Justice is not necessarily served by laws but fair-minded humans who believe in and commit to creating conditions that prevent injustice and promote justice. These are individuals and groups of people who believe in a fair legal system and enact laws that respect people’s dignity, respect individual liberties and beliefs, preserve safety, among other valuable attributes. It is the fair actions that respect human uniqueness, protect humans from all forms of injustice and empower individuals and communities regardless of ethnicity, race, gender, culture, and religion that bring about justice.
If laws were the birthplace of justice, Africa would be one of the beacons of justice and safety in the world, instead the continent is home to the worst tyrants who are hiding behind the strongest of laws imaginable. Under the shield of the law, tyrants have consolidated and not dispensed power because they have a fear for free-thinking people, and a sense of safety in more, not less, government in people’s lives, thus, more surveillance.
Sentimentalism has not brought freedom but more misery to the average African; we cannot continue to excuse chaos and outright human rights abuses in our society because the perpetrators are of the same race as us or the same ethnicity as us or look like us or claim to represent us and, like us, were once victims of colonialism.
Debate on African challenges must be objective and attentive to tangibles behind the causes of the challenges and their maintaining factors. Generalisations do not help a single African community apart from carving out escape routes and maintaining avoidance behaviours of many African leaders. Let us face up to the fact that many of the current problems are uniquely an African design, and no amount of sane washing will save us.
The main weakness of contemporary Africa is the weak civil society and even weaker democratic institutions barely able to stand up in the face of immense pressure from undemocratic institutions, and increasingly confident authoritarians in many countries in the region.
Underlining the problem is the inability of the various African Union, or AU, organs to implement and/ or enforce supranational binding agreements due to a lack of necessary legislative powers. Real power lies in the hands of its assembly which is composed of heads of state and government who have shown an unwillingness to cede power to appropriate organs to execute their roles effectively.
Fundamental to progress will be a robust confrontation of stereotypes that look at Africa as though it were a monolithic socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and political space. Africa is a vast continent, home to diverse population groups, and so are the factors behind the poor social, economic and political outcomes in most parts of the continent causes of which are multifactorial, ranging from internal human, internal natural to external, history to present.
It would be a disservice to the African socioeconomic and political debate if we try and historize colonialism and past internal conflicts that shape Africa’s political space today – from state boundaries to official languages to political systems and institutions and perception of our traditional institutions, including spirituality and religion, all of which influence our choices; but we start to lose the argument about today’s challenges the moment we start to explain away all our responsibilities and replace them with victimhood.
Colonialism imposed upon us militaristic government systems that consolidated state power to ensure the state enjoyed an unrestricted ability to freely extract natural resources for the benefit of the metropolitan. The colonial state willingly used military force to ensure compliance while marginalising the native African from decision-making process. Our solution, however, does not lie in being victims but survivors of colonialism and imperialism.
In that vein, we must vigorously address causes of internal conflict – historical territorial raids, slave trade enablement by local leaders and its broader impact on relations between different communities, and power disparities across society.
While it is true that external forces foment clashes within the African continent, it is equally true that various internal forces enable, deepen, and maintain them; without deep and wide internal cracks, external forces will find our systems impenetrable hence not easy to manipulate.
People are tired of division. Quality of life and not power for its own sake nor the identities and legal personal choices neighbours make about their lives is what the average African is concerned about. The traditional motto of the United States, “out of many, one” encapsulates the dream of many ordinary citizens in many African states.
Africa is a big continent of at least 1.3 billion inhabitants, and made up of numerous nations, each with its own traditions, values, strengths and weaknesses, but all striving for a better life. We may not always agree on things, but we are quintessential Africans who believe fervently in the continent, even when we question its direction.
MTHWAKAZI INDEPENDENT 