Africa’s Frozen VIP Cargo and The Loss of Hope

This piece was first published in The Standard on Saturday 14 September 2014. It speaks of the hopelessness of an African nation that is led by people who have no faith in the institutions that they build and lead. They build schools and head Ministries of Education, but send their children to foreign schools, or schools based on foreign curricula. Ministers of Health are not treated in the public hospitals that they head. Heads of State and Government are flown out of their countries for healthcare and often return as frozen cargo. It is difficult to understand why Africans accept this absurdity.
 
 – Barrack
The ultimate humiliation for an entire continent is when a former head of state returns home as frozen air cargo. Africa is a continent with fifty-plus countries, each parading its sovereignty. Yet none has a facility in which the nation’s chief sovereign can receive healthcare. You will hear every so often that a head of state is in London, Brussels, Paris – or even in tiny landlocked Luxembourg “for routine medical check up.”
 
Robert Mugabe – Africa’s longest serving strongman – becomes only the latest statistic. African leaders don’t die in their countries. That is unless, of course, they are assassinated, or die in some freaky circumstances. It is easier to mention odd cases, like Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, who died in State House Mombasa 41 years ago. Medical experts will tell you, however, that they had advised Mzee against the wisdom of air travel. Hence, instead of flying out, he flew in foreign doctors – like Christian Bernard of South Africa, who attended to him in his last days.
 
The question may be asked, when African leaders go to foreign countries for medical check up, where do they expect their citizens to go? Who should put up good facilities that our leaders can trust? You will want to tell me that Mugabe died in exile in Asia. You can tell that to your goats. Two years ago, this column laughed off the so-called “coup de tat” in Zimbabwe. When a man’s cronies abort a popular revolution by changing guards, you don’t call that a “coup de tat.” That is a game of minds. In the end, the doubting Thomas can now see that nothing changed in Harare. The custodians of the bad old order only changed guards.
 
Let us, therefore, ask the question again; when African leaders go to die in Europe, America, Canada and Australia, what should happen to the miserable slum dwellers they lord over? For, the entire continent is one massive slum. Even our so-called capital cities are nothing more than giant slums. The world must laugh at us whenever it comes visiting. The culture shock begins right at our “international airports,” virtually each of which has been named for some president or prime minister. It moves on to our dilapidated pot-holed roads, also named after them and their families. The potholes go all the way to our most “exclusive and salubrious” residential areas in our “capital cities.”
 
The shock moves on to our non-functional streetlights and dark alleys in the “city centres.” It goes on to our burst sewers and dry taps. In the “capital cities” water merchants make a kill with their bowsers of “clean water.” You move on to poisoned filthy rivers in the “city,” carrying heavy metals, sewage, domestic waste, aborted fetuses, and just about every kind of junk and toxin you could think of.
 
This is Africa. The story is the same everywhere, almost without exception. You could be in Otta in Nigeria, or in Mulago in Kampala; or you may be in Libreville, Gabon. It does not matter. The smell of sewage wrestles with that of cooking food, commercial sex and rotting garbage. Odoriferous dead dogs wrestle with putrid dead cats and rats – and other anonymous dead stuff. Amidst all this, someone calls himself a head of state. And he has a Cabinet calling him “Your Excellency.”
 
When His Excellency gets a simple pimple, he jets himself to Europe. Every so often, like Sekou Toure, the tour ends in frozen cargo. Umar Yar’Dua, Levi Mwanawasa, Michael Sata, Kamuzu Banda, Meles Zenawi, Omar Bongo, and dozens of others, they return as cold air cargo. Ivory Coast’s Felix Houphouet Boigny is urgently flown back from Paris to try to die at home. The objective is in fact to sign off his ill-gotten wealth. As soon as this is done, he is removed from the life supporting machines.
 
State failure does not get worse. Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart in Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding A Fractured World give us an astute snapshot of the failed state. The two scholars remind us that the function of the state is provision of basic opportunities to citizens. Among these are security, health and nutrition, shelter and education. A state whose leaders are medical tourists should be modest in proclamation of such lofty notions as sovereignty. What is the worth of such sovereignty, if any? Indeed, are some of our states non-states?
 
Africa excels in systemic corruption. Our reptiles that die in Europe and Asia have grabbed everything. Ghani and Lockhart remind us, “The common people of failing states have no real stake in the success or failure of their countries. They are not ‘stakeholders’ in that they have no legal title to whatever they possess, no guarantees against its expropriation at any time, and no real belief that the conditions they face will ever improve.”
 
In Nairobi, we have only this week seen the home of 75-year-old widow being brought down by faceless masters of impunity. The unknown characters have begun building on the site where her home once stood. The site is guarded by crude-weapon-brandishing goons. The police can do nothing about it. This scene replays itself across Kenya and the rest of Africa.
 
To sum up Ghani and Lockhart, “Africans have no stake in their present since they are totally disenfranchised. They have no stake in the past since it is being stolen from them. Their heritage is destroyed and their needs of subsistence and lack of education prevent appreciation for their past. Finally, they have no stake in the future since they see no evidence that the state is bettering their lot. There is nothing to motivate them, except the imperatives of simple survival.”
 
The citizens must ask themselves a simple question, “Why do we allow this abuse and misrule?”