There are times when you just come short of screaming that we Africans are a stupid lot.
The peculiarity the African hit me particularly hard about two months ago, after an American firm published the results of an opinion poll.
So contradictory were the answers that you would think the questions had been deliberately framed to confuse and undermine the respondent.
In other words, even if the questions would have confused a European, a Mongolian or a gorilla, the respondents in this case happened to be Africans; so it was their type that would look inferior.
But there was no mischief like that. The questions were quite simple. What picture emerged?
A significant majority of those interviewed thought that Uganda was poorly governed. On health care, education, agriculture and justice, or in the effort against corruption, Mr Museveni’s NRM government was mostly below par.
Moreover, a majority thought that Uganda was going in the wrong direction, and that the 2016 general election would not be free and fair.
The army, more trusted than politicians and most other institutions, was virtually the only redeeming feature of the regime.
So the respondents had very good reasons for wanting President Museveni and his government to leave the stage. Instead, more than 60 per cent said they wanted him to stay on!
Of course, in a thoroughly corrupt society, even an opinion poll can be rigged. I am not saying that it was, but it can.
Also, under a semi-totalitarian dispensation, where Big Brother guards his job with pathological jealousy, many ordinary souls might avoid revealing to a stranger that they really wanted the big gentleman to go away. Their cowardice would distort the result.
However, without evidence to support such speculation, we are hit by the picture of natives who are completely at peace with themselves in the face of massive contradictions.
I can see only one mitigating argument. Maybe – just maybe – the citizens have been so hypnotised by the image (and NRM hype) of a fairly decent army, that at critical moments they will live with anything in an otherwise non-performing state as long as there is relative peace.
Needless to say, they do not recognise how, just under its skin, this same army is essentially a killing machine, which at the right time can be switched into that mode, and the Great Lakes region would be on fire again.
Let us go south-west. Burundi: little country; great instinct for self-destruction; our African again; a truly baffling primate.
The African tends to flee from common sense as if from a plague. President Pierre Nkurunziza has been playing constitutional hide and seek with his opponents, although the issue can be solved by common sense.
Nkurunziza pretends to think that his first term did not exist. It was a non-term just because he was elected to it by the legislature rather than by popular vote.
But didn’t he exercise executive power during that term?
That exercise of power is the crux of the matter. The principle of limiting presidential terms is directly related to the difficulties often experienced with rulers who have exercised executive power for too long.
Considering the history of horrendously bloody power contests in the region, Nkurunziza’s manoeuvre cannot be justified by the tired argument that he is “still popular in the rural areas”. All Africa’s dictators are “still popular in the rural areas”, in the repository of mass ignorance and slave mindsets.
You have to be reckless and foolhardy to do what Nkurunziza is doing. But perhaps he is encouraged by Uganda’s President Museveni’s luck, which has been good whenever he has chosen to trample the spirit of the Constitution and extended his stay in power.
And he might have got additional strength when he hears Rwanda’s Paul Kagame now being pushed to roll his old clarity on the subject into tongues.
But these are our rulers. If we do not exactly always choose them, we deserve them. And we should not blame the West if the Great Lakes region slides into more instability and surges into another wave of generalised violence.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator. altaccaone@gmail.com.
0 comments:
Post a Comment