Charles Onyango-Obbo
24 August 2008
column
Nairobi — As the power-sharing talks between Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and the Morgan Tsivangrai-led opposition chug along, the noises from the government -- especially the security establishment -- are growing ever more belligerent.
If appearances amount to anything, you could argue that compared to the post-election violence talks in Kenya that produced the Grand Coalition, Zimbabwe's are going nowhere. But, then, appearances can be deceiving and the long-suffering Southern African country might produce a deal, after all.
What is striking about the Zimbabwe talks is what is striking about all talks to resolve political crises in Africa: Contrary to the conventional view that African countries are similar, often there is little you can borrow from the experience of another African country that negotiated a political settlement to help another failing one.
It is often argued, when some western diplomat or leader lectures an African despot on democracy, that Africa is very different than the west, and that the experiences of the developed countries cannot always be successfully transplanted here.
That might be so, but then why do African countries too turn out to be so different from each other? After more than 20 years of a ferocious war, Khartoum and the southern Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army rebels agreed a peace deal in Nairobi.
The deal shares national power between Khartoum and the SPLA, with the latter as junior partners. But it created a semi-autonomous government in the south, where the SPLA leader who is vice president at the national level, calls the shots as president.
No other African country had taken that route before, and since. In Sierra Leone, when the country was being torn apart by a savage rebellion, the British sent in a few troops, took over the place and handed it to the UN.
In South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, a liberation movement, the ANC, negotiated with the apartheid regime, and cohabited with it in government as a partner for one term. After that, winner-take-all elections were held, and South Africa, for all intents and purposes, became a democratic one-party state dominated by the ANC.
IN RWANDA, THE RULING RWANDA Patriotic Front reached a similar arrangement with the government in Kigali during the war that ended in the 1994 genocide. But when it took power, it didn't go the South African way. It entrenched the power-sharing principle in its constitution.
The difficulty of replicating political solutions in Africa, even between neighbouring countries, means that a lot of time is wasted trying to invent a wheel to take every troubled country out of crisis, and too many lives are lost in the process.
One possible explanation for this is that African countries have not gone enough common homogenisation experiences, except perhaps colonialism which was too crude a weapon to do that.
One such experience would have been industrialisation, which tends to produce a similar mindset among the capitalists and entrepreneurs, and among the urban working class, irrespective of the country where it happens.
Absent industrialisation, all you are left with are very particularist cultures, superstition, and ethnic, and national passions and prejudices. Because every hill produces its own superstitions, and every valley its own version of tribal government, its experience is very different than that of the next hill.
Because Africa will, definitely, be a much better if we homogenised, this is probably the best argument for a continental government, as opposed to Muammar Gaddafi's who thinks it should be for enabling Africa defend itself against the rest of the world.
A continental government, however, is too grandiose a scheme to succeed in these times. Smaller regional efforts, like the East African Community, are more likely to work. However, you run up against the problem above; our cultural "similarities" are one of our strengths as a region, but they are also our biggest obstacle.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.
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