Governments in power across the continent deserve huge blame for the pervasive lack of good governance and development, and so do opposition movements and parties for often failing to offer a compelling constructive alternative.
GABON is in turmoil and stoking its unrest are two men who claim they want to lead the country to peace and prosperity. Both men, the buddy of the country’s late dictator’s and leading opposition candidate, Jean Ping, and the late dictator’s son and incumbent President, Ali Bongo, are fighting to rule the oil-rich West African state. The country’s electoral umpire named the latter as the winner of last week’s presidential polls to the utter dismay of the former who clings on to claims of victory. But neither candidate possesses a compelling political narrative, commands the followership of the populace nor can boast of the personal integrity to reform the country’s broken socio-political system. What they do have are a money-acquired influence, mobs – dressed as protesters or government forces – and the unfettering desire to do anything possible to rule or retain rulership of Gabon, even if it means laying the country to ruins.
Caught in the middle of Bongo and Ping’s power tussle are Gabon’s masses. Among Africa’s poorest in one of the continent’s richest states, the ordinary people of Gabon hunger for socioeconomic progress and upliftment but are starved of a credible alternative in leadership. It is a plight that is all too common across the continent.
THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO has a president who is reluctant to leave office when his term constitutionally expires in November. President Joseph Kabila, the son of the former President Laurent Kabila, has been testing out several techniques which he could use to elongate his stay in office; from delaying the general elections (which ought to hold this year) and remaining in power in a ‘caretaker capacity’ to amending the constitution to remove term limits. Most Congolese do not want Kabila’s increasingly undemocratic, institutionally inept and overtly corrupt government to continue. But his likely alternative is very much a part of the very system that the people of the DRC wish to upend.
83-year-old Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba is the DRC’s leading opposition figure. He is almost twice the president’s age and was the infamous Mobutu Sese Seko’s ally, serving as his Prime Minister on three different occasions before breaking ranks with him. Despite Tshisekedi’s anti-Kabila rhetoric, he is a member of the DRC establishment that has failed the people of the DRC, and more significantly, he played a major role in the divisive politics of the 1960s to 1980s which essentially built the foundation of socioeconomic upheavals which still plague the DRC. If anything, the support for Tshisekedi is in a large part driven by the dislike of Kabila, and as the current situation in Nigeria aptly shows, that is often not a good thing.
In NIGERIA’S 2015 ELECTIONS, current President Muhammadu Buhari triumphed due to the simple fact that the country’s swing voters located mostly within the middle-belt region of the country and among the urban working class population of the major cities had become very disaffected with former President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. Jonathan’s lukewarm approach to the blatant corruption in government circles, his poor handling of the country’s security challenges especially in the north (chief of which was Boko Haram’s kidnap of the Chibok girls) and his government’s ineptitude in tackling pervasive poverty and rising inequality were too many crimes for the electorate to forgive. They went for the “only other option” in an ethnoreligiously divisive septuagenarian ex-dictator whose earlier reign as Head of State was as disastrous as it was short. This leading opposition candidate shied away from presidential debates, gave very few policy speeches (the most significant of which was presented in faraway London) and struggled to sell his candidacy to one-quarter of the country.
The result of such opposition candidate and his political party taking power is the Nigeria of today with an economy in recession and a government that just over a year into its regime is already severely out of favour with most of the governed. President Buhari and the ruling APC is thus an example of the kind of devastation that the lack of a credible opposition movement can cause. It is an example that is repeating itself all over again with the former-ruling-party-now-leading-opposition-party known as the PDP. Rather than reform itself into a credible opposition movement critically holding the current government to account and constructively laying down how it would rule differently, the PDP has been embroiled in megalomaniac infightings that serve as a constant reminder to just how destructively self-centered and unprincipled many of its stakeholders are and have been. The Nigerian masses are again at the receiving end of both bad governance and abysmal opposition; choosing between either in an election year is akin to a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
No society can make remarkable advancements if its people always have to choose their leaders from a pool of bad eggs. Unfortunately, this is the situation that much of Africa finds itself, from South-Sudan, where the notoriously unfit-to-rule president Salva Kiir has as his chief opponent an equally notoriously unfit-to-rule former Vice President Reich Machar, to Zimbabwe where the alternative to the despot Robert Mugabe are his former vice president Joyce Mujuru and ex-ruling partner Morgan Tvangirai both of whom have huge question marks of credibility. Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the opposition parties and movements across the continent to change this societally depressing milieu. Africa’s masses have for decades suffered under inept and often corrupt governments and desperately need opposition movements to rise up and offer credible alternatives. This is a call that the African opposition must heed for the continent to move forward.
