Accountability is important in strengthening systems, there is no dispute that the post-colonial Africa is failing its people – black and white. Year-on-year youth unemployment is on the rise and governments are failing to improve youth employability. This is a serious indictment to the leadership, particularly from the liberation movements. While they fought a good fight against colonialism and all that it stood for, the failure to actualise promises of freedom and liberty for the average person remains a huge stain in their endeavours.
For understandable reasons, black nationalism and populism were the foundation that fuelled and maintained the liberation movement. Now, those not so well-thought out and unfulfilled promises of the past have come back to haunt the government led by the movement. Those broken promises of the ‘liberators’ are like broken mirrors, the average citizen who has held onto them has been left with shards of glass in his hands, bleeding, and staring at fractured images of themselves.
Positive changes that the average black African had hoped for have not materialised and there is no hope that is about to happen. The question we ask: Are the liberation movements taking the public for granted or they were simply never primed for civilian government and the constant changes of the world?
Talking justice is easy when you do not have power, making laws and applying justice even when it means leaving your own power open to constant scrutiny and even threatened, requires political maturity and a genuine sense of service to the people. Promising jobs when it is somebody else’s responsibility to create an enabling environment is what liberation movements specialised in, but when their time in power arrived, they never invested in ideas, innovation, and infrastructure to improve the employability of the population.
One evident weakness of former liberation movements’ political rhetoric today is their politics of othering, constant reference to their past achievements, blame-shifting, and populist but unfunded promises for the future with minimal investment on policies to serve present, real needs.
We have a weak civilian society, and for leaders, we have military elites or those connected to the military that enjoy power for its own sake, but do not know how to use it for the greater good of the nation so power grab is the essence and those with access to power make sure no one else has.
It is no accident that we find ourselves in a situation where civil society is marginalised and polarised along racial and tribal identity. The colonial regime underestimated the natives’ desire for liberty, freedom, and independence. It is safe to say the growing need for force and the willingness of foreign governments to invest in military aid was due to the arrogance of authoritarian white minority governments that were unresponsive to nonviolent means for change. But disinvesting in political solutions had its long-term problems, it caused the liberation movements to evolve into not only militant organisations but military entities.
That process oversaw the evolution of liberation movements and military wings growing into too powerful sectors of the movement which then undermined the unarmed political enterprise and thus marginalised the public from decision-making processes.
Every tool has its use, and a beautiful piece of sculpture will require different tools at different stages of its making. While arms were effective in destabilising the colonial and apartheid State making it unviable and forcing it to concede and commit to political negotiations, they did not provide a genuinely right environment to develop effective civilian rule.
The already too powerful military wing was left to call the tune, run politics and/ or pick politicians who were subservient to it to run the State affairs on its behalf. Meanwhile these liberation movements did not invest in reviewing their relationships with their foreign supporters who were allowed to maintain a ‘master/ servant’ relationship. Foreign governments literally run African states, and in turn they ensure the friendly local military and political elite keep power.
That model has clearly failed, even with regular but fake elections, coups or threats of them dominate the African political scene. Elections do not sanctify dictatorships but marginalise the average population and take away public confidence in state systems and the oftentimes weak institutions.
We need to appreciate that no matter how effective the tools one uses to fight injustice and oppression are, they are not the same tools you would need to establish and maintain justice. A different set of skills and resources is required. Defining yourself is critical in finding your purpose. Perhaps to define ourselves primarily in terms of skin colour while paying less attention to internal cultural diversity hence systemic formulations was always a train heading for a fatal crash.
Former liberation movements are not the saviours they promised to be and that we hoped they will be. The challenges we face today have a different face to them and require different solutions from the ones employed by the twentieth century fighters. Social, economic, and political polarisation remain our biggest challenges. Access to power, resources and opportunity is tribalized and racialised. Significantly, what we need for ourselves and from the international community has changed, in the same token the international community’s expectations of us has new dimensions to it, all that requires a review of our international relations policies.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 