West Africa: a cursory glance
by Ato Imbeah
West Africa is now a scarecrow of negative situations. Abject poverty, where the total earnings of a family are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessities for the maintenance of mere physical efficiency is their accepted existence in this late twentieth century.Since Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957, thus leading the African countries south of the Sahara in their bid to control their own destinies, political chaos has been the order of the day, and many of the elites who sprang up to lead the various nations only succeeded in carving their sub-regions into arenas of political comedy. West Africa is one such region.
When the colonial masters left West Africa, they thought they had left it to democracy and peace. The politicians came to power with the cry that their urgent duty was to ease the grinding poverty of the masses of ordinary folk who expected, and quite properly too, that the change would bring some speedy relief to their long social misery.
Freedom to govern themselves never came on a silver platter, it never came automatically. The people cultivated it carefully and ceaselessly and at certain times it became necessary for lives to be sacrificed to guarantee this freedom for their posterity.
After independence, there was restlessness amongst the youths of West Africa, restlessness for self-discovery, for self- realisation, signifying the power breakthrough, a realization that the West African youths were demanding pluck of that age, knowing they did not have the luxury of waiting forever to solve their problems. The young people of West Africa knew then that they faced a challenge never before met by the youths of any continent, and they revealed all the moral qualities that were needed to make the sub-region great, for they knew it was their responsibility and right to determine their future in the world. But self-determination, they later found out, was a serious business as military coups and civil wars devastated the sub-region.
Self-determination requires a leadership that is willing and prepared to defend its people against injustice and oppression, and that was what West Africa lacked "a leadership willing and prepared to defend its people against injustice and oppression.
West Africa has lacked leaders born for the people, leaders who live for them and give thought to their great happiness whenever and wherever leaders who are often seen lost deep in thought, and never work according to time, and always prepared to hear the voice of the people's hearts by asking themselves such questions as:
How will our people rise from their total ruins, and from these human degradation?
How should we stabilize and improve the life of the people who suffered so much from depravation and corruption? How? West Africa needed leaders who could join their strength in response to their vigorous call to the people to collect their undamaged heritage and culture from the religious, political, social and economic ruins, and at least they would have been seen to be doing a wonderful thing in the dawn of dark- ness that engulfed the sub-region. But West Africa never saw such leaders.
The leadership that emerged after independence only litigated over power sharing, as if that was the ultimate goal. They argued over systems of values and beliefs, forgetting that ideologies must be allowed to organically develop together with other political and social traditions. Some of them wanted the new countries that had channelled their energies into fights for independence to come up with a democratic form of government de- scribed essentially in Western terms, something that took the West centuries to define and get used to.
Others opted for socialism, and although that could be the natural and inevitable end of African revolution, they felt it should be the socialism as was elaborated by Marx on the basis of an analysis of a society fundamentally different from the traditional African society. Even some advocated for the form of government said to have been practised by their ancestors, forgetting that there is nothing to be gained by the restoration of lifeless tradition of admitted previous merit. What the leaders failed to learn was to face each situation as it arose, unencumbered by venerable habits of thought, for each period poses its own questions.
And independence in the sub-region ceased to be true to its nature and was made a rennet that curdles rather than a heaven of fermentation. The fearless generosity of the youths in their hearts and the touch of unity which was lit, instead of being raised proudly in the days of darkness and doubt became the assured reality of a probable tomorrow.
West Africa is now a scarecrow of negative situations. Abject poverty, where the total earnings of a family are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessities for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency is their accepted existence in this late twentieth century. The lightening and utensils for cooking and washing which need to be purchased at the lowest prices are in quantities necessary for physical subsistence only.
But even then the West Africans who hardly lost hope believed that in their hands were the future of their land and that their land would be secure, mighty and benign, if not for them, then for their children.
But then came the military, eager to push on with West Africa's unfinished business of using state power to engineer a more just distribution of life's blessings be they health, shelter or cash. But instead of them seeing the need for open- minded observation and also being people whose sensitivity to the pulse beats of the time could not be impaired by doctrinal commitments, they go about depriving the people of the basic things that even the politicians in their chequered era deemed it as their in- alienable rights - freedom of speech, power of self-determination, boldness of conception, capability of notion, and worst of all, life.
The military in politics in West Africa, which most writers and historians prefer to ignore or underestimate is a disaster that threatens the sub-region.
Self determination requires leadership that is willing and prepared to defend its people against injustice and oppression, and that was what West Africa lacked.
There is no way for these countries to develop any political system suitable for their efficient administration with incessant threats from the military. They always adjust to one, but the political system must be a continuous process, and there is no need to annihilate an experience to establish one.
Each of the nations in the sub-region was bubbling with life, and proved to develop in a lot of different ways at its own time. Geographical location, the nature of its external commerce and resistance to overcome from outside. gives its own history, though its constitution is the same as other nations be they developed or developing.
Execution, either of the highly experienced professionals or the ordinary people, do not instil discipline in a people. It generates fear, and when fear dominates the aspect of the governed, they become serfs, living a rigid life, and forced to work not for the good of it but because the government now is the lord of the manor, temporal or clerical.
The mass of the people thus experi- encing the domination of the privileged few, will league together and eventually rebel and struggle to oppose the dom- inant military regimes in most West African countries.
But despite all these political comedies, the people of West Africa continue to hope of a better tomorrow, for if the unbridled ideological farming in the sub- region by the politicians made most of the countries these spheres of misgovernments, the various military dictatorships have been nothing but political corrosion.
NEXT WEEK
The greatest scandal that has ever hit Nigeria is the disappearance of £2.8 billion of the nation's oil funds. No satisfactory answer has ever been given of what happened to the money.Talking Drums is in possession of information that sheds light on the scandal. Look out for it next week.
