“The military formations, the uniforms, the starch, the saluting aides-de-camp, the parade-ground precision might look, at last, like the decisiveness of purpose that Africa needs in its leadership. They camouflage a regimented sterility of ideas and social policy”Mali, once a poster nation for orderly and qualitative elections, has in the last two years become the butt of global derision and pungent jokes on account of anti-democratic behaviour.
In order to prevent the fulfilment of an earlier promise to do a handover early this year, the junta leader announced recently that a new transition would take place presided over, of course, by him and would gulp up an interval of anything between 6 months and 5 years. In other words, the supervision of a so-called legendary legerdemain for prolonging the rule of the junta beyond what is acceptable to men and women of good conscience.
“Transition Without End,” many will recall, is an influential book on the transition programme, so-called, of former Military President, General Ibrahim Babangida , who crafted a slow-motion transition agenda, that lasted eight years only to annul the presidential election which was its climax. This bag of tricks plunged the country into crisis and the infamous dictatorship of former Military Head of State, Sanni Abacha, unusual in its brutality and persecution of democratic activists.
To be sure, the ECOWAS leaders, the majority of them at any rate, have their own moral and legitimacy questions to answer. Questions such as the credibility of elections held in their own countries, the disconnect between them and the people, the worsening misery of the citizens they claim to govern and the reduction of polling to what is jocularly referred to as “holding elections for the Americans to notice.
It should be recalled that West Africa, indeed the whole continent, can ill afford the contagion of coups which the Malian example, if allowed to succeed, can spark. As martyred South African journalist, Ruth First, in the opening quote informed, there is much superficiality and mediocrity in the military experiment which was once thought by some to be the solution to Africa’s problems. Obviously, coup after coup, not counting counter-coups, have failed to change Africa’s fortunes.
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