When asked what his views on the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States, foremost revolutionary pan-Africanist Julius Malema said Africans should not have a high opinion of American affairs.
“There’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats; they’re both enemies of Africa,” he blurted out.
Malema’s argument stems from the popular argument that the United States – and the West as a whole – is responsible for the economic underperformance and political instability witnessed in some parts of Africa through imperialism and neoliberalism. Of course, this is a perfectly legitimate point, but it’s not true in its entirety.
Everyone who might have listened to Malema’s speech must have cringed in horror; nothing could be further from the truth. First and foremost, Malema has vied for president twice and performed dismally on both attempts.
He garnered less than seven per cent of the total votes cast in the first attempt and slightly more than 10 per cent on the second attempt. South Africans almost overwhelmingly supported the African National Congress that Malema has widely accused of being captured by imperial powers.
What this means is if the West is holding Africa captive, Africans living in Africa have – inadvertently, perhaps – facilitated the status quo by giving their elected leaders the legitimacy through which they – heads of state – contract neocolonial loans, for example. In short, by failing to actively participate in narratives that speak to the past and future of the African story, Africans living in Africa have allowed Western and Eastern imperialism to thrive in Africa.
Ever since the High Court in Kenya declared the clamour for constitutional review through the Building Bridges Initiative unconstitutional, I have been thinking a lot about what Kenyans have done and what they haven’t in shaping the country’s political leadership.
The five-judge bench ruled President Uhuru Kenyatta has failed the integrity test – a key leadership requirement under Article 6 of the Constitution – and as such could be sued in his personal capacity for violating the Constitution.
In a functioning democracy, one would expect that Parliament would immediately initiate impeachment proceedings against President Kenyatta. But Kenya isn’t a functioning democracy and so it didn’t happen. In fact, a section of legislators whose position on BBI the court ruling vindicated issued a statement saying they would not initiate such a process. Instead, they said, they will allow the President to finish and go.
It unsurprisingly didn’t occur to the Kenyan electorate– from whom President Kenyatta and other elected leaders derive their legitimacy – that they have a civic duty to hold the President to account.
By not so doing, we have facilitated the institutionalisation of impunity. In her novel Dust, Kenyan author Yvonne Owuor announces that Kenya has three main languages namely: English, Swahili and Silence.
Kenyans, needless to say, have overly used ‘Silence’ during these difficult and uncertain times at the expense of truth and justice. It’s not enough to ask President Kenyatta to finish and go. It’s important to proactively interrogate how he finishes.
FirstGen scholar. [email protected]
