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Most African Heads of State are afraid of political alternation because of the oppressive situations they themselves put in place. They are no longer sure how to extract justice from their own follies and dread becoming its victims.

By Christopher Fon Achobang*
Initially Published: Southern Cameroons Forum

 

At Barack Obama’s inaugural on 20 January 2009 as President of the United States of America, he sent a clear warning to the oppressors of the world that their end had come. Most Africans started jubilating, that perhaps their time had come when one ‘wretched of the earth’ had emerged to liberate all the oppressed. This message of liberation was crystallized in Accra Ghana, six months after, when Obama called on the young people of Africa to take over their destiny.

Obama’s call came at a ripe moment in Africa’s quest for liberation from its ‘sit-tight’ presidents or life presidents. In fact, Obama arrived Africa when Africa was still mourning one of its longest serving presidents, Omar Bongo Odimba. Africa was at a point of resigning itself to its fate that it was God himself who had placed such leaders at the helm of power in their countries, when God decided to free Gabon.

It has been a full 45 years since Paulo Freire started his education to end the ‘culture of silence’, crowned by his seminal work titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Paulo Freire was born and experienced the great economic recession of 1929, concluding that man’s state of mind was probably responsible for his predicament. The peasants were kept illiterate so as to oppress them in ways unbeknown to them.

Today, so many years after independence, Africa prides itself with a bourgeoning intelligentsia, distilling knowledge in Western universities, from the USA through Canada to France. The African cannot be simplistically compared to the peasant of the 1950s. Today’s African is an intricate being, capable of pondering on his freedom and predicament.

Africans in all facets desire to be free and to be human. Unfortunately, in Africa’s quest for freedom and humanity, he adopts an attitude of adhesion to the oppressor. Feeling so unsecured, the African thinks that the powerful with his ill-gotten wealth is a source of security. In the process of understanding and fraternizing with the oppressor, the oppressed starts identifying with him and learning his antics to hold on to power. They grab the wealth of the people and reduce them to the wretched of the earth. The African oppressor seizes the wealth of the people and controls the minds of the less critical.

Every once in a while an African sub-oppressor emerges with messages to liberate its people. They start preaching things like rigour and moralization, and eventually end up being the most corrupt and lethargic of regimes. Beyond their political platitudes, there is no corresponding will to take the people out of oppression and misery.

Oppressors start behaving as if without them; the fate of their collaborators is sealed. Such collaborators, even without prompting from the oppressors, go out to campaign for them to be at the helm forever as life-presidents. We may recall how far my namesake the other Christopher, Nsahlai went to get the life-presidency for his friend in Jakiri. He slapped quite a few of his subjects and ensured that life-presidency, but unfortunately collapsed and died before the imagined fruits of such a political dispensation became ripe. We have witnessed the same political gerrymandering in Zaire, Zimbabwe, Cameroon and today Niger. Most African Heads of State are afraid of political alternation because of the oppressive situations they themselves put in place. They are no longer sure how to extract justice from their own follies and dread becoming its victims.

Obama’s call from Accra is welcomed as Ghana is seen as the beginning of African conscience. Independence came to Africa through Ghana, and when Kwameh Nkrumah thought that he had to work only for his Egyptian mistress, the peasants rebelled and overthrew him. From then on Ghana has yanked itself free from the yoke of the oppressor by progressive coup d’états. When Flight Captain Jerry Rawlings seized power, Ghana was about the most corrupt and poorest country in Africa. Thanks to the vision and fist of strongman Jerry Rawlings, he swung Ghana around to being a prosperous and progressive democracy.

The United States of America itself, just like the French Republic, were not born at corrupt and fraudulent ballot boxes. Democratic as they are today, America and France are both products of radical bloody change. And as George Hegel (1967) puts it, ‘It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;… the individual who has not staked his life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” There is no having omelets without breaking eggs.

African youths, according to Obama, must be ready to break eggs to have a savoury African omelet. The messages from western capitals can be confusing at times as they rally to condemn coup d’états. It will seem, the condemnation of those who un-sit sit-tight presidents falls within the context of some questionable international constitutional doctrine. Those who are condemned are embraced after a few months in power as the best things to happen to their countries, until they themselves start oppressing their people.

From Accra, Obama called on young Africans to metamorphose into Jerry Rawlings. They should free their countries from the oppressors in the sheaths of Paul Biya, Robert Mugabe, Ahmadou Tandja, Idriss Derby, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, and the new Ali Bongo who will want to outlive Africa. As Marx pointed out, ‘there is no historical reality which is not human. There is no history without men, and no history for men; there is only history of men, made by men and in turn making them.’ Africans must join in making their history and not resign to history. Obama will not make our history, we will make it and be judged by it.

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*Ph.D Candidate (Applied Linguistics), Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, University of Buea
P.O. Box 63 Buea

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