Despite the fact that Kenya has a population of 40 million people while that of Canada is about 32 million people, Canada’s economy is sixty four times bigger than Kenya's. This African situation where there are too many people struggling to stay alive on meager wealth whereas a tiny minority use state power to steal from the citizens is what makes African men go wild in their endeavor to grab and preserve state power till they have their coffins draped in the national flags.

There is no morality in African politics and Kenya’s 2007/8 post election crisis explained this situation more vividly. I spent two years in Zimbabwe before the tragic 2008 general elections trying to explain to their civil society and political leaders that they needed to create a different narrative from that of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF without success. Mugabe’s narrative, which some Kenyan politician held and now Gbagbo’s are  spewing, is that African nations are sovereign and their strong men should be encouraged on in their programme of annihilating their citizens and stealing from them.

For Gaddafi (Libya), Museveni (Uganda), Zenawi (Eritrea) and even Gbagbo, elections are only acceptable if they serve to leave them in statehouse. The fundamental Ivorian and African problem is that states and governments here are not required to be legitimate. Power is an end in itself. In other words, states need not be agencies for creating wealth, enlightenment and securing dignity for citizens in order to exist. Instead, states are seen as public commercial banks with owners, bank workers and depositors. Africa’s despots see themselves as the owners of the commercial bank. They expect Ouattara and other politicians to accept to be workers in the bank and the citizens to be humble depositors of taxes in the commonwealth.

Prof. Horace Campell of Syracuse University laments that it is this kind of attitude that has rendered African lives cheap and dispensable. So long as Omar El Bashir remains the President of The Sudan, it does not matter what happens to the citizens of Sudan who do not come from his ethnic extraction. That is why the new African narrative should be a narrative of the third liberation. The first liberation was about overcoming the cynical colonial evil; the second was about guaranteeing multi-party politics for the big boys and the third must be about making the state an agency of delivering food, employment, development, security, stability and freedom to the people of every African nation through informed policies and effective governance.

We need a Panafrican movement for the third liberation where the citizens of Africa shall get their countries back from the blood-thirsty and greedy elite who use the people’s taxes produced by means of blood and sweat to crush the hopes of the very citizens. This is the betrayal of independence that must be stopped sooner than later. Recently the Kenyan parliament has offered forum for the most decadent political forces to oppose the International Criminal Court. These Kenyan politicians, like those in Ivory Coast, believe that citizens, whether dead or alive should accept the division of labour where the ethnic strong men own the state and  perpetually steal and kill.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga who has been appointed by the African Union must know that his mission in Ivory Coast is going to be as good as what he does here in Kenya to deliver justice for the millions of Kenyans who remain landless, jobless, in IDP camps and violated by his fellow political plotters. This is because Alassane Ouattara and his fellow elite gang including Guillame Soro will disappoint just as Jakaya Kikwete, Meles Zenawi and Museveni have. Ouattara must be allowed to reign because that is what the ballot said but then again has Goodluck Jonathan changed the lives of the people of Nigeria even with all those resources teeming in the soils and brains of the nation?

There is a crisis of the state in African that University lecturers have disappointingly refused to explain. Easy explanations about our colonial past are no longer sufficient. The third liberation narrative must be solid. It must overcome what Prof. Michael Chege has called the poverty of development ideas in Africa. How come Prof. Nyong’o accepts to be a member of a mediocre forty-something-member cabinet yet he can not deliver healthcare to the citizens of Kenya? We need a major transformation of the narrative of African development and struggle that seeks to build democratic-developmental states here to replace these administrative, extractive and criminal states founded on state capture, impunity, inequality and intolerance.

May be Kenya’s new constitution has not resolved this crisis – the reason behind our taxes soon being spent on defending the prime suspects of the post election violence in Kenya. Africa shall arise.

By Cyprian Nyamwamu.

The author is a Panafrican Governance and Human Rights analyst working at the National Convention Executive Council (NCEC), Nairobi.