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02.12.2017 Feature Article

Duly Honoring Our Dictators And Political Dinosaurs

Duly Honoring Our Dictators And Political Dinosaurs
02.12.2017 LISTEN

He is Africa’s longest-serving elected dictator. He was an “elected dictator” because he did not hesitate to modify his country’s constitution, like several other dictators on the continent before him, and consistently rig the polls to entrench himself in the seat of power. And like his counterparts and predecessors elsewhere on the continent and in the diaspora, he quickly morphed from a fairly accountable Westminster-style Prime Minister into an American-style Executive President or even the latter’s French equivalent. But, of course, unlike either the American or French presidential system, there were absolutely no checks-and-balances here. The glib excuse on this belated front of modern political culture was that the European colonial imperialists had not introduced and nurtured any democratic culture of accountability on the African continent and much of the Third World.

And this is primarily why it has taken so long and extremely slowly for any semblance of a salutary democratic culture to take a stable and comfortable hold on the continent. It is this subterfuge that has given vent to the anachronistic establishment or emulation of the precolonial African monarchical dynastic system. Whatever the quiddities of the practical reality may be, it is increasingly becoming clear that until a clean break with the parochial and conservative past is negotiated, the continent, as a whole, is highly unlikely to catch up in the sphere of intellectual, socioeconomic, cultural and technological development with other parts of the world, in particular the Western and the leonine giants of the East, namely, China, India, Singapore and Malaysia, among several others. Japan, of course, like Ancient Egypt, has been cannibalized by the West, for good or ill.

Well, I have before me this brief printout of a news article captioned “Zimbabwe Declares Mugabe’s Birthday a Holiday” Agence-France Press [AFP] / Modernghana.com 11/27/17). The article talks about the leadership of Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, having instituted February 21 of every year, beginning from 2018, as a public National Holiday, in honor of the former freedom fighter who ruled that country with an iron-fist for some 37 years and gave the people of Zimbabwe, especially members of the non-Shona ethnic minorities more grief than the racist Prime Minister Ian Smith is known to have given them. It is also worth remarking with good humor that Zimbabweans are a proud people who love their good, old dictator. In Ghana, Nkrumah had his Preventive Detention death squad which appears to have been far more refined, legally speaking, and humane than the GukurahundiMasssacres that occurred in Matabeleland in the Zimbabwe of the 1980s.

It was decidedly of ethnic-cleansing proportions that made the imperialist pogrom-contractor likes of Cecil John Rhodes, after whom Zimbabwe was once named, seem like angels. Except that to hear the mastermind of the Gukurahundi Massacres (1983-1987), in which up to 20,000 people in the western-half of the country lost their lives, tell of this patent act of genocide, there are absolutely no angels here.

I suppose in the narcissistic and megalomaniacal imagination of 93-year-old Mr. Robert “Gabriel” Mugabe, there are absolutely no devils here as well. I suppose it was simply a battle-royal, a free-for-all feast of agape brotherhood, as it were. Besides, after all, isn’t it in the very nature of the primal andvisceral bestiality of humans to maim and massacre in ritual celebration of the purification of the land. And then the heroes of this cannibalistic feast in celebration of a paradigmatic shift from Euro-colonial depredation to an internecine self-love and gloriousimmortality.

Thus, the decision to canonize the February 21 birthday of Comrade Mugabe into an annual statutory holiday must be squarely envisaged strictly within the context of Afrocentric self-love, except that it is not clear just how an ethnic Matabele is supposed to feel about this patent canonizing of the “Bespectacled Devil in the Three-Piece Armani Suit”? And I also wonder, in terms of gender-complementarity, what is in it for Comrade Gucci Grace? But, of course, there is a ready and easy answer for the latter proposition – and it is simply that you can’t satisfy everybody, and so by thePrinciple of Utilitarianism, in Millsian or Benthamian parlance, you try to satisfy as many citizens as possible. I also kept wondering why none of the members of the Liberation War Generation seemed to be concerned about the fact that all the encomiums and monuments were being heaped upon the lustrous bald pate of the Angel Gabriel, almost as if he was all by himself on the battlefront.

But in simple English, when does enough become enough already?! All right, there is absolutely nothing wrong with renaming the country’s biggest airport after the Generalissimo of Divine Providence’s Cherubims and Seraphims, but a $ 1 billion Robert Mugabe University? Observers want to know how many universities did Comrade Mugabe inherit from the racist white regime of Mr. Ian Smith and what was the country’s population at the time of his takeover? And how many more universities did the man add to the already existing stock of tertiary academies over the course of the four decades that he held Zimbabweans by their throttle or scruff?And the population of the country at the time of his forcible relinquishment of the reins and trappings of power? And even more significantly, under what material conditions were these tertiary academies inherited by Angel Mugabe?

Don’t, in the hallowed and glorious name of Pan-Africanism, tell me that it is none of my frigging business because it is my damn frigging business; and because every measure of deliberate and systematic acts of diminishment unleashed by the Mugabe regime against Zimbabweans diminish me, a bona fide continental African of Ghanaian descent, as well. Holy Glory! All this, for ratcheting up his country’s unemployment rate above the 90-percentage mark. I mean, which professor of political science at the University of Harare would score Mr. Mugabe’s job performance and approval rating higher than a D+? Time for truth and self-love, Africa!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

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