam into their faces for those oh-so-fat contracts. Now and again there seems to be a glimmer of hope. A tyrant falls and, if surviving, flees to live like a pasha on his huge looted fortune banked in the West. Elections are held but only to bring to power yet another raft of crooks. That is why Nelson Mandela was such a stunning exception and worldwide hero. He never embezzled a penny.
Now Mugabe, on whom boundless sycophancy was lavished at the Lancaster House conference, is finally ousted. But after that conference, installed in power in Salisbury (to become Harare), he organised the slaughter of 20,000 civilian Matabele (he is a Shona), drove his country bankrupt but made himself a billionaire and used his army to impose utter tyranny. And now?
Waiting in the wings is his hatchet man, Mnangagwa, the Crocodile, said to have carried out the Matabele massacres, which he denies. Put your celebratory sparklers away. Only the faces will change. But why can that whole continent not find one single new Mandela?