Not just in Africa

It’s the election fever right now in the States. One continent that suffered the most experimenting with democracy is Africa. This 700-page book took a while to read last year. It is literally a history book, the 50 years of Africa’s experimentation with nationhood and of having own leaders dictating their own destinies.

From Ghana, the first to gain her independent in the late 1950’s, to all the other countries that followed the same downward spiral, the book’s review describes what seems to start as excellent motives; first generation of post-independence leaders set the pattern that continues to the present day. These leaders built regimes that were corrupt and dictatorial. Their single objective always was to retain power at all costs, by, seizing and keeping power by force, building excessive nepotism, enriching supporters and exploiting the rest of the population. These are men who bled their countries dry and whose policies led to poverty and war that continues into the present. They turned their countries into money-making machines for themselves, families and supporters. The over-whelming picture that emerges is of tyranny and violence.

For example; an airport capable of handling supersonic Concordes which Mobutu, the president of Democratic Republic of Congo’s, often chartered for his trips abroad. Or the Ivory Coast’s journalist, who inspected the President Houphouet-Boigny palace of Ivory Coast, exclaimed “My God, anyone could live here – the Queen of England, President Kennedy. It makes me thrilled to be an Ivory Coast citizen.”

But then this was not just happening in Africa.