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Africa: The Obama Presidential Marathon And Africa (II)

Okello Oculi

3 November 2008

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By way of contrast to the culture of competitive elections built and reformed in the United States of America for over four decades since African-Americans had the right to cast their votes, GEMA killed elections within the ruling party, Kenya African National Union, KANU; made Kenya to experience a paralyzing three decades of multi-party politics being banned by law, and conducted general elections in which rallies by opposition candidates could be disrupted or prohibited by provincial and district administrators who were directly answerable to an authoritarian presidency.

In 1988 Moi's government, for example, conducted general elections in which voters were required to line up in the open behind candidates of their choice. When the open voting failed to intimidate voters and opposition candidates had more people lined up behind, election officers declared candidates with shorter lines as winners. While this brazen contempt for popular will could be said to have contributed to building civil culture by arousing increasingly fearless, combative challengers(among women and men)of repression by government , it delayed the growth of a healthy, convivial and tolerant political culture in Kenya. That Kenya's women groups had to assemble and strip themselves naked (at Uhuru Park in central Nairobi), to show their anger, frustration, and bitterness over unlawful and rampant detentions of critics of President Moi's government, only contributed to deepening an aesthetic of brutality in Kenya's electoral politics. It was a high price being paid for a road not taken since independence in 1963. It merely deepened the barbarism and contempt for human dignity that British colonial administration had entrenched in governance in Kenya. In this legacy Kenya is not alone. Critics of a record of electoral violence in Nigeria also reach back for explanations in legacies of the violence of British colonial governance, often deliberately engineered and combined with local traditions of brutal administration.

Obama's presidential election campaign is benefitting from past struggles to reform American electoral politics. This technology of electoral reform is one that successive American governments failed to export to Africa. American criticism of colonialism in Africa as extensions of European international power, did not come accompanied with training newly independent African countries in organizing political parties, conducting issue and programme-based election campaigns, and elimination of violence from change from one elected regime to another. American officials are yet to get used to the notion and reality of African politics being committed to protecting Africa's resources and using public administration to turn them into means of collective welfare and development in Africa. Their competition for global control with the former Soviet Union and the ideology of socialism in Africa, Asia and South America, gave them the excuse for preferring military dictators to competitive democratic electoral politics in Africa. The tragic costs for Africa have usually been measured in monetary terms, including resources wasted through corruption. What is ignored is the vital time lost by Africa from inventing, crafting and consolidating tools and social dramas for the selection of their political leaders. Consequently, millions across Africa are dazzled by the tortuous marathon that candidates for the American presidency have to run to get elected. Those of them bred on hearing martial music at dawn broadcasts from the single official radio station followed by "I, Captain/General Bash-Zaku, on behalf of the Revolutionary Armed Liberation Council, announce the overthrow of General.... With immediate effect", etc., are most likely scandalized by what seems like an indulgent American tribal ritual of torture.

The American failure to export some of the best in their political technology has a long history. After their own liberation struggle to overthrow British colonial rule in 1776, successive American governments adamantly opposed the use of their example to also successful y win freedom. Its use by black revolutionaries in Haiti in 1801, is a case in point. As late as 1959, American governments were suspicious of its use in Cuba; and after it became clear that Fidel Castro had ensured the total liberation, and sustained development, of Cubans of African descent, American official opposition remained both militarily and economically violent. President Nelson Mandela was indignant at calls by America and her former NATO allies for Fidel Castro not to be invited to attend his inauguration in 1994. Cuban blood had been shed to throw back invading apartheid troops out of Angola where the fighters of the African National Congress had their military bases. Some commentators have blamed American support for President Moi's deepened use of naked maximum violence and torture against critics of elections rigged since 1977. This gross failure and dark hole in American foreign exports has denied Africa the benefit of borrowing from the political and cultural roots of America's own internal reform and national dynamism. It is a cumulative loss to Africa, in the last six decades of independence, that leaves millions of Africa's peoples now unprepared for the 'Miracle of political Obama'. Worse still, it leaves many of her political elites paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge of ensuring effective choice of political leaders through the use of the American presidential electoral model. There is, however, hope that his historic specter will positively challenge imagination all across Africa and push new creative energies for the training, production and monitoring of her leaders in the decades to come. When he wins, Africa too will win new dividends in reparations and in post-Cold War global politics.

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Oculi is Executive Director of Africa Vision 525 Initiative.

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