Africa at war with itself

An eggshell-thin veneer of stability is holding as the East African country counts the cost after political attack dogs butchered innocent people in the aftermath of a hotly disputed presidential election observes are unanimous was undisguisedly rigged.
One and half years ago, in dramatic scenes seen on television news channels throughout the world, the insanely malevolent lapdogs murdered more than 1 500 people and displaced over 600 000.
Those murdered in this most barbaric act are largely common people from the sordid back streets in the poorest parts of Nairobi whose only possessions are their names and whose rights are the last thing anyone remembers when a system crumbles. 
The tragedy in Kenya is but one entry into the catalogue of horrific tales of political mass murders in Africa, the gigantic begging bowl where the leaders do not know how to use power with sufficient caution and people are yet to taste true freedom, democracy and the fundamental rights of Man. 
The list of those guilty of helping reduce Africa into a continent of banana republics is as long as the original snake. Mengistu Heile Mariam, a fugitive from justice and controversial guest of the Zimbabwean government for several years, Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, Emperor Bokasa, Omar Bongo, Charles Taylor, Eduardo Dos Santos, King Mswati, Kamuzu Banda, Omar al-Bashir, Theodore Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Sani Abacha, Yoweri Museveni and I could go on.
Thus African leaders are in the main as black as they are painted. I know the eccentric if enigmatic Arthur Mutambara, a politician critics say has the devil’s own luck,   recently got Messrs Museveni, Banda and Kikwete’s backs up when he alluded to this. But it is what it is. We should speak directly and frankly about our embarrassing and unpleasant situations.
Admittedly this argument has always been emotive as it is politically-charged. It is undeniable that colonialism is responsible for the plunder and rape of Africa’s riches. But with all due respect to Walter Rodney whose free and clever hand authored, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, it is contestable whether colonialism is solely to blame for the continent’s ills. Indeed, many countries in Africa are today poor, politically unstable and indeed unimportant more because of despotism than colonialism. Poignantly, the countries plunged into the darkest of their historical periods after attaining self rule.
In Kenya, government spin-doctors and image-makers quickly moved in to unashamedly trot out the old chestnut that the complete mayhem was due to opposition politicians “who will always complain that the elections were not free and fair unless their candidate wins”.
This is hardly surprising. African leaders, ironically unable to hold out without foreign aid themselves, have found scapegoats in opposition political parties, which they accuse of depending on the external factor.
Thus opposition political parties, particularly those that embody the spirit of the age, have become objects of   special hatred and virulent attacks.  
Needless to say nothing could be further from the truth than most African leaders’ ritualistic nonsense regarding the senseless orgy of killing, rape, wanton destruction and the precipitous economic decline.
For example, ethnicity is pronounced in Kenya. But the bloodbath in that country had everything to do with Mwai Kibaki’s brutal lust for political power, which so often disfigures human conscience and has brought out the worst of the continent’s charismatic leaders. Too harsh a judgment? Perhaps. But it is not altogether undeserved.
Whatever the British and the Americans whose ulterior motive is to safeguard strategic interests — as exemplified by their less than meticulous friendship with odious regimes of Somoza, Pinochet, Zia ul-Hag Ferdinand Marcos, Museveni and Gaddaffi — say about their friend Kibaki, it doesn’t change the fact that he is one of those leaders that have no regard for democracy and human rights. Such leaders stifle democratic space, denying people a platform to protest lack of basic rights and freedoms or to express their distress.
This they achieve by planting, nursing and fostering the politics of intolerance, intimidation, bullying, violent confrontation, bigotry and hatred for compromise, strong, assertive civil society and freedom of the press.  
Hypocritical poseurs who in their frenetic politicking try very hard to be what they are not, the African leaders come to power on pro-democracy tickets. But once in office they revert to type. A chameleon can only change its colours and not its habits.
A case in point is Kibaki. All that talk about re-energising democracy in Kenya, when he was contesting former president Daniel T arap Moi, was cheap. Much like the word love coming from the mouth of a whore in a spit-and-sawdust pub in Nairobi.
And when the moment of truth came, he dug his heels in.  He would have to be carried out feet first. That is the nature of a typical African leader, unaffected by conscience or consequence.
They cannot accept electoral defeat with quiet dignity; shake hands with the victors before retiring to their preposterously grandiose homes financed with the taxpayer’s money. Nelson Mandela who has since retreated to the peace of retirement was a blue rose. 
Eternally blustering about the dignity of patriotism, sovereignty and other such high-sounding principles yet stooping to the dregs of infamy, reducing their once prosperous nations to economic basket cases, the macabre African story of the leaders for whom terror is the most potent and trusted method of maintaining power gets even weirder.
To justify their tenacious hold on power the leaders speak of the strangest thing with the most perverse irony. They bizarrely claim that “people” who bear the brunt of lack of freedoms and rights, collapsing economies due to ruinous policies, waste, fraud and systematic corruption “want me to stay on”! 
We have heard a cacophony of this profoundly disturbing chorus from a raft of African leaders as they try to unashamedly scrap presidential term limits. Niger’s tin pot dictator, Mamadou Tandja is the latest to add his voice to this highfalutin nonsense.
Suffice it to say no piece of political rhetoric was more meaningless and empty.
How do people who don’t have two nickels to rub together clamour for the architect of their severe impoverishment and misery to remain in power?
Could there be worse political sadomasochism?
– Sunsleey Chamunorwa is the Group Editor-in-Chief of Modus Publications.