Who takes responsibility for human rights abuses, insecurity, political instability, and poor economic performance in Africa? Well, your guess is as good as mine – nobody. Actually, the blame is being tossed around like a ball between African governments and their counterparts in the global South, and leaders of major countries in the North. Peter Uvin has put the blame for violence and insecurity in Africa squarely on international donor agencies with focus on the Rwandan genocide, as Nic Cheeseman and Jonathan Fisher have done in their study of conflicts in Ethiopia and Somalia. Peter Lewis takes a comparative approach on the issue, weighing the impact of regime type on economic performance. He argues that “although democracy appears to yield economic benefits over time, the transition to democracy has not fostered dynamic economies or substantial improvements in welfare in most of Africa.” The reason, as he sees it, is due to the following domestic (and international) factors: strong presidential regimes, dominance of single parties or elite cohort, maintenance of control through extended patron-client networks, weak formal institutions, unregulated elite discretion over resources, and a propensity for consumption rather than investment. The international dimension of the problem centers around limited policy choices for African regimes, limited access to overseas markets, and excessive bureaucracy of aid conditionalities. Similarly, economists, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson had called attention to institutional weakness as the major factor driving underdevelopment in Africa and accentuating global economic inequality.
Also, Bonny Ibhawoh has horned in on the need to revisit the rhetoric of the Right to Development (DRD) as it is used by African and Western leaders to pursue domestic and international agenda. Between the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1979 United Nations Resolution which certified that the right to development was human right, leaders in both the global North and South have deployed the principle as it relates to the New International Economic Order (NIEO) to legitimize political and social agenda, and to further statist policies against human-interest goals. Ibhawoh argues that within these frameworks, the right to development has mainly been advanced to rationalize and justify national priorities as well as legitimize statist political and economic agenda using the language of rights. In this sense, it is articulated not so much as a claim against the developed West, but as a means of maintaining the status quo and to counter domestic and international pressures for political liberalization.
While this political and ideological jockeying continue, Africa remains the poorest continent in the world amidst stupendous mineral, human, and material resources. As I write this blog post, the current Nigerian government under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is trying 67 children aged 10 to 14 years old for treason! The kids were arrested on August 1, 2024, during the nationwide protest against economic hardship and bad governance. They have spent over 90 days at the Kuje maximum security prison in the country’s capital, Abuja. During their arraignment at the Kuje Magistrate Court on November 1, the visibly malnourished children collapsed due to severe hunger, lack of medical attention, fear, and exhaustion. In spite of a nationwide outrage and few political statements from opposition figures in the country, not much has been done to secure the release of the minors from political incarceration. The presiding judge (Obiora Egwuatu) slammed the children with a bail of 10 million naira (around 10,000 dollars) each with two sureties worth about the same amount. As the fate of these frightened little kids remain in the balance, so are the fate of over 200 million Nigerians and many others across Africa who experience the daily enactment of unbridled official corruption, civil rights violations, insecurity, and economic downturn.
There is a common tendency to blame authoritarian regimes in Africa on colonial political structures. Cheeseman and Fisher outline some of the grey areas in this direction to include authoritarian inheritance from colonial rule, “Big Men” politics, weak internal democratic institutions, political leadership with stronger ethnic or linguistic loyalties over national interest, and the creation of geographically large states which allowed postcolonial leaders to wield unprecedented power over a diverse group of communities. However, while these facts are reflective of Africa’s colonial experience, they do not account for the personal idiosyncrasies of African leaders. A structural, top-down explanation for a deep-seated problem which continues to endanger millions of people across Africa does little to account for instances where African leaders have demonstrated charismatic leadership and political accountability as Nelson Mandela did in the case of South Africa. Should we continue to toss the blame around or is it time to wake up and challenge the sheer personal greed, insentivity, and depravity of the various individuals occupying sensitive political positions across Africa?
Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash
