Maravi

Rupiah: a stubborn and deaf President

Rupiah: a stubborn and deaf President
By The Post
Thu 28 Oct. 2010, 04:00 CAT

It is shocking that Rupiah Banda can go to Malawi and say that African leaders must be stubborn and not waste time listening to critics and doing what they wish and that the best way to foster development was to pay a deaf ear to critics.

It is said that for one to be a leader, one must, among other things, be a good listener. Surely, one who advocates the turning of a deaf ear to critics cannot be a good listener and consequently, a good leader. The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people. Nelson Mandela once said, “When leaders have the honesty to criticise their own mistakes and their own organisation, then they can criticise others.”

Democracies make several assumptions about human nature. One is that, given the chance, people are generally capable of governing themselves in a manner that is fair and free. Another is that any society comprises a great diversity of interests and individuals who deserve to have their voices heard and their views respected. As a result, one thing is true of all healthy democracies: they are noisy.

The voices of democracy include those of the government, its political supporters and opposition, of course. But they are joined by the voices of the labour unions, organised interest groups, community associations, the news media, scholars and critics, religious leaders and writers, small businesses and large corporations, churches and schools.

All these groups are free to raise their voices and participate in the democratic political process. In this way, democratic politics acts as a filer through which the vocal demands of a diverse populace pass on the way to becoming public policy. As former United States president Jimmy Carter once said, “The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself – always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”

As we have stated before, one of the biggest hurdles to African progress, apart from the over-quoted colonial legacy and international capitalist conspiracy, is that Africans are over-governed by petty-minded dictators. In this case, African governments are not content with just running the affairs of the state and providing their people with the necessities of life, but would also run the very lives and control the thinking of the citizens they govern. And yet, ironically, this was the cornerstone of colonial oppression: to smash any deviant thinking of the natives by whip, gun or shackle. All critics inside or outside the ruling party or government are crushed! To agree with everything the leaders say is divine, to disagree is treason. The citizen must belong to them or be condemned. In fact, no regard is ever had for the patriotism of critics, unless they happen to die.

This is so - and as we can see from Rupiah’s thinking - because ruling African parties consider themselves as the government and government as the state. The ruling party, government and their leadership become as sacred as the state. Any denigration of these institutions and their leaders is tantamount to treason. Very few African leaders, however educated or intelligent they may appear, can differentiate between a critic and a traitor. Where there is a critic, they see a traitor. In popular philosophy they say, “That is the way of Africa”. That is, tyrannical rulers and uncritical people. Criticism per se is non-existent. Anything else is destructive. Opposition is an expression of hate, not pure disagreement.

Again, the people will say, “This is Africa”, meaning to say that we are incapable of being criticised without feeling rancoured about it. In fact, all the time the impression given is that to criticise is to condemn or curse in the biblical fashion. And yet, strangely, we should know better since our whole independence struggle arose out of critical awareness of the evils of colonialism and imperialism. Of course, we have not forgotten those evils and never will. Hence, whenever an opposition emerges, the first instinct of African leaders is to smear it with the filth of colonialism and imperialism - however greedy the leaders themselves may be. Every domestic crisis, however self-created, will eventually be blamed on the foreigners and the enemy within - the critics.

It is quite true that the acceptance of criticism implies the highest respect for human ideal, and that its denial suggests a conscious or an unconscious lack of humanity on our part.

Yet history tells us that the greatest epochs in mankind’s weary journey are characterised, not by subjugation of the intellect nor downgrading of thinkers and critics. On the contrary, the Greeks gave us Herodotus, the historian, Hippocrates the doctor and Homer, the poet. Go to Rome, and you will see what democracy produced in the arts and sciences. Move to more recent times and see the Renaissance or the French Revolution. Ironically, we take the greatest pleasure in admiring these eras and forget that the one real challenge they offer us perpetually is the development of sound minds, not the destruction of reason and intellect for the mistaken fear of losing power.

What is distinctly lacking among our leaders is a culture of tolerance and humility which places the humanity of others before self and accepts that all citizens have a right to participate in the shaping of their destiny directly without fear of reprisal.

The unending conflicts that we see on our continent are over one thing - power: power to allocate resources to oneself, cronies and tribesmen; power to crush one’s critics; and power to perpetuate oneself in office.

The basic causes of these conflicts have been the politics of exclusion. “Government”, as it is usually conceptualised, does not exist in many African countries. What exists is a vampire state - a government hijacked by a platoon of crooks, bandits and scoundrels, who use the machinery of the state to enrich themselves, their cronies and kinsmen and exclude everyone else. The richest people in Africa are generally the heads of state and their cohorts of ministers. The chief bandit is often the head of state himself. Groups which are excluded from the gravy train eventually rebel. They may seek to remove the ruling vampire elites by force; break away or secede; or vote with their feet to become refugees elsewhere. It should be obvious that the solution to all these senseless conflicts is the politics of inclusion.

Across our continent, people have been subjected to the most heinous forms of brutality and oppression by their own leaders. Political tyranny reigns supreme on a continent that has more autocrats than any other region. The post-colonial story of Africa is not pretty; it is both sad and maddening. Sad because it is a continent plagued with poverty, never-ending crises, and human suffering. The scale of human misery and suffering is horrendous. This was not what its people asked for at independence from colonial rule. It is a truculently painful tale of betrayal of the freedom they fought so hard for.

In ruining their continent, African leaders had help, not only from the West but also from Africa’s own intellectuals. Another painful aspect of Africa’s sad post-colonial story is that, many of Africa’s highly educated intellectuals, who should have known better, sold off their conscience, integrity and principles to serve as errand boys of brutal despots with half their intelligence. The African story is also maddening because there is no earthly reason why a continent, rich in mineral resources should be in such dire straits. The mineral wealth of Africa has not been utilised to lift its people out of grinding poverty. The political leadership in much of Africa is a despicable disgrace to the continent. The exceptions have been trenchantly few.
The crisis in leadership remains a major obstacle to poverty reduction and has many manifestations. It is characterised, among others, by the “big man” syndrome, subordination of national interests to personal aggrandizement, super-inflated egos, misplaced priorities, poor judgment, reluctance to take responsibility for personal failures, and total lack of vision and understanding of even such basic and elementary concepts as “democracy”, “fairness”, “rule of law”, “accountability”, and “freedom” - among other deficiencies. In some instances, the leadership is given to vituperative utterances, outright buffoonery, stubborn refusal to learn from their own past mistakes, and complete absence of cognitive pragmatism.

Believing their countries to belong to them and them only, they think they should be the only ones to speak and be listened to and to set the national agenda and cling to power at all costs. Their promises are more worthless than Al Capone’s.

It has been trendy - and indeed politically correct - to blame Africa’s woes on external factors: western colonialism, slavery, imperialism, hostile and unjust international economic system, inadequate foreign aid, exploitation by greedy multinational corporations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. For more than three decades, this blame game was a favourite sport of corrupt and incompetent African despots to conceal their own failures.

This reminds us how former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan at a press conference in London in April 2000 lambasted African leaders who have subverted democracy and lined their pockets with public funds, although he stopped short of naming names.

While external factors have played a role, far greater emphasis should be placed on internal factors - bad leadership, corruption, senseless conflicts, brutal repression and exploitation of our people. But even getting this view across has been an uphill battle. Those who try to point out the foolish policies of African leaders are routinely denounced, vilified, pilloried and attacked in all sorts of ways. These denunciations may be politically expedient, but they defy common sense. The average intelligent person looks both ways before crossing a street, or risks being hit by an automobile. Africa is in bandages because Africa’s leaders and their allies look only one way - at the external factors. And those who don’t listen to criticism are incapable of learning. And those who are incapable of learning are incapable of correcting their mistakes and get stuck in the wrong ways. This is where the likes of Rupiah are. It is difficult to understand how a serious political leader can go to another country and try to sell a policy of not listening, of turning a deaf ear to what other citizens are saying. How can one be democratic if they are not able to listen to the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anxieties of their fellow citizens, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way? This is not the way to run a democracy. Even wise emperors in absolute monarchs listen to what their subjects are saying. Rupiah seems to be worse than an emperor.

Labels: LEADERSHIP, RUPIAH BANDA

posted by MrK @ 7:05 PM