It is close to a decade since Libya became what it is today; its own shell after the fall of the regime led by Muamar Gaddafi who was toppled and summarily killed as the world watched. Post-Gaddafi Libya is bleeding to death as it spins and spirals to a failed country status.  The west, through its Libyan nodes, duped Libyans and used them to destroy their country. Many Libyans who were tired of Gaddafi’s rule thought that ousting him would usher in democracy. It didn’t happen. Instead, ochlocracy and delinquency have taken over. 

Libya is an idyllic country that throve economically and socially under Gaddafi. It was even firmer politically than many democracies despite being ruled by a despot for over four decades. Libya was all over the place, especially in Africa. Go to South Africa. You’ll hear a story of how Libya helped in the struggle against apartheid. Gaddafi provided scholarships to many African students in many countries. He donated mosques in some. Gaddafi hosted African rulers in Sirte, his hometown, and lectured them about how to become independent and prosperous based on wise utilization of their resources. 

Gaddafi’s African counterparts who used to benefit from his largesse didn’t have any muscle to save him. The dice was cast. There was no turning back. He had to die. Indeed, he died. Libya has been bleeding.

It is worth noting that while historians, journalists and social scientists have chronicled the brutal and shameful fall of Gaddafi from grace, they have emphasized on his person instead of the nation. This is wrong. To me, what matters is the death of Libya as is the case of Iraq compared to that of Saddam Hussein; Afghanistan compared to that of Mohammed Najibullah and Afghanistan who all, ironically died violently as opposed to those of Yugoslavia and Marshall Josip Broz Tito with the exception of that Adolf Hitler minus Germany. 

We have brutally and blindly overcharged the tyrants without doing the same to the forces that cloned and nourished them. What academic and practical ignorance and self-deception! We have exonerated the movers and shakers in this international delinquency. This is but a collective sin. Who cares if the real culprits hide behind democracy, human rights and what have you?

To avoid what befell Libya, we need to address the root cause of the scourge and be wary of the monomaniac kultur of destruction. Idi Amin of Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa Republic, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Abdul Fattah al Sisi of Egypt and many more are a few of those the west cloned to further its agenda. 

Raphael Lemkin gave the world the term genocide. Lemkin coined the word genocide by combining two languages namely Greek and Latin from which he scooped two words namely genos (family, race or tribe) and -cede namely killing. Ever since, the word has been entrenched in the international law. When Lemkin came up with this term, the world was reeling from the holocaust that the Nazi committed in Europe on Jews. Due to the sensitivity of the issue, there was a very urgent need of establishing national and international law to deal with this crime. Notably, the world by then was more of Europe and its allies. The rest were but a peripheric one whose importance was as good as none.

Another crime that is slowly being committed by the high and the mighty is what I call centumide or statumicide, or the killing of the nation or state. It has already occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. centumide or statumicide is arrogantly and wrongly called regime change. If we ask ourselves, was what transpired in Libya a regime change? A regime change would remove one regime and replace it with another. Looking at what transpired in Libya and Iraq, it is unreasonable to claim that it was regime change. It was nation or state destruction hence, centumide and statumicide.

In sum, the west has always created the propitious environment for destroying and exploiting countries with resources that it doesn’t have monomaniac freebooting access to. To do so, it destabilises them under many pretexts. It can use democracy or selective human rights. Every African country needs to learn from the fall of Libya instead of putting more emphasis on Gaddafi’s. As Publius Terentius Afer (The African), Roman Poet, puts it “Hom sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” literary I am a human; I consider nothing that is human alien to me–––what befell Libya can befall any country. 

By Nkwazi Mhango 

The author is a lifetime member of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador (WANL) and author of over 20 books among which are Africa Reunite or Perish, 'Is It Global War on Terrorism' or Global War over Terra Africana? How Africa Developed Europe and contributed many chapters in scholarly works