It’s a mystery: Africans can’t shoot Olympic arrows!

It is still early days in the Olympics and – how shall we put it? – Africa’s performance in the Games is still “young”.

When I last checked, no African country had won a gold yet. The highest placed country from the continent was Zimbabwe, with three silvers.

Algeria had one bronze. And Togo one. Nothing surprising there, as we are still going through the sports where Africa has no pedigree – gymnastics, rowing, cycling, weight-lifting, archery, fencing, equestrian events, and so forth.

When it comes to track events, the story will change.

Kenya, Ethiopia and Morocco will clean out most of the middle- and long-distance running events, and climb into the top half of the medals tally.

The middle classes in Africa don’t produce great sportsmen and women, so most people from working and peasant backgrounds who cannot afford to participate in any sports where you need to join a club dominate sports.

So we excel in football, which young Africans master by kicking home-made fibre balls in the village square.

Excellence in running says something about our politics.

We are always running – running away from the anti-riot police; running away from thieves; women constantly running away from rapists; fleeing armed conflict or persecution and ending up as refugees in neighbouring countries and exiles in faraway lands.

And daily, people flee the poverty of the rural areas for the deceptive lights of the cities.

You would have thought we would be good at weight-lifting. Wrong. Too many people are going hungry in Africa, so, rightly, it would not have been proper to squander food on a few fellows so they can go lift weights in Beijing.

What puzzles me most is that Africa doesn’t dominate archery. Definitely, no other continent uses bows and arrows for primary purposes as much as Africa.

In many African cities, you meet hundreds of security guards armed with bows and arrows going to protect the homes of the well-off members of society.

And bows and arrows are still used as weapons in conflicts, the way they were used in other parts of the world in ancient times.

Take the post-election violence in Kenya early this year.

In the Rift Valley, arrows were deployed to deadly effect. It is a mystery that from all these security guards and arrow warriors, this continent can’t find a single man or woman to go to the Olympics and claim gold.

Zimbabwe, which is Africa’s best performer at this point, owes its silvers mostly to its white citizens, ironically special targets of Robert Mugabe’s repression.

Meanwhile, following Zimbabwe’s recent farcical elections in which Mugabe made it impossible for his main rival, Morgan Tsivangrai, to run against him in the second round, the long-suffering country has gone to hell and even Comrade Bob has been forced to negotiate a power-sharing deal.

I read in the papers that by the end of this month, inflation in Zimbabwe will be the highest it has ever been since economists started measuring it anywhere in the world – 5,000,000 per cent!

Those who saw photos of Mugabe at the talks this week, will have realised that he has kept to form. It would seem one of the first things he did was to order a stylist to give him a youthful look.

When Zimbabwe was lurching toward the election, the opposition threatened Mugabe with a “Kenya option” (violent election protests) if, as he eventually did, he rigged the polls.

The protests didn’t happen, but Zimbabwe is still into the second aspect of the Kenya option – negotiating a power-sharing deal. But the outcome is unlikely to be anywhere near Kenya’s Grand Coalition.

In Kenya, President Kibaki is a last-term president, so agreeing to a power-sharing deal was easier because he wasn’t going to stand again at the next election, and the opposition was willing to bid their time.

Zimbabwe has no presidential term limits, and there is no clear exit strategy from power for Mugabe.

Secondly, Zanu-PF came to power as a liberation movement.

Africa has no single example where a leader and a party that came to power through an armed struggle have voluntarily relinquished power after an election defeat, or shared it. The only imperfect example was Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa.

Former liberation movements come to power with an overweening sense of entitlement and righteousness that makes it nearly impossible for them to come to terms with the fact that they have outlived their relevance.

Thirdly, unlike Kenya, there is almost nothing to share in Zimbabwe except incredible problems.

For ODM and Raila Odinga as prime minister, there was a functioning economy to supervise. They didn’t have to deal with 5 million per cent inflation.

In Kenya, one could see the case for Kibaki remaining president. In Zimbabwe, all one sees is a case for why Mugabe should leave.