[Be forewarned; this is extremely lengthy.]
merHaba Saleh from Q8. I am delighted that you've joined our debate on
Museveni, though I am a little disappointed that you have sided with
your moKsi from CA:-(
Sal, I appreciate your skill as a debater, but we have to stop
prefacing our post with a declaration of praise for each other, lest
other Dehaiers start believing that we are two sides of the same coin
and accuse us of forming a mutual admiration society in Dehai:-) I see
from your rebuttal of September 15 [Re. The Press, Democracy & More
Musevini] that my task of rescuing you from wishy-washy Western
liberalism -- a far worse condition than buying an African "lemon"-- is
not going to be an easy one:-)
For now, I will bypass commenting on your points about the Western press
and Pan-Africanism (full subjects for debate by themselves), and focus
instead on Museveni. The tragedy of Africa from 1960 to 1990 (the
post-colonial period) was not because, as you put it, we had "unhealthy
individuals" per se. In the first place, "unhealthy individuals" do not
grow in a vacuum. "Unhealthy Individuals" are a product representative
of "unhealthy [elite] groups" who perpetuated the unhealthy and
autocratic colonial system rather than replace it by a democratic
African system of governance at independence. Here I will digress a bit
from the point of discussion and quote extensively the eloquent and
trustworthy defender of Africa, the historian Basil Davidson, from his
latest book THE SEARCH FOR AFRICA (Random House, 1994) in order to frame
the discussion within proper background and context. For those who may
not be familiar with Basil Davidson, he is considered as "the most
effective popularizer of African history and archaeology outside Africa,
and certainly the one best trusted in Black Africa itself." Dehaiers
should also note that Davidson has been a consistent supporter of the
Eritrean struggle since the 70s. I am quoting here from the section of
his book titled "Debates" from pp. 249-251:
-----------begin Davidson quote----------------
I have called this new alienation [by the citizenry of the African
states] "the curse of the nation-state," meaning by this the curse of
the nation-state which was formed, and has derived out of, the colonial
state in Africa. … What I am insisting on here is that the postcolonial
nation-state in Africa has been derived from consequences of the English
and French revolutions of two centuries ago, even if the derivation was
sometimes indirect and only potentially specific. . . . Yet these
nation-states formed from the legacy of the colonial states, and bearing
within themselves the assumptions and structures of the imperialist era,
have lost the virtue they have claimed to posses. They have fastened a
deadweight of discouragement to every real chance of civility; all the
evidence of the 1980s, and much of the evidence of the 1970s, is there
to show this. No doubt these nation-states will survive; but if they
are to survive to good purpose, they will have to be reformed, changed
within themselves, even to the point of constitutional dismantlement and
reassembly.
This kind of thing was now being said. One talented and authoritative
African voice after another was heard to assert the same conclusion: He
or she said that the "neo-colonial' nation-state must be deprived of its
autocratic centralism in the exercise of executive power, to the benefit
of structures of democratic participation. … To some mostly distant
from Africa, this kind of advice came as unrealistic, sentimental, even
crassly utopian. Knowing little about precolonial history, or at times
nothing at all, there were critics who remained within the cliché-grip
of all those stereotypical accounts which have harped for so long about
the "vacuous barbarism" of Africa before colonial dispossession. If the
new nation-states had become derailed, then on this view they must be
told what had gone wrong with them, so as to become corralled again into
the structural pattern laid down by departing imperial powers in and
after 1960. If the pattern had been tried and had failed, it must
simply be tried again.
Yet there were African voices now beginning to be heard who did not
sound convinced. They wanted an end to tyrants and dictators of every
sort, no doubt of that; but the way to replace the tyrants would not be
to try repeating the failed policies of European decolonization. There
could be a better way.
Looking back on all this debate in 1992, the leading Nigerian economist
and reformer Adebayo Adedeji had interesting reflections to add. "So
great and pervasive has been the down-thrusting of colonial rule that
many Africans and most non-Africans have persistently denigrated the
precolonial historic achievements of the continent-its arts, customs,
beliefs, systems of government and the art of governance. Indeed, the
tragedy has been that when the opportunity came to cast aside the yoke
of colonialism, no effort was made to reassert Africa's
self-determination by replacing the inherited foreign institutions and
system of government, and the flawed European models of nation-state,
with rejuvenated and modernised indigenous African systems that the
people would easily relate to and would therefore be credible." And
Adedeji concluded: "There can be no doubt that Africa needs a new
political order which breaks the umbilical cord from its unenviable
colonial inheritance."
. . . The debate, of course continues. And this debate may already be
seen as the catalyst of new African thought in response to the crisis of
the 1980s. How this debate took shape and evolved has acquired a
historical value, to the point, even, that its intellectual thrust is
destined to become a central theme of inquiry and debate as the future
now unfolds.
----------------end Davidson quote-----------------
It is in this regard that I am cautiously supportive of Museveni and his
NRM's efforts at restructuring the postcolonial state in Uganda. The
colonial system was left intact and perpetuated by Obote, Amin and the
rest of Uganda's politicians with tragic consequences for that country
which was justly labeled as "the jewel of Africa." To his credit,
Museveni has uprooted that colonial system, which was a set-up for
failure. Here again is Davidson reinforcing my instincts for cautious
optimism on Museveni. Quoting from the same book, pp. 278-279:
-----------begin Davidson quote--------------------
Africa's recovery will have to be, essentially, the fruit of Africa's
own history. ..[T]he last two years have seen two new trends in play-not
always easy to perceive, by no means mature, and yet visibly emerging
from the history of those years.
The first of these trends is one which has demanded, in various ways
and definitions, far-reaching devolutions of power. It has arisen, I
think, from one increasingly powerful perception. This perception has
been, and is, that the strongly centralized state systems of the
colonial legacy have failed to prosper, or even to hold coherently
together, because, more than anything else, they have not been
counterbalanced by a systemic devolution of power to communities, above
all rural communities, at the grass roots of society and the base of the
social pyramid.
…A specifically insistent feature of historical African political
practice-what we may call LOCAL government, local power of
SELF-government-has either ceased to exist or has secured no effective
presence. This new trend, now observable in many countries, more
clearly here and less clearly there, is manifestly aimed at a reduction
of this centralization of power.
Countries deep in the institutional crisis-whether, for example, the
Ghana of today or, still more recently, the Uganda now striving for
peace under President Yoweri Museveni-have turned or appear increasingly
to mean to turn in this direction-toward effective PARTICIPATION of and
by the people "at the base," toward creation of local organs of
self-government, organs which can bring rural communities back into a
national consensus and loyalty, above all by counterbalancing the powers
of central government.
This trend toward mass participation in self-government seems to me to
have a genuine manifestation of Africa's capacity to find and apply its
own solutions.
A second trend reinforces this first trend. This second trend, another
very recent one, has emerged from resurgence-if under different guise
and in very different circumstances-of the old ideas and values of
African unity, of what used to considered Pan-African solidarity.
---------------------end Davidson quote---------------------
I am deliberately quoting Davidson at length to show that there is more
to Museveni than being, as Sal puts it, the Western press' 'recent
craze.' The morale of Saleh Q8's story is certainly worth taking note--
we may not want to join the village stampede to go to the rich man's
party based on a comedian's gossip. But how about when we are faced
with a hardworking farmer who is getting better crop harvest in a
village that has been consistently hit by drought and its inhabitants'
old farming methods have not yielded any results for years, shouldn't we
stop and ask why, rather than dismiss the successful farmer's harvest as
beginner's dumb luck?
In an effort to leave no stones unturned and examine Museveni and his
record, I will end with a final quote from Davidson's other book "THE
BALCK MAN'S BURDEN: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State" (1992).
The quote comes from the conclusion , pp. 311-312, of this thoughtful
and passionately argued book:
------------------------begin Davidson quote-------------------
Yet it was in this dire situation, however paradoxically, that some of
the worst sufferers from misrule and militarized mayhem had begun to
present evidence of social renewal. A regime of reconstruction in
Uganda headed by Yoweri Museveni after years of strong-arm misery under
Idi Amin or Milton Obote was a case in point, rare but by no means
unique. This regime of Museveni's National Resistance Movement reached
power late in the 1980s when the whole Uganda was in the last extremes
of disintegration, and the odds against its survival, let alone
recovery, had to remain heavy. Yet its early years into the 1990s
produced the makings of peace and reconciliation where no hope of either
had existed before. Fear retreated. The possibility of civil
government instead of executive abuse began to emerge. Genuine moves
toward the democratization of executive power thrust up their challenge
to despair. It was even as though Uganda's long years of clientelist
[or tribalist] tyranny had cleared the way for grass-roots political
life to push a harvest of renewal up through soil that had seemed
irretrievably ruined.
"Resistance committees at village, parish and district level have been
encouraged by the National Resistance Movement to elect local leaders,'
Victoria Brittain reported in 1987. These began to form themselves into
nine-person local executives which 'take care of community security and
the distribution of basic commodities such as sugar, salt or soap, which
had simply vanished with the collapse of [Uganda's] economic and social
infrastructure." And as may really happen in times of renewal "at the
base of society," all this began to create "new local initiatives, which
range from brick-making, maize processing, brewing, to co-operative
shops, football pitches and chess clubs for youths" who "used to roam
about with the soldiers, fighting, thieving, raping, outside any family
or village life." Yet all this was then found to be more than a flash
in the pan of optimism. Three years later Brittain would report that
"the old strongmen" of Uganda's statist structures had been successfully
"challenged by the resistance committees, many of them made up of
peasants," to a point at which "local decision-making, including the
settlement of land disputes, has given the committees control over the
lives of their communities."
-------------------end Davidson quote---------------------
Does this sound like the operation of peasants' "Simagletat bdho" of the
EPLF's liberated areas during the Eritrean struggle? Can you make the
connection, Sal? I hope this time I will at least get one Saleh on my
side:-)
sle zenwaHkulkum bzuH yQrieta:: kem gujm aHwat wey rsun kt'E ab mengo
bSot wesidkum ktrd'uley gn tesfa'leni::
HawKum
Elias Amare Gebrezgheir
kab New Jersey