There were never good old days in Africa and there are none now

Let me start with a disclaimer: I am no Afro-pessimist. I do not for one moment believe that nothing good can come from Africa.

Afro-pessimism is merely a convenient label to describe anyone who is not convinced that Africa had a glorious past that was despoiled by the marauding wazungu intent on loot and plunder.

Judging by how we conduct our public affairs today, I do not buy that notion. I also do not believe that we, as a race, are deficient in intelligence, or that we were destined to become hewers of wood.

On the other hand, our only game these days seems to be the good old cop-out in which everyone else is to blame except our own selves for our predicament as a race and as a continent.

The “good old days” were nothing like that; we were a warring lot, raiding our neighbours for cattle or for women to replenish our numbers so that the cycle of tribal and clan violence could continue unabated. Our life expectancy was dismal, the only bright spot being that we ate healthy and therefore did not readily succumb to lifestyle diseases.

During my childhood, half of my classmates were riddled with jiggers. Many were being eaten alive by these pests and a few have not recovered to date, the proof being that they still walk with peculiar gaits. There were no shoes to be worn then, and indeed, even some teachers could not afford decent foot-wear. There was very little clean running water unless you were lucky enough to live close to a spring. I therefore fail to see what was so good about the good old days except that our forebears were blissfully ignorant and not burdened by information overload.

In time, these things began to change. The oppression wrought by the civilising altruists did not leave us unscathed, and we now seem to believe that we have to be whipped into line for our own good. Luckily, there is a limit to which coercive measures can, on their own, work.

The human spirit is quite resilient, but it is not meant to be under oppression forever. White rule, our favourite bogeyman, ended only because resistance became inevitable, and the price of countering it too high.

But some incurable optimists still argue that, we Africans have acquitted ourselves reasonably well in some areas. The only difficulty is in identifying those areas. Why are we still so poor more than half a century after independence? Why have we made corruption our way of life? Why are we still so insecure and vulnerable? Why can we still not rule ourselves?

These are not idle questions. The kind of cacophony that goes for politics in this continent is way too shrill, deafening, and completely meaningless. We need to get our groove back.

Let us look at a few other details. Insurrection, coup attempts, and high-profile corruption scandals have become the order of the day. Two of the heretofore most stable countries in Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, have been beset by the predations of ragtag militias and terror groups targeting innocent folks to the extent that their leaders are unable to set the agenda for the future.

The other country which should be showing us the real value of democracy, South Africa, has allowed its frustrated rabble to set upon fellow African immigrants and slaughter them, while to our north, Egypt, the one country that the rest of Africa looked up to, has been in turmoil for too long. Libya, which used to be a relatively stable dictatorship during Muammar Gaddafi’s rule, is now a hell-hole.

Elsewhere, despots who have failed their people in every way are tampering with their countries’ constitutions in order to hang on to power. Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunziza is a case in point. He seems to be intent on plunging his country back into the kind of civil war that nearly destroyed it a few decades ago, but he does not seem to care as long as he retains power.

Is it any wonder that so few retired African leaders have, in the past 10 years, been honoured and rewarded by philanthropic organisations like the Mo Ibrahim Foundation?

Is good governance a foreign concept to us?

[email protected]