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Libya: Gaddafi Should Lead By Example
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Business Daily (Nairobi)
OPINION
26 March 2008
Posted to the web 26 March 2008
Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
Libyan Leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was recently in Uganda on a four-day official visit.
No sooner had he landed in Uganda than he started saying things that delighted his supporters and his host, but made his critics cry wolf.
While closing a ten-day meeting of African/Arab Youth, he repeated his controversial thesis about revolutionaries not retiring, not needing term limits and democracy being an imposition from the West.
The revolutionary leader (in power for 39 years) declared his host, President Yoweri Museveni (in power only for 22 years ) and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (in power for 28 years), as the genuine articles among Africa's state house-bound revolutionaries.
I do not subscribe to a lot of the Gaddafiphobia that we have been fed with over the years by reactionary African leaders and Western ideological warriors who are now falling over themselves to do business with Gaddafi.
I have met the Leader several times and support Libya on many Pan African and international issues. When we held the 7th PAC in Kampala his support was only second to that of the host country, Uganda. I am and will always consider myself a friend of the Jamahiriya.
However, as any person who has been in solidarity with Libya may admit privately, Gaddafi is a very difficult friend to have. The political system he has developed in Libya is highly personalised and leader-centric with the inner core vulnerable to instability- his whims determine who is in and who is out.
While the Leader may enjoy popular support, there is no strong evidence that the popular masses have really internalised the ideals of the revolution, four decades after.
That is why you have periodic conflicts between Libyans and other Africans often with racial overtones while the Leader is busy promoting stronger unity, solidarity and Pan Africanism.
Unfortunately, most of the supporters and the so called friends of the Jamahiriya do not tell the Leader the truth. This makes him vulnerable to flatterers, charlatans and opportunists both in interstate relations and in popular diplomacy. And they come wearing all kinds of ideological and religious masks. The more militant the better!
A consequence of this cheap populism is the tendency for the Leader to say anything, make unguarded declarations and sometimes espouse half-baked ideas that should embarrass any genuine comrade.
But no one will tell the emperor that he is naked. Sometimes when he really has original ideas and is willing to put his money where his mouth is, the penchant for showmanship becomes a fertile ground for his enemies and critics to kill the ideas and even some of his so-called friends to play games with him.
One example is his support for an accelerated integration of Africa which he has been championing since the Sirte extra ordinary Summit in September 1999. It was not just reactionary African leaders that led the onslaught in Accra. His 'revolutionary' friends, were among those who torpedoed the Union Government proposal in favour of tortoise speed.
If Libya had spent a tiny proportion of what it spends on lobbying these leaders in building strategic partnerships with democratic forces, peoples groups, parliaments, youth, women and student groups, trade unionists and other progressive forces in raising popular consciousness and political mobilisation in many countries in Africa, there would have been greater success because the masses would be driving and pushing the leaders.
Unfortunately because its system is also leader-driven from top downwards it cannot engage with genuine democratic forces.
When Libya attempts popular diplomacy, because they are not always good readers of country situations, they fall victim to conference mercenaries just like the jamboree that has just ended in Kampala.
In spite of his continuing rhetoric against imperialism, Libya is in reality now aligned to the West in an understandable Post Lockerbie realism. It is no longer a pariah state. And Tripoli has again become a magnet for all manner of Western companies and executive tourism for Western leaders.
That is why it is co-operating with the EU on xenophobic immigration policies to enhance fortress Europe by stopping desperate Africans from using Libya to cross into the EU.
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I am no advocate of Africans going to wash plates and do all kinds of dirty jobs in Europe. However a genuine Pan Africanist state should not act as Gate Keeper for the West.
Instead of deporting these Africans, why can't Libya show its seriousness about freedom of movement for Africans by giving them the right to settle and work in Libya? That will be leadership by example with which it can challenge other African states to set our peoples free and return Africa to Africans.
Tajudeen is deputy director, Africa - UN Millennium Campaign.
...Instead of deporting these Africans, why can't Libya show its seriousness about freedom of movement for Africans by giving them the right to settle and work in Libya? That will be leadership by example with which it can challenge other African states to set our peoples free and return Africa to Africans...
This is why I think Pan Africanism is a joke. Instead of advocating for political freedoms and fair and equitable competition for all, you are advocating for other Africans to work for slave wages ? First of all if Pan Africanists are serious they should be tackling the... [Read Full Text]
Because the Southern Mediterranean region, North Africa, is not for sub-saharan Africans and as a North African, I do NOT ACCEPT NOR WILL I EVER ACCEPT AN AFRICAN UNION THAT WAS DRAWN BY CORRUPT DICTATORS. North Africa is Arab, white and it will NEVER get involved with Sub-saharan black Africa. We will not only deport Blacks from the region but we will attack and use force to secure our borders and identity. North Africa is more than twice as large as Europe and needs to look to a North African union. Black people are not part of our Mediterranean World,... [Read Full Text]
There is no such thing as "African." This is a term that Blacks have invented. In the southern Mediterranean, "African" means a negro. North Africans will never identify with an alien, negroid people- blacks. As a North African, Mediterranean white Arab, I denounce all that Gaddafi represents and I will fight with all my might to protect our southern Mediterranean region. Black people have no right to break the law and enter regions illegally when they are not wanted. They need to look to their black world and fellow blacks for aid and focus on their problems- illiteracy, AIDS, hunger... [Read Full Text]
Hey you are cery racist. Africans are africans nomatter Black, White, Colourds, Reds or yellow. You are african if you are a citizen of any state btween Cape and Cairo.
Author: Sonia <<< There is no such thing as "African." This is a term that Blacks have invented. In the southern Mediterranean, "African" means a negro. North Africans will never identify with an alien, negroid people- blacks. As a North African, Mediterranean white Arab, I denounce all that Gaddafi represents and I will fight with all my might to protect our southern Mediterranean region. Black people have no right to break the law and enter regions illegally when they are not wanted. They need to look to their black world and fellow blacks for aid and focus on their... [Read Full Text]
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