What ultra-nationalism in the West portends for Africa

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the East African Law Society conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 

When I got to the conference room, a plenary session on democracy was under way. An intriguing question-and-answer session then ensued, with many questioning whether Africa needed democratic or economic reforms first.

The audience pretty much looked confused on the best way Africa could realise both, and the debate was a testament that Africa is at a crossroads, more than 50 years after many states achieved independence.  

That lawyers could audaciously seek dictatorship to get Africa out of the rut was simply confusing to me. 

I thought to myself that perhaps the legal fraternity, which is now composed primarily of the Facebook generation, needed intellectual discourse with their older colleagues.

Africa is not alone in this era of the dominant internet that favours localisation and inward-looking political rhetoric at the expense of intellectualism as a basis for economic, social and political development. 

Africa, which a few years ago was becoming increasingly democratic, is witnessing the emergence of dictators and the continent’s wretched citizenry is endorsing it. Term limits mean nothing to these emerging dictatorships. 

Intellectuals on the continent are either silent or living in the comfort zones of the West.

In my view, the death of Fidel Castro in the past week and the earlier election of Trump in the United States marked the death of ideology-driven human development and the introduction of dogmatic emotional leadership, which will have far-reaching implications on nascent democratic development in Africa. 

These events illustrate why intellectualism must be at the centre of Africa’s progress.

As far-right politics, which brings to mind the Arab Spring, keep on springing up in Western capitals, tremors of an African version of machismo are beginning to emerge. 

TEA PLANTATIONS

In Cape Town, just three days ago, a young, educated Sexwale Tebello told me that he never thought that Julius Malema, the controversial leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, would one day look “normal” and attractive as a leader in Africa after the election of Trump in the United States. 

Malema has been consistent on land matters in South Africa, urging people to seize white-owned land. He believes that land would emancipate Africans.

The message has begun to resonate with ordinary folk who in the past had not taken him seriously. Failures in Jacob Zuma’s administration have exacerbated the rise of this new form of nationalism. 

This new African politics perhaps explains why President Robert Mugabe was quick to welcome Trump's election. Trump justifies what Mugabe has said and done for years, never mind that his actions impoverished his people. 

In several other African countries, the land question is a political hot potato. In Kenya, the sentiments of increasingly confident devolved leadership are getting louder. Some, as in Kericho, are demanding compensation over their occupied land now under multinational tea plantations.

In Murang’a, Laikipia, Kiambu and coastal counties, voices on land justice are getting louder as we move closer to the 2017 general election.

It is probably a matter of time before the hotheads in Uasin Gishu, Trans Nzoia, Nakuru and Trans Mara, also start their nefarious agitations on land.

Without a doubt there is a winter blizzard sweeping across Europe. From Austria to France and Sweden, ultra-nationalism is gaining, and if it persists, Africa’s version of nationalism will have great consequences. There will be no one left with the moral authority to stop its devastating effects. 

PATRIOTIC INTELLECTUALS

Africa is too vulnerable to manage the course that a land crisis may take. Whilst in the past, moralistic and constitutional ideologies from elsewhere have remotely guided the continent’s land use policies, there is no more such influence, particularly after the coming into power of racist demagogues in the West. 

Hope obviously can’t come from conflicted African leaders and intellectuals, as they have failed to rise above insular matters and transform the continent.

There is no nation in the world that has ever developed without strong input from patriotic intellectuals. With all the failures of communism, Castro’s Marxist approach to development enabled him to develop human capacity and provide healthcare for his people that rivals that of developed nations. 

Even the successful Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal policies were largely driven by the intellectualism of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. 

Unfortunately, post-independence leaders and intellectuals failed to reconstruct Africa afresh after colonialism but submissively accepted colonial hegemony that has lasted far too long. 

This is primarily the reason, after independence, we still find ourselves entangled between modernity and colonialism. 

Sentimental intellectuals throughout Africa and the diaspora worked on African emotions but failed to offer meaningful solutions to continued subjugation by vestiges of colonialism masked in form of aid. 

We allowed ourselves to be stereotyped to the extent that in the 21st century, Africans have not managed to self-define. 

SOURCE OF DISCOMFORT

The quest for political and economic freedom may be futile if we don’t prioritise social development, without which the African stereotype may never cease. 

Let me expound on this statement with a question. If somehow Africa dealt with poverty and everybody was rich, would anti-Africanness or anti-blackness cease to exist?

From the hate that some Americans have exhibited towards President Obama and many accounts from black history, Africanness is a source of discomfort to some people around the globe. 

This somehow gets into the minds of young people and erodes confidence amongst young Africans but the matter is often swept under the carpet.

Some countries have fought such prejudices and come to assert themselves on the global stage. It was not just riches and better politics; they have developed wholesomely.

Examples include Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, when a nation was crafted from virtually nothing to a functional state.

There is also Singapore, where one man, Lee Kuan Yew, took his country from a struggling third world to one of the most developed nations in the word.

It is said that if you have no idea as to where you are heading, any route will take you to God knows where. 

RETURN OF WOLE SOYINKA

No one knows what the rise of ultra-nationalism will mean in the days to come. Some have argued that they will look East. But even there, no one fully knows the agenda of Eastern nations and what role Africa is earmarked to play. 

Sometimes, it appears the only people in the world who don’t plan strategically and in their own interests are Africans. Even wild animals have the presence of mind to mark their own territory with urinary scent.

The surest way is to encourage intellectuals to start planning the course of Africa’s future, and develop good infrastructure to seamlessly link African countries to one another. 

It didn’t have to take the election of Donald Trump to get one of Africa’s iconic intellectuals, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, back to Africa. 

African intellectuals must read the signs of the times and come back to develop Mother Africa.

Reforms do not happen without articulating problems. They require extensive, informed discussion and a leadership that is focused on truly emancipating the African, from not just the political abyss and economic handicap but also social subjugation. 

Now is the time to free Africa from internal and external forces of discord.

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business. Twitter: @bantigito