THIS week the African Union (AU) holds what it calls the 23rd ordinary session of the AU assembly. That’s a mouthful for a meeting where the continent’s ageing and tired Old Boys’ Club is expected to meet to make grand statements about moving Africa forward, while doing the opposite in practice. It is also notable that the gathering takes place in Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich but poverty-stricken country whose president has been in power since before 67% of the entire South African population was born. He is notorious for his elastic attitude to human rights but, just as the AU’s predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity, did for decades, this hardly raises an eyebrow among its member countries. The meeting takes place against the backdrop of growing insecurity experienced by the citizens of Africa, who remain among the most abused and exploited on the planet. Much of this is due to the actions and collusive silence of some of the same men who will occupy the summit venue in Malabo and ensure that their peers are protected from scrutiny. In Egypt, the political opposition in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood is being persecuted in sham trials, and death sentences are meted out with reckless abandon to hundreds of activists by a discredited judiciary seemingly eager to please the government. Earlier this week, three journalists from satellite TV news station Al Jazeera were given lengthy jail terms, essentially for doing their jobs. Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was recently elected in a discredited poll, will not be in Malabo following Egypt’s suspension from the AU. His peers must be anxious to welcome him back into the fold and continue with business as usual. He has been invited to the September summit in Burkina Faso. In parts of northern Nigeria, women and girl children are living in terror of Boko Haram, a brutal terrorist movement that President Goodluck Jonathan’s government is simply unable to stop. Nigerians have been reduced to asking for foreign help on the matter while their hapless president maintains a stunning silence on the country’s biggest crisis in decades. On the east coast of the continent, the suffering of Somalians has come to be accepted as normal, while an increasing number of Kenyans are living in constant fear of being shot in cold blood or blown to pieces by an enemy their government, like Nigeria’s, seems incapable of stopping. Like their fellow Africans elsewhere, their outrage will soon give way to resignation and an acceptance that this is their lot in life. The places where Africans are insecure either due to poor, ineffectual leadership or outright abuse from the same are too many to list in full here. What matters most is the meaning of this picture, and to ask what the impact of its continued existence means for the so-called African agenda. Firstly, it is patently clear that as a collective, Africa’s political leaders do not respect or care about the continent’s ordinary people enough to hold each other to account. The lack of outrage at the brazen persecution of the Egyptian people for their political beliefs is testimony to this. It seems that the beating, jailing and restriction of Africans is acceptable as long as it is done by their own people, and not by colonisers. The AU’s outrage is more likely to be sparked by the appearance of one of their number at the International Criminal Court than by hundreds of political prisoners being sentenced to death on trumped-up charges. It is this warped morality that has ensured reactionary political noise-makers across the continent have failed at the core task of redefining a sociopolitical ethos that is a radical and progressive departure from the abuse of colonialism. It is precisely why Ethiopia is able to jail journalists such as Eskinder Nega without consequence, and why many other countries routinely persecute reporters without general social outrage. The lengthy statement that will come out of the Malabo gathering will be hot air, just as it always has been.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 21:08:47 +0000
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