When Paul Wolfowitz was nominated by Bush to become the president of the World Bank there was a lot of anger and opposition from both development lobbyists and economists.

What is a Wolf doing in a bank that was supposed to be ‘helping’ poorer countries of the world? What is a war-mongerer with blood of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis dripping from every pore doing in a development bank?

A man who believed in destruction as a policy of subjugation was put in charge of reconstruction of global economy.

But the appointment was not surprising. It was typical of the 'I don’t care' attitude of Bush and his fundamentalist clique. They do not give a damn about the rest of the world, not even to their allies. Before the Wolf was sent to the bank, another hawk had been sent to the UN. Do you remember Bolton? He was made US representative to the UN, an organisation he held in deepest contempt and was determined to destroy.

For Bush, might is right. The rest of the world can go hang if they cannot put up with him.

The appointment of Wolfowitz showed yet again the undemocratic power relations in most of the so-called global institutions. In theory, the IMF, World Bank, WTO and UN are global institutions to which we all belong. They are meant to serve all the members. But in reality they are controlled by powerful countries, predominantly Western Europe and the US.

In the case of the IMF and World Bank the convention is that the Europeans get to nominate who heads the former; and their American cousins choose the latter. Despite the fact that many of the European countries were politically and ideologically hostile to The Wolf they had to put up with him.

In spite of raving noises and lobbying from their INGOs, asking them to veto the appointment, they simply wrung their hands because they did not want to lose their entrenched and privileged hold of to the IMF position.

The same unprincipled lack of transparency has bedevilled UN reforms. Europe and America hold undemocratic sway in the UN security council. They are unwilling to lose or even share bits of it with the vast majority of the world.

However, with Bush in the White House, the Europeans have developed a perfect ‘blame Bush' default as a foil for their own lack of commitment to a fundamental reform of these global institutions. Self-interest is essentially what is holding them back. But they blame an uncooperative, unilateralist White House.

So despite the fact that Europe along with Japan holds majority shares and has majority voting power in the bank, they continue to blame the US for blocking reforms and policies friendlier to the poor.

Wolfowitz’s current travails offer these hypocritical countries another chance to redeem their timid liberal pastures. If Wolfowitz is heading a normal private bank his board would have sacked him by now. Since he is not unwilling to jump, he must be pushed, and very fast.

The suggestion that Wolfowitz has support from African countries or other developing countries is an unoriginal excuse. Since when has the bank listened to these poor countries?

They are saying this because they are not yet sure what the US will do. Wolfowitz has lost the confidence of his colleagues and the trust of the Bank’s customers. So what is the board waiting for? It is about integrity, credibility and legitimacy.

The bank and the IMF have made themselves the apostles of good political and economic governance, lecturing poor countries on good practice, due process and transparency, even when their policies have wrecked whole economies and destroyed many lives. They never accept responsibility because they always claim that their policy prescriptions were correct, and that country A or B did not apply them well!

In the case of Wolfowitz, he arrived with the triumphalist glee of other mass murderers of the people of Baghdad to ‘shock and awe’ the bank. He was particularly determined to ‘root out corruption’ and crossed swords with many of his senior colleagues who found his arrogant style unacceptable.

So his current problems have become music to the ears of most of his colleagues, who had become exasperated with his management style. Like Tony Blair who promised to be ‘whiter than white’, and is now to be remembered for blood of the innocent Iraqis and the stench of running a government that awarded national honours to the highest bidders, Wolfowitz is going down for not practising what he preached.

It will be correct that Wolfowitz is hung out immediately. But his pillow mortgage is just the tip of the iceberg and a symptom of allegedly technocratic global institutions whose officials are not elected, who are mostly unelectable, and not accountable to those they serve. They do not even take responsibility for the consequences of their ideologically driven policies, which hurt the poor and marginalised peoples of the world, whom they claim they are in business to serve.

It is not just the personal hypocrisy of Wolfowitz that is on display, but the hypocrisy of the powers that control these institutions.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director of the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Two very important meetings that will fundamentally affect the lives of all Africans, alive and those yet to be born, took place this week. Both meetings took place in South Africa. One in Durban and the other in the affluent suburb of Midrand, near Pretoria.

The first is a meeting of the Executive Council of the African Union, which consists of all the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the 53 Member states. The other is the 7th Session of the Pan African Parliament.

What is most significant about the two meetings is the agenda before them. Foreign Affairs Ministers met for final deliberations on the agenda for the forthcoming Summit of Heads of State and Governments of the Union in the first week of July in Accra, Ghana. The Summit has a one-item agenda: the United States of Africa.

In addition to other items on the agenda of the Pan African Parliament was the only chance it would have to discuss and pronounce itself on the matter before the Summit – namely, the United States of Africa.

But how many Africans know about these meetings? Of those who know how, many care? And among those who care, how many can influence the process?

It is not too late to inform yourself and also to influence the process because, whether we like it or not, their decision or non-decisions will impact on our lives and the future of our children.

There is no longer a debate about the desirability of full integration of Africa. The powerlessness of most of our states, our marginalization in global trade, finance, the shame of our states competing for who is lowest at the bottom of most human development indexes have won the argument in favour of unity.

However, as in the anti-colonial and immediate independence struggles leading to the formation of the OAU, there are disagreements about how far and how fast we should move on the road to unity. One would have thought that these debates were settled in the process leading to the restructuring of the OAU and its transformation into the African Union. But these divisions have continued to rear their heads and undermine the capacity of the states to fast track unity.

What are these positions? The first group is led by Libya and Brother Leader Muammar Gaddafi, who has been the driving force behind the fast tracking of the United States Of Africa project since 1999. This group wants the immediate union of the states with one government, common citizenship, common defence, a standing Army, Foreign Minister and a president for Africa, etc.

The Second group consists of states opposed to what they consider to be Libya’s haste and argue for gradual integration through consolidation of existing regional economic communities as the key building blocs of the Union. Initially they did not have a clear leader (since most of them could not withstand the roller coaster diplomatic, political and economic pressures from Tripoli) but carried out their anti-Libya manoeuvres through bureaucrats, ambassadors, foreign ministers and the committee systems at which Libya’s proposals are watered down and bogged down in procedural politics. And since the Libyans are not known for paying attention to details they often lose out but take consolation in all kinds of phyrhic victories.

A third group consists of those states who share many of the concerns of the cautious path of the second group, but now say that the AU is there and has enough in its Act of Union, enough authority and consensus to fast track therefore let us consolidate it before going further. This ‘AU is enough’ group is now led effectively by President Thabo Mbeki and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Other important key players like Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria are basically either standing on the fence or trying to hold a dubious half-way house between Gaddafi’s enthusiasm and Mbeki’s cynicism. Other countries are hiding their indecision, ambiguities, hostilities or biases behind the protagonists. But this is an issue that cannot be fudged anymore.

The Durban meeting of Foreign Ministers is basically Thabo Mbeki’s fight back on the road to Accra, juxtaposing his vision directly to Gaddafi’s. The ways in which the South Africans have tabled the matter has already made this clear. Instead of the official UNITED STATES OF AFRICA they are saying AFRICAN UNION GOVERNMENT.

Personally I think we should be more original than just copying USA. But re-branding as Union Government also is neither here nor there. What is it that we expect the government, whether as a Union Government or as a United States of Africa to do?

In spite of the intrigues and manoeuvres by the various camps they share a basic weakness: they are state led and are projecting this vision without the involvement of the broad masses of their own peoples. They do not even involve their own parliaments let alone ordinary citizens. In many cases it is only the Presidency that is involved with Foreign Affairs Ministers playing guessing games.

There are already enough agreements, protocols and statutory instruments to fast track the unity project. What has been lacking is the political will by the leaders to put their money where their mouth is; and what has also been lacking is fully involving the masses. Without both of these, the grand debate will only be another sham executive posturing, which drive our peoples into inertia and cynicism.

It is not too late to reverse this wagon-less executive train threatening to run into each other from Tripoli to Pretoria. The business of Unity is too important to be left to Thabo and Gaddafi, even too important to be left to the 53 heads of state and government the peoples of Africa must have full say in it.

It is not a privilege to demand to be consulted. Rather, it is their democratic right. Otherwise the leaders are engaged in yet another futile attempt to try and shave our heads behind our backs.

In many countries people are organising to have discussions on this matter on Africa day this year: MAY 25. Join one or start one where ever you may be and demand of your president or Foreign affairs minister to debate the options and which side of the debate they are on.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

What sense can one make of the ‘result’ of the Presidential election in Nigeria?

Local and most foreign observers are united that the elections were ‘fundamentally flawed’. The Coalition of Domestic NGOs, CSOs and Think Tanks, under The Transition Monitoring Group, TMG, that deployed 50, 000 monitors across the country has not only condemned the widespread irregularities variously reported about the election it has gone further than any other group of monitors by categorically calling for a cancellation of the results and a rerun of the vote.

The two leading Opposition candidates, retired General Muhammadu Buhari (ANPP) and embattled Vice President Abubakar Atiku (AC) and other presidential candidates (there were 24 of them!) immediately rejected the results and have declared that a new president cannot be sworn in on May 29 based on the result announced on Monday because they believed the elections were massively rigged in favour of the ruling party’s and President Obasanjo’s anointed Successor, Alhaji Umar Musa Yar ‘Adua.

The losing candidates have left open their options for taking on the PDP and addressing their grievances including using the courts, public pressure, protests and international opinion.

On its part the PDP and President Obasanjo and the Electoral Commission have reacted not triumphantly but by conceding that there were ‘problems’ (understatement indeed!)with the conduct of the vote but they insist that the shortcomings were not sufficient to nullify the officially declared outcome.

So far there has not been much surprise in the reaction of the various interested parties including the sporadic violent reactions in opposition strongholds where voters felt that the declared result was not in accordance with their wishes. They burnt down houses, offices and other property belonging to members of the ruling party or suspected electoral officers or members of the public just caught up on the wrong side. Soon after the security forces move in and some calmness is restored. It is almost like the authorities were planning for a short period during which the frustrated voters can vent their spleen.

So what next? How long will these controversies last? And what long term impacts will they have on the body politic of the country?

In a game that will mostly be based on ‘wait and see’ the government has more time on its hand and can afford to wait. If the Opposition chooses to go to the courts the matter will definitely be bogged down in procedural issues that may not be decided by the 29th of May when the new President will be sworn in. As it happened after the last, also very controversial election in 2003, a final verdict on the election may drag on to the Supreme Court and probably take the next three years or more and it will not have any political impact or even a legal difference.

Should they choose to go on the streets it may not yield any immediate political benefits too but definitely create more chaos, destruction and even more deaths for their supporters and innocent members of the public?

They also have to consider the reality of the power relations. Opposition will only be able to get away with public disorder and impunity in areas where they are most popular. Why make ungovernable places that are already sympathetic to you like Lagos, Kano for example.

Would you not be inviting the government to declare state of emergency and Direct PDP rule in those pockets of places where the opposition is actually in power? How will that play out with elected opposition candidates from those `areas? The critical Niger Delta has been disenfranchised for a long time that stealing their mandate again is just routine. And now they can even claim one of them is finally in Aso Rock since the new Vice President is from the Niger Delta.

The last time Nigeria had a free and fair election was June 12 1993 and the Military dictator, the Gap-toothed fiendish General I.B. Babangida and his regime annulled the result. National protests and international isolation followed forcing IBB out of power but the winner, Chief MKO Abiola, never regained his victory. Instead another military regime even more brutal than IBBs followed and Abiola died in prison. When Abacha was aided to his death in leisure the same Generals organized Abiola’s`death in prison by choking on tea served to him in the presence of a ‘visiting’ (or was it supervising?) delegation of Senior US officials including Susan Rice`, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa., Susan Rice!

The June 12 struggle that was a national campaign became isolated as a Yoruba affair in spite of the fact that Abiola would have won even without votes from Yoruba Land. Obasanjo was one of the scheming Generals who denied Abiola his mandate. Other Generals rewarded his betrayal of democracy by making him President after Abacha. And they are all now complaining about him.

The situation is different now. Neither Buhari nor Atiku can claim the same National mandate and popularity as was claimed for Abiola. They are also unable to transform the frustration of the voters into a sustainable popular struggle. A military coup is more or less out of the picture. They cannot accuse Obasanjo of favoring his ethnic group or his religious faith. So all the fault lines of Nigeria's politics are safe.

Just as the Generals gave Nigeria a President who was Yoruba in 1999 but not necessarily the preferred candidate of the Yoruba people Obasanjo has given us a President who is Hausa-Fulani Muslim but cannot be Hausa-Fulani President.

The sadness of it all is that I believe that Yar’ Adua could still have won, may be not in such ridiculous margins. But the PDP has made it look like there were no good `reasons why many Nigerians would have voted for him given the limited choice they had of really effectively choosing between three candidates. One a former General and the other a former Custom Officer and Yar ‘Adua, the only civil civilian who also had a reputation for running a decent administration in his state and also one of only a handful of the 36 state governors not known or believed not to be corrupt.

Obasanjo has `helped` Yar Adua to the gate of Aso Rock he cannot cohabit with him in it. It will now depend on him how he shoulders on. It will take more than his initial reconciliatory statements to his ``worthy opponents`` for the controversies and the credibility deficit with which he was anointed to settle.

Obasanjo turned against those who facilitated his entrance into that bastion of power therefore he cannot expect that he would be driving Yar Adua from behind. Proxy politics like opposition ganging up have both never really worked in Nigeria. One of the first things Yar Adua has to do with immediate effect is to unlearn some of his benefactor’s worst ways of doing things. Politics is about persuasion not conquering your opponents.

The International Election tourists otherwise known as Observers or Monitors will already be on their way to the next election in some other country by now, cutting and pasting, on their high powered laptops, as they go. Democracy in any country can only be guaranteed by the peoples of that country not any group of outsiders no matter how well-meaning. EU, NDI, Madeline Albright, Common wealth and whoever can say all they will their governments are not about to impose sanctions on Nigeria (not while the oil is still flowing) and their businesses are not going to withdraw under Yar Adua (they bdid not under Abacha) so it is really up to Nigerians to fight to make their interests relevant to their political dispensation as they confront an undemocratic civilian government and equally non democratic opposition political parties whose only ideology is `its our turn to chop`

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

I was going to write this week about which of the numerous Presidential candidates in Nigeria's Presidential elections this weekend. But so grotesque and tragic have been the monumental irregularities in the elections of last weekend that the less about them the better because they were too blatant. They do not inspire any confidence that this weekend's ones will be any better.

The sad thing is that I believe that the candidate I would have voted for if I had the vote, Umar Musa Yar Adua, would still win but the credibility deficit is so highly debited that no one will concede that he has won fairly. PDP has finally succeeded in giving 'rigging' a bad name. So political scientists in Nigeria will either have to close shop or admit that they are now ghost social scientists!

Unfortunately for me this week there is no respite from embarrassments. I have been getting many embarrassing questions these days about a number of African leaders with whom many of the mostly hostile questioners and even curious friendly critics believe I enjoy close association. The questions are embarrassing because I am supposed to have answers or insights about them but my knowledge may not be more than that of an average observer.

On top of the list of these leaders is President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni followed by a whole club of leaders generally referred to as ‘New Generation of African Leaders’ that include Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, President Issias Afworki, President Paul Kagame and others. In a class of his own among leaders about whom I get embarrassing questions is Uncle Robert Mugabe. He is not so much a New Generation leader as a now pathetic relic of a glorious liberation epoch.

I am not complaining about these questions because they are based on concrete political realities of my personal ideological and political positions. I supported all of these leaders, wrote and spoke positively about many of them for many years. Therefore those asking me about what is happening to these leaders now even when their intentions are hostile what they are demanding of people like me is to tell them what has happened to our Dear Leaders? For instance while the same people may ask me about what is happening in Nigeria they will never try to embarrass me by asking: What has happened to General Olushegun Obasanjo since they do not think that both he and I have any shared ideological perspectives.

I have received more questions recently about two of these leaders: Museveni and Meles. How I wish I had inside knowledge to explain to these questioners Why President Museveni who came to power promising fundamental change has now raised to the status of theory the reactionary slogan of ‘No change’! How can I explain that a president who opened up the political space in the country, introduced so many political reforms that arrested the country’s political and economic decline and historically sectarian politics is now accused by many of his former comrades of being guilty of political infanticide, killing institutions which he created because they no longer serve his political purposes? Is it the same President who refused to allow any streets to be named after him that is now inaugurating his Saddam-like Statues? How can one explain the recent attacks on the judiciary and threats to liberty and the rule of Law that is even turning sedate judges into judicial militants? And even more what about the current controversy about the Mabira forest which has pitched even many loyalists of the President and a broad section of the populace including the Buganda royalty against the President and his dwindling band of hack men and women?

As for Premier Meles he has in recent years bungled his way from one unpopular decision and action to the other. He locked up people who defeated his ruling party in the 2005 elections charging them with treason and genocide! Only two weeks ago did he start releasing some of them but a majority (including two CSO activists, Daniel and Natsenat) are still detained because they allegedly stil have case to answer after two years in detention! Those who were detained were luckier than the many demonstrators protesting the irregularities of the elections who were murdered by Security forces. How can one explain how a leader and ruling party that overthrew the Stalinist murderous regime of the Dergue / Mengistu is today as totalitarian as the regime they threw out? Unlike the NRM (which had ideological people but was never a doctrinaire group) the TPLF/ EPRDF were very ideological in the old Stalinist ways but like the NRM they have become more free market than Adam Smith!

Both Meles and Museveni are happy to be Bush's allies without any shame.

Why do leaders who promise National rebirth and inspire their compatriots to believe in them end up disappointing them?

The one answer I can give to all these and many other questions about these leaders is: STAYING TOO LONG in power. No matter how great they may be they are ordinary mortals even if their propagandists deify them. They wither, become tired but their wear and tear have serious impact on the body politic. As they say ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. When leaders become tired they tire the nation with them. It is not just in Africa, look at Britain, rudderless under Blair who is finished but refusing to go but sinking lower and lower.

But at least in Britain it is not a question of if Blair leaves, it is when and there is certainty that it may be soon after the local elections in May but definitely before the October conference of the Labour Party. Imagine if he was an African Leader, he would have dissolved the party by now and Gordon Brown (his putative successor) will either be in Jail or facing all kinds of charges, or in exile or even dead!

But one thing is clear: afrika will survive these leaders but more than that we shall overcome these obstacles. We just have to keep hope alive and continue with the struggles.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Nigerians go to the polls this Saturday in a historic, highly contentious election. Tadjudeen contests the election may be determined more by local factors than powers of incumbency. It may also spur the opposition to unite behind a candidate against the ruling PDP at next weekend’s presidential election.

Nigerians go to the polls this Saturday in a historic, highly contentious election.

It is historic because it is the first time that an elected government will be handing over to another elected government through universal adult suffrage.

It has been highly contentious. It will leave people with negative forebodings because of the violence, generalised insecurity and uncertainties that elections continue to generate across this continent; as we try to deepen democracy beyond ‘voting without choosing’; and make a difference to the way in which we are governed politically, economically and socially.

As with any challenge faced by other African countries, the challenge facing Nigeria, by virtue of its size, is multiplied several times.

This weekend’s election is the first in a two week marathon to choose public officials for both state and federal governments of Nigeria. This Saturday, voters are choosing members for 36 state parliaments and 36 state governors. There are at least two dozen contestants for every available post. There are over 30 political parties contesting.

The resources at the disposal of many of the states are bigger than the national budgets of a majority of the member states of the African Union.

Therefore a lot at stake at these 'local' elections. It is not surprising that most of the electoral violence tends to occur at these elections, because the local elite is most visible at this level.

At this level, they can legitimately access a bigger share, second only to that of the federal government, of the nationally allocated oil revenues.

So if you do not control power at the centre, doing so at state levels is second choice. Local government is a very distant, and relatively poor third option.

At the federal level the contest is narrowed to two main parties: usually the ruling part and whatever coalition of ‘eaters’ and other foot lose opportunists on the one hand; and a coalition of opposition parties on the other.

At the state level things, are complicated by specific local conditions: personalities, historical memories and local rivalries.

The party in power at the centre always has the advantage of ‘changing political facts’ locally through all kinds of uses and abuses of the powers of incumbency.

Thus in 2003, the ruling PDP went on a rampage claiming victory in more than two thirds of the states across the country, mostly through blatant rigging, including massive votes in most of the oil-producing southern states where there were successful boycotts of the polls.

In Obasanjo’s home state, where he even lost his deposit in his own family ward in 1999, an election in which his own Yoruba people did not endorse his candidature, he was seen as sponsored by the Hausa–Fulani north.

The PDP reversed the course by giving Obasanjo more votes than there were registered voters! An election petition later nullified the result, but with no effect on the presidency.

However in at least one state, e.g. Imo, the rigged results were overturned, and the legitimate winning opposition party regained the governorship.

In two other states, Lagos and Kano - the two most populous, metropolitan states with very conscious civic populations, the leading opposition parties, AD and ANPP respectively, were sufficiently vigilant and organised in a balance of terror against the PDP, so as to ensure that there victories were not stolen.

At Saturday’s elections, the PDP may attempt to sweep everything again. But the party is no longer as formidable as it appears, in spite of its control of the state machinery.

First, its umbrella symbol is now so tattered that it no longer holds its various factions together. It is bitterly divided between Obasanjo loyalists, Atiku supporters and all kinds of anti-Baba PDP grandees. Those who did not defect with Atiku have gone to other parties.

Secondly, Atiku’s group had control over most of the party's financial machinery which was used to rig the PDP to power, notably in 2003. Therefore Obasanjo’s people do not have monopoly over the manipulations. Hence the mortal fear of having Atiku on the ballot, and risk having to content with his counter-rigging infrastructure.

Thirdly, Obasanjo does not know how to make friends, although he is field-marshal in manufacturing enemies by the seconds. He has caused more disenchantment in his ranks through the whimsical way he imposed governorship candidates in many states.

In one state Obasanjo imposed the fourth-placed candidate, while in other states, the names of winning candidates were substituted with Aso Rock favorites. Two of those went to court to have the decision quashed, and were successful.

But rather than reinstate them, Obasanjo’s party declared that they will not be contesting in the states. They expelled the victorious candidates in order to deny them the PDP platform. All these will militate against PDP at state level.

By no means are the other parties any more democratic than the PDP: most of them will rig where they can, and are able to.

What this all means is that this Saturday’s elections may be determined more by local factors than the powers of incumbency, whether at local or federal levels. The opposition parties may do better than feared. They may also spur the opposition to unite against the PDP at next weekend’s presidential election behind a candidate best placed to challenge the PDP candidate, Umar Musa Yar Adua, who remains the front runner.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The first and last time I ever voted in an election in Nigeria was in 1979. Ironically it was the military regime of General Olushegun Obasanjo who gave my generation (the independence kids) our first opportunity to exercise our voting rights as young adults. The military had overthrown the first civilian administration in 1966 and had retained power through more coups and counter coups for 13 years (nine of which were spent by General Yakubu Gowon including the three years of bloody civil war to ‘keep Nigeria One’, 1967-1970) until the Obasanjo regime returned the country to ‘democratic rule’ in 1979.

That election, like previous elections in Nigeria’s short lived experience of democracy as an independent country (1960-1966), was marred by violence, brazen irregularities, extreme polarization and allegations of official and unofficial bias in favour of the five registered parties.

The military regime was not seen by many as impartial observers. Their alleged partiality was not unfamiliar because, even under British colonial over-lordship, elections were rigged or tilted in favour of particular groups, regions, or ethnic interests amenable to British neo-colonialist designs. Therefore the British were never neutral about who succeeded them whether in Nigeria, Uganda or Kenya, although they miscalculated in some cases, most famously Ghana and the emergence of Nkrumah and the CPP.

Nigeria’s 1979 Presidential election, and the majority of the Governorship at the state level and also the National Parliament, were ‘won’ by the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), whose presidential candidate, a northern Hausa-Fulani Muslim, ex-school master and former Minister, Alhaji Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari became the President. The closest rival to Shagari and the NPN was veteran politician, an Ijebu-Yoruba Methodist from the South West, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).

The Chief came from the same state, Ogun, as Obasanjo but he and his fanatical supporters predominantly among the Yoruba accused Obasanjo of ‘betraying the Yoruba’ and of being ‘an agent of the Hausa –Fulani Feudalist North’. Since Lagos is the centre of Nigeria’s financial, industrial and commercial activities and the Yoruba had historically had hegemony over the media both, Obasanjo and Shagari were pilloried, abused and put under siege in the federal capital which was under the UPN.

The Chief, himself a successful lawyer, gathered together a formidable team of lawyers and took his election petition against the electoral commission, the military government and the NPN up to the Supreme Court. But the highest court decided against him. The election of Shagari stood.

By 1983 the Shagari government /NPN was in charge of the elections. Not only did Shagari win in a ‘landslide’ across the country, but in his home state, Sokoto, he had more votes than the total population of the state! So brazen was the NPN manipulation of the votes that even Chief Awolowo, a very litigious and cantankerous old man in Nigerian politics, unrivalled up to now, did not feel the need to go to court again. He thought it a waste of time. Instead he gave up the case to God and public opinion.

Less than 4 months after those controversial elections in December 1983 the civilian regime was overthrown in yet another military coup and General Muhammadu Buhari (he is, without any sense of irony, today a leading Presidential candidate) became the military head of state.

The military remained in power for another 16 years until 1999 when the country again ‘returned’ to civilian rule under a ‘civilianized’ Obasanjo. So the story of democracy in Nigeria has become one long journey from Obasanjo to Obasanjo!

The General is again at the threshold of another historic transition in Nigeria. He was the first military leader to handover to an elected civilian President and if all goes as well as possible in spite of the current uncertainties on May 29 2007 Obasanjo will become the first ‘elected’ president to peacefully handover to another elected president.

Less than three weeks before the elections the omens do not seem to be good.

There are two sets of problems even though one has received greater media space than the other which may be more important.

The first set are political issues related to the reluctance and very active resistance of Obasanjo to leave office, the third term ‘prolongation manoeuvers’, as Nigerians call it, but which Ugandans will be more familiar with as the ‘sad term’ or ‘Ekisanja’. This has brought on a credibility deficit to his legacy and public perception of the transition processes. The worst consequence of the checkmated futile term extension is, of course, the Vice President, Atiku Abubakar’s desperate struggle to be on the ballot, and Obasanjo’s blatant ‘do or die’ stratagems to block him.

The other set of problems concern the level of technical, administrative and organizational preparedness of the Electoral Commission – aspirationally called Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. It pleads readiness, but the average Nigerian believes otherwise. The evidence on the ground does not inspire much confidence. Many of the challenges could actually be technical incompetence. But so divided is the public that many think the incompetence is deliberate and orchestrated to create chaos and secure a ‘sad term’ extension for Obasanjo.

I do not believe in this conspiracy theory about Obasanjo creating chaos in order to remain in power. There is too much obsession with Obasanjo’s shenanigans that is really frustrating to any sane person. Some of his critics are so consumed by their hatred for the man that they even behave, talk and write as though Obasanjo is the worst leader Nigeria has ever had.

Yet many of these critics were resounding in their silence while others were active collaborators under the IBB and Abacha dictatorships. A lot of the animosity against Obasanjo is self-earned because of the man’s ‘I-know-best’ and often rude public profile. However hatred for Obasanjo should not confuse one to the extent that even if there is no rainfall (or even if there is too much rain!) it could be blamed on the regime. The Atiku supporters or their fellow travelers using this line need to wake up to the stark political realities. Neither Atiku nor Obasanjo will be on the ballot.

Would this be fair to Atiku? Of course not, but what will be new about political injustices by the Nigerian political elite?

Chief MKO Abiola won the fairest and freest election ever held in that country but it was annulled and he died in prison .The world did not collapse. The dictator, Babangida, banned 15 presidential aspirants (some of them ex-Generals including Atiku’s political God Father, Shehu Musa Yar Adua) and other Plutocrats were prevented from standing. The world did not collapse on that occasion either. It will not collapse if Atiku did not stand.

Somehow the country will muddle through. There is no military option anymore therefore Nigerians have to find ways and means of making democracy to mean more than just one set of oppressors and exploiters periodically posing to be their liberators. There are hopeful signs in the growing assertiveness and clear political demands of a new generation of CSO activists who want to deepen the democratic process beyond the Donor-driven project cycle and its complimentary protest by per diem culture.

In spite of all the gathering dark clouds one can hazard very quick guesses.

One, Atiku will not be standing and has to be content with enjoying his unlikely victim status and dubious rebranding as a ‘martyr to democracy’ even if he was a chief architect in all the scams and fraud that got Obasanjo elected both in 1999 and 2003. There may not be honor among con men, but the Obasanjo–Atiku saga is a just desert for both of them.

Two, the elections will be marred by all kinds of irregularities including ‘rigging where you would have won’ by all the leading contenders. But finally the ruling class will go back to ‘business as usual’ while the masses continue ‘suffering and smiling‘ as Fela Kuti once sang, in a country where the elite is unashamedly committed to only one ideology: LOOTOCRACY (government of looters, by looters, for looters).

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

Since the beginning of this month there has been all kinds of memorials, lectures, prayer meetings and other kinds of public activities commemorating two-hundred years of the abolition of the cross-Atlantic slave trade in Britain. They have provoked all kinds of reactions and generated a lot of interest, debate, reconstructions and deconstructions.

Unfortunately this is more in the diaspora than across Africa, outside of Ghana which has managed to weave the painful experience into a creative tourism package. In a year in which Ghana celebrates 50 years of independence and is guaranteed to be partying throughout the year, the anti-slavery commemorations have become another value added in a state-sponsored 'feel good' hysteria.

Ghana is not the only country from where slaves were captured and forcibly bounded and hounded on to ships, in chains, transported in the most inhuman conditions to the plantations in the Caribbean and North America, the other Americas and Europe. Nations of East, Central and Southern Africa and other parts of West Africa including present day Senegal and Nigeria were part of this shameful trade that went on for 400 years!

If the history touches all of us why are so many Africans and African leaders not interested in this barbaric experience whose impact continues to reveal itself in the continuing negative image of Africa and Africans in relation to the rest of the world? Slavery was followed by colonialism, which in many ways was a legal distinction without a practical difference in terms of the negative impact on the lives of our peoples. In a sense slavery formally ended in Europe but continued in the colonies.

Maybe one of the reasons Africans are not excited is that slavery reminds us, in too painful ways, of our subjugation, the indignities inflicted on us made more unbearable by the fact that the existence of many of our peoples today whether in Africa or in the diaspora bear too much parallel to slavery.

So for many regardless of the history and legal finesse slavery is not dead, it has mutated into other forms of exploitation and domination in which we still remain bottom of the pile on most indices of human progress. Like chiefs and emperors, kings and other slave dealers of old our Presidents and Prime Ministers preside over a system of power that continues to make our peoples 'hewers of wood and drawers of water', while the riches of this continent continue to be siphoned off by others; content to play junior partners for as long as their grotesque and gratuitous consumption lifestyles and that of their immediate family and hangers-on can be guaranteed.

They will sell anything having already battered their souls. So if they are sleep-walking through all the remembrances of slavery it is because the past is still weighing too heavily on the present and they may be afraid that such events may draw uncomfortable comparison to their collaboration in keeping their peoples in modern slavery in the name of thw free market, privatization, modernisation and globalization.

The slaves were captured in wars, slave raids, and forcibly sold but today we are willingly financing our own slavery. Just go in front of any Western embassy across this continent and see the hordes of our people (mostly young) willing to do anything to get the visa to go abroad. Anywhere will do as long as it is outside Africa, even if the former slaving countries of Europe and America remain favorite destinations! Look at the risks many take traveling, hitch hiking, facing all kinds of abuse, exploitation and indignities to smuggle themselves through the straights of Gibraltar into Spain from North African countries.

Even at the height of slavery millions of our peoples resisted, and many died, in what is euphemistically called the Middle Passage. Many as a result of being thrown overboard due to illness or because they were 'difficult to handle', and many also dived into the sea, preferring to be eaten by sharks, crocodiles and other sea predators than be taken into plantations.

On the plantations resistance was rampant in all forms through culture, the rise of the African churches, music, drums, etc; the most decisive being the successful slave revolt in Haiti. Haiti may be a by-word for all kinds of inhumanities today with the dubious title of 'poorest country in the western hemisphere' but it used to be the prized jewel of slavery economies as the leading sugar cane producer. It has a glorious role in the resistance against slavery which we should not forget. In the jungles of Brazil former slaves established the Zoumbi kingdom after overthrowing slavery.

It is important to remember these struggles because what we are getting through the Western media and the shameful 'cut and paste' uncritical coverage in our tech-dependent and intellectually lazy African media is that the Anti Slavery Society in the UK, the church and missionaries and good people in Europe and America helped to bring slavery to an end.

How come their conscience only woke up after four centuries? And that same conscience did not prevent them from supporting so called 'legitimate trade' (between unequal peoples which echo what we still face today) for another century, and colonialism after that!

Africans need to be aware of their own history to understand how and why we are where we are in order to be able to fashion out the best strategy to lift us up and fulfill the aspirations of our peoples to be rid of poverty, disease, want and shameful misery in the midst of plenty. That was the point that the Young Man, Toyin, from the African Campaigning Group, Ligali, was making when he 'allegedly' disrupted the service last Sunday at Westminister Abbey to which all the great and mighty of that slaving nation (who's Greatness has always been built on iniquities) were gathered.

The Queen, her arrogant but thankfully expiring PM Blair, and the ruling class of Britain, all of them including the church, heirs to slavery and beneficiaries of its illegal and immoral earnings up to now. The Anglican Archbishop, Rowan Williams, is a sincere and frank man who is a pain on the side of the powers-that-be. He was open in expressing remorse and confronting the painful past and the complicity of the British establishment.

But the British PM can only express regret and cannot find it in him to say 'sorry'. But his sorry is meaningless since he has been exposed to be a compulsive serial liar.

The bigger shame is that some African leaders (Museveni being the first to say there was no need for reparations and his current successor in Western adulation, John Kuffour, has loyally joined the queue) and poodle cousins among the few leading black tokens in Blair's government like Baroness Amos (she was in Elmina castle in Ghana recently and all she could say, with all her posh accent, was that the slaves, definitely including her ancestors traveled in 'difficult circumstances'!) think that it is not necessary.

Together with former top guard-dog of Bush, Colin Powell, Baroness Amos led the British and US delegations to the World Conference against Racism in which they tried but failed to scuttle any attempt to link Israeli occupation to racism and apartheid and also seek reparations for slavery. Thy do not need reparations because they have been more than amply rewarded by their House Nigger status. As good Christians, all of them, even if they are not Catholics, have they forgotten the relationship between: confession, resmorse, absolution and forgiveness?

Blair thinks (wrongly again) that he is being smart by stopping short of an apology because of the implication of guilt and subsequent legal obligation to compensate for his ancestors through reparations to the victims. But the issue will not go away even if they are ignoring it now.

When Africa becomes united and more assertive it will no longer be possible to ignore our demands. For me the challenge is to put our house in order first, then reparations will become a mainstream issue. Then issues of debt cancellation, aid and reform of the modern slavery economic system forced on humanity by IMF/World Bank/WTO will not be favors to us but part of the reparations.

The Reparations Movement should not despair. The answer is simple to any member of the Pan African Movement: "Do Not Agonise! Organise!!

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

I have been living in Kenya for almost a year. I did not know that there would be so many cultural and political differences from Uganda, which was once my home for more than a decade. I was only moving across the borders of a East Africa that was definitely uniting, albeit slowly. In any case, for all the years I had been in Uganda, even in the most difficult periods of tensions and suspicions between Museveni and Baba Moi (when Moi could close the border at will), we had no alternative but to pass through Nairobi which was, and still remains, the regional communications and transport hub.

In those days there were not many direct flights from Entebbe, so we had to transit through Nairobi whether we liked it or not. There was a time when many senior members of the Pan-African Movement (PAM) in Uganda (Col Otafiire, Late Lt. Col. Serwanga Lwanga, Late Major Ondoga ori Amaza, Lt. Noble Mayombo, Mzee Chango Machyo, others and myself) were regarded as agents of destabilisation by the Moi/KANU government. In those days you stopped over in Nairobi with anxiety. At one time The Kenya Times, the government/KANU mouth piece, published a series of articles claiming that PAM was created by Museveni to foment troubles among his neighbours and across Africa in general. In my particular case I was not only persona non grata in Nigeria but had been closely associated with the Kenyan exile opposition in the United Kingdom, initially through the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya, and later UMOJA. It was true too that many senior people in the NRM had sympathies and solidarity with different elements of the opposition to the Moi/KANU dictatorship.

A particular kind of understanding of Kenya flowed from these experiences. One had a sense of who were our friends and who were our enemies. Consequently, even as relations between Uganda and Kenya improved, forced by economic realism and the increasing isolation of Moi's regime by its erstwhile foreign backers, and the confidence and perseverance of the democratic opposition, the view from Kampala was that Moi and Museveni were in mutual embrace for reasons of realpolitik only. The bulk of the opposition remained 'our friends'. It was no secret that Uganda supported the NARC opposition in the run up to the 2002 historic electoral revolution that saw off four decades of political monopoly.

We were all jubilant that 'our friends are in power', but since that euphoria, the reality of power and alliances based on the negative unity of 'Moi must go' has shown their limits. You may remove individuals, but dealing with the structural relations of power skewed against the majority of the people requires more than merely getting rid of the incumbent. Within two years of NARC taking power, the unity of the opposition that won the election was cashed in for all kinds of opportunism, factionalism and sectarianism and accusations of betrayal.

So it was not a familiar country that I settled in last year. It is really not clear who our friends and our enemies are anymore. They are all at logger heads. For instance, veteran opposition politician Raila Odinga, son of the even more famous Mzee Oginga Odinga, along with others, including Kalonzo Musyoka and former Vice President George Saitoti, quit KANU because Moi imposed the son of the former president, Uhuru Kenyatta, as the KANU presidential candidate. They teamed up with Mwai Kibaki and others to form the NARC which booted out KANU. Today, Uhuru Kenyatta is part of the ODM-Kenya, an alliance of parties and personalities who were formerly in NARC but are now opposed to Kibaki. Musalia Mudavadi who became Moi's vice president after Saitoti is now in ODM-K too, while Saitoti is firmly with Kibaki.

Are you confused? There is more in store. No one is even sure which party the president belongs to because the DP, which was the basis of his partnership in NARC, is all but dead. But there is another coalition, NARC-KENYA, which is effectively the party of the president while he is still presiding over a NARC 'Government of Unity' that theoretically includes those NARC members who did not flee with Raila and co, such as Charity Ngilu and Ford People. But listening to Ngilu and other ministers who are not part of NARC-Kenya, you wonder what they are still doing in Kibaki's government. Let me stop there because I will not only be confusing you, but will lose the plot myself as the names and parties become incestuously intertwined.

Kenya is the worst example of a farcical multi-party democracy, because political parties have become so easily disposable depending on the personal ambitions of their leaders who own them, and can literally do what they please with them. Essentially they rely on assumed or assured ethnic constituencies, which makes national politics a club of ethnic notables.

The manipulation of ethnicity, religion, region and race by the political elite to secure support from the masses is not uniquely Kenyan or African. Electoral politics involves such manipulation even in the so-called matured democracie. Ask yourself why John F. Kennedy was, and still remains, the only Catholic to have been elected president of the USA? Why is there no labour or conservative party in Northern Ireland rather than Irish parties that are allied to the mainland parties?

My surprise in Kenya - even for a Nigerian where all kinds ethno-religious and regional manipulations are common currency in the battles between different sections of the ruling classes - is the shameless way in which ethnicity is flaunted and ethnic prejudices proclaimed even, especially, among the 'enlightened classes'.

Nowhere is this more prominently in evidence than in the current electioneering campaigns which everybody agrees will be a two-way battle between President Kibaki (standing under NARC-K) and whoever emerges the opposition candidate in ODM-K. In ODM-K the final duel is between the two leading aspirants, Raila Odinga and Musyoka.

If other Africans had a vote in Kenyan elections, Raila would have won hands down because he is the better known figure; not just because of his old man status, but as a veteran opposition figure who spent several years in prison for his political activities. However, come to Kenya and ask many people, aside from his fanatical supporters, and you get a different picture. Unfortunately most of Kenyans who are anti-Raila will give you no other reason why he cannot be president, than the fact he is Luo. The same Kenyans who are hysterical about Barrack Obama, a Luo man running president of America, will not vote for his Luo uncle in Kenya. Why is a Luo good for America but not for Kenya?

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.
* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

I have been struggling with a commissioned article for an online journal about ‘the rule of law’. I was not sure which angle to take, given the multifaceted entry points to this widely used and abused concept and the even more diverse practice and bad practice in real and lived experiences. The question is whether the rule of law is simply a concept used by powerful nations or classes to legitimise their domination of the poorer and weaker nations and classes. When it suits their interests, they will preach rule of law. But they will quickly dispense with any notion of the law, if their interests are threatened.

Another related issue is the normative assumption that all citizens or countries are equal before the law, that our actions are circumscribed by the law whether we are rulers or the ruled, prisoners or presidents, men or women, the minority or the majority, whatever our religion, region, ethnicity, race, nationality, class or clan, whether we are rich or poor countries.

Globally these are not good times both for the concept of the rule of law and the notion of equality before the law. Western countries in general, the US in particular, demand democracy, rule of law and compliance with ‘international standards’, in spite of their continuing flouting of those same standards. Only last week, the US State Department released its annual ritualistic reports on human rights conditions everywhere around the world, except in the US itself!

The report predictably condemns those labelled pariah states - Sudan, Eritrea, etc, and remains silent or lenient about the current darlings of the US - Ethiopia, Kenya and others, while avoiding its own abuses. How can a country that bombs other peoples as it pleases; illegally detains thousands in a third country; and abducts citizens of other countries in the name of ‘rendition’ be so shameless as to be issuing such reports? After Guatanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia, the US should be humble enough not to lecture anyone about rule of law: because it is the most powerful rogue state today. It is so law abiding that it has never signed up to the International Criminal Court (ICC), and will go to war for ‘UN resolutions’!

Bad practices of the West, the US in particular, undermine any regime of international law, and aid other countries in their flouting of international and national law. A situation where everyone is guilty, or potentially so, does not create an environment in which everyone would wish to voluntarily respect the law. Instead the law is interpreted in terms of what you can get away with. For instance, so far, the ICC has been bedeviled by accusations that it is only poor countries, along with regimes and dictators that are out of favour, which are facing trials, such as the late Milosevic or Charles Taylor. Until the day George Bush, Tony Blair or their generals are brought to trial before the ICC for foisting a war that even the UN, albeit belatedly, declared ‘illegal’, no one will believe that international law respects either persons or nations.

However the hypocrisy and lawless behavior of the US should not excuse other states not being law abiding. The bad manners of others should not be a license for the lawlessness of our own leaders. We should ask why is it that only they want to copy Western leaders or declare their sovereignty when it comes to bad practice? Why can they not copy them in terms of respecting and defending their citizens?

For instance, drought regularly occurs in some regions of America but does not become famine, because the country stores enough to take care of most emergencies. Ethiopia and Eritrea on the other hand are ready to beg for food for their citizens but willing to fight wars on behalf of the same citizens. Why is Meles Zenawi willing to be a Bush in Somalia, but not vis-a-vis his starving compatriots?

The past two weeks have not been good for law, human rights, citizenship rights and the democratic movement in Africa in general. As I write, the leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other colleagues are in hospital as a result of injuries sustained from the police and other security agents who had arrested them allegedly for participating in an ‘illegal’ prayer meeting. You do not have to be a sympathiser of the opposition MDC to condemn the callousness of the Zimbabwean police and other security thugs. Does Tsvangirai really deserve to be beaten up on the television?

Assuming he and his colleagues are indeed guilty of an illegal act, is it not the responsibility of the courts to convict or acquit them? Is it the duty of the security service to administer punishments to suspects? Supposing they are acquitted by the courts, what penalties would the police thugs pay for their brutalities? Even an accused person has human rights, as do prisoners, irrespective of the gravity of their crimes.

In Uganda, the judiciary that many members of the opposition and human rights activists have always criticised - if sometimes unfairly - as too timid, complacent or conservative, has finally found its voice. It confronted the excesses of the executive over the years, after being pushed against the wall by consistent lawlessness of security agents. All observers and critics agree that rebels and judicial activists are made of sterner stuff than the painfully moderate and loyal personalities of Justice Odoki and Kanyihemba. When such legal luminaries begin to support strikes instead of the President and his over zealous boys (and boys they all are), berating the judges, or threatening to ‘fix the judges’, then they should look at their own bad manners. No government that claims to be based on the will of the people, rule of law and constitutionalism can disobey the courts as and when they please, and expect the citizens to be law abiding.

What threatens a culture of the rule of law taking root in Africa is not the criminals, rebels or disloyal opposition, rather the many reluctant democrats who occupy state houses across this continent. Because we deify them as presidents, they think they have the right to preside over any matter that concerns their citizens: from our toilets not flushing, through who we sleep or should not sleep with, to how judges should interpret the law.

Consequently those who serve them in the security and intelligence agencies believe they can get away with anything, including torture, abuse, humiliation, corporal punishment, intimidation and other kinds of excesses, in the service of their masters. The rule of law will remain a pipe dream so long as presidents perpetrate or condone these acts. It must be a ‘first’ that President Museveni made a grudging apology to the judges. More importantly however, both the president and his trigger-happy security elements need to accept that the rule of law is not a ‘katogo’ meal (a Ugandan delicacy for the masses, bits of this and that, similar to what Kenyans call Sukumawiki) made in state house that they can cherry-pick.

In Nigeria, Obasanjo has the same a la carte attitude to parliament, judiciary and the country. He simply goes on regardless of what the law says, or the people feel. These cavalier attitudes to the law are undermining the principle of separation of powers, and any notion of checks and balances. They are creating elective dictatorships across the continent.

If these presidents think the law is wrong, they can change it through the parliament. But they should have no discretion to choose which of the laws they obey. Similarly, citizens who think a particular law is wrong or unjust, can exercise their right to lobby or campaign to change it, including even defying such laws - as many defied the infamous Pass laws in apartheid South Africa or many colonial laws in the nationalist era. But they must also be ready to face the consequences. The state is not the personal property of the president. Therefore those opposed to him or her should not be treated as if they are ungrateful tenants. We have to deliberately de-programme ourselves, so as not to see opponents as ‘enemies’, and difference in opinion as treason.

Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, is Deputy Director, Africa, UN millennium Campaign and more recently General-Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Tajudeen reports back from a conference in South Africa on sustaing Africa's democratic movement. The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour.

Where did you spend 6 March 2007, Ghana’s 50th anniversary? If you were not at a celebration party, you would have joined in the national celebrations in Accra remotely through the television, radio and other media. So powerful is Ghana a metaphor of Africa’s self-confidence and indomitable desire to be free. Everywhere globally, Ghana’s anniversary of independence was a reaffirmation of the possibilities of Africa taking responsibility for its own destiny.

I would have loved to be in Accra that day, but a previous commitment to participate in a conference ‘Sustaining Africa’s Democratic Momentum’ in Johannesburg, organised by the Electoral Commission of South Africa, the African Union and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, meant I would be in the rainbow nation. But Ghana’s milestone was not far from the minds of all the conference participants. South African vice preseident, Phumile-Ngcuka, led the tributes to Ghana by appearing at the conference in a splendid Kente dress.

The anti-colonial struggles represent an historic opportunity for popular mass movement for liberty and democracy across the African continent, and among all colonised peoples, including in Asia and Latin America. The movement united in a shared quest for freedom priests and peasants, leaders and proletariat, the elite and the masses.

After independence, many countries faced the challenge of building nations out of the artificial colonial states they inherited. The alliance between the masses and the leaders fell apart, giving way to military dictatorships, one party states and other forms of authoritarian rule which provoked protests, rebellions and even revolutions.

The challenges were not only internal. Externally the Cold War, neo-colonialist policies, and the new bourgeois elite and militated against the new states. Sometimes states tried to play the powers off against one another, but mostly they became proxies and agents for the wars and agenda of others: in the looting of their countries and the degradation of their peoples.

However, African people did not remain helpless victims, continuing to struggle against dictatorship in many forms, directly and indirectly. In the past two decades Africa has seen renewal, in spite of all kinds of people (African and non African) bad mouthing the continent, paid to derive huge sums of money from Afro-pessimism.

The Jo'burg conference could not have come at a better time, coinciding with Ghana’s 50th anniversary. Ghana was the first independent black African country. South Africa was the last country on the continent to be liberated from racist minority rule. Ghana was inspiring to African nationalist struggles. Today, South Africa represents the spirit of Afro-optimism, African responsibility and leadership, despite the challenges of giving real power and prosperity to its majority population.

The conference was an opportunity to audit the state of democracy, not only in Africa, but compared with other regions of the world. It brought together the electoral commissioners of most African countries, democracy activists, scholars, representatives from the private sector, multilateral institutions and agencies, and politicians of all hues and colour. The topics discussed included: representation and participation; the role of electoral systems in enhancing or limiting participation; the role of political parties; constitutional frameworks and constitutionalism; the nexus between democracy and development; the capacity, integrity and legitimacy of electoral management bodies as umpires of the democratic space; and the role of civil society and other stakeholders, both national and international, in deepening, expanding or limiting democratic spaces.

Political parties in Africa The session that interested me the most was ‘enhancing the capacity of political parties as agents of democratisation: towards creating political parties that are democratic, representative and trusted by voters'.

Political parties are vehicles for putting forward alternative public policies in dynamic confrontation, and in competition for citizens' votes. No competitive democratic political system can endure without a viable party system. The independence struggles were led by political parties with various strategies and tactics for getting rid of colonialism. They mobilised the public who voluntarily funded, supported and voted for them. In many countries, the colonialists intervened directly or indirectly, to control, manipulate, compromise and subvert those processes. But still the nationalists won - and without writing proposals for funding to any foreign power. The masses supported and funded the struggles, and actively participated in political parties.

Today we have no political parties that present alternative policies, values, or ideologies. Instead, they resort to taking issues of the lowest common denominator such as ethnicity, region, religion or race to mobilise support. Many parties are nothing more than family businesses, or machines for rolling out voters, who can be easily discarded after the election. For instance, in Kenya, `almost no MPs are members of the party or alliance, the platform on which they ‘won’ their seats. If parties mattered, how would it be so simple to cross the carpet without apparent sanctions? If elected members can change their allegiances so capriciously, why should people vote for parties at all?

It is the ultimate privatisation of politics to have MPs who are neither accountable to a party, nor to the people who voted them. Multi-party Kenya today is closer to neighbouring Uganda’s ‘no party democracy'. Uganda is struggling to evolve into a viable multi-party democracy with a reluctant president and ruling political clique. Even in some of our much vaunted stable democracies, such as Botswana, one must question whether such stability does not derive from an environment where one party dominates? What would happen, for instance, if the ANC lost power in South Africa? At the other extreme, what would be the political implications are if Museveni were no longer President in Uganda? Would their fate not be similar to that of Ghana, once Jerry Rawlings was no longer president or presidential candidate?

Different again is a country like Nigeria with more than 40 political parties, yet no where near being truly a democratic state. Nigeria basically is a two-party country. And the irony is that neither the ruling party nor the many opposition parties make any pretense of democracy.

Hence one of the biggest challenges to democracy in Africa is trying to develop a democratic society without democrats, whether in government or opposition, at home or in the work place. Democracy is always work in progress renewed from one generation to the next. But the main engine remains political parties. Therefore citizens have a duty to form them, join them, and be active in them in order to produce leaders that will serve their interests.

Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, is Deputy Director, Africa, UN millennium Campaign and more recently General-Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem returns from a weekend in Accra where they are busy preparing to celebrate 50 years of independence. For Ghana’s ruling party, the New Patriotic Party and President Kuffour, the 50th anniversary celebrations are problematic. How do they celebrate the legacy of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism when they and their forbearers opposed him and his party, the CPP (Convention People’s Party)? Well, they do so by having the 'mother of all parties' and attempting to make political gain out of the celebrations.

Last weekend I was in Accra to participate in a symposium at the Great Halof the University of Ghana, Legon. It was organised by a coalition of Nkrumahist and other prgressive forces under the aegis of the African People’s Platform.

The choice of the dates (23-24 February 2007) for the two day workshops were not accidental. On 24 February 1966 the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, founder, leader of the independent state of Ghana, and trail-blazer of the anti-colonial movement and foremost Pan-Africanist leader of the mid-2oth century and probably most popular of all times, was overthrown in a military coup orchestrated by domestic reactionary forces and their imperialist backers notably the ex-colonial masters, Britain and their American cousins through the CIA. Two monographs compiled by the Socialist Forum of Ghana: 'THE GREAT DECEPTION: The role of the CIA and right wing forces in the overthrow of Nkrumah', and 'FIGHT BACK: A Response to anti-Nkrumah provocations' refreshes our memories about the local and international context of the various challenges that Nkrumah faced both in life and even in death.

Amidst the official celebratory mood, the Legon symposium sought to situate the independence struggles and Ghana’s emancipation within the context of: the ideals of the Osagyefo on Ghanaian, African and World politics; The fight for freedom, justice and the continuation of the anti-imperialist struggles today; and the struggles of ordinary peoples for a just new economic and social order. It is part of the many alternative celebrations by Ghanaians who feel marginalised by the official anniversary or are dissatisfied with the Opportunistic politics of the celebrations.

President Kuffour is generally seen as a very decent man especially outside Ghana but even many domestic opponents will give him the benefit of the doubt. However ordinary decency is not enough when it comes to state craft. For instance many Nigerians will attest to former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon’s honesty as a person and swear by his personal integrity even more than 20 years after his overthrow. But in the same breath they will condem the profligacy and crass incompetence of his administration in managing post Civil war Nigeria. There are too many uncomfortable parallels with Ghana’s Mr Nice guy President who overwhelms people with his gentlemanliness!. Politically it is too apologetic to continue to perpetrate the sophistry of ‘the good leader ... bad advisers’ about our leaders. If they are so good how come they surround themselves with ‘bad people’. They choose these advisers so they should have responsibility for accepting or not accepting their advice. The flip side of this of course is the disclaimer by many of these advisers soon after they are booted out of office or the president is shown the back door. They mostly come with claims of ‘we told him but he did not listen’. They never tell the public why they remained with a client who never follow their advice. They are all
guilty of political opportunism and that’s why they can only give excuses for their conducts but no convincing explanations.

President Kuffour and the ruling New Patriotic Party have a wider political problem about celebrating Ghana’s 5oth annivessary. They come from the anti –Nkrumahist tradition of Danquah-Busia political families. Their forebears even opposed Nkrumah and the CPP when he moved ‘THE MOTION OF DESTINY” that heralded the final exit of the British colonialists. They collaborated with imperialism to overthrow Nkrumah thereby orphaning not just Ghana but the African revolution. Ironically Kuffour’s victory is the first time that reactionary political group has ever won a democratic election (Busia’s victory was orchestrated by the military junta). The poachers of independence struggle have now become the game keepers hence their ambiguity and cheap politics about the celebrations.

They are trying to celebrate and have the mother of all parties, make enormous political, diplomatic, commercial, cultural, tourism and all kinds of gains from the land mark but are pained to acknowledge the main architect of not only Ghana’s independence but a man who represents the best in the aspirations of Africans for liberty, freedom and dignity.

It is not a dishonour to Nkrumah but a reflection of the small mindedness of Mr Kuffour’s party because for many people inside and outside Ghana the independence of Ghana was not conceivable without the courageous leadership of the Osagyefo. As Basil Davidson said of Liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa 'no hand is big enough to cover the sky'. Nkrumah does not need governments and presidents to remember him as he continues to be an inspiration for millions of Africans and freedom loving peoples across the world.

It does not mean that Nkrumah did not have his own faults as a person or a leader but he has endured because no one since after him has come near his socio-economic and political achievements for Ghana. For many decades until the latter years of Rawlings’ rule and now Ghanaians did not know power shedding as is common among their richer cousins, oil-cursed Nigeria. When Nkrumah conceived of the Akosombo and the Volta Dam projects they were not meant for Ghana alone but for the whole region. He also did not see it as merely provision of electricity but within a wider industrialisation strategy. This point was discussed in detail by Yao Graham of the Third World Network within the context of energy privatisation in Ghana and the West Coast of Africa.

At the Pan-African level we have not seen another leader who has been so inspiring in his example of complete dedication to the ideals of Pan-Africanism and a better humanity. Many pretenders have come forward and but have not had the staying power of the Osagyefo. Today many of them scramble to be friends of imperialism (now euphemistically referred to as donors, development partners, friends from abroad etc betraying their peoples, Africa and the possibilities of a better humanity at the alter personal power.

It is too petty to deny our nationalist heroes/heroines their place of honor in our history simply because our masters of today were either not born then or played no role in them or were on the opposite side of freedom or even on account of what those nationalist leaders may have become later. History is a lived experience that cannot be erased.

It is not only Kuffour and the ruling party of Ghana that are ambiguous about Nkrumah. Even the former military dictator turned reluctant democrat, Jerry John Rawlings has always been anti-Nkrumah. in typical empty populism he claimed that there was nothing to celebrate in the 5O years of Ghana's independence. He was so much in a hurry not to give any credit to Nkrumah that he even forgot that 20 of the 50 years he was rubbishing were under his misrule. Nkrumah was in power for only 10 years and yet all the other forty years combined have not equalled his record!

There are many 50th anniversaries coming up in the next few years and it would be interesting to see how the present occupants of our state lodges celebrate them . For instance how would President Museveni and the increasingly exclusionist and revisionist NRM government (if they are still in power) celebrate Uganda’s 50th anniversary in a few years time? Would they try to write Obote/UPC out it or downplay his role as the NPP is doing and not succeeding with Nkrumah? How would Guinea mark its 50th anniversary next year, with or without its dead-but-not yet buried military dictator who took over after the death of the radical Nationalist, Ahmed Sekou Toure who was a popular leader but made many mistakes too.

If current leaders are sure of their own loyalties and commitment to the cause of their peoples they will not need to be hunted by the legacy of their predecessors. So unsure of their place in history that some of them like Museveni are beginning to honor themselves with statutes completely oblivious to what happened to other self-worshipping gestures most recently Saddam’s many statutes in Iraq that were pulled down with glee once the myth of immortality with which dictators always decorate themselves.

For many years Museveni refused to allow any street to be named after him and also have his picture on the national currency like previouis leaders. But now he has started launching his own statues. May be he does not trust Ugandans to honor him after he leaves office or dies, so he is on a 'DO IT YOURSELF' narcissism. A sage once said: greatness does not abide in how many honors one has BUT IN DESERVING THEM.

Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, is Deputy Director, Africa, UN millennium Campaign and more recently General-Secretary of the Global Pan-African Movement.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Tajudeen reports back from the launch of the Citizenship Rights in Africa initiative (CRIA) held last week in Kampala, Uganda. If we are all Africans, and recognised as such, then we can stop 'foreignising' people who disagree with us, or referring to other Africans as aliens, or discriminating against fellow citizens as 'indigenes' or 'settlers', and practising other forms of xenophobia that are so rampant across Africa. An African citizenship will, he says, restore to all of us what is naturally ours - being African.

Last weekend I returned to Kampala for a few days. It is always a pleasant return for me in a way I do not or expect to be welcomed to Lagos, or feel very homely in my current abode, Nairobi, now more notoriously referred to as Nairobbery. Kampala is a city bursting with all kinds of construction: roads, hotels, bungalows and shopping malls. It is a frenzy the economics of which I have not been able to understand. They are all ostensibly being built for the Commonwealth Summit (CHOGM) being held in November. No expense is being spared and the government is in overdrive to give all kinds of subsidies and concessions to ensure that all these luxury apartments are completed before the summit begins. In this rush it is strangling the struggling domestic furniture industry because CHOGM builders can go to Malaysia and import all that they need with little or no tax. After the summit what will happen to these hotels? Would a one-week summit generate returns to keep them open forever? It is clear that in spite of all the rush some of them may never be completed, while some may find other uses, and the very big ones like the new Serena Hotel should survive having risen from the ashes of the old Nile Hotel to the status of a hotel 'fit for a Queen'.

My visit was not about touring the dizzy heights of Kampala. I was in town to participate in a launch of a very important campaign sponsored by the Global Pan African Movement (PAM), the International Rights Initiative (IRRI) and Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI): Citizenship Rights in Africa Initiative (CRAI).

It is a matter that concerns all Africans. We may call ourselves Ugandans, Nigerians, Malawians or whatever, but are we really citizens? Do we really enjoy the full rights, freedoms and feel the complementary obligation to be loyal and voluntarily discharge our duties towards these states? I am always envious at the rate at which Western governments dispatch airplanes and soldiers to take their citizens out of any conflict situation, whether war or natural disaster, across the world. Hence Westerners are often the first refugees from any theatre of conflict. How many times has an African government mounted the same operation to rescue their citizens?

How many times have we heard any of our numerous diplomatic representatives in Europe or America or even in Africa make any public comment about the treatment of their citizens in the countries they are resident in? But let one Westerner be unfortunately lost in some impenetrable forest anywhere in the world, and the ambassador or high commissioner and the full weight of their propaganda machines - the BBC, CNN, VOA, RFI - would be brought to be bear on all of us; and if it is in Africa our security establishments will do anything to find the missing Westerner yet may not raise a finger for their own citizens. That is why many of our people will not run to the police or the army or 'government people' when they are in trouble.

The one aspect of citizenship that makes news is the now routine arbitrary denial of citizenship to compatriots who may have fallen out with the powers that be. The most recent demonstration of this is the publisher of the only surviving privately owned media in Zimbabwe, and also the proprietor of the Mail and Guardian in South Africa, Trevor Ncube. Because he would not toe the line, the Zimbabwean government refused to renew his passport, denationalised him and rendered him stateless. An older, well-known case is that of Jenerali Ulimwengu, who is the CEO of the Habari Corporation, publishers of several Kiswahili and English language newspapers in Dar es Salaam. Of course there was the more famous case of Zambian President Kaunda who was denationalised by his successor, the little man with even smaller brain, Chiluba, who was later 'discovered' to be of DRC origin himself.

Jenerali and Trevor were at this meeting and gave chilling, if sometimes ridiculous, accounts of the processes leading to their denial of citizenship. Trevor has brothers and sisters who are not in trouble at all, and Jenerali also has siblings who were never the subject of any investigation by the Mkapa government. What is common to both cases is that the matter was purely political. The first time I met Mkapa, it was Jenerali who took me to his house near the Aga Khan hospital in Dar. He was certain that 'he was our man' to succeed President Hassan Mwinyi. Our man indeed!

But Trevor and Jenerali or Kaunda are lucky because their cases became a source of huge embarrassment to their governments who had to back-off either in court or gave in politically. There are millions of people across this continent who are affected. According to the press statement issued at the launch of CRAI:

'Tens of millions of Africans have been victims of the pandemic of statelessness and denial of citizenship. In terms of the number of people affected and the implications for peace and security, it is easily the most serious human security and human rights problem on the continent today.'

It further stated: 'Statelessness and the arbitrary denial of citizenship violate human dignity, undermine the integrity of government and its institutions, dislocate families, destroy the livelihoods of those affected, and render the victims open to further abuses of their rights and lead to war.'

Leading international and African advocacy groups joined the three organisations in launching CRAI. It is a cry for liberty in which all of us have a role to play, either as part of the problem, or as part of the solution. Anyone of us could be a victim. The solution is very simple: accept Africans as Africans and treat them with dignity anywhere they may be as legal African citizens, from Cape Town to Cairo.

If we are all Africans and recognised as such then we can stop 'foreignising' people who disagree with us, or referring to other Africans as aliens, or discriminating against fellow citizens as 'indigenes' or 'settlers', and other forms of xenophobia that are so rampant across Africa. If we disagree we should try to solve them peacefully or understand the basis of our differences without resorting to stripping our opponents of their humanity and citizenship.

Rights should derive from our being human beings and the state has an obligation to protect all of us as citizens regardless of the circumstances by which we come about our citizenship which may include, ancestry, birth, settlement, marriage, migration, naturalization. Conferring African citizenship on all Africans may not solve all our problems but it provides an important legal and political basis for us to hold our governments accountable and enjoy the full rights of political and socio-economic participation wherever we may be without fearing expulsion and statelessness. It will also remove the insult that non-Africans are freer to move around the continent, especially those holding North American and European passports, while Africans are routinely humiliated and treated as 'others'. We are both 'others' abroad and still 'others' in Africa. Do we not deserve a place to call 'ours' where we can enter or leave without hindrance? We may never quite be Nigerians, South Africans or Kenyans, Chadians or any of the other possible colonially-induced artificial creations, but at least we can be who we are: AFRICANS. An African citizenship will restore to all of us what is naturally ours.

* Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

I spent New Year with two visiting friends, both of them Ugandan, who have been living outside of the country for most of their lives. One is more Nigerian than I can ever claim to be. He is married to a Nigerian, and I am not. He has lived in the country for the past 30 years, which I have not done. Having left home at 22, I could not go back for a decade and a half. I have never spent more than one month there since 1999, when I was ‘allowed’ back. The other friend crossed over to yankee-land, studied, worked and became famous - though he has never lost his Kabale roots. The former is Professor Okello Oculli and the latter is ‘Mr Terrific’, the hugely popular anchorman of VOA’s mass audience programme, Straight Talk Africa.

We were invited to dinner by an Eritrean sister, the immediate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Nairobi, Aki Aseghedech, and her visiting brother, the former long-term minister in the EPLF government of Eritrea, Tesfaye. Tesfaye - like a few other prominent refugees from president Afworki’s one-man rule - is now working with the UN.

They say opposites attract in marriage but there are more opposites than cupid could conjure up between these two siblings. Aki is a hot-blooded radical who sometimes makes me seem like a ‘moderate’! But the brother is more sedate - though no less a revolutionary. He is one of those stoics who can keep his brains on ice while his heart is on fire.

You can just imagine the kind of conversation, intellectual and political exchanges around that dinner table that night. Five widely travelled and politically committed Africans, none of them in their country of birth, but feeling no less African. All angry because they know that their individual countries and Africa as a whole can and deserves to do better than it is doing at the moment. Our heated conversations and passionate exchanges over all kinds of topics and themes from the global to the local gave me more hope than anything that although this continent might be down, it is not out: not yet, and it will not be, so long as there are many Africans not giving up on themselves, and on Africa. But it also confirmed to me the necessity to heed Karl Marx’s advice and move from ‘interpreting the world’ to ‘changing it’.

I had promised a friend that I would come to their church. So soon after honking in the New Year, we left Aki’s beautiful home in one of the most posh areas of Nairobi - which residents call Nairobbery - because of the high rate of crime! Since I was the driver, my two guests had no choice but to go to where I was going. And that’s how we arrived at the Parklands branch of the Nairobi Pentecostal Church, joining the faithful in their midnight service for the New Year. There were hundreds of worshippers who had been keeping vigil all night, pouring out their hearts to God in anticipation of good tidings. One would have thought that I, being born a Muslim, would be the most uncomfortable in the church. But thanks to my missionary education, lifelong love of Christmas carols and Christian choirs, I acquitted myself well. But one of my guests was more uncomfortable. He cannot remember when he was last in a church. Just imagine a scenario in which a Muslim was trying to placate the nerves of a person born and christened in a church! But that’s another story, to be continued another time. Anyway, we survived the service.

Okello has again been visiting Nairobi, and we got involved in church-related conversations again. A few days ago, in my office, we were engaged in a half day discussion about God in Africa. A firebrand Anglican reverend, responsible for mobilising 45 million Anglicans on this continent, came to my office to say hello. We were still halloing three hours later. Our discussions soon veered towards the church in Africa. The context is a Kenya that has been gripped by the story of a very popular born-again reverend, Rose Wanjiru whose desire to marry another Charismatic priest from South Africa had been the subject of a very public legal tussle. It turns out that this self-proclaimed bishop has been married before and had children. The husband in question went to court to stop the marriage, and also demand ‘his conjugal rights’ from a woman he had married under customary law and had never divorced! The courts stopped the marriage. The battle continues both in the law courts and the court of public opinion. However it has raised questions about the role of the church, and the ever-growing born-again, Pentecostal charismatic church across the continent.

Okello, our Anglican reverend sister, and I spent hours discussing this. There were no conclusions to our exchanges, though a number of issues are becoming clear. First, the Pentecostals are occupying a vacuum created by the established churches, which focus more on delivering their herd to heaven. Whereas, the Pentecostals offer God’s kingdom on earth. Second, while the established churches preach humility, poverty and guilt, the born-again (or mulekole as they are called in Uganda) preach prosperity and ‘feel good’ ideologies. For instance Bishop Wanjiru admits to fornication, children outside marriage, witchcraft and all kinds of failings, but then says, ‘see what God has done in my life, if I can make it so can you’.

These ideologies offer hope to the hopeless in a way that no government, president or CSO activist can do. We know many of them are fraudulent but their supporters believe they are God’s ‘little angels’ with all kinds of miracle prayers that can solve their immigration problems, marriage and other relationship challenges, barrenness, even HIV/Aids. And even but more importantly: their poverty. They offer bargain priced prosperity, as captured in one of their more popular slogans, 'a giver never lacks'. The more you give to God the more you are entitled to expect. They proclaim ‘Jesus is the answer’; but never quite tell their believers what the question is. What can or should we do about it? It is not enough to say ‘religion is the opium of the masses’, because it is both the rich, the very rich, the poor and poorest who are flocking to be saved. It is not just the ‘uneducated’ masses, but our highly educated and professional classes who are seeking salvation and refuge from the helter-skelter rat race of their lives.

And it is not only these churches that are witnessing revivals, but all religions. Many Muslims are becoming radicalised thanks to Bush and Blair’s ‘wars on terror’, that has made Islam and Muslims targets. Are the manmade problems of the world so out of control that ‘Only God’ can solve them? Or are we inventing God as a shield and convenient excuse to avoid facing up to these problems, both personally and politically? What has God got to do with poverty? What has he got to do with rapacious globalisation, intolerance, Iraq, the Niger Delta, Darfur, Palestine and Lebanon? It is about time God issued a disclaimer!

* Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The 8th Ordinary Session of the African Union ended in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Tuesday. Although the theme of the summit was “Science and Technology in Africa’ it was the political and Peace and Security issues that dominated media attention. This is not unexpected because the summit is the most important political and diplomatic forum for Africa. And since the AU was launched, there have been concerted efforts on the part of Africa’s leaders to make it relevant despite many criticisms and doubts by both Africans and outsiders. One indication of this is the large number of leaders who attend these summits and the increasing openness even on the most controversial issues.

There has also been more formal and informal spaces opened up for engagement by different stake holders in Africa whether African or onternational NGOs and CSOs, business sector, think tanks, etc. Gone are the days when the summit used to be dominated by largely ‘special invitation, ‘special guest’ chosen at the whims and caprices of the bureaucrats of the Union who were generally more disposed to welcoming all kinds of foreigners, but fearful of ‘trouble makers’ from Africa!

Almost anybody who wants to engage with the AU has some access and opportunity to do so. That only a few of our NGOs and CSOs engage, is both a reflection of residual cynicism and also of the donor-driven agendas to which they are captive. On the other hand, the lack of engagement by broader social movements and popular forces is due to continuing perception that the AU is essentially a leaders’ forum and since many of them have gripes against their national leaders they are suspicious of the Pan Africanist credentials of these leaders.

That cynicism, whether amongst CSOs/ NGOs or our Social movements, is tantamount to behaving like the proverbial ostrich. There are many windows for engagement that can only become gates of opportunities if used by Africans to expand the frontiers of democratic governance and accountability of our institutions. They will not change of their own accord but as a result of constructive dialogue, or sometimes confrontational approaches, but remaining engaged all the same.

Often outsiders are quick to grasp the opportunities and significance of our institutions than we are, since we are too consumed by our own alienation from our governments. For instance could it be by accident that all major international NGOs (INGOs) have representation in Addis Ababa, monitoring, engaging and lobbying the AU on all kinds of issues? Increasingly these INGOs are appointing Africans to represent them. But these Africans will mostly be carrying out the self-given mandate of these organizations and their interests. Sometimes they may coincide with ours, but often they do not in a most fundamental sense. Our misery is their career.

The political landscape in Africa is changing and generally for the better even if the challenges of democratization and development continue in many countries. It is a work in progress that should make us focus on the larger pictures and trends instead of the ‘problems’ no matter how overwhelming they may seem.

Would it have been possible in the old OAU for Sudan to have been rejected twice in succession in its claim to assume the chair of the organization? In the old days, the argument would have been that what is happening in Darfur is an ‘internal affair’ on which Sudan’s ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’ could not be questioned.

But these days those arguments do not hold sway anymore. We may not have collective sovereignty in place but it is no longer a case of “leave my victims to me and I leave yours to you’. We have moved from non-interference to non-indifference. What happens in all African countries is legitimate concern of other African states. A new sense of shame has arrived where bad conduct by leaders and states are frowned at, and public opportunities for rebuke are used instead of the old ‘diplomatic hush- hush’.

In the past Sudan would have threatened to leave the Union. But today, Sudan remains despite the snub. Clearly, Sudan’s rulers judge their interest better served by remaining than by leaving.

The isolation of Sudan on the Darfur issue also demonstrates how Civil Society activism in dialogue with progressive African governments, Union bureaucrats and other concerned Africans can yield positive result. It is not the noise of the US or Britain or their NGOs (who are the ones the BBC, CNN regularly quote) that has made it impossible for Sudan to become Chair of the AU. Instead there is consensus among Africans that a country like Sudan that is so flagrantly and massively abusing the rights of its own people -- orchestrating their mass death -- is just not able to speak in our name. Pressures were not only being exerted by the West: there have also been serious pressures, cajolery, all kinds of carrots and inducements on Sudan, its allies in the Arab League (which announced its contribution for Peace Keeping in Darfur only a few days before the Summit), and filial support from some North African countries in support of Sudan’s claim to the Chair. But the AU still said: NO to Al Bashir. In saying that we are saying: No to Genocide in Darfur!

Even the reluctance by many states to contribute troops to Somalia is not a weakness, but a statement that Africa will no longer act as proxies for the US or any other foreign interests. Ethiopia might wish to be the Americans’ trojan horse, but the rest of the states are not so eager.

* Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The World Social Forum (WSF) that took place in Nairobi was one of those 'once in a life time' events for many people; and 'once a year' events for the veterans who continue to attend every one.

It is an all-comers forum. For instance, the gay and lesbian lobby in Africa are there along side the Maoists, Anachists, peasant movements, trade unionists, radical scholars, grassroots movements, all kinds of gender activists and more. The reactionaries will say: all lunatics are in town.

It should be no surprise if there were many Africans since this is taking place in Africa, but so marginalized are we in our own affairs that one is always happy to see Africans at these meetings even when they are happening here. Many of the usual suspects are around, from the veteran radicals to the budding ones; and not only from Africa but from across the world. If you want to gauge the state of global revolutionary consciousness, the frustrations, the challenges and opportunities of the global forces for change and transformation, the WSF is the place to be.

But these gatherings always frustrate me for many reasons. One; they show up Africa's weaknesses whether they are held outside or inside Africa. One of the critical areas is our level of participation and preparedness. A majority of the African participants - even many from Kenya itself - were brought by foreign paymasters or organisations funded by outsiders. Often they become prisoners of their sponsors. They must attend events organized or supported by their sponsors who need to put their 'partners' on display, and the 'partners' in turn need to show their loyalty to their masters.

Two; even when these meetings happen in Africa, the participation of local groups and citizens are constrained by the three factors of fees for participation, language of discourse, and location. Local activists and sympathizers in the WSF had to organize a protest and even a temporary occupation before the fees for Kenyan participants were waived.

Three; we go to these events without adequate preparation about our own agenda and line up behind other peoples' not-so-hidden agendas, although at this WSF there were a number of attempts to forge a Pan-African agenda before the summit consultations. One of them was the Pan-African Youth Forum working closely with the Youth Commission of the WSF. But the truth remains that many of the youth who came did so on the platform of one donor or the other and were mostly not African.

This dependence on foreigners, both financially and ideologically, is so pervasive that it cannot be ignored anymore. There are signs that an increasing number of Africans are not only outraged by it but becoming ashamed by it, and are looking for ways and means of freeing our activism from the clutches of donor funding and donor-driven agendas. These issues were frankly and honestly discussed at many forums before and during the summit.

This dependence on foreigners raises a lot of disturbing issues about the state of Africa's NGOs and CSOs, and their capacity to contribute to lasting changes in the social, economic and political conditions of Africans in favour of social justice.

The first is a question of legitimacy. Who do these NGOs represent? Who are they accountable to? To whom do they owe their loyalty: to their donors or to the African people they claim to speak for? The second is the related question of the generally anti-government posture of these NGOs. They take money from foreign governments/agencies like DFID, USAID, DANIDA, SIDA, allegedly as independent CSOs. But why should foreigners be helping us to be independent of our own governments? How are their own citizens independent of them? The same African NGOs that queue up to suck up to all kinds of foreign governments and funders will raise their eye-brows and shout 'autonomy' and 'sell out' if any of their members has close financial or political links with their own governments.

In effect, the autonomy they are asserting is one of being sovereign against their own government and subservience to any foreigner. Where governments are illegitimate or have bad governance records this may hold for sometime, but in the long run it delegitimises the NGOs concerned.

The third issue is the constant conflation of NGOs to mean CSOs which should not be the case. Genuine CSOs will include trade unions, guild and professional associations, self-help groups, village or town associations, faith-based charities or interest groups, etc. Their most distinctive character is that they are voluntary, membership-based and generate their funds from their members.

How many of our busy-body, noise-making NGOs qualify in this sense? It is similar to our governments being dependent on the aid of outsiders, and we demanding that they should be accountable to us. We do not pay taxes but demand representation and wonder why the leaders are more responsive to any noise that comes from outsiders?

The worst excesses of the dependence on foreign sponsors are the various scams that have developed in many of these NGOs about 'creative accounting', which does not mean accountability: Per diem wrangles, multiple claims, bogus ticket refunds, multiple accounting, budgeting and reporting for similar proposals from the same organisation and many other unsavoury practices that make these organisations not dissimilar to the governments we climb on holy mountains to attack for being corrupt, inefficient and unaccountable.

And this issue of dependence on foreign donors is not just because there are no resources. How come the nationalists freed this continent from the yoke of colonialism without writing proposals to any funder? Why are our peoples not willing or able to support our activism? Could it be that the people do not associate themselves with the self-given mandate of these largely middle-class led, elite focused, and urban-based counter elite? Or worse still, people may be seeing that these self-declared crusaders, whether foreign or local, are only there for their own interest. The proliferation in the last decade of MONGOs (My Own NGO), GONGOs (Governmental NGO) , BONGOs (Business NGO), PONGO (Private NGO), all over Africa, may be an indication of democratic openings, or state collapse, or of the irresponsive state, but are not good indicators of building democratic, people-led, people-based organisations connected to and organically linked to the wider social movements without whom social progress, democracy and development is not possible.

If they truly belong to the masses the masses will defend them. And if they are truly based on the interests of our peoples their first allegiance will be to those they serve.

In that sense it should worry us that the African participation in the first ever WSF in Africa in Nairobi is more of a gathering of NGOs than that of the real social and political movements and peoples' organisations who can make lasting change possible. Many of our successful NGOs and INGOs, like their forebears, have become gate-keepers - or to use a better term - commissioned agents between the masses and their oppressors, occupying spaces for the poor and the marginalized when most of them do not or no longer belong to that class or share their vision of change.

* Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director for the UN Millennium Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article in his personal capacity as a concerned Pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The World Social Forum (WSF) is holding its Seventh Session in Nairobi, for the first time in Africa, 20-25 January 2007.

This is a global Movement against globalization and the triumphalist neo-liberalism that underpins it. For any African who is casually aware of the painful history of this continent in relation to the rest of the world globalization should not be a new term. Slavery was global and so was colonialism. And Imperialism has always been global.

So why are we using globalization today as if it was discovered a few years ago? It is used as if it all has to do with technology, internet, freer movement of goods, services, people, skills, knowledge, etc. It is all these and more. It has both an ideological, political and class context. Technology is not neutral.

What is distinct about globalization today? One, it is happening in the context of a UNIPOLAR world that is dominated by an illiterate lone superpower: USA. Two, it asserts an end of ideology with another ideology: There Is No Alternative (TINA) thereby turning neoliberalism, into a gospel truth, from which there can not be deviation.

Democratization, progress and survival of humanity, in this discourse, become linked or even interchangeable with western political structures, capitalism and Western culture. Consequently the destiny of the world is to become Westernized and even more brazenly become Americanized!

If Westernization produced prosperity for all the peoples of the world and respect the dignity of all human beings there may not be much opposition to it and its hegemony. But slavery, colonialism, genocide, mass violence, expropriation of majority by the minority, destruction of cultures and peoples and many more atrocities in the pursuit of raw materials, profits and markets are the heritage and contemporary expression of this ideology. Hence it has always provoked resistance from its victims and other peoples who desire social justice and a better humanity.

The WSF movement has evolved from the late 1990s becoming organized expression of the peoples of the world at its first meeting in 2001 at Porta Allegro in Brazil. It brings together all kinds of anti-globalisation forces and social movements struggling against all kinds of class, racial, ethnic, religious, gender and other kinds of oppression at all levels of human existence. It is united by the twin ideology of opposition to the current imperialist anti –people globalization and the totalitarian ideology of there being no alternative to Neo liberalism.

Those may be the only two things they agree on because different groups, organizations and individuals decide where and how they go about confronting the two evils they identify. To the untutored in WSF dynamics it may look like an anarchists’ bazaar. But there is a method to the madness. These are people committed to changing the world they live in and are prepared to sacrifice for it. They may sound like lunatics and champions of lost causes but so did many thought of Mandela who, as a firebrand youth believed they could overthrow Apartheid and bring about Black Majority rule at a time when people thought White power was impregnable.

Winston Churchill infamously and loquaciously declared his opposition to Independence for Non White British Colonies in his rude reaction to Mahatma Ghandi’s mobilization of ordinary Indians against colonialism insisting he had not become the Prime Minster of ‘His Majesty’s government’ to hand over the British Empire ‘to a half-naked Kaffir’. But it came to pass in his life-time. Not only India, but also Ceylon (Sri Lanka now), and several Asian and African Countries became independent before Churchill’s life snuffed out and they were welcomed to England by the British crown in pomp and pageantry at Buckingham palace.

History is full of the contributions made possible by people who were regarded as ‘lunatics’ by their contemporaries and the powers that be that they challenged but with time many of these ideas and issues they fought on became common sense.

Many will snigger and even be amused by the clarion call of the Nairobi WSF: “Another World is Possible”. The cynicism will in part be due to many people believing that the world as we live it today has come to stay, that America will always gets its way and the west will always dominate therefore since you cannot beat them you had better join them or get lost. But this reading of the world’s history is so short sighted as it is ahistorical.

Most of the territory we now know as the USA today used to be a colony of Britain, but now Britain especially under TORY Blair has become a vassal state of Britain. Yet at the height of British Imperial grandeur in the 19th and up to the middle of the 20th century its imperial propagandists use to boast that: ‘The sun never sets on the British empire’ because the colonies stretched against all continents.

Those struggling against British Colonialism used to retort that the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire was because: God never trusted the British in the dark! The Empire did collapse. Why should the American empire be any different? Were not Rome and the Catholic Church imperial power before? What happened to the Egyptians and Greek civilizations? From generation to generations, from one epoch to the other human beings continue to seek alternatives making change the only permanent condition of humanity.

Empires rise and fall. Just imagine the next fifty years with China, India, and Africa, Latin America and other previously marginalized peoples and regions of the world on the rise. The apostles of neoliberalism want to put an end to our imagination but the ‘strugglists’ assembling in Nairobi from all corners of the world for the WORLD SOCIAL FORUM (which should really be World Socialist Forum) just as the beneficiaries of the current unequal and unfair global power structures gather for their annual vultures’ festival in Davos, for the World Economic Forum (really WORLD EXCPLOITERS FORUM) are defiantly reaffirming the truism that Another world , without hunger, poverty and greed is possible and desirable. But more than that they are prepared to work for it.

Karibuni to Nairobi to all of you. A luta continua

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director, Africa, for the UN millennium, Campaign. He writes this weekly column in his personal capacity as a concermed Pan Africanist.
* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem hastens to the defence of his ten theses on the new leaders in Africa (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/39066). The power-worshippers, he says, believe only in one thing: power. And whoever is wielding it at the moment, they have only one party, which Nigerians call AGIP (Any Government In Power)

My piece last week has, predictably provoked a number of reactions from all kinds of corners.

First, there were those who say ‘we told you so’ or ‘welcome to your senses’. They were cynical about the 'New leaders' from the start and were never as enthusiastic about them as I and many others were.

Secondly, there were the hardcore believers in these leaders who still believe that they are progressives caught up in the realities of holding power in a dependent state and are engaged in tactical manoeuvres rather than strategic sell out.

Thirdly, there were those who agree with all the analysis but believe that the problem is more structural than personal degeneration. That the system is amenable to the excesses that we decry and all of us can become its victims unless we are willing to take it on fundamentally.

And finally, there were those who accuse me of still being naively puritanical by expecting that people in power can behave differently.

I must concede that all of these have elements of truth in them. But they do not diminish the points I made last week. We are not judging these leaders by intention alone. It is on their record in office. And most of them have now been in power for more than a decade. There is no need to be smug about ‘we told you so’ because those who do not make mistakes are those who do nothing. The fact that history may not turn out the way we like does not mean that we stop doing things unless we are ‘sure’ we will succeed.

Political independence did not bring economic independence and liberation to our peoples in many countries, does that mean we go along with the recolonisers who argue that everything has been going wrong since colonialism ended in Africa? We can critique the anti-colonial movement and struggles without throwing away the historical and political victories it brought to us. Without those struggles many of us may never have had the opportunity to go to school or even realise that what we were having was neo-colonialism.

Similarly the ‘New Generation’ of African leaders did bring about many positive changes. Maybe their ‘historic mission’ is to stabilise neo-colonialism. Therefore it is the responsibility of other generations to transform the situation. As Achebe used to say, many critics criticised him not for the book he had written but the ones they should have written!

Those who are happy that the New Leaders turned out as bad as they feared remind me of some of the Trotskyites who were jubilant at the collapse of the old Eastern Bloc believing it proved their case against Stalinism without realising that the right wing counter revolution was directed at all socialist forces whatever their differences.

The undying band of believers in these leaders are a mix bag of the usual power worshippers, genuine patriots and faithful supporters. The power-worshippers believe only in one thing: power. And whoever is wielding it at the moment, they have only one party, which Nigerians call AGIP (Any Government In Power). You will find them in every government virtually since Independence singing the same praises of the leader as everything, omnipresent and omniscient, and if he is not in charge the “country will collapse! Initially our new leaders detested such characters and shunned them but over time you find such people are getting closer to them, as their former comrades and decent people move away from them. There are many such charlatans around president Museveni in Kampala today.

There are also many genuine patriots who think that the leaders still mean well but are constrained by circumstances both objective and subjective to become ‘moderate’ given the fact that reactionary forces are the dominant forces globally. Such patriots try to preserve some progressive nucleus within the regimes. In many countries the leaders tolerate them and used them especially in propaganda at election time, in the grassroots mobilisation and to maintain progressive contacts internationally. But often they lack real influence in government policy that is policed by pro IMF/WB technocrats. They are given direct access to the President or made advisers but no access to real policy.

In the end they become apologists for the leader blaming ‘people around him’ for misleading him. But the key question is who appoints these advisers? Is it not the President or Prime Minster himself? How come we are always ready and willing to blame ‘those around the president’ instead of the president who surrounded himself with those people in the first place?

As for my friends who take a more structuralist view of the challenges: I agree with them, but only up to a point. I have been around many corridors of power long enough to know and be very sympathetic to the pathetic demands on an African leader, not just the president. Anybody with some office, comes under extreme pressures from family, clan, friends, relatives (in the most expanded sense), in laws, cronies, fellow officials, not t talk of the corporations, foreign governments, companies, etc.

All of them seeking one favour or the other. People in power are supposed to deliver miracles, legislators are supposed to bury every constituent who died, donate generously at various Harambee in Kenya, pay school fees and even participate in the wedding of their constituents! The reason why this is so is the extreme poverty faced by majority of our peoples and also some enabling cultural norms that perpetrate this. The other reason has to do with the weaknesses of our institutions.

The challenge of leadership is to find a more institutional and collective public policy bases for dealing with these problems. Instead, what you get is a more personalised power relations that has turned the New Leaders into destroyers of institutions. If any of them were to die today there will be so much chaos because they have not allowed institutions to develop their own autonomy. They have become the system, rendering the country like an aeroplane on a long haul with only one pilot and no auto pilot mechanism! Any leader who cannot imagine life without leading or the country surviving without him is on an expensive ego trip on the backs of his or her peoples. If after 20 years of presidents in power, people in Kampala or Harare can still not imagine life without the president, then we should ask: what have these leaders being doing in all these decades?

Finally, I am too involved not to realise that power both objectively and subjectively changes those people entrusted with power, the people around them but a progressive person must show their progressive credentials in the face of all the challenges. At the end of the day the questions to be asked must include: what do you stand for? In whose interest are you governing? How do you want to be remembered? By the size of your bank account and number of cars in your garage or the fabulous mansions you own across the world? Or the honest service you gave to your country?

We adore Castro today and remember Nyerere with nostalgia as we celebrate Madiba, not because they did not make any mistakes buy because we knew where they stood and on whose side they are. The problem that most of the ‘New leaders’ face is that people just do not know on whose side they are anymore. And in some cases the painful truth is that they seem to be there only for themselves. And will do anything (including enlisting as headmen, pointsmen or foremen for imperialism) to remain in power.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director, Africa, for the UN millennium, Campaign. He writes this weekly column in his personal capacity as a concermed Pan Africanist.
* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Where did the New Leaders go wrong?

It is a new year but excuse me if I do not begin with the customary seasonal platitude. Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi, playing the role of a Bush clone in Africa presented us with a Christmas present of bombs in Mogadishu. LIke Israel in Lebanon he claimed to be supporting the 'legitimate' government by offloading bombs on the Airport! For a country that cannot feed its own peoples Ethiopia seem to be overfeeding its defence (or is it offensive?) establishment.

In the Middle East, while Muslims were preparing for the Eid. American Cretins, otherwise called Iraqi government, presented Saddam's head to their Patron-Saint in Washington on Eid Day. Ironically the Eid El Kabir, was institutionalised as Ram slaughter in place of human slaughter but Bagdad and Washington reverted back to the barbaric practice.

I am not sure how many of us can say Happy New Year in these circumstances?

Prime Minister Melees Zenawi of Ethiopia is one of the most intellectually engaging leaders on the African continent today. He is one of the small groups of younger and supposedly dynamic leaders that burst on to the political scene in the 1990s for whom President Yoweri Museveni (who had come to power earlier in 19856) became a titular head. They were generally referred to as ‘New generation of African Leaders’. I was, along with many colleagues inside and outside the Pan African Movement, a great proponent for these leaders. They represented a fresh approach to leadership, seemed to be clear ideologically and politically. They spoke with confidence and inspired many Africans and friends of Africa that indeed ‘African Solution to African problems’ was indeed a reality.

But did we celebrate too early? Were our hopes and enthusiasm misplaced? By the mid-1990s, many of these leaders began to show personal, political and ideological strands that made people to wonder whether these are not ‘old wines in new bottles’. To some of their opponents these leaders are even worse than the former dictators they replaced.

I am not one of these perpetual pessimists who always seem to see an unending bad news that imprison the present and moors us permanently to our inglorious and the more unsavoury parts of our history. A lot of positive changes did take place and are still taking place in many countries. And we did learn to dream again but more importantly renewed our hopes.

Whatever one thinks of Museveni now he is not an Idi Amin. And Meles is no Mengistu. Whatever may have happened in the DRC, we did well to remove Mobutu. Whatever anyone thinks of the RPF or Kagame in Rwanda we should never feel or be made to feel guilty for ending genocide and putting the country on a path of normalcy.

We can explain what has happened to these leaders and what they may have become without forcing the parallels that they are not different from past dictators. Such blanket criticism negates many of the positive things that have happened and continue to happen, albeit, unevenly across the continent.

Like other enthusiasts, I am still asking why and what happened to some of those I got to know fairly well. For now I would like to share 10 reasons why the ‘New Leaders’ seem to have extinguished or are extinguishing the hopes they had inspired. It may not wholly apply to all of them but the pattern is generic.

One: They come as liberators but the longer they stay in power the more they become oppressors, intolerant of dissension or even discussions within their own political and military formations, among original leaders and in the wider society. Check in all these countries where the original leadership has remained intact even five to ten years after assumption of office.

Two: The vanguard of the masses slowly become vanguard of the ruling party / clique and soon degenerates into vanguard of the leader. Take the example of Eritrea‘s Issias Afwerki, who has managed to turn a country we all thought was going to be a shining example of a ‘future that works’ into a large garrison. They wrote a beautiful constitution that was ‘people-driven’ but became ‘Leader jammed’ and remains gathering dust. The people had their say but the leader had his way!

Three: They usually come in with big dreams and enormous commitment to the masses but the paraphernalia of power, the glitz, pomp and pageantry and all the trappings begin to take over. The ascetic ones amongst them begin to enjoy the good life and could not have enough of it. Add to that the institutionalized culture of sycophancy, jungle fatigues soon give way to the best of Savoy row suits, Gucci shoes, Rolex watches, etc. The comrade has now ‘arrived’ and will not be in a hurry to vacate he State House which he once detested. Some of them made a point of not occupying huge palaces vacated by their predecessors but soon moved into them or build even more imposing ones ‘on national security grounds’.

Four: A ruling group that had been held together for many years (from rebel groupings until they capture power) by shared ideology and perspectives become more and more built around the personality of the leader, his family, in-laws, freelance opportunists and other cronies recruited for ‘loyalty’ rather than any commitment to the country or people.

Five: The interest of the party, the government and the people become indistinguishable from the whims and caprices of the Leader. To oppose him was to oppose the people.

Six: The progressive changes they have brought about in the country become ‘gifts’ from a benevolent leader to his hapless citizens. Again here we should not throw away the baby with the birth water. Generally these leaders did turn around the economy and political arrangements in their countries. Things did improve even if in most of the cases, they were growth without development anchored on neo liberal policies beloved and imposed by the IMF / World Bank.

Seven: The one failing that many people -- especially their former comrades --find unpardonable in these leaders are their ideological somersaults. Most of them were revolutionaries who began their political carriers and rebel lives as firebrand anti imperialists but soon became converts to the free market and new best friends with the imperialist countries especially the USA and other Western powers. What angers many is the way in which some of them even use their new approval by Washington as a badge of honour replacing their former revolutionary icons!

Eight: These former revolutionaries, who previously espoused Pan Africanism, resigned themselves to ‘better managing’ the neocolonial state and soon became engrossed in competition rather than cooperation with their former comrades. Instead of more Pan Africanism, they engaged in less as they reduced relationship with other states to one of bilateral economic and political arrangements. The consequence of this is a tragedy like the DRC where we built a Pan Africanist Alliance to get rid of Mobutu, but could not sustain it after victory because every state wanted to have a pliant regime in Kinshasa instead of a Pan Afrianist regime in the interests of the people of DRC people and those of the region. Liberators become looters and occupiers...

I have saved the last two reasons deliberately to the end because they help explain the folly of Meles in Somalia.

Nine: This is the twin evil of these leaders becoming both victims of their militaristic means of getting and retaining power and wallowing in external validation by the same Western powers that not too long ago were praising our dictators as ‘moderate’.

Most of these leaders do not know how to negotiate without having their AK47s corked. They are used to conquering. Therefore, even when they profess democratic reforms, they are being tactical rather than strategic. They expect their peoples to be forever grateful and to accept incremental changes as decried by the leader. The only institution they trust is the armed forces. That’s why Ethiopia could fight Eritrea and Uganda and Rwanda can do the same in a third country despite assumptions of solidarity and affinity between the leaders.

Ten: My last reason -- and probably more decisive -- is the flattery and endorsement by the West. It makes these leaders feel that they are doing their peoples a favour. But more than that, it gives them illusions of becoming global players and they instinctively ally themselves behind geo-political and economic strategic interests of the West. But in these days it means lining up behind the USA and bush for all kinds of Bush wars.

Meles’ Ethiopia is the current worst practice of this. I am not one of those who think that Meles is just doing what Washington wants. What he has done is to use Bush’s doctrine to affirm his alliance but also justify his narrow national and sub-regional security concerns.

In invading and occupying Somalia, Ethiopia even has the legitimacy of the IGAD (Inter-Governmental Authority on Development) and AU backed process that led to the formation of the TFG (Transitional Federal Government).

But as intelligent as he is, why can he not learn from his Washington friends that, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, it is easier to occupy a country than govern it in peace. Are they not talking to Rwanda and Uganda about their experience in the DRC? Why does Meles think that Somalia will forever remain weak militarily? If a country with almost 100 % Muslims want to be governed Islamically how undemocratic is this? Does Meles not realize that the TFG will remain what we call in Hausa ‘GWANATIN JEKA NA YIKA” (i.e. a puppet regime)? Sooner than later, its allies will turn against it the way Kabila senior turned on his Kigali and Kampala allies.

It was Prime Minister Meles who famously insinuated that African leaders may be having psychiatric problems because ‘they repeat the same things but expect different outcomes’. Since he was a medical student before leaving for the Bush, it is perhaps about time he turned his diagnosis to himself.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the Deputy Director, Africa, for the UN millennium, Campaign. He writes this weekly column in his personal capacity as a concermed Pan Africanist.
* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Professor Issa Shivji is a legend in his own lifetime. He is one of the few veteran members of the leftist intelligentsia who has withstood all storms and remains firmly on the side of the people. He is truly a life long member of the ‘Africa will never, never surrender’ Club for whom ALUTA CONTINUA is not just a slogan, but a working motto. He retires from the University of Dar Es Salaam this year. He may be retired but he is certainly not tired. More importantly his colleagues, comrades, and several generations of students are not tired of him.

It is not often that Africans, especially those of us on the left, say thank you to one of us. Often we reserve our best homage till they are no longer with us. We think it is a kind of bourgeois ostentation, vanity, or what they call ‘feferity’ (ie showmanship) to celebrate individual achievements because the struggle is all that matters. Individuals, no matter how much they have contributed to our struggles, are not supposed to matter.

I have always had unease about this... It is the people that matter in the end but who are these people if not an aggregate of individuals?

It is heartening that times are changing and we are beginning to celebrate our heroes and heroines while they are still alive. The Africa Research and Resource Forum this week in Nairobi has been holding a celebratory seminar alongside a series of public debates in honour of Shivji.

One of the public lectures was entitled “Choosing leaders: The dilemmas of democracy in Africa and abroad”. It was held at the Kenya National Theatre close to the University of Nairobi and opposite the colonial edifice of the Norfolk hotel. Prominent African scholars participating in the seminar were on the panel chaired by Prof Peter Wanyande who is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Nairobi. The panelists included Prof Thandika Mkandawire; former Director of the Dakar based CODESRIA and Head of the UNRISD in Geneva: John Oyoo of the Africa Institute of South Africa; Prof Haroub Othman of the University of Dar; and Professor Mahmood Mamdani.

Thandika opened up the discussion with a Brecthian quote suggesting that in Africa the challenge of democracy may not be about the way to choose our leaders but how they choose their peoples. He was not downplaying the importance of the formal processes of free and fair elections, or rule of law and associated freedoms, instead of drawing attention to the mystification of formalities that lead to people confusing the process with the end itself. This has created a situation in many countries where people vote without choosing or become ‘choice-less voters’.

Just being chosen in an election is not enough. There are consequences for the chosen one. One of these is the obligation to be accountable to the voters. This is an area where democracy is still facing numerous challenges in Africa and elsewhere. How do we hold our chosen leaders accountable in between elections? How do we prevent them from becoming elective dictators and self-serving lots who only care for themselves? This is very important in Kenya where the MPs are among the best paid in the world. During this week President Kibaki had to turn down a salary increase awarded by the parliament that would have seen him earning more than President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Even in the so-called ‘advanced democracies’ where institutions are more developed and there are countervailing centres of power, checks and balances, accountability is difficult to enforce. For instance Tony Blair went to war even though an overwhelming majority of British voters did not support the unjust war.

In Africa, thanks to the IMF and World Bank and their fellow travellers in the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the moment, accountability has now become accounting. Yet according to Thandika, it was African scholars who first suggested to the IMF/World Bank, in a now forgotten pioneering dialogue with African scholars, that governance was a central issue for the continent. This was in the 80s when the Bank and its egg-head economists believed that only structural adjustment mattered. They produced a two-volume report which was quickly forgotten but they were to pick up on ‘good governance’ later as a mantra. In Washington terms, good governance is government without politics, a dictatorship of experts in the name of technocracy.

Thandika advised that African scholars should examine our societies more in terms of how they are shaped, and who is shaping them, in order to understand our politics and the political behaviour of the masses. By looking at ourselves we can better understand the sociology and ideology that determines the consciousness of the African voter, and why this voter is susceptible to class, ethnic, religious, and other forms of manipulation.

Finally, he suggested that there is a cyclical turn-around in African politics that he estimated to be between 30-40 years, during which the same political elite have been dominant (whether in or outside of government) waiting to be government. He sees the next few years as the period during which a new cycle will begin. He challenged the younger scholars and political activists to seize the opportunity to reshape Africa.

I am not quite sure about this cycle of Thandika’s because there is another problem that I see with some of our political leaders especially the so-called ‘New Leaders’. They are a special class that has known no other role other than leading. Last job: Leader. Present job: Leader. Future expectation: Leader. They do not know ‘followership’.

John Oyoo spoke after Thandika. He observed that in the independence period there was a more unified elite with the common aim of riding the continent of colonialism. Many of the politicians were intellectuals and many intellectuals were politically involved. However in the post-colonial phase, intra-elite conflicts led to military coups which decimated the intellectual class and devastated state and society. Intellectuals became either opponents of the khaki boys or their stooges and hirelings.

The Cold War also took its toll on our intellectuals and politicians who became cold warriors for the east or the west. By the late 1970s and throughout the 80s, Africa had become prostate and formed an experimental ground for all kinds of half-baked ideas of development from outside, principally through the hegemony of the IMF /World Bank and their dubious Washington Consensus.

The IMF and World Bank did not want thinkers who would challenge their dubious assumptions and arrogance. The military or one party dictator did not want any criticism of their misrule. Between both of these, our once promising and flourishing intellectual centres became deserts and development thinking and planning became externalized.

Haroub concentrated on his familiar themes of the essential difference between visionary and non-visionary leaders. At independence, many of the leaders, regardless of their ideological leaning, were visionary, charismatic and beloved by their peoples and they derived their legitimacy from the people.

However the unity between the leaders and the masses soon fizzled out in many countries as class differences began to emerge and consolidate. The progressives of the nationalist period soon became the conservatives in power, unwilling to set their own people free. Resistance to their tyranny developed.

Some countries like Tanzania under Nyerere managed to retain popular legitimacy largely due to the personal discipline, humane and humble leadership of the Mwalimu.

He concluded by observing that leaders do not emerge from the heavens but need to be developed organically from among the various social forces in any society: political parties, mass movements, factories, industries, workshops, production sites, farms, villages, etc.

The final speaker was Mamdani. He lived up to his well-deserved reputation as one of the most engaging intellectuals of this continent. As usual he turned the topic upside down, preferring not to focus on individual leaders per se but first the structural basis of the relationship of power, and secondly the kinds of individual leaders they produce.

In the past few years it has become very difficult (or maybe impossible) to discuss anything with Mamdani without coming back to ‘Citizenship and Subject’, his seminal book that still remains very thought provoking. It is still provoking Mamdani himself.

He began by postulating that, in general, countries that have gone through colonialism are susceptible to group violence especially civil war. A cursory look at the history of India, the USA and Africa will confirm the point. Mamdani thinks this is largely because of the struggle for the expansion of the rights of citizens who live in these colonial states. They are about citizenship since citizenship defines who belongs, who has a right to belong, who is to include and who is to be excluded.

Colonialism distorted peoples’ ways of life and imposed new identities, regimented those that were previously converging and in many cases offered different sets of rights to different peoples in the same political community. At independence the leaders did not inherit a country with one citizenship and one people but a myriad of political communities in one state with different grades of rights enforced through colonially constructed customs and traditions, natives and subjects. What the colonialists used to maintain their power was soon adapted and adopted by the new elites with devastating consequences.

He contrasted Nigeria and Tanzania. While Nigeria carries on with the colonial divisions albeit through new forms of tribalisation (state of origin instead of tribe, federal character instead of ethnic character), Tanzania completely changed the colonial basis of citizenship and succeeded in creating a nation which Nigeria has not been able to do in spite of all the riches.

While identifying the colonial roots of the problems Mamdani was clear that the responsibility for changing them and righting these wrongs are ours, not anybody else’s.

On the role of individuals, he posed a number of questions: How do we find a saint in politics? Why should we be looking up to those in power to help us make them accountable to us?

They are rhetorical questions for which he provided his own answers. It is not the leaders who will voluntarily render themselves accountable. Rather, we have to mobilize socially and politically throughout society not to accept lack of accountability in our public and private lives. We must struggle to broaden the political space for the fullest participation of all members of our political communities without discrimination. We also have to make politics about the social questions that affect the majority of our peoples rather than the political ambitions of the individual elite.

It was a very good forum and a worthy testimony to Issa Shivji as one of the most important of our intellectual leaders. The turn out was great and quite refreshing to find so many young people in attendance.

But I am always left frustrated whenever there is a discussion about leadership in Africa. The comments, questions and answers session of this panel discussion had all the elements that frustrate me.

One, the discussion of leadership is often too narrow and limited to politicians. We do not include ourselves and our role or inaction and how this impacts on the socio-economic and political lives of our peoples. Invariably we blame others and are content to ignore our own culpability. These leaders did not emerge from space; they grew from amongst us and are kept in power in part by our collaboration or indifference.

Two, Mamdani asked why we want saints in politics. The same question has to be asked about our intellectuals. Why do we expect them to be prophets or messiahs? They are part and parcel of our society, with their contradictions, and they have to make choices to be part of the solution or part of the problem.

Three, we need to look beyond our political class and politicians for the failures of leadership on this continent. Are our universities better run? Are our NGOS better run? Are we running our homes democratically? How many NGOs, including the human rights ones that make so much noise about political leaders and state abuse, can claim that they practice what they preach?

The dilemma of democracy is not just about the leaders. It is about us as a whole and about creating a democratic culture that tolerates difference, manages diversity and respects the right of everyone of us whether as children and parents, old and young, women and men, bosses and workers.

• Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Rwanda and Burundi were recently admitted as full members of the East Africa Community. It is both historic and timely. We criticize our leaders a lot, and most of the time justifiably. However, when they do good things we should also have the integrity to say well done.

It is historic in beginning to right some of the injuries inflicted on Africa that turned us into Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone and all the phony phones in spite of the fact that majority of our peoples do not have access to any phone! And if we are to be phonic, why should it not be Africaphone?

Whenever Pan Africanists talk about colonialism critics always say we are too focused on the past, escapist and blaming colonialism when, in their view, colonialism ‘finished’ long time ago. My retort has always been: How I wish! The impact of colonialism is so pronounced in our lives that even our physical geography is determined by this shameful past. For instance, go to any of the fancy hotels on the continent and ask for the breakfast menu. The option you will be given in many places is ‘continental breakfast’ but the continent will not be referring to the African continent. If you ask for African meals (Nigerian hotels being exceptions in terms of always having African foods) many of them will tell you that they needed ‘24 or 48 hours’ notice yet they can offer you all kinds of so called ‘international’ cuisine. In ‘Francophone’ countries, choices of cheeses and wines from particular regions of France are available on demand!

Leave the foods and let us look at traveling on the continent. If you travel from Kampala to Kigali by road and it is raining in Mbarara, it is likely that it will rain all the way to Kabale and from there to Kigali. Similarly the physical geography, topography, the lush greenery, hills, valleys, all remain the same, only increasing in density as you move on. Then you reach Kabale, the last major city on the Uganda side, about 20 kilometers from where you come to the border post, Gatuna (to Ugandans) or Katuna (to the Rwandese).

Nothing has changed in the geography, the looks of the people and even the languages they speak are mutually intelligible. You will see the peasants, petty traders, carrying their wares through panya panya roads parallel to the formal border roads, while those of us with passports are waiting to cross over on either side in our vehicles. These peasants just carry on as good Pan Africanists ignoring the tarred road and officials.

After you clear border bureaucracy, your first challenge will be to change from driving on the left (as in Britain) to the right (as in France). Before you recover from the driving change you also have to adjust your watch by one hour! I am not a geographer but I am not persuaded that between Kabale and Kigali or Kampala there is an hour time difference, exactly the same time difference between Paris and London! I think this has more to do with history than geography, and that history is colonialism. Those who claim colonialism ended have definitely been quick to forget. However there is a part of the criticism that I do accept. The responsibility for keeping these mental and physical borders rests with Africans and our leaders. It does not excuse you and I, because these leaders came from among us and we are the ones who through our action, inaction or indifference keep them in power.

They enjoyed keeping us divided so that they can remain big fishes in the tiny ponds bequeathed to them by colonialism. They talk regional integration but engage in national disintegration politics. They talk Pan Africanism but preside over sectarian political systems of ‘tribalism, ‘clannish’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘regionalism’, ‘religiosity’ and other kinds of divisive politics. Since they could not hold the country together it became impossible to aspire to regional integration or Pan African unity.

The Cold War also gave some of our leaders the false confidence that they could survive as client states of the West or the East without bothering about their neighbours.

Hence the first East Africa community collapsed under the twin pressures of internal political disagreements between state elites and their external alliances. But the peoples of the region continued cooperating irrespective of what happened in the state lodges. The governments are now listening to the people and reconciling themselves to reality.

In the past few years Africa has returned to the agenda of regional integration and Pan Africanism because globalization is making most of the states irrelevant. Also with the end of the Cold War many of our states and leaders ceased to be of strategic importance and lost their opportunistic levers of playing the West against the East.

The larger point is the fact that in spite of the many challenges, our democratic struggles are succeeding. Most of the leaders are not able to rule in the old ways again. The quality of leadership is improving across this continent.

In addition to the Cold War, the old colonial rivalry especially between the British and their French cousins endured for a long time in Africa and militated against regional cooperation, integration and Pan-Africanism.

Two regions of Africa - East Africa and West Africa - suffered most the consequences of this European tribalism. As the European Union became a reality the Francophone countries suddenly became aware that they were in Africa after all because France could not take them into the Euro Zone.

What makes Rwanda and Burundi, Central Africa? Geograhically and historically if they are central to anything it is East Africa. However because the French had to distinguish their looted territories from those of their British cousins, the geographic misnomer came about. This misnomer groups Cameroon, which is in West Africa, with Rwanda, the real Central Africa, the two Congos and Gabon as Central Africa!

By formally admitting Rwanda and Burundi into the East Africa Community the political leaders are finally reconciling history with geography and snatching victory from the jaws of colonial defeat.

It is a sign of a region slowly coming to terms with itself. The biggest contribution of the two countries to the region is their peoples as workers and producers. The Banyarwanda are easily the largest ethnic group in the region. They live in their millions in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and DRC. But historically they have been badly treated in their own countries and treated as either refugees or long-term migrants with no permanent rights as citizens no matter how many generations they may have lived there. Genocide and irresponsible leadership drove many away from their homes, and xenophobia prevents them from becoming full citizens in the countries of their refuge.

Xenophobia is so strong in the region that in Uganda two popular ways of discounting the claims of your political opponent is to call them ‘Banyarwanda’ (meaning Tutsi) or Nubian (meaning Sudanese).

The expanded East Africa now provides opportunity for regional citizenship and with it the right of every citizen of the region to live, settle, work in any part of the region. With progress towards a political federation this will include the right to vote and be voted for.

For Africa as a whole we want our peoples to have the right to move, settle, work, and live without visas or passports from Cape Town to Cairo. As steady progress is being made at regional level it makes this Pan African dimension inevitable. West Africans have been free to move across their region for two decades now, and this has not led to everyone moving to Nigeria. The peoples of the Old East Africa have been free to move around and adding Rwanda and Burundi to the region does not mean that all the people will move to Kenya or Tanzania or Uganda. It just means that they are free to do so if they wish without any security or police always harassing them as ‘foreigners’.

Similarly, other East Africans could go to Kigali or Bujumbura as and when they please.

South Africa and Southern Africa need to learn from these two experiences to assure them that freedom of movement does not mean that everyone wants to come to Joburg. The majority of Africans live and would like to remain in their villages in peace, security and prosperity. Those who need to move will do so one way or the other. We need to stop criminalizing them as ‘smugglers’, ‘aliens’, or ‘illegal immigrants’. Most of them are Pan-Africanist entrepreneurs delivering goods and services to our peoples, as and when needed in the true spirit of ‘Africa sans Frontiers’ or ‘Africa without borders’.

• Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org