Leadership (Abuja)
29 November 2011
editorial
For almost two weeks now, the revolutionary wave has swept through Egypt again. There were recorded cases of fighting in darkened streets, protesters suffused with tear gas and eerily illuminated by the flashing lights of police cars and the floodlights of armoured personnel carriers. At stake, unlike the case in January and February this year when there was a collective enemy in Hosni Mubarak, is the issue of transfer of power to a democratically elected leadership.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians defied lethal violence to insist that they must reclaim authority from a military regime that they thought had no intention of letting it go.
The protesters were determined not to leave until Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi steps down along with the rest of the generals on the ruling council.
We support the people’s right to be governed by people of their choice, since the tightly managed electoral and constitutional processes which the generals, who control vast commercial interests, have suddenly turned to a pipedream. The army junta has, once again, been forced to make serious concessions and may yet be brought down. Though we are encouraged by the transition system that would return the country to civil rule in June 2012, it is a sad metaphor that a political transition, often called the ‘Arab Spring’, has, in the last few days, become bleak autumn. It is hard to understand why the euphoria careened into deep uncertainty just days before elections that were supposed to anchor the shift from military to civilian rule in that country.
Perhaps, Egypt’s current military rulers are the inheritors, not merely of the Mubarak regime but also of the colonial order that the events of 1919 failed to fully overturn.
Throughout the long decades following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, colonial rule rested on a rigid logic of security that rejected the very notion that Egyptians themselves might be capable of serious political thought. It baffles us why, in the Knowledge Age, a mode of historical amnesia that humanity can no longer afford to entertain crept into the consciousness of the military junta.
It goes to show that military regimes are an aberration.
The struggle for permanent constitutional and democratic transformation has been an issue we align with; thus we support the powerful Muslim Brotherhood on its agenda. We support the re-ignition of the revolution in Egypt, if it would accelerate the democratisation process of the country and change the dynamics across the continent of Africa – and strike a blow against the hydra-headed attempts to stifle liberal renaissance. Though a huge cloud has been cast on the elections which began yesterday, we look forward to Egypt becoming Turkey after 1961, France after 1968, Iran after 1979, or Poland after 1989.
AllAfrica – All the Time