Friday, February 19, 2010

Africa will always be Africa

It has been suggested that in recent blogs I have been a little hard on Africa, suggesting that the continent is beyond salvation...using that term in the secular, economic and political sense.

Words like "hopeless" and "going back to bush" do appear in my posts, along with scores of others suggesting that the poverty and chaos which marks today's Africa is the result of the ignorance, incompetence and corruption of Africans. In a nutshell, the suggestion is that Africans can't run a railroad...or an airline or a postal service or a government.

But does saying so make me a racist? I like to think of myself as a realist. I spent half a dozen years in Zimbabwe, a nation (in name, at least) going to hell in a handbasket. So I drew on my own experiences. But the bulk of the observations I shared with you were those of other writers who lived and worked in the Dark Continent. Every one of them was predisposed to be fair and forgiving, but couldn't escape the conclusions that (a) Africa is a mess, and (b) the chances of any improvement are slim at best.

This week brings news of yet another typically African coup, this time in Niger -- not to be confused with Nigeria. A gang of mutinous soldiers seized power on Thursday after capturing the President and cabinet in a violent coup. They were taken away to an unknown location in the aftermath of a gun battle that killed at least three people, and have not been heard from since.

The renegade troops have now installed in power a platoon commander, in keeping with a tradition which has sprung up in Liberia, Ghana, Uganda and other African countries. A spokesman for the plotters, wearing a military uniform and surrounded by soldiers, went on national television Thursday night to declare that Niger’s constitution was suspended and power was held by a group calling itself the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy.

Asking the people of Niger (those who had TV sets, at least) to stay calm, said the coup was a “patriotic action” to “save Niger and its population from poverty, deception and corruption.” These words were apparently taken from a script already presented in Liberia, Ghana, etc.

State radio was playing military music, as it did in previous military coups in the 1990s. This coup was the fourth, by most counts, since Niger obtained its independence from France. One wag commented that Africa is like an old LP record -- 33 1/3 revolutions per minute! In fact the average in Niger is roughly one every nine years.

I'll have some news from east and south Africa for you later.

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