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Kofi is a Ghanaian-Canadian based in Toronto Canada. He has a Master of Arts (MA) in International Development and Globalization, University of Ottawa, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language. Mr Akosah Sarpong also holds a Masters in Journalism from Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
He was also Media Relations consultant for the Ghana High Commission, Ottawa, May, 2003-August, 2004.
For the past years, the Ghana’s enlightenment movement have shown that rational choices are essential to how Africans distinguish and argue about their culture in relation to their progress. The enlightenment campaigners have identified cultural challenges – from the impact of witchcraft to developing policies from within the African culture – and raised their consequences should Africans continue to integrate their cultural values into their formal development process.
The ‘City Forum on Culture and Development,’ a multi-sectorial undertaking that took place recently and was opened by Prof. Kofi Awoonor, chair of Ghana’s Council of State, at the Accra International Conference Centre, demonstrates the influence of the enlightenment movement on national thinking. More so the fact that the City of Accra, Ghana’s Ministry of Trade and Industries, Arterial Network, UNESCO, Goethe-Institut, Agenda 21 and Accra Arts and Culture Network participated in the culture-progress seminar. Continue reading “The First Lady and The Pregnant African Women”
The “City Forum on Culture and Development,” a policy orientated venture held in Accra to openly strategize the African culture for African progress reveal the increasing attention being given to the African culture.. For almost 50 years, the African culture, either because of colonialism or bad intellectual savvy by African elites, has not been purposely appropriated for policy development and bureaucratization.
Overtime, it has made Africa shamefully the only region in the world where foreign development paradigms dominate its development process to the detriment of its tried-and-tested traditional values. This has had psychological implications on Africa’s progress. A situation that makes African elites, as the central directors of Africa’s progress, not only rationally fragile but morally flimsy. Continue reading “At last, African Culture in Mainstream Thinking”
It doesn’t matter if Ghana’s 2012 general elections is a year away; campaigning of some sorts is underway. Democracy-crazy, everyday appears to be campaigning day. The mass media is charged. Character, development issues, policies and programmes jumble easily with foul language and the irrational juju-marabou spiritual predictions. The past veers into the present and the present into the past.
While the unfolding political drama can be entertaining, it is sometimes awkward. The ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) touts its incumbent President John Atta Mills as honest, and accuses the main opposition National Patriotic Party (NPP) presidential candidate Nana Akufo Addo as once dabbling in marijuana. The NPP sells Nana Akufo Addo as having big development ideas, and charges Atta Mills as visionless.
Despite the universality of all this, it is the peculiar Ghanaian/African cultural sensibilities that disturb the infant democratic process: the appropriation of traditional spiritualists into the democratic politics that is expected to generate development thoughts.
A non-Ghanaian may find it weird to read headlines like “MOCTAR BAMBA: NANA ADDO’S ADVISOR ON JUJU AFFAIRS …Yes, I consult spiritualists in Mali, Nigeria and Benin” or “A Kumasi-based Spiritualist Predicts Atta Mills Will Win the 2012 Elections.” “Sheikh Mallam Musah had prophesized that the current leader of the opposition NPP Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo has not been spiritually chosen to lead this nation after the 2012 elections … According to the renowned spiritualist the NPP will again suffer a painful defeat from the hands of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) come 2012 because the flag bearer is not spiritually ordained to rule the country,” the Accra-based The Al-Hajj newspaper reported.
As expected, the NPP responded, pandering for metaphysical attention. Its national organizer, Moctar Bamba, repudiated Sheik Mallam Musa’s prophesy. Moctar said he has been undertaking “spiritual consultations on behalf of Nana Akufo Addo which shows that Nana Akufo- Addo will win 2012 elections.” The spiritual consultations, Moctar disclosed to shocked Ghanaians, took him to some West African states such as Nigeria, Mali and Benin.
The leaks may seem like some sort of spiritual playact to score political mileage in a vastly superstitious society but some members of the political parties do consult and spend large amount of money on traditional spiritualists and prophets to determine whether they will win elections or not. And where appropriate, elaborate spiritual rituals are undertaken to turn predicted lose into win.
Whether false or not, both the NDC and the NPP are deliberately tapping into the mind-set of gullible Ghanaians, who are stuck with the spiritualists, and, like their politicians, find it difficult to extricate themselves from such absurd believes. The political spiritual battle between the NDC and the NPP is seen in the spiritual imageries that have quietly been projected by the Atta Mills presidency over the past three years. The effects are dramatic and intoxicating. The NPP occasionally counter it but the game rolls on, fast heating up as the 2012 general elections approach.
Dominic Nitiwul, the NPP Member of Parliament for Bimbilla, created a row recently when he alleged that “President John Evans Atta Mills was helped spiritually to win the presidency by a “magic ring” he wore during the 2008 elections.” Since becoming President, Atta Mills’ obsession with spiritualists is an open secret. Despite Dominic Nitiwul, with MBA and LLM degrees, expected to be exceptionally rational in dealing with juju-marabou spiritual issues, plays-on, pandering to the irrational juju-marabou spiritual sports. The popular Nigerian spiritualist, Temitope Balogun (TB) Joshua, founder of the Lagos, Nigeria-based The Synagogue, Church of All Nations, plays the spiritual game well with President Atta Mills.
Like Sheikh Mallam Musah, TB Joshua is alleged to have prophesized that candidate Atta Mills would be President of Ghana during the 2008 presidential election. Superstitiously, candidate Atta Mills visited TB Joshua before the 2008 presidential elections in Lagos. Like Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who had immense influence on the Russian Emperor Nicholas 11, TB Joshua is said to have powerful control over Atta Mills, helping him participate in the political spiritual sports.
The NPP, bent on wrestling power from Atta Mills and his NDC, isn’t joking. In Moctar Bamba, the NPP is playing the political spiritual games with the NDC. Such excessive concentrations on the spiritual games have made scientific opinion polls less listened to. Few scientific opinion polls are independent; most are conducted by the political parties. Like the spiritual predictions, each poll appears coloured by where the polling organization is coming from. Each political party disagrees with any poll that doesn’t favour their forecasts.
The juju-marabou spiritual games undeservedly dominate the democratic space. Hardcore development issues, policies, programmes and intellectual discourse are supposed to dictate the democratic process and push the excessive irrational juju-marabou spiritual debates out of the democratic practices. The democratic process appears impotent in the face of the juju-marabou mediums, who still direct the politics of ideas, thus undermining wobbly development issues.
As an African development watcher, the preposterous Ghanaian political spiritual bickering, short of higher debates on development from the political class for Ghana’s progress, leaves me concerned.
Comments: Essay
In and out of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, the City, supposed to radiate enlightenment to some of Uganda’s dark ancient cultural practices, has failed to do so. The City is entrapped in obscurity. “The villages and farming communities that surround Uganda’s capital, Kampala, are gripped by fear.” Human sacrifices, the BBC World TV reports, are on the prowl. For some time, Kampala is darkened by the denial of child sacrifices. Modern technology, as the BBC investigation aptly used, is helping to track Uganda’s and Africa’s malignity and putting the refutation to shame. Some part of Kampala’s mind has gone into denial and avoidance.
The long evasion has enhanced certain cultural inhibitions that have been stifling Uganda’s and Africa’s progress. This has occurred because Uganda/African elites are intellectually lazy, do not understand themselves, and find it difficult to comprehend their cultural values for answers to their developmental challenges. Where they are supposed to refine cultural issues such as human sacrifices, they are found wanting. Where they are supposed to appropriate the enabling aspects of the culture for progress, they cannot think through.
Dabblers will rather tell you human sacrifices will bring “progress.” That’s wealth and power. What sort of “progress”? If human sacrifices could bring progress, then the elites and their funky associates, with their egomaniacal Big Men swaggers, can grab one million of Africa’s one billion people, mass sacrifice them with juju rituals, and hoo la la, Africa will be the most developed place on earth – with fantastic thinking and reasoning, long life expectancies, superb sanitation and health, sound education, free food and drinks, greater peace, and so on.
The twisted African Big Men involved in human sacrifices see human rights, the rule of law, freedoms, human dignity and enlightenment as not progress. They are allergic to such human advancement; and that make them demean their victims. The children killed for traditional juju rituals are seen as sub-human. But ironically their blood are deemed powerful enough potent to bring power (an African Big Man’s obsession). What a contradiction!
Despite the human sacrifices, Africa is still the poorest region in the world. We talk about this in an age of rising enlightenment, science and technological feats. The attempts by African Big Men to engage in human sacrifices reveal their inability to think well. As key appropriators of this primordial craft, they are still stuck in cavernously dark primeval practices that are counter-productive. This has muddled the African Big Men’s thinking, the notorious “African mentality” unfathomably at work.
Some important part of the African elites’ mind has gone into perennial denial. It shrinks back the African progress. It makes Africa at the mercy of dark forcing. How does a society deal with its leaders who think of killing children for rituals? How can such leaders think well and deal with very challenging developmental issues that need higher thoughts? If the leaders are engaged in murdering children for power, how can they have feelings for the poor, the hungry, the weak, and the marginalized? The leaders loose empathy, a key basis for progress, and for that, they also loose compassion for Africans.
In such a heartless atmosphere, the African Big Men look down upon ordinary Africans; they do not really care about them! Normal Africans are thought of as lambs that can be easily slaughtered for rituals. The African Big Men’s human sacrifices began as an extravagance and ends as a filthy necessity, glued to the murdering of children, other people’s children, and not their children.
In ritually sacrificing Africans, the rot in the African Big Men’s private minds eat away at their public responsibilities. They become ritual murderers for nothing. How can you have leaders who whose private thoughts are dark, evil? If real development is measured by the nature of private thoughts of a society’s leaders, then do not be surprised by what you see in Africa’s development terrain. The leaders’ thoughts aren’t good. The thinking is destructive.
Liberia President Samuel Doe was known to engage in human sacrifices; he projected such dim thinking unto the entire Liberia society, and boom!!! Doe blew Liberia into pieces. Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Macias Nguema was engaged in human sacrifices of all sorts including burying some of his victims alive with juju rituals. Macias used the knowledge of witchcraft he inherited from his sorcerer father and built a huge collection of human skulls (from the people he has killed) at his farmhouse. Marcia paralyzed his country as a result.
In all these the average African will tell you that surely retribution will occur, and the fate of the African Big Man involved in human sacrifices is disastrous. Doe was short, stripped naked in public, his ears cut off and then brutalized to death, and his dead body thrown into an unmarked grave. Marcia was killed by firing squad.
The African Big Men’s mentality of human sacrifices prevails in zones. Almost all the zones are inhuman. Marcias and Doe were insane. The African Big Men addicted to human sacrifices find it difficult to extricate themselves from. Once involved, there is no turning back. In some parts of Africa, such as Uganda, this has become a mania, driven more by the primitive attempts to play supernatural being. In engaging in human sacrifices for the quick fix of their problems, the African Big Man want to live a painless life, where all the good stuffs in life are automatically brought by the blood of the children he has ritually sacrificed.
At the centre of the human sacrifices is the clash between irrationality and rationality. The irrational forces are ancient and think more with the superstition part of their brain. The rational forces think more with the objective part of their brain. The “irrationalists,” who look at human sacrifice from within the soul of the African culture, are in the majority. The “rationalists” (or the realists), who gawk at human sacrifices within high morality, humanity, the criminal justice system and locate human sacrifices in the conditions of peoples’ lives, are in minority. The irrational forces win because they have power. As the Uganda human sacrifices issues revealed, African Big Men arm-twist the objectivists (the police, the criminal justice system), hoodwink the justice system and terribly weaken the prosecuting of the perpetrators of human sacrifices to serve as a deterrent to others.
The anti-dote to Africa’s worrying human sacrifices is greater democracy! With its tenets such as the rule of law, human rights, social justice, freedoms, and liberty, democracy will throw greater light into the dark recesses of the African culture and free the African from the predatory Big Man.
It is encouraging to hear these days the constant talks about research and development (R&D) in Ghana’s/Africa’s progress. Propositions of setting up high-level research and training institutes in crucial fields such as green technology, crop improvement, tropical medicine, deforestation, water supply and desertification are becoming daily issues not only in Ghana but in one part of Africa or another.
At issue aren’t the arguments that part of African states’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) be given to R&D but also how the mass media should appropriately communicate the R&D results to Ghanaians/Africans. You watch CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta or read Time magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger and you get the message. Eugene H. Amonoo-Neizer, chair of Ghana’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), says Accra should set aside a percentage of its GDP for R&D. The Ghana mass media is yet to communicate to Ghanaians and Africans how the CSIR’s intercession in the shea butter industry has enhanced the industry so good that it is now growing faster and may beat Ghana’s ancient major cash crop cocoa.
The initial point is how African governments will think indisputably about R&Ds in their development processes, finance them and appropriate the results for development. African governments need not be told about R&D, the elites know the benefits all too well. In 2005, African Ministers of Science and Technology approved the ambitious Consolidated Plan of Action for Africa’s Science and Technology (CPA, 2008-2013) to beef up the wobbly African science and technology capacity.
Amonoo-Neizer is merely reminding African governments that it is an African Union’s protocol they signed which mandated them to set aside one per cent of their GDP to R&D. Rather, most African governments are concerned with excessive spending on defence. As Africa’s democracy deepens, critical questions are being asked openly about development indicators, most of which qualities are better shaped by R&D. Why are Africans’ life expectancies so low and so many people dying in their 50s? Why are infant mortalities so bad? Why do people think death is caused by witchcraft? Despite abundant water, why are Africans thirsty?
Despite these, the small R&D outcomes aren’t communicated to Africans. Though Ghanaians are one of the leading producers of cocoa, it was only recently that they got to know about the health benefits of cocoa. The Western world, where R&D is high and backed by superb health communications networks such as United States’ produced The Doctors and Dr. Oz, had known about cocoa’s health benefits years before Ghanaians, and they consume cocoa (and use it for other products) more than Ghanaians.
Olugbemiro Jegede, secretary general of the Association of African Universities, in Accra, grumble about the dearth of communications between researchers and the mass media to Africans. “Africa can only develop and tell the world about its research capacity if the media put out put relevant information … The gap between the public and research continues to widen because journalists are not bridging that gap. Africa needs to transform to ensure that whatever we are spending on research translates into results.”
In the absence of poor R&D and inadequate communications, certain cultural inhibitions that need scientific interpretations have been entangling Africans’ advancement continue to grow, and entrapping the supposedly highly educated. In the year 2011, backed by solid scientific research, Ghanaians/Africans should have less to do with issues of witchcraft, false prophets, demons and evil spirits. In 2011, it is still the irrational ancient way, and more so.
Olugbemiro Jegede and Eugene Amonoo-Neizer reveal Africans attempt to raise their R&D profiles regardless of challenges such as lack of funding. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) acknowledges Africans’ new interest in R&D. “A growing number of African countries have realized that, without investment in science and technology, the continent will remain on the sidelines of the global economy and will find it difficult to bring an end to extreme poverty.”
UNESCO sees Africa’s R&D hopeful signs from the fact that recently several African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Burkina Faso have enacted laws supporting biotechnology and bioscience researches.“In 2008, 14 countries (Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Senegal, Swaziland, Togo, Zimbabwe and Zambia) called on UNESCO to help review their science policy. And, since 2005, six new science academies have been set up in Mozambique, Sudan, Mauritius, Morocco, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, compared to just nine in the entire period from 1902 to 2004,” UNESCO reports.
As Eugene Amonoo-Neizer said, UNESCO has the same opinion that the development of Africa’s science and technology sector faces a number of challenges, starting with budgetary constraints. “Research and development (R&D) attracts considerably less public investment in sub-Saharan Africa than defence, education or health. The proportion of GDP devoted to R&D averages about 0.3% on the continent, seven times less than that spent by industrialized countries on this sector.”
But Eugene Amonoo-Neizer should have used his forum at the Germany-funded Savannah Agricultural Research Institute, in Ghana’s Northern Region, to move beyond African governments’ low funding of R&D. UNESCO will do that for Eugene Amonoo-Neize: “Brain drain, fostered by the absence of measures to promote research and innovation, the gaps in legislation to protect intellectual property and the low wages earned by scientists, constitutes a major concern. In 2009, at least a third of African scientists or those with engineering degrees were living and working in developed countries. The absence of measures to encourage innovation, gaps in the legislation regarding intellectual property rights and low salaries paid to researchers have all contributed to the brain drain.”
In the efforts to resolve these barriers, the battle for the soul of Africa’s research and development will be waged by “rendering science more attractive to pupils in secondary schools and to students.” And yes, a good dose of international scientific cooperation to keep the emerging African scientific soul warm.
The mass failure of Junior High School students at this year’s national examination, a worsening trend over the past couple of years, has sent educationists, parents, the mass media and Accra scrambling for answers. Is it the quality of teachers? Is it lack of educational material? Is it the environment? Is it the nature of the education structure that is frequently ruffled by ruling political parties? Is it the content of the curriculum? Are the education policies realistic? Is it the lack of the broader use of Ghanaian languages? Is it lack of deeper attention to educational issues?
The long-running education crisis reveals that after years of tussles to construct education content that actually reflects its Ghanaian/African appendages in relation to global linkages, there are still worrying schisms within the education system that undermine Ghana’s core progress. The science sector of the education system is still feeble. Research and Development (R&D) is nothing to write home about. Continue reading “Harmonizing the Unrealistic Education System”
Democracy or Prosperity, Which Comes First for Africa?
As Africa’s democracy gradually evolves, the arguments are whether Africa should concentrate on creating prosperity first and then grow its democracy later or build up its democracy first and then use it to develop its prosperity. This thinking has come about because of the on-going democratic revolutions occurring in Africa, in places such as Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and multi-party democratic elections after elections have become recurring rituals.
Despite its global hypothesis, in the African context, the democracy-or-prosperity arguments wheel around Africa’s largely enviably untapped wealth and the continent’s painful dark political history where totalitarianism of all brands had been the order of the day. So whether prosperity first, democracy second, or the other way around will be determined by Africa’s political history in the past 50 years.
In most parts of Africa independence from colonial rule saw authoritarian one-party-systems and military juntas dominating the political scene. The erroneous thinking, as Kofi Abrefa Busia, a former Prime Minister of Ghana, explained, was that democracy was thought to be “alien” to “Africans thought and way of life,” and that the only language Africans understands is despotism that emanates from the African culture. As Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah witnessed, the argument was that authoritarian one-party system will bring rapid prosperity by controlling all dissent and freedoms.
Still, as military juntas in Southeast Asia such as South Korea or South America such as Brazil had done, the thinking was that Africa’s then mushrooming military juntas such as Uganda under Gen. Idi Amin will either be able to use their military discipline for either speedy advancement or laid the foundation for swift progress. In all this, the so-called rapid prosperity didn’t happen – Africa became more backward materially than before despite it’s immensely endowed human and natural wealth. Rather, the military juntas and the one-party systems left in its wake muddled thinking, oppression, deaths, confusion, state paralysis and state collapse, civil wars, endemic corruptions, tribalism, and constant fear and threats.
In Libya, a key face of Africa’s current democratic revolution, despite is immense oil wealth with a population of only 6.6 million; its problem is that for 42 years it has been despotically rule by Muarmmar Gaddafi. Despite having per capita income of about US$13,000, average life expectancy of 77 years, UN Human Development Index at 53th position out of 170 countries graded (high at 2010 rankings) and literacy rate of about 90 percent, the schisms between democracy and prosperity saw a civil war for democracy and freedoms break out in the face of dictatorial practices where freedoms were brutally suppressed.
On the other hand, Botswana, Africa’s longest democracy star, has about a third of Libya’s population, and a little better than Libya’s per capita income (at US$15,489). Botswana’s UN Human Development Index is at the 98th position (medium at 2010 rankings). But Botswana has been able to balance democracy and prosperity ever since it got independence from Britain in 1966 and its people enjoy greater peace, freedoms and democratic tenets for the past 44 years under the long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party. Unlike Libya, Botswana’s democracy has come with it sound accountability and transparency. Transparency International reports that Botswana is the least corrupt country in Africa. In the course of the Libyan democratic revolution, an anti-corruption worker who spoke to Transparency International’s Arab branch said, “It wasn’t safe to fight corruption. If you opposed the government, you would disappear. We were careful. But now we are ready to work.”
The lesson from the Libyan and other African states’ perturbations is that when a country is prosperous its people want more freedoms. Libya had been undemocratic for the past 42 years. Till the democratic revolution, Libya had put economic development first for prosperity but missed out in opening the democratic field (as South Korea, Chile and Taiwan did) and saw Gaddafi blew its authoritarian regime into pieces. Most Africans states, after gaining independence from European colonial rule had put democracy ahead of economic development but didn’t prosper and went back to despotism that sent most into turbulence.
Botswana and Mauritius’ experiences teach that there have to be skillful grafting of prosperity and democracy if holistic advancement is to take place without recourse to dictatorships. Botswana and Mauritius show that African governments who put democracy ahead of economic development do not slip back into tyranny. The 2009 Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance, limited to sub-Sahara Africa, measures the health of African governance practices using different variables. The Index’s 2009 report revealed that Mauritius has the highest rank of “participation and human rights” and “sustainable economic opportunity.” With a per capita income of US$14,097, Mauritius came second in the “rule of law.” In the UN Human Development Index, Mauritius ranked 72nd out of 170 countries measured (high in the 2010 rankings).
The African understanding indicates that democracy and prosperity should be simultaneously affixed in the proposition for Africa’s sustainable progress. The Botswana and Mauritius’ successful models that are gradually been replicated Africa-wide is captured in The Prospects for Democracy in Africa (1961) by Kofi Abrefa Busia when he asked: “The question which we cannot avoid asking is whether economic development and nation building must mean authoritarianism and denial of freedom. Is it true that roads, railways, houses, harbours, factories and the like can only be quickly built under dictatorial forms of government?”
Ghanaians are enjoying their 19-year-old democracy. Why not! They have spent most of their 54-year statehood in autocratic one-party systems and dictatorial military juntas.
Freedoms, a very critical indicator of their democracy, are breaking out everywhere, wheeling the democratic tenets. One will never believe that this was a country where at some time people were gloomy, couldn’t express themselves openly for fear of either being killed, disappearing or imprisoned, and developed a disease aptly called “the culture of silence.”
But Ghanaians needn’t have gone through 35 years of nauseating undemocratic practices. Come to think of it, the excruciating contours were unnecessary. It doesn’t matter the political challenges along the path of statehood, democracy informed by Ghanaians’ cultural values should have directed the political system. From scratch, the Ghana state was founded on democracy. Though there are slight differences, the 100 ethnic groups that formed Ghana are traditionally democratic. The reminder is that whether Western liberal democracy or African traditional democracy, the erroneous view have been that Africans aren’t democratic by nature but inclined to authoritarianism. And that democracy planted in Africa from the Western world wouldn’t work.
Kofi Abrefa Busia, An academic and former Prime Minister of Ghana
Kofi Abrefa Busia, a trained sociologist, academic and Prime Minister of Ghana from October 1, 1969 to January 13, 1972, not only rejected such views of prospects for African democracy back in 1961 when most Africa was embroiled in political turbulence but Busia becomes a rich stimulant, an excellent fertilizer for Ghana’s and Africa’s democracies. The African democratic fruition has also seen the imperative calls for Africans to situate their democracy in their cultural values. Rationally, US President Barack Obama has told Africans that when he visited Ghana in July 2009.
Despite some painful contours in Ghana’s political terrain, Busia believed unwavering that there are prospects for democracy in Africa. Like all democracies, it needs to be worked out. As Botswana has done from within African traditional values. The 44-year-old Botswana democracy that mixes Western liberal democratic ideals with Botswana cultural values makes Busia an African democracy realist way before the current thriving democratic atmosphere with its attendant democratic revolutions.
In The Prospects For Democracy In Africa, Busia agreed that coup d’etats, civil wars, political paralysis, tribalism, traditional tyranny (otherwise called the Big Man syndrome) and endemic corruption aren’t forecasts for democracy not to be grown in Africa. Rather democracy, with its accountability and decentralization, could be appropriated for democratic growth and progress. Busia thought that while such views are correct, such views should also look at the human possibility of the African – the possibility to correct himself or herself and be faithful in his or her democratic convictions.
This is seen against the notion that the only language the political African understands is authoritarianism. Busia strongly dismissed this. “Such hope would need to be firmly founded on faith: faith is the strength, the appeal and the universality of the values of democracy,” Busia said in London, UK on 4th January 1961, on the 18th Christmas Holiday Lectures and Discussions for Tomorrow’s Citizens, organized by The Council for Education in World Citizenship.
Unlike Botswana, either in Busia’s Ghana or other African states, most African leaders then had little faith and conviction in democracy. That’s the human aspects of the African to live a fruitful democratic life, as most African states are enjoying now, wasn’t looked at. Faith and conviction in democracy was either weak or nil. So crisis after crisis loomed either in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Idi Amin’s Uganda or Amilcar Cabral’s Guinea Bissau. Busia himself became a victim of such predicament, when Col. Kutu Acheampong overthrew him in 13 January 1972. For years, under Ghana’s then authoritarian systems, Busia lived mostly in exile and died in exile in Oxford, UK. But was buried in a democratic Ghana.
The lack of faith and conviction in democracy in Africa, that didn’t consider the African veracities, means not understanding the democratic principles within Africans’ traditional values that should be tapped for greater democracy. Despite the extremely complicated nature of the insurgent-ridden African Great Lakes Region, that has come from undemocratic actions, greater democracy faithfully brewed from within African traditional values are the sure card to play. This makes the conviction for democracy stronger and not feeble, as has been the case. Busia was aware of this when he stated that, “The realization that the tender plant of parliamentary democracy planted on the African soil by Colonial powers is by no means robust, has caused apologists to offer easy explanations in defence of undemocratic actions.”
Botswana and Mauritius significantly repudiate the long held notion that democracy is “alien” to “African thought and way of life” (the quotes are from Busia). For their faithful and convinced democratic practices, Botswana and Mauritius lead in sub-Sahara Africa’s development indicators. Botswana and Mauritius also confirm Busia’s view that democracy isn’t unnecessary impediment to African states’ rapid progress. Busia notes that those who opposed democracy in Africa, and called for either authoritarian one-party systems or military juntas, identified two stumbling blocks – national unity and economic development.
The national unity card is played on “narrow tribal and regional loyalties re-assert themselves,” Busia supposed. The economic development tag, Busia explains, is engaged in authoritarianism as the “need for rapid economic development. Standards of living have to be raised considerably, and in as short a time as possible, and this, it is again argued, can only be done under a strong leader and a strong centralized regime that can adopt a planned economic and social development, and impose the necessary social discipline.”
Pretty much of most early post-colonial African states, intoxicated in the debilitating authoritarianism, bought erroneously into this idea. Either in Busia’ Ghana or other African states, it didn’t work but rather plunged Africa into civil wars, widespread corruption, state paralysis, misconstruction of Africa, frightening tribalism, all kinds of leaders (some horrible such Uganda’s Idi Amin and some insane such as Equatorial Guinea’s Francisco Marcia Nguema), among others.
On the other hand, African countries like Botswana and Mauritius, that convincingly choose democracy fermented in African traditional values, reveal today the Busian vision of democratic Africa in greater peace and greater development indicators. Busia, therefore, honestly asked, based pragmatically in the African experiences and traditional values, “The question which we cannot avoid asking is whether economic development and nation building must mean authoritarianism and denial of freedom. Is it true that roads, railways, houses, harbours, factories and the like can only be quickly built under dictatorial forms of government?”
No matter where one turns to in Africa today, whether in oil rich Libya or diamond rich Sierra Leone or copper rich Zambia or cobalt rich the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Botswana and Mauritius, with their democratic practices of freedoms, social justice, the rule of law, equality, free press, decent leaders and good governance, accountability and transparency, choices, and public opinions, point inspirationally to the prospects for democracy in Africa as the best ways for Africa’s progress.
But the democracy has to be primed in African traditional values, history and experiences.
Busia was staunchly persuaded about this in 1961. “If attention is fixed on the human resources and human potentiality of Africa, the Vision of the triumph of democracy in Africa will become clearer and more challenging; that is, if there is the faith and the conviction that democracy represents the best way yet devised by man for community life, and that it is a way of life which is open to any group of men who choose and aspire towards it. Therein lies the challenge of faith which illumines the compelling Vision not only of a democratic West or a democratic Africa, but of a democratic World.”
