A. SUMMARY
We tend to look to our presidents the same way as we look up to leaders. Unfortunately, our presidents do not command the respect of leaders because: they are not leading; they are not proposing any vision; they are not mobilizing the people around that (inexistent) vision; they are not uniting their nations; they discriminate politically and you may not have a job or that tender if you do not belong to their party, no matter the qualifications.
Leading? As I wrote in an earlier article[1], when one sees African Presidents rushing to Italy to respond to the call of one Italian Prime Minister, whose interest is to keep Africans out of her country and Europe, while still hoarding our gas and our resources, one wonders: why would twenty or so Presidents all rush to Rome? What is in Rome that you do not have in Maputo? Why twenty Presidents would be sitting across one Prime Minister? What message are they conveying? And why, if anyone would want to talk to me, would (s)he expect me to find them instead of them visiting me?
Leadership is a theme that brings me to more recent events in West Africa. And before I get into that, I need to digress into a few events of continental, regional and family importance happened while I was serving in West Africa, events that found me in the region of interest of this narrative:
When my very fine uncle Bernardo Sizala died, I was the Representative of my organization in Sierra Leone.
When the Marikana massacre in South Africa happened (a government killing their own nationals on strike), I was the Representative of my organization in Sierra Leone.
When the President of Libya, Muhammar Kaddafi was “smoked out” of a tunnel and assassinated without trial in his own country, and NATO proceeded to bomb a prosperous country into misery, I was the Representative of my organization in Sierra Leone.
And when, as a result of Libya crumbling, insecurity affected Mali and refugees streamed across into Niger, I was rushed from Sierra Leone into Niger to provide emergency assistance to refugees together with the government and other organizations.
So, in 2011 I served as head of Emergency Operations in Niger, dealing with the influx of refugees from Mali. I happen to have travelled extensively in the southern part of the country affected by the influx of Malian refugees, including in the Burkina/Mali/Niger triangle. Why is this important? Because travel allowed me to see the countryside and notice some infrastructure that seemed to have no historical or economic significance, from the possible fact that it could have been a failed project that may have cost a lot of money to Niger and abandoned for some interesting reason.
I traveled severally from Niamey through to border areas (Bani Bangu, Abala, etc) and to Tillabery and Ayourou, near Mali. On the way, one follows closely the Niger River, and at one site, one sees an abandoned hydroelectric dam project. Tired of so much road travel, one has a mild curiosity over the history of the abandoned project, but one does not pay much attention. The Niger River comes from beyond Mali, passes through Niger and enters Nigeria, becoming one of the biggest rivers in this country, joining with the Benue River from Cameroon at the heart of Nigeria, before wasting into the Atlantic Ocean.
B. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE BEFORE DECISION
My history recollection: the dam project in Niger did not proceed because of a request from Nigeria, afraid that with a hydro project upstream, not enough water would run through, and negotiated that instead, the dam should be built downstream in Nigeria. In exchange, Nigeria would guarantee electricity export back to Niger. Harnessing the waters downstream would be less detrimental to both. So, the Maiduguri Agreement was signed in July 1990.
Enter the coup d’etat of July 2023 in Niger. What followed were protracted tensions with France, unable to accept that the Ambassador and the military contingent were no longer welcome in Niger. Having retreated from Mali and Burkina Faso, France was losing its control of the security playbook in the Sahel and its monopoly over local economies. That was not acceptable to a colonial master. So, France presses other ECOWAS countries to wage war and restore the status quo ante. It did not work. It presses for sanctions, which were immediately imposed: borders closed, and for good measure, Nigeria cut the supply of electricity, glossing over the enormity of the fact that Niger depended on Nigeria for 70% of its power supply.
Two of the most dramatic and inhumane consequences have been taking place since: for a landlocked country, closing borders means, among other serious economic, commercial and social consequences, the denial of entry of medicines for Niger. Further, cutting electricity for seven months means that not only businesses suffer, but more murderously, hospitals cannot operate and hundreds of people can be speculated to have died for lack of energy to operate machines in hospitals -operating theatres, ventilators, incubators, etc. Beyond sanction, that is murder. Criminal behaviour by blocking the importation of medicines and medical supplies, murder by denying electricity to hospitals and health centres, handicapping their emergency capacities. The human cost during these seven months may never be quantified, and that is looking at health alone.
Such sanctions, which hitherto have never been how African countries transact with each other, are not part of the African culture. Sanctions cast the regional organization ECOWAS as a club of Presidents, not really an organization of the peoples of West Africa. Considering further that a few regional organizations (like the AU) can only function with foreign funding, it is clear that whoever finances the organization has the power to use it to impose its policies and peddle its interests. The EU, France in particular.
What the Nigerian leader did not consider (maybe not even known) when using sanctions, was that the current energy interdependence is part of an agreement that favoured Nigerian farmers in the Niger River margins. And that whatever political changes happened in Niger are really a matter for the Nigerien people to manage. Cote d’Ivoire depends on Burkina Faso, not just for agricultural produce and other commerce, but a good part of the population of Northern Cote d’Ivoire and people engaged in the cocoa plantations come from Burkina. A good part of the traders in Cote d’Ivoire and in West Africa come from Mali. Relations in the region are imbricated by labour, trade, intermarriages etc. Relations between peoples of the same ethnic groups across borders have evolved over centuries of movement and nomadic trade. That state of affairs leaves no space for European interests to prevail over African peoples in the Continent.
Now ECOWAS is in panic because the three countries (Burkina, Mali, Niger), having been ostracized, sanctioned and demonized by ECOWAS, decided to leave the regional organization. Still, when months later another coup happened in Gabon, the new leader was embraced and celebrated by the same ECOWAS and France. When Senegal President announced the postponement sine die of the elections that were due before April in the country, and opposition lawmakers were militarily marched off their parliamentary seats in Dakar, no organization ostracized Macky Sall: not ECOWAS, not the AU. One wonders whose standards are these that ECOWAS is pursuing.
C. CONCLUSION
Whose discourse are we advancing and whose interests are our leaders pursuing? Coup d’etat as the standard for judgment about democratic credentials, on whose authority? And the democratic values being peddled to the poor (impoverished) countries are designed to achieve what? The story and the narrative are an intoxication. Especially if we look back at the reaction of the people in Mali, Niger and Burkina to their coup events, and considering that in the three countries no blood, innocent or otherwise, was shed during or after/because of the coups. Even the withdrawal of foreign forces was done in an honourable, respectful and peaceful manner. As far as our judgment goes, Macky Sall and Olivier Nguema are as “junta” as the other three.
The whole public display of bogus righteousness is quite contradictory to the history of birth of ECOWAS: a force for good created by 15 countries in 1975; of these fifteen, seven were led by military leaders who had overthrown their predecessors: Gen. Kerekou of Benin, Gen. Lamizana of Burkina -Haute Volta, Gen. Akyeampong of Ghana, Gen. Traore of Mali, Gen. Kountche of Niger, Gen. Gowon of Nigeria, and Gen Eyadema of Togo. So, something good can come from a military leader. Let me not talk of Gen. De Gaule or Gen. Ulysses Grant, Marshall Broz Tito and many others elsewhere.
My second conclusion is that Presidents are tending to take decisions without research, a public grand-standing to display raw power. Tinubu would otherwise have known that in Maiduguri, his own territory, an agreement had been signed where Niger accepted to sacrifice its energy project to satisfy a bigger country with more need of water.
Presidents are not showing leadership. They need to be surrounded, not by yes-(wo)men, but by technical staff in most areas of policy, with the necessary tools and elbow room, unencumbered by pollical pressures, to do research and present policy alternatives on the most pressing issues affecting our countries today, tomorrow and fifty/hundred years from now: education, agriculture, land management, urbanization, demographics and services, natural resources, health, diplomacy, relations with international institutions and organizations that have been with us for long but do not allow us to develop, regional complementarities, industrialization, etc.
Parliaments have become political football fields, devoid of their supervisory powers over the executive. All you need to see is how opposition parliamentarians were herded out of Parliament manu militari in Dakar, Senegal[2]. Our institutions need reengineering. Your standard Minister is not fit for the Africa condition and is only a copy of what everyone else does. Africa could benefit from starting to think that we are not everybody else. The yes-men, the close family members in political or public function are like a monarchy, and the party stalwarts are only concerned with party survival for personal enrichment, are not taking us anywhere. They are not dead weight, they are parasitic.
With no vision, no historical perspective and no direction, we (African countries) display the behaviour of a rudderless ship ready to be hijacked by anyone with their own vision, direction and interests. Thinking of waging war on the neighbour in Africa is like considering seriously putting fire to the neighbour’s house, while we have saved money when we agreed and decided to share the costs of building from a common wall!
Presidents, stop presiding, start leading. We have urgent national and Continental issues.
Jose,
Tete, February 2024
[1] https://www.canhandulatete.com/post/open-letter-to-our-presidents-meeting-at-the-au-summit-this-week
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