Africa Works

Tiny Togo, a blessed sliver of territory sandwiched between Ghana and Benin in West Africa, has demonstrated once more that merely holding an election doesn’t deliver a democratic outcome. Even an election where the mechanics are sound and the process seemingly transparent, as a regional West African authority has pronounced.

Despite relative non-violence and procuedural transparency, Togo’s presidential election, held last week, highlights the problem of representative democracy in an Africa where incumbent presidents repeatedly win elections.

In the case of Togo, the son of the country’s late dictator “won” re-election, according to officials reports. The opposition put up six candidates against Faure Gnassingbe, thereby insuring his victory. Why did the Togolese not rally around a single candidate? Why did the international community not insist on such a show of unity? What kind of “democracy” re-electes the son of a dictator who ruled since the 1960s?

The answer: no democracy at all.

Togo was and remains a dictatorship.

Let’s set aside any speculation that Gnassingbe may have bribed opposition candidates into standing against him and thus fracturing the opposition. Let’s set aside the speculation that Gnassingbe manipualted the media, the courts, the election commission — indeed the entire official apparatus of the national government — to insure his victory.

The facts are unnecessary. Gnassingbe should not have been allowed to stand for re-election.

That his right to rule Togo was forfeited is not merely the result of biology. His father was not a monarch, and the younger Gnassingbe is not a king. Rather he is a failed president because of Togo’s miserable condition under his (lack of) leadership.

Five years of mis-rule, above else, should have disqualifed Gnassingbe from standing for re-election. And his victory, over a divided opposition, should be a prelude to the African Union’s refusal to recognize his new government.

Let Togo struggle for development without Faure Gnassingbe.

Hats off to the UN’s development news agency, IRIN, for a insightful report on the neglected subject of marginalization and inequality within African countries. In a collection of articles, “Another Kenya,” IRIN shines a bright light on the forgotten have-nots of rural Africa. I never tire of saying that the divide between rich and poor within Africa is now a problem of greater magnitude and urgency than the problem of African marginalization within the world economy, society and culture. The global community remains mired in an outmoded view of Africa’s contradictions within the international arena. IRIN can play a helpful role in re-0rienting media priorities, towards inequalities within Africa, where African solutions — by and for Africans — can do a great deal of good.

The widespread killings by Nigeria’s trigger-happy police are receiving welcome condemnation from government officials. Today even the country’s police minister joined in the chorus of complaints about police brutality. Will fresh attention lead to reforms?

Nigeria is not alone in seeking a new approach to policing. Kenya also faces an urgent need for police reforms. Indeed, across Africa, there’s probably no more important improvement to be made in civil society. While the U.S. in its foreign policy continues to emphasize assistance to the armies of Africa, the triumph of civil society and nominal democracy has meant that policemen and policewomen, not soldiers, are on the front lines of securing law and order in African cities and rural areas.

In general, Africa’s police use to heavy a hand against alleged criminals and legal protesters. In Kenya and Nigeria both, police have maintained informal death squads in a misguided attempt to rid the streets of armed robbers and others who prey on the poor and the weak.

Some African countries continue to have police forces that are too weak rather than too strong. South Africa needs more effective police, for instance.

Whether to aggressive or too passive, police forces across Africa need to strive for a higher standard. Civil activists within countries — and across the globe — should strive not only to expose “extrajudicial” killings by police, and other forms of brutality, but they must also provide concrete suggestions on police improvments.

The media also has a special role to play. African journalists should make “the police beat” among the m0st important on their papers. Close monitoring of police behavior, including the taking of bribes as well as the taking of lives, could be the most effective way for the media to assist in Africa’s social uplift.

A good friend asked me to compile a list of my dozen favorite African musicians (and their groups) by country and region. The musicians must be living, he instructed, and for a reason: His dream is to produce a great African music festival. With the aid of digital music, the festival can occur every day, actually, by drawing on the music of these classic performers. Here’s my list, of 20 (I have large appetites). A few of the biggest names in African pop music are missing because, honestly, I’m not drawn to them. A few of my own West African favorites are from Ghana, and relatively unknown internatonally. The Nigerian band, Lagbaja, is the most political of the performers listed. The East African selections number only three, which reflects the overwhelming influence of hip-hop, Soukous and other “derivative” forms, especially on Kenyan music. Two of my choices for this sub-region are from Uganda, both groups whose leaders I personally know and admire (and whose work is most easily found on the sound track to the movie “Last King of Scotland). The best-known of my selections from the Francophone zone are Yousou N’Dour of Dakar and the incomparable Malian singer, Oumou Sangare. The Francophonie has other outstanding musicians of course, including the wonderful Cheick Tidiane Seck, whose album with the great jazz pianist Hank Jones represents the greatest colloboration ever between an American and African musician. And the lineup from Southern Africa, while diminished by the deaths of Brenda Fassie and Lucky Dube, remains extraordinary. Oliver Mtukudzi, from Zimbabwe, performs regularly in the U.S. and his “Tuku Music” is one of a handful of “essential” African albums by anyone, living or dead. Of South Africans, Pops Mohamed is perhaps the bandleader most deserving of wider recognition (his “Ancestral Healing” album is among the rarest and most affecting pieces of pop music ever created). The greatest living South African female singer, the diminutive Busi Mhlongo, remains shockingly little-known in the U.S. Sello Twala, meanwhile, was the musical genius behind Brenda’s rise to super-stardom in 2000 — and a terrific performer on his own.

I could go on … and on … but let the list speak. Listen, enjoy, and celebrate:

Southern Africa:

Thomas Mapfumo

Pops Mohamed

Oliver Mtukudzi

Busi Mlongo

Sello Twala

Yvonne Chaka Chaka

East Africa:

Afrigo Band

Percussion Discussion

Makame Faki and the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar

West Africa:

Lagbaja

Daddy Lumba

Kojo Antwi

Rex Omar

Les Amazones de Guinee

Richard Bona

Congo and Francophone Africa:

Youssou N’Dour

Oumou Sangare

Lokua Kanza

Cheick Tidiane Seck

Baaba Maal

Dobet Gnahore

The BBC has brilliantly retold an old story: how in the mid-1980s charitable aid intended for hungry Ethiopians was diverted to rebel soldiers, some of whom even pretended to be humanitarians in order to get their hands on cash from private donors, who meant the money to be spent on food.

A quarter century ago, the CIA privately documented how soldiers grabbed famine aid, making mockery of the international movement to assist poor, hungry Ethioipians. Revisiting these allegations, the BBC found soldiers themselves admitting to the cruel farce.

The familiar story is a reminder that humanitarian aid often fuels the very violent conflicts that humanitarians seek to curtail or end.

Those who want to crack the code of Nigeria would do well to visit the essays of Chinua Achebe. Well-known for his novels, which include the classic Things Fall Apart, Achebe also crafts compelling short essays, which he then collects into slim but thoughtful volumes. His latest, The Education of a British Protected Child, is the subject of a new essay of mine in the March issue of the political monthly, In These Times.

Seems so. Goodluck Jonathan, vice president of Nigeria, remains “acting president,” despite the return to the country of ailing president, Yar’Adua. At most the acting president has a year in office in order to put a stamp on his benighted country. The first resident ever to serve as Nigeria’s top government official from the oil-rich Delta region, even in temporary role, Jonathan has plenty of opportunities to give positive direction — of even halt the dangerous drift — of Africa’s most populated country. Nigeria remains a power even in this time of trial. But how long can my wonderful wife’s  home nation remain in the wilderness? The Christmas Day underwear bomber has highlighted the emergence in Nigeria of an international-linked Muslim extremism, which has a domestic agenda as well — of countering Christian extremism, especially as displayed in the difficult borderlands between the Northern and Southern regions of Nigeria.

South Africa’s former president, the austere and dignified Thabo Mbeki, often lectured Europeans and Americans, hectoring his country about the relationship between sexual promiscuity and the spread of HIV/AIDs, that African men are not obsessed with sex and in pell-mell pursuit of new sexual liasons as if quantity, rather than quality, matters most to them.

Well perhaps Mbeki never met Jacob Zuma, who happens to be his replacement as South Africa’s president. Reports that Zuma has fathered a child with the 39-year old daughter of one of his cronies has ignited an unusual level of protest in a country where, since his election, “Big Daddy,” as Zuma sometimes is called, has maintained high popularity ratings.

Zuma, who practices polygamy and an estimated 19 children with four former and current wives, last married only in January of this year. This month he admitted fathering a child with a girlfriend last year. Zuma divorced one wife and another committed suicide ten years ago. His latest paramour may become wife number four. South African media are reporting that Zuma may already have married her in a “customary” ceremony.

Whether Zuma’s personal behavior represents South African “manhood” as a whole is clear: the answer is a resounding no. Not only Mbeki but of course Nelson Mandela have provided very different notions of manhood and the male relationship to marriage and female partners. Mandela especially presented a model of husbandly devotion to Graca Machel, a wife of intelligence, independence and dignity.

By treating women as a form of property, and accumulating them in public fashion the way another man might collect art or race horses,  Zuma raises questions anew about how best to promote gender equality in his country and the region as a whole.

Stephen Smith, the respected Africa analyst, thinks the answer to this question is yes. A former Africa editor of Le Monde, Smith knows as much about Francophone as anyone and his long essay on the subject, newly published in London Review Books, contains much of interest and is well worth reading closely. Yet I’m respectfully skeptical about his “retreat” thesis. The French have occupied Ivory Coast for years, insuring a partition of this benighted country. They have military forces stationed indefinitely in Chad. In their role as the leading influence on the European Central Bank, the French have guaranteed (at some cost) the continued support for the African franc, the legal currency in countries as diverse as Senegal and Cameroon. The French also insured that the sons of both Bongo and Eyadama took power in Gabon and Togo after the death of their fathers, both effectively the longest-running dictators in Africa. All this — and Smith must ponder the question of whether the French are retreating from Africa? What would staying the course in Africa be for the French: reinstituting slavery in their sphere of influence? The France have shifted ground certainly in Africa, and outside of the Francophone zone, their influence is tiny. But retreat? Only in Rwanda have the French left a former country of influence, and in Rwanda the French did not retreat: they received an eviction notice from Rwanda’s president.

For decades, American reformers have asked African governments to radically reorder their priorities, spending money on human needs, infrastructure and authentic law-and-order activities. Perhaps the best recent examples of American officials exhorting African governments to change comes from Kenya, where last year the U.S. Ambassador campaigned vigorously for “fundamental change” in the behavior of Kenya’s elected political elite.  Now it is time for African reformers to do the same — and ask the American government to make fundamental changes on behalf of the American people.

Now when the U.S. lectures, often the Kenyans do not listen. In turn, the U.S., as the Ambassador to Kenya did last month, suspended aid to the country.

This suspension creates a nice precedent for Kenyans who call for reforms in the U.S. and get ignored. What can Kenyans withhold in order to punish the U.S. government? Perhaps they can, say, punish the U.S. by not moving to America with their skills and resources.