Saving a lost continent
By Ebo Quansah
Over the past few weeks when Christmas festivities hung heavily in the air, very disturbing political events erupted in the Middle East and inside Africa. This writer examines the various factors and the common thread in the upheavals.Frustrated by the slow pace of opening up Africa to the rest of their global market, the early explorers coined the phrase "Dark Continent" to describe the land mass containing the largest concentration of the Black race.
Several centuries of occupation with the Bible and the sword, followed by one score and a quarter years of self- determination, have done very little to change that initial image. In every sense of the word, Africa is a lost cause to both political and economic advancement. While carols everywhere reminded the human race of the birth of the saviour Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago, events in Africa were anachronistic to the Yuletide messsage of "peace on earth and good will towards men".
Border clashes between Mali and Burkina Faso, two of the world's poorest nations, left about 300 dead on both sides and several installations destroyed and once more drew attention to the volatile nature of the West African sub-region.
After several years of drought with its attendant famine, the rains have finally come to the Sahel regions of Africa to which both nations belong. Instead of applying their manpower on the land, both Mali and Burkina Faso found a better use of their energies on the war-front.
Incidentally, both nations are ruled by trigger-happy 'khaki' men. Both Moussa Traore and Thomas Sankara owe their leadership to the intimidating powers of the gun. Perhaps the best way of expres- sing their gratitude is to embark upon a career of conquest if even the consequences would be the continuous bowing to pop stars for a few bags of grain.
As for Sankara, his association with Col. Gaddafy and his Libyan style adventurism cannot be unconnected to his desire to seek new lands. It cannot be the fancy for the mere name that drove him to declare the impoverished former French colony a Jamarriyah.
In South Africa, while Winnie Mandela's defiant stand in the wake of apartheid suppression wins more white souls to the black cause, two tribal wars that have left nearly 80 dead threaten to undo all that has been done in the name of black emancipation.
The Zulu-Pondo confrontation left 58 dead just before Christmas and in the New Year 18 people have lost their lives in another tribal conflict.
With their stone age implements and chanting of war songs on the television screens, the African warriors only succeed in making the viewer wonder whether it is worth the effort to even think of the remote possibility of extending franchise to these groups of people, who appear to be living ages away from dictates of modernity.
Colonel Gaddafy and his Libyan Jamarriya have been implicated in the latest terrorist attacks at Rome and Vienna airports that claimed 18 lives and left 102 people injured. Like a punch-drunk boxer, Gaddafy's only answer is to threaten war and instability in the Middle East and the entire Mediterranean zone.
With all these problems, the question is what could be done to save the continent? While it would be unrealistic to blame foreign powers for all Africa's ills, there are certain problems that owe their origins to Whitehall and Capitol Hill.
While the world awaits any military option Israel or the United States might adopt, it is pertinent to stress that the economic sanctions the United States have announced are not enough to bring the "mad man of Africa" to his senses. The fact that these measures have not been successful in the past necessitates a more potent option.
The graft for oil money has driven many American firms and citizens to ignore the federal government's sanctions in the past and there is nothing to suggest that these firms and people, as well as job conscious nations in Europe, would see the need to isolate the Libyan regime.
That Gaddafy has a hand in the instability of the African Continent is as clear as the mid-day weather in Africa. If the world shall know something like peace then it behoves all nations with power to do something positive.
Cracks in the three-week-old peace treaty signed between Gen. Okello's military government and the National Resistance Army of Uganda are widening every day with reported atrocities on the part of government soldiers on defenceless civilians.
Instead of disarming his soldiers, many of whom are re-living the Amin reign of terror, the Ugandan leader, in the evening of his life, has found his answers in press censorship. Like the traditional ostrich, Gen. Okello has buried his grey hair in the sand hoping for a miracle to stop the blood-bath.
Two decades of mis-government, civil- ian strife and military misadventure have conspired to reduce Uganda, once the pride of East Africa, to the problem- nation of the community.
In Nigeria, six military officers, out of a total of 14 said to be implicated in a plot to overthrow the liberal military regime of President Ibrahim Babangida, are reported to have been killed in a plane crash while being air-lifted to Lagos to face trial.
While the circumstances of their death appear suspicious, the fact that they set out to derail the liberalisation process which has given Nigeria a new lease of freedom after one-and-a-half years of the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship, epitomises the sense of insecurity still haunting Black Africa's most populous nation.
In Liberia, Master-Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe has completed his meta- morphosis from a lean and hungry- looking non-commissioned officer in the Liberian Army to a pot-bellied President of the republic with the inauguration making him the constitutional occupant of the Executive Mansion. While the sudden thrust has ensured a prosperous future for himself and his cronies, the Liberian people, whose 'love for liberty' brought them all the way from the United States, still groan under his political dictatorship and economic mis- management which, in the words of a national, makes the Tolbert regime 'heavenly'.
The Liberian question is one sore area which exposes the hypocrisy of the American administration. The self- imposed referee of world politics could have done better than watch Gen. Doe and his cronies rain blows on a populace under orders to keep down their guards. If the Reagan Administration remains impotent in the face of flagrant disregard for human rights by a regime propped up by Uncle Sam's dollars, then what right has the United States to talk about human rights abuses in Nicaragua?
Togo's accusing fingers at Ghana for the wave of bombings ostensibly aimed at overthrowing the Eyadema regime, has affected the functions of the Economic Community of West African States. In Ghana itself, the anti-Western rhetorics which fuelled the worst hunger this West African nation has ever known in 1982 and 1983 are creeping back to the body politic.
The first casualty is United States aid to this impoverished nation, currently propped up by loans from the Inter- national Monetary Fund and other friendly donors. Since the US pulls the strings in most of these bodies, one needs no ghost to forecast a gloomy future for this nation ruled by gun-tooting Rawlings and his kinsmen.
Meanwhile, it is pertinent to note that the current anti-Western stance owes its genesis to the CIA spy scandal that resulted in Rawlings' first cousin, Michael Agbouti Sousoudis, being exchanged for eight full-blooded Ghanaians and their families.
Elsewhere in Africa, trouble is far from subsiding. Egypt is still haunted by the bungling of the hijacking drama that saw its troops storming the Egyptian airliner, killing nearly 60 people. Sudan's civil war has escalated while in the Sahel region, though the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organisation forecast an improved condition from what obtained in the immediate past, there is still much to be done to avert the hunger and depravity that have conspired to deny the people any qualitative improvement living in conditions.
With all these problems, the question is what could be done to save the continent? While it would be unrealistic to continue to blame foreign powers for all Africa's ills, there are certain problems that owe their origins to Whitehall and Capitol Hill.
That Gaddafy has a hand in the instability of the African Continent is as clear as the midday weather in Africa. If the world shall know something like peace then it behoves all nations with power to do something positive.
The South African situation, for instance, would not have persisted if Britain and the United States had not continued to give tacit approval to apartheid.
Because of jobs and immense revenue Britain draws from the apartheid nation, Margaret Thatcher and her advisers continue to confound the world with theories about why economic sanctions would not work.
I do not think it needs any academic mind to rationalise the contention that if goods are not patronised and the seller denied goods and services he or she clamours for, chances are very bright that his or her very existence would be threatened.
The argument that sanctions will affect mainly blacks, many of whom have very little purchasing power anyway, cannot be anything more than an insulting justifi- cation to continue to prop up the regime that owes its birth right to the British. expansionist campaigns of the past.
The Black leadership owe it a duty to educate their people on their civic respon- sibilities. It is not enough to raise clenched fists at funerals. Tribal war- mongering must be curbed. Events such as those conflicts that claimed rival tribes lives do no good to the black cause.
As for the rest of Africa, the main problem is how to combat military adventurism and instill dedication in the entire citizenry to be prepared to defend their fatherlands.
At his press conference in London last September, the former Vice-President of Ghana, Dr J.W.S. De Graft Johnson, proposed the co-ordination of efforts to democratise politics in Africa. His call was obviously directed at various exiled Africans and those who believe in democracy still living on the continent. Since that high sounding proposal, nothing has been heard from the ex-Vice-President himself or the Ghana Democratic Movement that spon- sored his conference while Africa wallows under oppressive regimes. The GDM itself seems to be groping without properly harnessing the energy in the form of the large Ghanaian nationals throughout the world crying for effective leadership to end the four-year blood-bath in the land of their birth.
A properly organised GDM could cause major changes back home and act as a catalyst to reverse the dicatatorial trend in the whole of Africa just as the Convention People's Party under Dr Kwame Nkrumah lit the flame of liberation throughout the continent in the 1960s.
