In his recent article published in The African Executive online magazine of 13 - 20 August 2014 titled “Geopolitics: Why Africa Must Create Its Own Dream,” James Shikwati made a couple of revelations and thought-provoking suggestions worth paying due attention to by any concerned child of the African continent. For Shikwati, Africa is living the dreams of other civilizations. In the absence of a well-crafted centre of gravity—a set of African ideas and values—the continent is tossed left and right in the sea of geopolitical interests.

Some critics of the African governance models have maintained that the idea of building a nation in a multi-ethnic society is still untenable and that a multi-ethnic nation in Africa is impossible for self-governing. The centre of contention is normally placed on what would genuinely and peacefully bind people together as they come from different backgrounds and share little in common. Besides the many predicaments faced with many an African leader while interacting with forces from both within and outside the State, some ethnic communities or socio-political groupings still do not accept others, yet they are too ready to dominate them.

The noted Harvard University political scientist Samuel Huntington underscored that the quality of the political systems—nurtured in the womb of a global third wave of democratisation—that emerged out of the efforts of the late 1980s to the mid-1990s in the Global South (Africa inclusive) stood short of political inclusiveness and accountability for far-reaching social transformation. Whereas elections were routinely held, constitutional reforms produced, multi-party systems registered, and private media licenses issued, democracy such as it was instituted failed to deliver the dividends expected by the citizenry to the extent that a growing feeling of déjà vu and this emptiness prompted the late celebrated Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake to draw attention to the ‘irony of democracy’ as disempowerment in the contemporary African experience.

Shikwati further argues, and rightly so, that Europeans came to Africa armed with Christianity together with the Poker and Chess games: a poker winner is determined by the ranks, combination of their cards and what they are able to hide to the end of the game, while chess is a game of ‘checking’ a ‘mate’ and ‘capturing’ through long-term positioning and tactical maneuvers. Little wonder that emerging out of the ashes of the collapse of dictatorships of yesteryears the willingness of elected African governments to adopt the (in)famous structural adjustment policies was, in accordance with another respected Nigerian pracademic Adebayo Olukoshi, absolutely not an issue of preference; these African governments that emerged in the course of the 1990s could better be described as “choiceless democracies.”

Even more worrying, Shikwati posits that after over 50 years of independence, the leadership structure on the continent has largely spawned short term minded “gate keepers” that safeguard external interests. The spirited academic and policy debates that followed the decentralisation project in the 1990s focused on whether African States would not be better served moving from centralism to federalist arrangements and from presidentialism to parliamentarianism. What seems to have transpired, however, has been a decentralisation of despotism in which local-level governance has been highly authoritarian, exclusionary, and even predatory. No wonder that the facade of democracy and decentralisation notwithstanding, the essence of had not really changed in spite of the policy and institutional frameworks that had been introduced. The cost of getting governments to pay attention to domestic concerns has indeed been very high, involving the organisation of domestic protests, the deployment by the State of violence, the routine abuse of power in order to upstage domestic opposition, and the rigging of elections to thwart the popular will. Or else, the erection of a patronage system that serves the purpose of sustaining ruling coalitions in office but with so little input to extend the frontiers of good governance per se.

This is precisely why far from overlooking the overall quintessence of the arguments posited in Shikwati’s essay, I argue that the encounter of Africans with Europeans by which colonisation ensued did NOT, in any substantive way, make Africans craft their own modern nation-states as known today. I am in total agreement with Gerard Prunier--one of the most insightful commentators on African geopolitics alive--who argues that at the heyday of European imperialism (in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference), societies in Africa were what mattered, and the State was a construct many could live without. Boundaries did exist, but not in the European sense (as formulated by Western statemen since the treaties of Westphalia). From 1885, African social and cultural ways of doing things were neither taken into account nor questioned; they were simply rendered obsolete.

And this is Prunier's cardinal point that we Africans ought to reckon with today: The Europeans rationalized African cultures to death. And it is that contrived rationality that they bequeathed to Africa when they walked away from the continent in the 1960s. We (Africans) seem not to have fully recovered from this colonial hangover. Have we? If we can even pretend to have done so, the question is, “How come we discharge more energy (human, material, financial, intellectual, etc.) in defending, up to date, a nation-state project (in the Westphalian sense) while spending relatively less energy in questioning the very geopolitical as well as geo-economic expediencies such project serves? Time is up, if not long-overdue, for Africans to get up from the time-poverty slumber!

David-Ngendo Tshimba

Assistant Lecturer (Uganda Martyrs University) and Research Fellow (International Alert – Uganda).