From rock bottom we can only go up
With an opportunity to build back better, we’ll start by learning to love ourselves.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki
Guinea-Bissau’s coup d’etat on 26 November was the ninth attempted or successful coup in the country since its independence from Portugal in 1974.
The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) quickly suspended Guinea-Bissau’s membership, prompting jokes that Ecowas will soon have more suspended states than members.
A general was declared leader. For a year, he said. Ecowas dispatched officials to urge a return to the constitutional order. We’ve seen this before.
The plot thickens. Deposed president Umaro Sissoco Embaló, who’d been seeking a second term, flew to Senegal but moved again in a huff, this time to the Republic of the Congo. He was offended that Senegal’s president referred to the coup d’etat as a “sham”. Former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan, who went to Guinea-Bissau to observe the elections, also called it a “ceremonial coup” engineered by Embaló himself, now “in exile”. Huh?
Jonathan urged the general-now-in-charge to release the election results anyway. The electoral commission said it couldn’t because armed men had destroyed their computers and seized tallying forms. From doctoring results around the rest of the continent, we have now escalated to destroying results.
Civic actors in Guinea-Bissau have called for total civil disobedience. Embaló allegedly couldn’t – wouldn’t – countenance results in which he didn’t “win”. Not even Nollywood could make this up. This is beyond a performative election. This is saying to hell with the very concept of elections.
We cannot tell how matters will settle in Guinea-Bissau. If the trajectory of other military takeovers is anything to go by, the country will be under military rule for years to come. This is where we are, as a continent: at rock bottom, with a social contract that is null and void.
Taxation in these circumstances is a joke. Every rational person – top to bottom – will do everything possible to evade paying taxes. The process of establishing the social contract is ineffective. The ability to deliver on the social contract is nonexistent. Not just because those people in political office have zero intention of delivery, except as it benefits themselves, but also because we have no money to deliver.
We can’t borrow more to plug the hole. Those people in political office long ago breached the outer limits of borrowing thresholds to keep the state (and their own interests) afloat. Nor can we beg instead. The age of “aid” is over.
Trade and foreign direct investment are not making up the deficit. Our trade with the world is down and intra-African trade is not rising as fast as it needs to. The continent’s share of foreign direct investment is so paltry as to be practically nonexistent – except for the new scramble for critical minerals and rare earths. Concessions to the lands these minerals lie under are dished out without any attempt to use them as leverage.
What then gives us hope?
First: the generation gap between the leaders and the led – so extreme on this continent – is coming to an end. If coups d’etat (real ones) are one form of protest at the jokes that our republics have become, then youth uprisings are yet another. And the latter hold more transformative potential than the coups.
Second: the financing crisis is an opportunity. The ever-diminishing sources of slush funds for our political actors can only be a good thing. When the buck can no longer be passed to external actors for entire public-sector services, education and health for example, our political actors will eventually be pushed to deliver – or at least to attempt to do so.
Third: the current nakedness of the global disrespect for Africa can also only be a good thing. Enough Africans – even among those who hold political office – are mortified by the contempt within which we and our lives are held. That mortification is creating anger and (more importantly) a determination to do right, not by external actors, but by our internal constituents. Africans loving ourselves.
What a concept.
It’s become a cliché but what the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara once said still holds: “A true revolutionary is guided by great sentiments of love.”