The African pattern
POST-colonial politics in Africa has followed a pattern. After independence there is one meaningful election after which a one-party state or dictatorship will emerge.
Here are some random examples: Egypt after King Farouk became a military dictatorship under Colonel Abdel Nasser, then generals Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. The same pattern followed in Libya which also became a military dictatorship under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
In the former Belgian Congo Mobutu Sese Seko became a genocidal dictator. Uganda, after Milton Obote became a military dictatorship under Sergeant Idi Amin, a homicidal maniac. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya established a personality cult like Stalin, after which chaos descended on the country.
Zimbabwe was blessed with Robert Mugabe who swiftly founded a one-party dictatorship, also along Stalinist lines, with similar purges of thousands as all opposition was ruthlessly crushed.
Botswana has been ruled by the de facto dictatorship of the Khama family and the Bamangwato nation. In Lesotho Chief Leabua Jonathan won the first 1966 election, stole the second election when he lost in the early 1970s. Since then the Mountain Kingdom has wobbled between sporadic military coups (with one brewing now). Swaziland is ruled by a rapacious dynasty and is a despotic kingdom.
In South Africa the ANC succeeded the vile apartheid regime of the National Party, but is practising a very similar mode of government. Zuma has surrounded himself with powerful sycophants, very like B J Vorster and PW Botha with the SADF generals.
Zuma’s sycophants are loyal because they depend on his patronage for their hugely well-paid jobs. If Zuma goes (as per our threatened Constitution) at the next election these men and women are likely to lose their livelihoods and face possible corruption charges. It is an even-money bet that just before or during the next election (if the pattern of African politics holds) an engineered crisis will be fomented, followed by a coup and the country will be saddled with a man who, like Mugabe, aspires to be president for life, so as to cover up and continue with his corrupt rule.
African states ultimately end up ruled by a strongman or the military. Our tragedy is that we will not get another man in the mould of Nelson Mandela. — Quentin Hogge, King William’s Town answers to the world’s problems. It does not. What this notion does is to isolate America and make it a country that seeks to police the world on one hand, and make its citizens targets prized by these terrorists as bargaining chips and pawns to make points on the other hand.
The real question is, what is South Africa doing about Boko Haram. What are we doing about ISIS? Obama has tried to work through the United Nations and Nato because these are not America’s problems, but the world’s.
It is time for the world, and not America, and not Obama, to respond to these senseless killings of people by those who don’t want to subject their ideas to a vote.
If these terrorists have been living under the rock for the past 50 years and have missed globalisation and mobility of citizens, so that each country today has a huge number of world citizens living within its shores, tied by common humanity and not burdened by differences, religious or otherwise, it is time for the world to teach ISIS a hard lesson: that the world they seek no longer exists.. — Yonela Diko, Cape Town