Fredrick Masiga
1 January 2012
column
I would have wanted to set myself against the odds and try to second-guess what nature or science for that matter has in store for Uganda in the New Year but I will leave the forecasting to Timothy Kalyegira and Charles Onyango Obbo, both being devoted columnists in our various media platforms.
Even though I believe in certain premonitions, actually, I think the two gentlemen have been at the game long enough to hone their forecasting skills ahead of the pack. Nonetheless, my monologue today is more historical and, therefore, material to the naked senses. You really don’t need to have ‘faith’ to believe in it.
On December 17, 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his weighing scales and an assortment of vegetables and fruits. He died on January 4 last year.
What he had not done while alive, he did posthumously – it turned out to be the one single thing that toppled a 23-year rule of western blue-eyed boy of Ben Ali of Tunisia. His mother would later say her son didn’t intend to kill himself nor cause a revolution but as we know it now, his single self-immolation act found enough fodder to light a fire that gutted down three historical governments in the neighborhood; Hosni Mubarak and Col. Muammar Gaddafi lost decades of consolidated dictatorship.
It took just one death of a vegetable vendor to awaken the ghosts of a revolt on the continent that have since taken on a new life causing smaller civil rebellions in other African countries and moved on to the Middle East where the ‘Arab spring’ is its preferred reference.
Back in Tunisia, it took even the family of Bouazizi by surprise that a whole nation rose on the ashes of their son to topple a government that was hitherto perceived as ‘untouchable’ and ‘pure’.
The Arab Spring is, if you like, the 21st century version of what used to be our fore fathers’ rebellions and resistances during the colonial times. In the Arab Spring, what used to be a preserve of older citizens has been acted out by teenagers and youths aided by modern technology of Facebook, e-mails, Twitter and other such modern wireless electronic communication systems.
Western powers have been quick to christen these gun-trotting youths “forces of democracy”; and in way it fits to argue that these forces have redefined the way civil power is understood. Many an African governments, however, loathed by their people have been returned to power through a highly complex trend of commercialised politics.
The vote no longer belongs to the people rather to the one man or political party with the cash to buy the vote. It is this trend that makes the western style of presidential transition in Africa a mere puff of hot air. In the presidential and parliamentary elections we had back in February, if every currency note used to buy votes was cast as a vote, we would count a 300 per cent voter turnout.
The Opposition cannot genuinely win such an election unless it employs similar or better tactics. In Zambia, it took a no nonsense approach from President Michael Sata to run rings around Rupiah Banda – Banda unfortunately, didn’t seem to have learnt the tricks of overstaying in power fast enough.
Bouazizi becomes a dichotomous embodiment of what African citizens are, representing what we have failed to do and what we have succeeded to do. The general attitude on the continent is that of complacency where everybody somehow thinks somebody else will do it for me or that of accepting situations, even when they seem to stretch through our human rights. A customer in a restaurant does not complain when he is being served on a dirty plate even though he is paying for the food.
When a police woman refused to return his weighing scales and declined to hand over his vegetable cart, Bouazizi’s form of protest defined what Africans need to do when they do not get the kind of services they expect from their elected leaders.
The spirit of his act is the readiness to risk everything about ourselves and many times for people beyond our usual vicinity.
From Tunisia through Libya and Egypt which had a direct scathing after Bouazizi’s act of self-destruction, to the lesser acts of civil disobedience in Khartoum, Lilongwe and Kampala, we all owe it to that single death.
AllAfrica – All the Time