Continue from last week

 

Fr. Anthony AKINWALE OP

 

I do not know if Obama had the two men—Nkrumah and Rawlings—in mind when he uttered those words.  What I know is that, in his audience as he addressed the Ghanaian parliament were men and women conversant with the history of Ghana. In that history, Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry Rawlings stood out as “strongmen”, to use Obama’s words.  And, to that extent, Obama’s address to the Ghanaian parliament sounded like an allusion to Nkrumah and Rawlings.  Nkrumah fought for the independence of Ghana, became her first Prime Minister, and was a strong leader with a vision.  But Nkrumah the strong man stifled opposition, turning Ghana, not into a one-party state, but into a one-man state—which is what autocracy is.  Autocracy is the rule of one man who has succeeded in convincing or intimidating the people into believing that he has undergone an apotheosis.  

 

 Autocracy represses the democratic spirit that releases developmental energy in peoples.  With their developmental energy released, their land becomes a habitation of persons of actualized potentials.  One major factor that has weakened, and continues to weaken democracy in Africa, contributing to the under-development of the continent, is that Africans have had and still have too many autocratic rulers.   Such autocratic rulers might have acted and might be acting with good intentions.  But autocracy manifests itself in paternalism, a totalitarian and tyrannical paternalism that insists that all must think like the leader who is presumed to be an unquestionable and infallible strategist simply because he is the leader.  Let me remind my audience that this Ghanaian narrative is only an illustration of what is in fact a continental narrative.

         

Ghana, not unlike many African countries, including Nigeria, has had a history of being on the receiving end of her autocratic rulers in military and civilian dresses.  In Ghana, after Nkrumah, not immediately though, was Jerry John Rawlings who presented himself as an anti-corruption crusader.  At his first coming, he entered the political landscape of Ghana through a coup d’état.  He overthrew a military government led by General Frederick Akuffo, who, in a palace coup, had earlier overthrown General Ignatius Acheampong.

         

At the end of his first coming, Rawlings organized elections won by Hilla Liman who took over from Rawlings on September 24, 1979, a week before President Shehu Shagari took over from General Olusegun Obasanjo in Nigeria.  President Hilla Limann’s government was like a government on probation with Rawlings as probation officer.  For, shortly after handing over to Limann, on December 31, 1981, Rawlings staged a second comeback.  He staged another military coup that truncated the Limann administration.  His second coming was longer than his first coming.  By the time he organized elections to return the country to democratic rule, not only was he presidential candidate, he had no strong opponent.  His reign had been so repressive that no strong opponent could have emerged.  So, Rawlings was elected civilian president.

         

Like Nkrumah, who governed Ghana with iron fists, Rawlings was brutal in dealing with dissenting opinions. It was dangerous to disagree with both men.  They both imposed their idea of governance on the people.  Many young Africans of today only read about them.  Many see them as heroes.  Nkrumah and Rawlings represent two of the many instances of apotheosis of the African strongman leader.  But I shall focus more on Rawlings.

 

 

Brutality or Illegitimate use of a Legitimate Institution

 

It was quite significant that Jerry Rawlings died shortly after the #EndSars protests in Nigeria.  The #EndSars protests represented a repudiation of police and military brutality in Nigeria.  But the problem was neither SARS nor the Nigeria Police.  The problem was and still is, proximately, the relationship between the government and the citizen, and, ultimately, the constitution.  

 

The purpose of government is to protect the rights of the citizen.  The purpose of the constitution is to establish institutions which ought to be used as instruments to protect the citizen.  But here, there is a double jeopardy: the 1999 constitution is weak, and this weak constitution has established weak institutions incapable of protecting the citizen from the rule of the strong man. 

That is why successive governments in Nigeria have been accused of being at the vanguard of human rights violation in Nigeria.  We still carry on as if we were under military rule.  If government is at the vanguard of human rights violation, then the police, more specifically, SARS, will violate the rights of Nigerians.  And, we must add, it is not just the police.  Nigerians are at the mercy of government and its officials at various levels and in every institution of government, and Nigerians are at the mercy of one another.

 

Police officers are agents of the state.  What is at stake is the relationship between the government and the citizen? What kind of state do we have?  What kind of state has the 1999 constitution created in Nigeria? Is it a friendly state?  Is it a state that respects the citizen?

 “The police is your friend.”  So says a slogan.  But whoever believes that slogan will believe anything.  It is one of the most cynical lies ever told to Nigerians.  The Nigerian driving through police checkpoints knows that the police is not his friend because the state, whose agent the police is, is not his friend.  If you have an unfriendly government then you will have unfriendly government agencies.   If you have an unfriendly state you will have an unfriendly police.

Police brutality in Nigeria is symptom of impunity by government.  In a country where impunity is paraded as governance, police brutality cannot be addressed by a presidential directive issued to the Inspector General of Police.  It is one of the many symptoms of our dysfunctional constitution.  We have ended up with a hostile state because we have a hostile constitution.  The 1999 constitution sets up Nigeria in such a way that government is more powerful than the citizen.  That is why the problem is not the police, not the judiciary, not the legislature, not the executive arm of government, but a weak constitution that has engendered weak institutions.

The urgent task before us is to re-envision our society, re-envision and rewrite our constitution, rediscover what it means to be a nation, re-envision the police.  Not to embark on this task is to continue to beat about the bush.  It is becoming increasingly clear that you cannot secure a country so vast and so populous as Nigeria with weak institutions controlled from Abuja.

The brutality of the police and the military illustrate a lamentable absence of institutions capable of protecting the citizen.  The military and the police are agencies of a strong-man state. Rawlings represented the ambiguity of military rule and its attendant brutality in Africa, and many instances can be sighted to buttress this assertion.

         

A first instance. Upon coming into power through a military coup on June 4, 1979, after an unsuccessful coup on May 15, 1979, an unsuccessful coup that earned him a death sentence, Rawlings and the military junta he headed lined up eight military officers, including Generals Kotei, Joy Amedume, Roger Felli, and Utuka, and three former military rulers of Ghana—Akwesi Afrifa, Ignatius Achaeampong and Frederick Akufo, and executed them by firing squad upon allegations of corruption.  This is not an attempt to say the men were innocent.  This is to express profound regret that these men were not given proper trial.  That can only happen where either there are no democratic institutions or democratic institutions have been weakened by rule of the strong man.  Rawlings later embarked on what he called a “house-cleaning exercise” involving the killings and abduction of over 300 Ghanaians. But many Ghanaians applauded their execution, believing such arbitrary shedding of blood would put an end to corruption.  His initials—JJ— became known as Junior Jesus.  But when things became hot, students of the University of Legon turned those initials into Junior Judas.

         

A second instance.  On a particular evening, during the second reign of Rawlings, three Supreme Court Justices, Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Sarkodie and Kwadjo Agyei Agyepong were abducted about the same time, only for their corpses to be found later.  Also killed secretly were military officers Major Sam Acquah and Major Dasana Nantogmah. Rawlings was never able to deny his role.  He was never held accountable.  When he was interviewed by the BBC on the episode, he was evasive.

         

A third instance.  The Editor of the Catholic newspaper in Ghana, then Father Charles Palmer-Buckle, now Archbishop of Cape Coast, was a target of Rawlings’ death squad.  Searching for him to kill him, the death squad found a religious brother of the Society of Divine Word who looked like him, and killed him.  For days, this brother’s whereabouts were unknown to the Church. By the time his corpse was found, it was in an advance state of decomposition.  He was buried before the Mass as his body could not be taken into the Church.  Let me say in passing that Rawlings was Catholic.

         

A fourth instance.  When Rawlings metamorphosed into a civilian President, he physically assaulted his Deputy during a cabinet meeting.  The poor Vice President reported the matter to the police.  But in Africa, leaders are above the law because Africa is under the rule of strong men, not under the rule of just laws.

 

 A fifth instance.  On June 8, 1998, when Sani Abacha died.  The BBC interviewed Rawlings.  During the interview, Rawlings wept and sobbed over the loss of “a good African leader”.  But Abacha visited untold brutality on Nigerians.

         

Rawlings’ economic policy of state-controlled economy, his imposition of price control in particular, turned out to be misguided and ruinous.  Seeing their catastrophic consequences, he who would not tolerate any opposition to this policy.  He later embraced a free market economy in 1992. But not until after he silenced all opposition to his erstwhile misguided economic policies. His imposition of unrealistic economic policies exemplifies the philosophy that says power is knowledge.  But that precisely is what has kept Africa down for centuries, right from pre-colonial years.

         

Despite his less than sterling human rights record, as could be seen in the gratuitous shedding of blood narrated above, he is spoken off in laudatory terms by his many supporters.  Indeed there have been times some Nigerians, out of frustration over corruption, expressed the wish for a “Rawlings solution”.  Corruption becomes an excuse for tyranny in a futile search for an illusory “benevolent dictator”.  But in Africa, we can and we must fight corruption through legal means, not by breaking the law, through institutions that are independent of the whims and caprices of strong men.

  

 Apart from Rawlings, another poster boy for “revolution” in Africa is Thomas Sankara, and his latest successor Ibrahim Traore.  As a young army officer, Captain Sankara and his friend Blaise Campaore overthrew the government of then Upper Volta and changed the name of the country to Burkina Faso.  Later on, in a tragic turn of their juvenile military adventure, Campaore would kill Sankara in a bloody palace coup.  But on this continent of deified rulers, so much myth has been built and peddled around Sankara, and even more sophisticated myth is disseminated in social media about his successor Ibrahim Traore.

 

 This is not to pass a judgment on Rawlings and other members of the clan of tyrants who have ruled and are still ruling in Africa.  This is to set the records straight. It is to submit that strong men and brutal dictators should not be presented as role models to young Africans.  They might have had the good intention of fighting corruption.  But good intention alone does not suffice.  We Africans must learn to hold our leaders accountable.  We must rise above our hunger and thirst for messiahs and learn to take responsibility for the common good.  Intelligent regulation of our common life must not be outsourced to messiahs.   It is in fact the case that the messiahs to which we love to outsource our land end up as strongmen with a sense of entitlement.

 

On the need for strong institutions and the competence of those who man them

 

Let us return to Obama’s speech before the Ghanaian parliament.  Repeatedly insisting on the need for good governance and strong institutions to facilitate the development of Africa, he went on to say:  

 

In the 21st century, capable, reliable and transparent institutions are the key to success — strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges ... an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives.  

 

And again: 

 

With strong institutions and a strong will, I know that Africans can live their dreams in Nairobi and Lagos, Kigali, Kinshasa, Harare, and right here in Accra.  

And so, to Ghanaians, and through them, to the rest of Africa, he spoke these words: 

We must first recognize the fundamental truth that you have given life to in Ghana: Development depends on good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That’s the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.  

It is not difficult to agree with President Obama that absence of such institutions is largely accountable for unaddressed and unmet developmental needs on this continent.  Such institutions exist to secure the rights that belong to the human person as a human person and as a citizen.  They secure the environment in which he or she can seek to fulfill legitimate aspirations and actualize potentials. “People everywhere should have the right to start a business or get an education without paying a bribe,” says Obama. 

The problem with the government of strong men is that it is predicated on the twin principle that power is knowledge and the strong man is omniscient.  Not only does he know it all, he monopolizes wisdom and patriotism.  We have seen that in recent and distant memory on the African continent.  Since he wields the biggest stick among those contesting for power, he stages a coup d’etat or rigs at elections, or stages a coup d’etat so as to become the major contender in an election he organizes.  He does not get into office with people’s votes, so he is not accountable to them.  He comes in by force and maintains his hold on power by force.  If he is not in government he sponsors some others to get into government and pay him tithes taken from public coffers.  

The strong man is nothing but a tyrant, a self-imposing benefactor, paternalistic and condescending in his style of leadership.  The strong man sees himself as above the law.  In fact, he breaks the law and gets away with it.  He has power over life and death, or so he believes, and distributes patronage by distributing appointments and contracts.  He builds or encourages the building of a personality cult around him.  He is, as Mobutu Sese Seko was called, “father of the nation”, “enlightened guide”.  The strong man brokers no divergent opinion.  He “settles” and stifles the opposition. And, for this reason, he ends up surrounding himself with sycophants and court jesters, with yes men and yes women who glorify his incompetence, eulogize his tyranny, canonize his corruption, and beg him to institute a process of tenure elongation. 

That Africa has had and continues to have many of such strong men is largely responsible for the sorry state of the continent today.  For Obama, Africans can no longer blame the colonial past for her problems.  “Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.”  

Now, while that statement is true, it is somewhat misleading.  In fact, a number of commentators have rightly observed that while that speech proposes to point the way forward for Africa, President Obama appears to have glossed over the role of America and other superpowers in installing and supporting corrupt, incompetent and bloodthirsty regimes, “strong men”, to use his own words, whose interests never coincided with the interests of the people.  How, for example, can one ever get over the romance between Mobutu Sese Seko, erstwhile doyen of corruption and despotism in Africa, once described by former President Reagan as “America’s best ally since the days of President Lyndon Johnson?” Whether the situation has changed in the Congo is a matter to be debated.  But history shows that in the 1960s, the decade in which many African states hoisted their flags in place of the colonizers’ flags, Africa indeed graduated from the reign of strong white men to the reign of strong black men some of whom were assisted in infamy by colonial powers during the Cold War

President Obama’s speech certainly has the potential to inspire and galvanize.  He said: 

I am particularly speaking to the young people all across Africa and right here in Ghana. In places like Ghana, young people make up over half of the population. And here is what you must know: The world will be what you make of it. You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease and end conflicts and make change from the bottom - up. You can do that. Yes you can ... because in this moment, history is on the move.

If this dream is to come true, indeed, we need strong institutions and not strong men.  Africa needs leaders who enable, not leaders who disable.  Yet, as intelligent and admirably inspiring as it is, there is something incomplete in this Obama recipe.  Strong institutions are necessary for development.  But they are, in themselves, insufficient.  They would be able to facilitate integral development if they would be imbued with deep spiritual and moral values.  Institutions without morality are dangerously inimical to the dignity of the human person. But the level of morality of institutions is a direct reflection of the level of morality and the depth of spirituality of the human beings who man these institutions.  

When President Obama spoke of strong institutions, he listed “strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges, an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society.”  But institutions are creations of human beings.  They are instruments in the hands of human beings.   That is why we must also be vigilant and prudent in our leadership selection process.  It is a matter of ensuring that we not only create strong institutions, we must also ensure that those who man them are strong in the sense of possessing requisite competence to man them. A morally depraved generation can neither put in place nor maintain good institutions.  The personal moral life of members of parliament, policemen and judges, journalists and directors in the private sector is of vital importance if institutions are to protect and promote the dignity and the rights of citizens. If the people who man our institutions are corrupt and incompetent such strong institutions enslave even more than strong men. It is therefore of utmost importance that those who man our institutions be men and women of intellectual, administrative and ethical competence.  If such men and women are to be formed and found, education at all levels must be given its premium in our country.