May 25: Africa NEEDS strongmen

...recognizing that the continent is in an ongoing war for self determination and that there is equal to overwhelming opposite reaction from the West; Africa actually needs strongmen.
The vision of founding fathers of the continent like first Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah who charted the way to political and economic independence needed, and still need strong characters to see through.
It is no coincidence that the West plotted his downfall as it did for another visionary, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, among many others.

By Tichaona Zindoga
There is little to contest that Africa for the last half century of its independence from colonialism, has had more than its fair share of problems, some of them calamities and catastrophes.

It follows therefore that Africa Day, marked on May 25 every year, has been commemorated every other year against a background of some kind of setback or the other.

This year the continent marked the 48th anniversary of Africa Day with events in Libya casting a strong pall on the continent.

In fact, the situation in Libya where United States of America and Nato are bombing the country to unseat colonel Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s legitimate leader, represents the worst that the continent thought was over.

Suffice to say, while neocolonialism could be grudgingly accepted as an evil kick of a dying empire defeated with the demise of colonialism, a brazen military crusade such as the one Nato undertook against Libya was unfathomable.

The military crusade, it must be admitted, was legitimated by a dubious United Nations Resolution 1973.

On the strength of the same, Western powers, America, Britain and France even went further than the discredited resolution and announced that all they needed to see in Libya was the back of Gaddafi.

And perhaps not his back only, and even his head, too, witness Nato’s bombing of his compound which tragically claimed the lives of Gadaffi’s son and three under-six grand children in the process.

There is a lot of significance on the Libyan issue, especially with US’ first black president Barack Obama, in the matrix.

It will be remembered that Obama when he came into office warned against African “strongmen”, saying that Africa needed strong “institutions” instead.

By which, he meant, destroying what the revolution against colonialism had built and supplanting it with new systems.

“Strongmen” like Gaddafi and here at home President Robert Mugabe embodied the continuum of a people’s struggle against the evil West and stood in the way of neo-colonialism.

They had to be replaced by “institutions” of puppetry that do the bidding of the West, and America in particular, without question.

It is a system of politics that is directed from White House and Brussels and the armed rebels in Benghazi and their civilian counterparts in anything in the mould of Zimbabwe’s MDC, are the ideal institutions that the West relishes.

They do not only ensure the defeat of the old liberating order but also the entrenchment of the mutated evil that was defeated over the last 50 years.

This is a strong case for basically two interventions on Africa’s part.

First, recognizing that the continent is in an ongoing war for self determination and that there is equal to overwhelming opposite reaction from the West; Africa actually needs strongmen.

The vision of founding fathers of the continent like first Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah who charted the way to political and economic independence needed, and still need strong characters to see through.

It is no coincidence that the West plotted his downfall as it did for another visionary, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, among many others.

That the West has threatened, and succeeded in many cases to defeat the quest for self-determination is no secret

Successive Western regimes have held and executed this rogue intent with the efficiency of a grinding machine.

And they have known when to eliminate strong, visionary leaders and in turn install puppet regimes.

Connected with the need for strongmen is Africa’s need for a global “super power”.

By all accounts, Libya, under Muammar Gaddafi qualified to be an African super power buoyed by its oil revenues, the charisma of its leader, and the general welfare of its citizens.

Never mind the lies of the West who ostensibly wanted to protect civilians from Gaddafi.

But for all its clout, which even included giving money to the West which now bombs him and the arrogance that Gaddafi was wont to show at home and abroad, Libya is nowhere a global super power.

That Western forces could have a field day of bombing in one of Africa’s strongest countries speaks just as strong that Africa needs military and even nuclear arsenal to repel enemy forces.

It is hard to imagine the West riding roughshod over Libya, and by extension the continent, had the country or its African peers (in the real sense) had fingers on potent arsenal.

Or could we have seen the resolutions of the African Union on Libya being trashed and ignored the way they did and the West bombed their way into Libya on March 19?

But there is more to defending Africa’s sovereignty by way of possessing the repellants named above.

One is the recognition and consciousness of Africa’s history, which needless to point out has been one that saw its civilizations being raped or set back; the people’s struggles against the same rape and setbacks and the present condition which delicately is balanced between imperialist regression and atavism and a prosperous, self-determining future.

The consciousness of Africa’s history which regulates the present and future is critical.

Anyone who is detached from Africa’s history against Western imperialism and its present struggles against the same cannot be trusted with the continent’s future, or any country thereon.

An example will suffice.

Recently, this writer was part of a group which included fellow journalists and a number of diplomats who gathered at a dialogue forum in the capital.

Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was presenting a paper on “Beyond party politics - Towards a national vision for Zimbabwe” which happened to be the inaugural “Pan-African Series on leadership” conducted by Sapes Trust.

He touched on several issues on the topic, mainly limiting himself to the happenings within the inclusive Government which his party features along with Zanu-PF and another faction of the MDC.

The long and short of Tsvangirai’s presentation was that his Zanu-PF partners prevented the country from having a national vision, which he did not explicitly name, either.

This was because of corruption, securocrats, elections, indigenisation, etc.

And when it was time for him to field questions from the floor, journalists generally went for the sound-bites which would make the next big story.

(Like that he had called journalists from “state media” shallow minded.)

Thus Tsvangirai rambled on with his narrative regarding the inclusive Government.

For anyone who had hoped that the premier would talk of what constituted this nation – the history, the ethos, the values and national interests on which a future and its vision could be predicated; marrying into the Pan-African picture of which he was said to be leader, they were disappointed.

This writer, regretting to take the premier back to the topic, challenged him to situate what constituted the nation of Zimbabwe and thus locate himself in the greater pan-African story.

It was an observation that his presentation had only but started in a particular era, the era of the inclusive Government, itself a party-based arrangement.

Further, questions that focused on the inclusive Government only but made him drift further from a grounding that define a commonality that would see a party-less future.

To which, sandwiched as the question was between to questions that demanded the inclusive Government immediate, the premier briefly and without conviction related how he believed in the dignity of African people.

Unfortunately, he regretted, the last 50 years had seen the dignity of African people being eroded by their own leaders through dictatorship and repression.

He did not mention, of course, West’s history of toppling popular and progressive leaders and installing puppet and often-repressive darlings of the West.

Thus Tsvangirai did not help the misgivings that many well-meaning Africans have of him and his brand of Western-created or funded politician.

Namely, they do not have grounding or claim in the patriotic or nationalist history of the continent.

Rather, they are planted somewhere on the way to heaven by the West to subvert the African will to have total control over resources on the continent.

This might explain why the MDCs have often given us the impression that Zimbabwe’s history started with the formation of the party in 1999.

It is no surprise then that when talking of a “nation”; this nation of Zimbabwe, Tsvangirai starts in the air of the inclusive Government and does not talk of the liberation history that brought Independence.

He is said to have run away from the war.

With that history having borne of and in a continuing culture that craves self-determination, which the West stands opposed to, Tsvangirai does not identify with the ongoing struggle against the imperialism of the West.

Instead, he identifies with the West which happens to have nurtured his own political career.

It is a counter revolution.

It is the bane of Africa.

Thus Africa needs strongmen like President Mugabe to see through the vision of the founding fathers: to have political and economic independence.

Conversely, institutions and people that the West foists upon Africa – even if they have presidential faces, like some remarked cynically of Tsvangirai – should be strongly resisted.

This is simply because the West of the pedigree of slavery and colonialism and now neocolonialism cannot be trusted with furthering the wishes of their perpetual victims.

And on this one former South African President Thabo Mbeki was absolutely right when he found the “revolutions” in North Africa suspect the very moment the West took the side of the protestors.

There ought to have been something fishy – as Libya eventually turned out.