Presidential Term limits versus accomplishments

Oct 06, 2024

Africans lining up to vote for misrulers like the three Corrupt Reprobates below!

Three of the insanely corrupt and clueless misrulers in Africa beloved by NGOists and liberal scholars.

Why is the simple logic that to be successful, a political or economic system must organically grow in a cultural milieu, escaping the so-called educated people in Africa, even those with advanced degrees?

Why do African intellectuals and scholars still tout Western-style democracy as the panacea for African developmental challenges after four decades with nothing to show for it? Not even the glaring failure of the system, even in the West, appears to dampen the enthusiasm of its African cheerleaders led by NGOists and liberal scholars.

"Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves." - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.

Rod Blagojevich explained in the WSJ, earlier this year, the gist of what it was that had broken with the system:

"We [he and Obama] both grew up in Chicago politics. We understand how it works—with the bosses over the people. Mr. Obama learned the lessons well. And what he just did to Mr. Biden is what political bosses have been doing in Chicago since the 1871 fire: Selections masquerading as elections".

"While today's Democratic bosses may look different from the old-time cigar-chomping guy with a pinky ring, they operate the same way: in the shadows of the backroom. Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the rich donors—the Hollywood and Silicon Valley élites—are the new bosses of today's Democratic Party. They call the shots. The voters, most of them working people, are there to be lied to, manipulated and controlled".

"The Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month will provide the perfect backdrop and place [for appointing a] candidate, not the voters' candidate. Democracy, no. Chicago ward-boss politics, yes". - https://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-and-the-chicago-way-biden-withrawal-ward-boss-be1a45e1?mod=WTRN_pos6&cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_171&cx_artPos=5

Is four decades of experimentation with this political system insufficient for Africans to conclude its viability and suitability?

My questions were provoked by a recent piece in which a commentator lambasted Rwandan President Paul Kagame for being an autocrat who has overstayed his limits.

If it agrees with facts and empirical comparisons, there is no problem with taking any president to the cleaners. Our well-degreed commentator lives in Ghana and still praises the Ghanaian political, which has, over the four decades of the Fourth Republic, produced two identical political parties whose sole interests appear to be the rape of the Republic like a conquered territory.

No, we do not hold briefs for Mr Kagame or any so-called autocrats. But it saddens me greatly when African intellectuals appear to lack the thinking capacity for original thoughts. Many seem to take their scripts strictly from the BBC and CNN.

A more beneficial analysis would compare the conditions in Rwanda under Mr. Kagame's rule with those of Ghana under the duopoly of the NDC/NPP.

The Ghana Fourth Republic came to life on January 7, 1993 (31 years). Mr. Kagame came to power on April 22, 2000 (24 years).

Ghanaians who went to Rwanda never fail to recount their astonishment at the contrast between their country and Rwanda. They marveled at the sophisticated development Mr. Kagame has taken in his country.

Concomitantly, they lament the havoc the NPP and the NDC have wrecked on their beloved Republic. The APC and the PDP have done far worse in Nigeria.

Paul Kagame brought a lifeless Rwanda to higher heights, yet liberal African scholars and NGOists continue to disparage him!

Yet, we have some African intellectuals parroting the nonsense they gleaned from the pages of CNN and BBC websites and shed copious tears on how long a president has stayed in power instead of what benefits a country has derived from its rulers.

Why do we in Africa appear to be contented with the four-year rituals of electing unadulterated, corrupt reprobates who do not hide their utter contempt for us?

Why do we keep on promoting a system where elected leaders allocate and lavish our scarce resources on themselves while they tell us that only the gods can solve our problems?

Why do we find it acceptable that those who purport to lead us keep on telling us to keep tightening our belts to promote their Jurrasic economic measures, which have borne any fruit after four decades of imposition?

Why do we find it acceptable that our leaders can have a fleet of Presidential jets (about ten in Nigeria and two in Ghana)?

Why do we tolerate conditions whereby those who lead us send their children to foreign schools and rush themselves to foreign hospitals after over sixty years of ostensible independence?

Why do we not feel affronted that over decades of ostensible independence, we cannot feed, cloth, and house ourselves without foreign assistance?

Rather than celebrate our shambolic democracy, why do we leave it to a few of us to question our thieving mis-rulers and what they did with all the money earned from extracting our natural resources and those they borrowed?

Why do we lack the courage to ask why our continent cannot provide ordinary treated water and light for our people despite all the money earned from selling gold, diamonds, timber, etc?

These are not too hard questions to ask those who continue to mismanage our national and continental affairs and turn our continent into a laughable stock in the comity of nations.

Let us end this piece with the following three incisive quotes:

The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. As we have seen, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness, and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfill its historic role as bourgeoisie. The dynamic, pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new-worlds aspect common to every national bourgeoisie is here lamentably absent. At the core of the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries, a hedonistic mentality prevails because, on a psychological level, it identifies with the Western bourgeoisie, and it has slurped every lesson. It mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie, whatever the circumstances. In its early days, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies with the last stages of the Western bourgeoisie. Don't believe it is taking shortcuts. In fact, it starts at the end. It is already senile, having experienced neither the exuberance nor the brazen determination of youth and adolescence." – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
"What the African elites lack most is the courage to use their "own reason." This, despite how modern they like to think of themselves, has actually kept them in an age of pre-modernity. The African governing class is in its great majority constituted by marionettes; and string-puppets, we know, cannot think for themselves. They dance to the rhythm of whoever pulls the strings. So do most African elites, dancing to perfection at the pull of the strings. Perfection is the operative word, for indeed, the marionette African elites are pathological perfectionists. It would have been affirmative that the elites be perfectionist to the cause of nationhood, that they be devoted to safeguarding national dignity. Instead, they are pathological perfectionists; that is, they have misidentified the measure of perfection to be whiteness just as they have mistaken the measure of imperfection to be blackness. Because of this misidentification the black elites run compulsively—as true as compulsion is another symptom of neurosis—from themselves toward accumulation of the symbols of whiteness in the hope of tending maximally toward whiteness. In so doing, they actually impoverish their living environment while enriching the living environment of the Occident. It is their proximity to the center of oppression that makes the black elites neurotic subjects. Black in the thick of exclusive whiteness, placed at the heart of white paradise yet constantly indexed as a devil burning of all the fires of heathen, the black man, and mostly the black African man, has been ruminating his desire for vraisemblabilisation, for imitation, for sameness, for too long to act rationally. Fanon's warning that the national elites be kept in check for there to be any hope of safeguarding national consciousness against the perils of sabotage is well indicated. The elites, who are closer to the center of oppression, are the most affected; they are the most alienated. For the black estranged from himself through colonial experience, first, and later, in a more disguised way, in a more subtle way, through the promises of globalization, whiteness constitutes the lack of desire. The black's every desire is desire for whiteness, white aesthetics, white economy, white politics, white culture, white environment. To wit, President Wade of Senegal has just shed $175 million to acquire President Sarkozy's used airplane so he can fly high above the miseries of Senegal and, in the company of his milky companion, crow to have arrived at the level surface of the Great White Man. Sarkozy knows of this black ego's epidermal malaise, and so he uses it to his advantage, making the black elites modern slaves in shining shoes and three-piece suits. For Africa to develop, the black elites will have to learn to think by themselves. To the African elites I say: Have the courage to use your own judgments." - M. Frindéthié, Black Leaders, White Master.
Professor John Henrik Clarke: "Professor Gates, Cornel West, and other Black conservatives use beautiful words, sometimes to say nothing, sometimes to say what has already been said and sometimes to say what is not in debate. They display their ignorance of European history and history in general. They decry any form of Black nationalism and often call it racism without knowing that for the last 500 years the world has been controlled by European or White nationalism. African self-assertion, the demand for a proper curriculum in the schools demand that we stop praising a liar and a faker like Christopher Columbus who discovered absolutely nothing-threatens an apparatus of European control set in motion by the Atlantic slave trade and continued with colonialism that ultimately laid the basis for present-day monopoly capitalism. No matter what Europeans say they believe religiously, politically or culturally, their main objective in the world is control. Everything that has ever been developed in the European mind was meant to facilitate mind control of the world. There are no exceptions, Left or Right politically.
Black conservatives are really frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation, figuratively, letting their master know that they are willing to go back into bondage.
One needs to question their words because, as slaves and enemies of their people, they will say what they are told to say and do what they are told to do. The Black conservatives have nothing to conserve except their miserable obscurity and their tragic cowardice. These pathetically lost creatures and avid White behind kissers don't have the nerve to be African or Black. (Source: http://www.africawithin.com/clarke/clarke_response.htm