Of Marxists, Sergeants and All
Whispering Drums with Maigani
by Musa Ibrahim
Today, Samuel Doe is not only General Doe but Dr. Doe as well. In Ghana, the people are never short of raw deals from Rawlings who insisted he had to shed blood to prove his was a 'revolution'. And recently, a new brand of 'revolution' tagged 'Laborat- ory Revolution' was seen rearing its head in Upper Volta under the 'disting- uished' leadership of Captain Thomas Sankara.
Karl Marx, I was told twenty years ago, started the craze about societal equalities and inequalities, and that he it was that adopted society to the use of high sounding verbose and 'dogon turanci' such as 'revolution', 'masses', 'proletariat', 'bourgeoisie', 'dialect- ics', 'materialism', et cetera. Waking up one cold, snowy morning, Marx found out that the society he was living in was created like mistakes - God's mistakes.
Why should some people have everything ready made for them while others have nothing?, he reasoned. There and then, he swore to reconstruct the entire universe. But to do that, Marx had to come to terms with the dynamics of the society and the people living in it. He wrote and read and learned and remembered. In the final analysis, he figured out that as long as human beings remain human, changes in society are not only inevitable, but are, in fact, a constancy and a standard way of life. He also noted the gradual stages through which such changes are bound to occur.
Thus it is that ages after Marx's death, he is still very much alive in the minds of youths, politicians and soldiers alike. He is quoted like a Bible, and in Africa for instance, the number of people who have come to profess marxism is both baffling and staggering. Africa's soldiers are no longer warriors because they are all drunk with Marxism. At the slightest chance, they rush to their various artillery houses, carry guns and a 'revolution' is embarked upon all in the name of Marx. They come out with abstract ideas as to how society is supposed to be reconstructed and fill everybody with starry-eyed promises.
They yell that they are in govern- ment to protect the masses - the faceless masses from the bourgeoisie.
But unlike Marx, Africa's sergeants, captains and generals are not tutored in the art of government and much besides. In order to quote Marx, they slash their way through the impenetrable thicket of irregular verbs and tenses, turning everything into a series of horrible, incomprehensible noises (vis: Captain Sankara's recent interview with the West Africa magazine. And within a short period of time, the regimes of such self-styled Marxists became unstable because they had been founded on deception and coercion and exercised by a bunch of ignorant and unscrupulous 'Philosophers'. So ten years after such a 'revolution', the society does not in any way emerge as the dream of the down-trodden classes, but the sole property of the 'revolutionaries'. Purges and vaporizations become the order of the day while the leadership becomes a marvel of organized inefficiency.
In its brilliant x-ray of Africa's problems recently, TIME magazine came out with three variables: 'coups, conflict and coruption'. I shall beg to disagree with their analyses. Like it or not, Africa's one and only problem today is Karl Marx, for around him all other problems revolve. I would want to be proved wrong.
The OAU Totters On
RECENTLY, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Council of Ministers met in Ethopia's capital, Addis Ababa, to prepare grounds for the next Heads of States summit. Unlike in those good old days when such meetings were heralded by the ferocious drumming of cymbals, and the aftermath created jitters and ripples in the international community, this meeting was listless and was without the usual media coverage and publicity. Reasons for this nonchalance cannot be far-fetched. For one, the so-called wind of change blowing across the continent has saddled Africa with inconsequential leaders who are in no way capable of directing the continent towards unity, mutual agreement, political and economic self-sufficiency and independenceSo engrossed are these leaders with petty internal squabbles and witch hunting that the entire continent is of no significance to them. Battered and fractured by coups and counter-coups, Africa is in need of genuinely committed and dedicated leaders. Besides, how can a leader whose only training and inclination in life is 'shoot and kill', come out with any concrete and positive development proposals? How can they? And so like the council of Ministers' meeting, so will the Heads of State's summit I am watching
