Niger and the burden of democracy in Africa

That President Mamadou Tandja of Niger has succeeded in destroying all democratic institutions in his country for his selfish ambition to rule the West African nation till eternity is no longer news. What is news however was the effort of AU and ECOWAS in trying to stop him. ECOWAS or AU could have stopped him long ago in order to avoid plunging the country into chaos and political crises. However, due to what analysts see as the moral burden of legitimacy hanging on almost all the leaders in the West African sub-region and the continent in general, most of them kept quite. To me the only leader that has the moral authority to talk to him or challenge this illegal move in ECOWAS is the Ghanaian President, Professor John Atta Mills, who the whole world acknowledged came to power through free and fair election.
Tandja felt that since majority of his counterparts came to power through either fraudulent elections or imposed themselves on their people through military coup, nobody can lecture them on democracy. Tandja, who came to power ten years ago was to vacate office in four months time as his legal tenure expires in December, but decided to extend his tenure first by dissolving the parliament and later dismissing the country’s constitutional court. He went further to ridicule democratic tenets by organising a referendum described by civil society groups in the country as a sham, to seek the opinions of Nigeriens to allow him stay in office beyond the stipulated time of two tenures of five years each.
In Africa, a continent that is used to the power longevity of its leaders in office and where acts of political bullies are always non-events and political attitudes are more compliant and dictators come at a dime a dozen, Tandja’s story is one of many. From Egypt, Tunisia, Uganda, to the almighty Robert Mugabe to Ghaddafi, the present AU President – we have leaders who spent more than twenty years ruling their own countries, and who have no intention to vacate office. So Tandja is no fool, he knows that no leader in the continent can challenge his tenure elongation since majority of them are guilty of the same offence. Who do you think in the AU or ECOWAS has the moral authority to do so? Even those leaders that can speak out for instance, like the Ghanaian president, in ECOWAS or South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, who has a Mugabe in his neighbourhood, on whose support are they going to rely upon? Is it from Umar Hassan Albashir, Mubarak, or Mugabe? Or is it from Museveni?
Africa’s democratic experience is one characterised by leaders whose major take in the process is subversion of people’s will. A continent ravaged by AIDS, overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities, drought, war, and war refugees, the continent’s problems were compounded over the years by greedy, selfish and visionless leaders whose main preoccupation is to amass stupendous wealth which even their 6th generation of lineage cannot spend . These are leaders who have turned their nations into their handbags and believe that their nations can not and should not do without them. In the process they turned their citizens into slaves, beggars and paupers denying them their basic rights of decent living as human beings. In some countries even the rights to choose leaders in election is not allowed, for instance Ethiopia, while in others elections are won before they are even conducted like the charade we have seen in Nigeria in 2003 and 2007! Constitutions are tampered with at will. Some have even groomed their sons to take over if there is an emergency or if they die. We have them in Egypt, Cameroun, Togo, Libya, Guinea, etc, not to mention absolute monarchies like Swaziland and Lesotho.
Tandja’s decision to manipulate necessary provisions of the country’s constitution to suit his purpose and actualise his vaulting ambition is not a new phenomenon in African politics; the only difference is the fact that nobody expected that from him. He has disappointed many of his admirers and draws the political progress of his country backward. The relative stability enjoyed by the country in the last decade has been fractured by Tandja’s actions and this constitutes a negative signal for democracy and the stability of this poverty ravaged country. With a history of military take-overs, nobody can rule out this possibility, as the military can use the present disturbances in the polity; arrest of opposition politicians, journalists and civil society groups, as a convenient excuse to take over.
But what is clear from the political crises in Niger is the fact that Africa is yet to come to terms with the advances achieved in other continents in the new millennium. While leaders in Europe, America and even Asia are guided in their leadership by service to their countries, developing new ideas, intelligent vision that can enable them to connect to their people, in Africa the opposite is the case. Everywhere the story is the same – of poor leadership, corruption, election rigging and intolerance of the opposition. Tandja and his sit-tight colleagues in other part of the continent are a disappointment. The challenge here is for civil society groups, democrats and journalist in African to stand up against these leaders who did not see their destinies as tied up with that of their fellow Africans.
Democracy, as it is now has become a burden to Africa and Africans. Our democratic development and our hopes of joining the league of free societies, where citizens elect their leaders who can rule according to rule of law is being impeded by sit-tight rulers like Tandja Mammadou and his friends. This will continue for a long time to come in Africa, because of hypocrisy from the Western countries in addressing Africa’s problems. Their sole interest in the continent is to have leaders that they can continue to use to milk the continent’s resources dry. They will continue to support them as long as they can get cheap energy for their industries and in return arm rebel groups to destabilise the continent.