Ademola Araoye

Ademola Araoye

The wounds inflicted on the people of Africa by the founding fathers scheming to permanently appropriate the newly won freedoms of the people entrapped in the many puny colonially inspired state-enclaves have sadly proven to be enduring. The desperate pursuit of this agenda that ran against the spirit of the incipient false consciousness of nationhood was in itself a counter historic enterprise. More significantly, the advancement of the agenda of personal aggrandizement of the wounding fathers deviated from the intended ultimate continental pan African statehood. Yet, absolutely nothing, including any form of human resistance or reminders to the true aims of the struggle for emancipation from colonial silos, was tolerated by the autocratic self-proclaimed fathers of the nation. Against this background, the One-Party state metamorphosed into the One-Man state. The actualization of the personal objective necessitated that the god-father cultivate a very narrow contractual governing circle that was often entrenched within his familial base and the extended ethnic group, a la Eyadema, Bongo, Boigny and Mobutu.  The god father apportioned the perks and privileges in an informal political settlement that reflected the mood of his mercurial benevolence of the ruiner-ruler at each point in time. That is notwithstanding dignified titles attributed to the wounding fathers in national narratives formulated by paid palace intellectuals and griots to cement their false reputations in the national memory and archives. The toxic legacy of fixations and stagnation with foundations laid by the founding pretentious renegades since the 1960s have remained immovable norms and protocols of successive regimes now under the watch of the scions of the old brigands. The worst assurance, among many others, for the fossilization of the division of African people was entrenched in paragraph 4 under Article III under General Principles that called for “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of each state and for its inalienable right to independent existence.” By that act, and coupled with the creation of the disuniting Organization of African Unity rather than the envisioned continental republic the wounding fathers had secured life-long control of the piece of their respective estates. Accordingly, irrespective of the evolution and transformation in situational context of the global system or the exigencies of the African peoples, Africa would remain carved out for wounding fathers and violent godfathers. The scions of the wounding fathers have not deviated from the entrenched ways of their unworthy fathers. The practice of authentic democracy had no room to thrive. In that setting, even the procedural caricatures that go for democracy in Africa was doomed. Accordingly, it has not mattered to Africa that many forces, both at the national level and in systemic level, interacting in an uncertain direction are currently at play in the global system. The implications of these systemic stresses are seemingly lost on the continent. There is however the glow of revolutionary hope along the margins.

The decomposition of the state across advanced democracies has rendered internal politics even more complicated as the world around has been transformed through the evolution of jousting thoughts, contra-pulling sensibilities, and contenting material cultures with globalizing impact impelled by technological breakthroughs in the Third Millennium. In the new setting, with a click of a button, the entirety of the collapsed universe is impacted by the minutest movement in the most obscure corner of the globe. In the challenging context of the state within the larger structural turbulence of the global system of which the interaction of decomposing states have decisive impact, Rana Dasgupta has captured the complexity of the evolving situation comprehensively. Through the lenses of reputable European journals, Dasgupta observes that “politics in the UK shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit while France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. Further, in neighboring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.

Meanwhile, the stresses on the very idea of democracy as the incontrovertible and exemplary norm of social organization of societies across the world has been exacerbated to almost a breaking point. The strains reflect the impact of open repudiation of all the underpinnings, tenets and protocols of democracy especially in the United States of America. In its stead has been a regression to the rhetoric and political tactics of a far right National Socialist ideology associated with totalitarian and authoritarian principles. These avow rabid nationalism, a hierarchy of a human race and positively, the superiority of the white race above all as national policy. The concept of contrived anarchy distils the foundational pivots of the belief-system of President Trump in the United States.  These developments were however not unforeseen. Kevin Phillips had in his book American Theocracy warned against “the perils of a foolish combination of global overreach, militant religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning debt as perilous for the United States.” Phillips had also argued “that it is exactly this nexus of ills that had come to define America’s identity at the start of the new century. This entrenched booby traps for democracy set the stage two decades later for the rise of a President Donald Trump who in 2024 deftly milked the frustrations of the population impacted by the identified perilous nexus to attain his political objectives. Paradoxically, those objectives are inconsistent with the very core values of the United States. In Africa, dubious and ever opportunistic and reputably unserious messengers have caught on the train to speciously talk of the unsuitability of democracy in Africa. They howl as if the continent, with very few notable exceptions, ever tried democracy as a form of managing social aggregates.

Otherwise, the complexities have deepened. With the steep degradation of the practice of authentic democracy in the United States of America in the sharp direction of authoritarianism, the so-called free world that is encapsulated in the concept of an ideo-philosophically homogenous West had lost its historic leadership.

Continued in Part 2.

*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).