Unless we hypocritically say, our youth are not suffering. Unless we say everything is okay while people live in an area, knowing that they could be bombed, kidnapped and killed overnight. Unless we say corruption, unemployment, insecurity, poverty, and resentment aren’t part of our problems. Mother Africa, has pitifully gone back to her post-colonial period, where guns and bullets in the hands of coup plotters were her answers to political and economic upheavals. Africa is gradually changing, with new waves of Coup d’états, outrage, and political turmoil.
In Guinea, Mamadou Doumbouya ousted Alpha Conde with no reservations. Nigeria, from the ashes of EndSars Campaign, are still impatiently waiting to bork Buhari from their Federal government. Ghana’s outrage, vicious insults, and revolutionary protests (FixtheCountry) have gotten to higher boiling point, for the first time since her fourth republic. Assimi Goita’s juggernauts have become a menace to the Mali Government. These conundrums have become liabilities to the Ecowas.
The riddles of anti-colonial fathers are being interpreted; political spiritless youth have now become revolutionary incarnates. Politics in Africa has taken different shape, by stampeding on international systems, certain individuals, mostly within the military class are directing the paths of the resented unemployed and poverty-prone people to their own political spree. Once again, with an uncertain political destination. This ambivalence, coupled with daily reporting of corruptions, and crippled democratic institutions would once again render Africa at the mercy of revolutionary thinkers. In Ghana, the thoughts of Kwame Nkrumah have been brought back to the center stage of their domestic politics.
The Chairman of the Ecowas, Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo, after receiving a new political hand wave from Doumbouya, went to Guinea having only French-speaking ability as his only negotiation element, his primary goal was to tell Doumbouya to restore the constitution. A set of rules having it wings plucked off, exhausted, drained, and stampeded by Conde. As if legitimacy and legality can be played like a puzzle game; like a student who had become superior to his teacher, Doumbouya sat on a sofa chair with alps moving down his feet, looking deep inside the eyes of the Ecowas diplomats to assure them, that he is out of their hands. A long-held resentment, with diligent scrutiny of how a country’s destiny can be grabbed by one man, to put hopes into sway, progress into a halt, and values into uncertainty. He was determined to test his core convictions, to poke every bit of conventional maxims to look forward to whether his opponents can be round into a zero-sum game of diplomacy. Doumbouya’s legacy has not only become fortress nemesis but will also serve as a political minotaur, occasionally to be pacified by some nations.
Diplomats, Kissinger wrote, “can still meet but they cannot persuade, for they have ceased to speak the same language”. Ecowas at this moment has no common grounds for diplomacy. The individual states within it structure have turned out to be prisoners of their own political blockades. The Post-colonial absurdities have haunted their political convictions, with leaders becoming puppets of neo-colonialism and the new China’s economic crusade. Different political maxims that alarm different concepts, culminating in different democratic government, leaves a dilemma to all who want to reason through their politics. [And] whenever there exists a power, Kissinger continued, “which considers the international order or the manner of legitimizing it oppressive, relations between it and other powers [countries] will be revolutionary. In such cases, he concluded, “it is not the adjustment of differences within a given system which will be at issue, but the system itself”. Mali toppled the system through the same fragile and tactically-bankrupt diplomacy.
There are no practically shared political and economic values; individual West African states struggle to interact even on basic political and economic principles. Sanctions are but merely a set of rules for dedicated participants in a system. International systems are meant for policymakers, not for unanimated intellectuals. The west African community must know their acceptable and unacceptable values, the limits of their political scope, and economic principles. Another set of revolutionary (in our case; Coup plotters and rebels) insurgence will rise when all these seem unachievable within nations having different catalogs of history.
The ecstasy to play on such a weak ground of politics can sometimes be associated with the 21st Zeus of politics call democracy. It is a political novelty, which feeds the spiritless nations with political divinity, it gives hope to the hopeless government and wakes the culturally and socially dead people from their political slumbers. For these reasons, democracy has now become the ticket for insane political orgy games, played within the emotions of innocent people who know nothing about politics. Democracy is not an organ; it has no predetermined structure for growth. It is rather a machine that needs fueling for immediate service. In the hands of politicians with no core convictions, democracy, and its institution become an outrage machine for uneducated individuals and a Christmas tree for partisan demagogues. In West Africa, primary institutions of democracy; legislature, executive, and judiciary mostly exist only by names and recognition. They are theoretically bankrupt, practically useless with no historical statutory.
The proof of these is what we are witnessing in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, Mali, and others. People are not only skeptical about these institutions, they are also sophisticated with their clandestine procedures and mechanisms which in their eyes, serve no purpose. In others words, the citizens can’t see and feel their ideal representations, therefore demanding change. These institutions have melted in their corruption pots for long, meanwhile more hopeless situations are added with an insane borrowing from foreign countries. Nana Addo seems to have his country Ghana, to be compromised and mortgaged as his depth to GDP stands 78.4%. Poor accountability with no transparency, and unequal justice fuming more anger and rage to the corridors of the unemployed. Such happenings propel the actions of the revolutionaries to be intensified.
But then, looking deep inside Africa, one could find desperate youths with no future plans, no security, and no shelter. Sometimes no food and water. The same applies to fair number of adults; beautiful women being rotten in their rooms, and men who struggle to put food on the table. Prostitution, gangsterism, murder, arm-robbery, and crimes increasing and taking different shapes simultaneously. The innocent ones will walk around cities and towns, drop application letters here and there, come back to sit and wait to be called for an interview. Only to find out that he or she has to compete with thousand people for only one job.
They have been seeing government officials receiving belt allowances, spending thousands of dollars annually for lunch. Hiring expensive jets for traveling, with cabinets members, ordering for brand new land cruisers all the time. They have been seeing them receiving proper healthcare abroad while their wives die in labor, for the sake of poor roads. As they rot in poverty, mothers and sisters are seen delivering their babies on floors, sometimes on plastic chairs. They see their families in villages, sharing the same drinking water with sheep and cows. Once again, such societies will organically beg for the actions of the revolutionary actors. Gradually responding by rebels and coup leaders.