allAfrica.com: Africa: Opposition Politics on the Continent (Page 1 of 1)

Africa it has been said is the most abused and manipulated continent. While this may be the case, it does not mean that Africans as a people are themselves not to blame.

If we look at people who have been abused and manipulated in the scale near that Africa has suffered, we often come to the conclusion that there are problems intrinsic within the African which has made it easy to be abused, manipulated and changed to represent the image of their manipulators.

Indians, Chinese and Arabs suffered the same fate yet there still exists what everybody agrees to be typical Indian, Chinese or Arab. For Africa, what identifies us is our high propensity to be gullible to every "ISM" that we get introduced to.

I would like to draw a parallel, notwithstanding this an unenviable situation between the politics that has come to characterise political opposition in Africa in the 21st century vis-a -vis political opposition in the 20th century also known as independence struggle politics.

In the 20th century, African groups organised themselves to gain "political" independence around issues that they saw were making their lot underdeveloped and less privileged within their own communities and against the forces that they considered was engendering these.

The politics was thus grassroots founded and driven to address the injustices. After independence, to many people's dismay, the ruling parties in most African eloquently campaigned to short-change these political oppositions arguing they were divisive and not good for the country's development. Most of them joined the ruling parties while a few that remained were so weak.

This trend continued for most of the 20th century till later in the last years of the century when the African strong man rule began being challenged by the very people who had supported it.

This gave rise to what the Western press referred to as a "wind of change" that was seeing the rise of a new "breed" that quickly turned themselves into a new "brood" of African "leaders".

Most of these were mainly militarists masquerading as defenders of democracy and social justice only to become worse than the independence African leaders of yore. They initially started by claiming they were forming governments of "national unity".

But with their being transformed into a brood of a kind, opposition to them started from within their ranks. It is this opposition to these "brood" of leaders that we have to examine and put them where they actually belong.

Being from the brood, they are mainly composed of people who identify themselves as elites and thus are expected to have all the wherewithal, first to upstage their hitherto erstwhile bosses and secondly, most of them claim to have the military muscle to meet their former bosses at their own terms if need be. Is this really the case?

Political opposition has thus been transformed into a club of disillusioned former supporters who are using their anger to get even with their former comrades in crime against the wanainchi and for this matter, most of their supporters are urban or peri-urban-based in the major metropolis of their countries.

The most unnerving thing about their support though is the glee with which because of their predisposition, they are always willing and ready to appeal to Western media for support during elections.

It's these Western media that are actually their constituents who need to prop them up so that they can share the spoils of their political misadventures. We thus find our opposition elite instead of getting the grassroots support resorting to such media and thus becoming irrelevant to the cause of democracy in Africa.

Kenya's opposition leaders adopted the slogan "Orange Democratic Movement" copy catting what took place in Ukraine and a number former communist states.

What they miserably failed to copy was the way these revolutions were conducted. The leaders were actually frontline leaders because they believed in their convictions and their grassroots support.

In Kenya it was the poverty-stricken civilians who were on the streets while these armchair revolutionaries dined and wined and possibly womanised in the cozy retreats of 4 to 5 Star hotel suites from whence when needed by the BBC, would materialise to make their statements as ordinary and poverty-stricken wananchi died.

In Zimbabwe, the story was different only in the method the opposition used. At one point, they produced "results" to their neo-colonial masters stating they had won but were by their own body language not in festive moods to match this claim.

Yet the next day news was that their leaders and foreign journalists were in hiding and government operatives were looking for them. This twisted reporting of events in Zimbabwe made me wonder whether opposition politicians of the 21st century Africa are not turning their their people into political football where gossip and delusional speculation are used to foretell what will happen to them.

Exceptions, they say, make bad laws! If Africa as a continent has to become "democratic" as per the West's dictates, this policy must be across the board! Looking at the recent Zimbabwe's elections, the West is not concerned about democracy in Zimbabwe at all.

All they want is to show Mugabe that what he did in 2000 about the land reforms did not please them and so, they want to have a Morgan Tsvangirai to right the wrongs. Democracy in the image of the West is good for Zimbabweans, but not for Ugandans, Gabonese, Egyptians or Libyans!

Mr Mulindwa is a Ugandan living in Toronto, Canada.

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