Back to elections – in Africa… As Ghanaians go to the polls on Wednesday 7 December 2016 to elect a new president, what indeed are the prospects of a free and fair election in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa?

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

ONE OF THE most profoundly enduring iconic imageries of the African scene during an election in any region of the continent – west, south, east or even in the desperately bleak “Arab spring” of the north – is the thrust and enthusiasm of the very patient and disciplined would-be voter waiting, anxiously, in stretched out and meandering queues, quite often in uncomfortable high temperatures or heavy downpours, for their turn to cast their vote in that ballot box… Tens of thousands may have begun queuing first thing at dawn, some having earlier walked many miles to a designated polling station, and several probably not able to vote well into sundown and a few returning the following day, if eventually unable to vote, in cases where a “staggered” election arrangement operated. For this teaming population of the electorate, it is not just a demonstration of some abstract civic responsibility to wish to cast their vote, but, more importantly, their belief, their earnest conviction, that they are involved in a democratic programme to exercise and clearly indicate their personal choice on who or what party should represent and advance their prescribed or preferred interest(s).

Paper

In the paper that follows (link below), I examine, in a continent-wide survey, the salient issues that the voter in Africa contends with in exercising this crucial democratic right:
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/elections-in-africa-voter-court-outcome.html)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

FWD: Elections in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe... Whose choice?

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas, Vol. 18, Número 3, 2013, pp. 804-836.

Full paper in English available here, free, by clicking on following link:

http://www.unifor.br/images/pdfs/Pensar/v18n3_artigo6.pdf

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

In the current “election”-season in Nigeria, the following study presents a continental stretch on elections, their validity, and aftermath in Africa

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas, Vol. 18, Número 3, 2013, pp. 804-836.

Full paper in English available here, free, by clicking on following link:

http://www.unifor.br/images/pdfs/Pensar/v18n3_artigo6.pdf

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas, Vol. 18, Número 3, 2013, pp. 804-836.

FULL PAPER in English available here, free, by clicking on following link:

(http://www.unifor.br/images/pdfs/Pensar/v18n3_artigo6.pdf)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

FWD: Why Britain inaugurates election rigging in Africa

http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/elections-in-africa-voter-court-outcome.html

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Elections in Africa – the voter, the court, the outcome”, PENSAR-Revisita de Ciêcias Jurídicas, Vol. 18, Número 3, 2013, pp. 804-836.

Full paper in English available here, free, by clicking on following link:

http://www.unifor.br/images/pdfs/Pensar/v18n3_artigo6.pdf

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Reminder – Readings from Reading

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95/CDN$30.68/EUR23,99/￥2,580

Do you have a copy of Readings from Reading? Does your library have one? If not, why not order one today – right away (please see order details below). Have a feel and be part of the discussion in this seminal study which has part of the following excerpts in its concluding optimistic insights about the future of Africa (p. 199):

The bridging of 29 May 1966 and 9 January 2011, the two most important dates on the African calendar since 1885, will henceforth chart and transform the continent’s political landscape in this evolving epoch of the post-Berlin state of Africa. After 9 January 2011, the bridge becomes a panhandle unto which the new successor states will embark on the construction of an unprecedented polycentric connectivity of relations on the African scene. 

Fifty-five years after 1956, the wheel has undoubtedly turned full circle in Africa. Africans are back to the beginnings but this time clearly on their own terms. The constituent African nation – so long maligned, so long impoverished, so long brutalised, so long humiliated, so long massacred, is recognised, at last, as the principal actor and agency of its being. This nation can now decide what precepts, what aspirations, what trajectory, what goals, it has set its new state to embark upon…[1] Whoever says that history isn’t so incorrigibly fascinating?! As Aimé Césaire deftly puts it in the interview already referred to, the challenges of the times become the “quest to reconquer something, our name (sic), our country … ourselves”.[2] 

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[1]To underscore an important feature of this fast moving development in Africa, even if some might wish to categorise this particular example as “retrogressive”, Omar al-Bashir, the head of the Sudanese regime, made the following broadcast on Khartoum radio and television on 19 December 2010: “If south Sudan secedes, we’ll change the constitution. There will be no question of cultural or ethnic diversity. Sharia will be the only source of the constitution, and Arabic the only official language”. The people of the south would probably have responded, presumably quietly, in the confines of their homes: “This is your right, Mr al-Bashir! We have gone!”

[2]Melson, “The Liberating Power of Words: An Interview with Poet

Aimé Césaire”.

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2013 – time for reflections

In a seemingly paradoxical vein, 2013 begins on an optimistic note for Africa. Even though more states in Africa failed in 2012 than the previous year and yet more will fail or indeed collapse in this new year
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/africas-berlin-states-of-dysfunction.html),
it is to the next dual indices of crucial data on the continent that the immense possibilities of African restorative and reconstructionary quests are typecast – Africa remains, since 1981, a net-capital exporter to the Western World
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/salute-to-those-who-make-difference.html) and African émigrés in Europe, the Americas, Asia and elsewhere presently constitute the primary exporters of capital to Africa itself (Ibid.). In a sentence: The African humanity currently generates, overwhelmingly, the capital resource that at once sustains its very existence and is intriguingly exported to the Western World. It is precisely the same humanity that those who benefit immeasurably from this conundrum (over several decades and are guaranteed to benefit indefinitely from it, except this is stopped by Africans) have consistently portrayed, quite perversely, as a “charity case”. Surely, this historic big lie of characterisation can no longer be sustained. Africa is endowed with the human resource and capital resource (in all its calibration and manifestation) to build advanced civilisations provided Africans abandon the prevailing “Berlin-states” of dysfunction that they have been forced into by the West’s creators
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/african-population-food-and-future_22.html).

Just in case there are any constituent nations in Africa who still wish to be “boxed in” in these states, they are very welcome to their preferred choice but should be honourable and democratically disposed not to obstruct those who will embark on this inalienable right to flight of freedom. 2012 is a reminder, if we indeed needed one, that the blueprint for African transformation will neither be scripted nor actuated in a London, Paris, Brussels, Washington or New York, or even in a Beijing or Delhi as some fanciful commentaries have appeared to contend. The answer remains firmly lodged in Africa. So, the dynamic of Africa state failure, cited earlier, is nothing else but symptomatic of that defining truism of contemporary Africa: for the fundamental interests of African peoples, the post-(European)conquest state is not fit for purpose
(http://www.tensoesmundiais.net/index.php/tm/article/view/249/307).  

Breakthrough!

2013 will particularly be a year of intense reflections across Africa on the continent’s genocidal regimes. This year marks the 47th anniversary of the beginning of the Igbo genocide, during which the Nigeria state slaughtered 3.1 million Igbo children, women and men – a quarter of the total Igbo population at the time – between 29 May 1966-12 January1970. This is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. Africans elsewhere remained largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences of such indifference as subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan (all three in the Sudan) and Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in other wars in every geographical region of Africa during the period have demonstrated catastrophically.  Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa, other genocidal and brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath, murdering those additional 12 million people in their countries considered “undesirables” or “opponents”. These 12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if Africans had intervened robustly to stop the initial genocide against the Igbo people.

Chinua Achebe’s memoirs on the Igbo genocide, There was a Country, is the most important book published in 2012 on and for Africa. It is a priceless gift to a much-beleaguered people, a compulsory reference to our understanding of Africa of the last 47 years – this turbulent age of pestilence. Just a few months before his 28th birthday, in 1958, Achebe writes Things Fall Apart, the classic restorative narrative of African affirmation which subverts the European conqueror’s frantic efforts to construct a historiography of African-memory erasure in the wake of a devastating conquest. Fifty-four years later, just a couple of months before his 82nd birthday, in 2012, the literary interventionist genius publishes There was a Country, an indefatigable reminder to an oft-complacent world of the Igbo genocide and the incredible survival of Igbo people. 

Forty-seven years and 15 million murders on, Africans finally realise that there cannot be any meaningful advancement without abandoning the post-conquest state, essentially a genocide-state. This state is the bane of African existence and progress. Africans on the ground are working tirelessly to build extensively decentralised new states that ensure full democratic aspiration, participation and representation for constituent nations and the individual. It is in the longer-term interest of the rest of the world, especially in the West, to support African transformations initiated by its peoples rather than the “helmspersons”/“helmsconstituent nations” ostensibly entrenched in the hierarchical architecture that maps the typical continent’s genocide-state.

Readings from Reading

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), ISBN 9780955205019, paperback, 236pp., £19.95/US$29.95/CDN$30.68/EUR23,99/￥2,580

The essays here in Readings from Reading underscore Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe’s continuing optimism about the possibilities of Africans constructing post-“Berlin-states” as the launch pad to transform the topography of the African renaissance. Readings from Reading is a timely publication, coming on the eve of the historic January 2011 referendum in south Sudan in which the people of the region will choose to vote to restore their national independence or get stuck hopelessly in the Sudan, the first of the “Berlin-states” that Africans tragically “inherited” in January 1956. Ekwe-Ekwe insists that the contemporary Africa state, imposed on Africans by a band of European conqueror-states and currently run by what the author describes as a “shard of disreputable African regimes to exploit and despoil the continent’s human and material resources”, cannot serve African interests. The legacy, as this study demonstrates, has indeed been catastrophic: “The [African] overseers pushed the states into even deeper depths of genocidal and kakistocratic notoriety in the past 54 years as the grim examples of particularly Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan ... depressingly underscore. 15 million Africans have been murdered by African-led regimes in these states and elsewhere in Africa since the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970”. Ekwe-Ekwe argues that there is no future for African progress, especially in ensuring that the peoples, themselves, exercise an unfettered self-governing ability to develop their lives, reconstruct centuries of a battered heritage and transform their societies, except Africans dismantle the “Berlin-state” on the continent. This state remains a conqueror’s/conquest principality as its original creators have indeed sought and reinforced unrelentingly and cannot, therefore, respect not to talk of safeguard the human rights of African peoples. On the contrary, the future for Africans predicates on an extensive sociopolitical decentralisation process where constituent nations, however “small”, exercise their inalienable right to control and develop their human and natural resources and decide, freely, on the nature of the relationship that they wish to establish with their neighbours and those elsewhere in the world.

Readings from Reading is an engaging, incisive, wide-ranging and multidisciplinary discourse, salient features that have come to define Ekwe-Ekwe’s groundbreaking scholarship of the past three decades. The author covers an assemblage of diverse topics and themes which include the Igbo genocide, the Jos massacres in central Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s failed attempt to blow up an incoming aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, African presence in Britain, Robert Mugabe, Muammar Gaddafi, Obafemi Awolowo, Omar al-Bashir, Yoweri Museveni, Charles Taylor, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ali Mazrui, Andrew Young, the G8 and Africa, Africa “debt”, African émigrés’ remittances to Africa, “sub-Sahara Africa”, reparations to Africans, African representation on the UN Security Council, African choices for the Nobel Peace Prize, Africa and the International Criminal Court, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, the Sudan and the Congo, arms to Africa, arms-ban on Africa. Finally, on the subject of the restoration-of-independence, the key connecting thread that links all the visitations, Ekwe-Ekwe critically examines the contributions made variously on this cord by an impressive line up of some of the very best and brightest of African intellectuals: Achebe, Adichie, Césaire, Damas, Coltrane, Diop, Equiano, Ngũgĩ, Okigbo, Senghor.

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