If the Nigerian intellectual and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka is right, sub-Saharan Africa may be closer to the most serious post-colonial political upheaval than it thinks. In an interview with Reuters in February Soyinka, a sustained and outspoken critic of autocratic leaders in Nigeria and elsewhere said that African leaders who seek to perpetuate themselves in power by manipulating constitutions and judiciaries risk the same popular rebellions that deposed rulers in last year’s Arab Spring.
“In the end those who refuse to bow to popular will, who continue to treat, describe and regard their own peoples as inferior to themselves or their petty clans, I‘m afraid will confront the same nature of violence as we witnessed in the Arab world,” Soyinka says of the men he describes as Africa’s “sit tight leaders.
Africa, of course, has an unenviable record of leaders who have perpetuated themselves in power over protracted periods, in some cases, upwards of three decades. In the Reuters interview Soyinka makes the point that many of these leaders – the notable ones being Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos – whose hold on power is orchestrated through a combination of constitutional sleight of hand and outright popular repression – display the same arrogant, condescending paternalism as the former colonial powers. Milder forms of the same tendency are to be found in some Caribbean leaders.
Soyinka is correct in his characterization of Africa’s dictators. The continent’s “sit tight” leaders account for around forty per cent of its rulers. At least ten of them have held power for more than twenty years. Some like Mugabe ascended to the political pinnacle through democratic elections only to subsequently abandon any pretence at democratic government, immersing themselves in retention of power through dictatorial rule. Others, like Equatorial Guinea’s Tedoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore, military men who came to power in bloody coups, never really made any pretence at being democrats in the first place.
In seeking to answer the question as to just how far away from an African Spring sub-Saharan Africa might be at this time, Soyinka acknowledges the differences between the Arab world and Africa. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, those countries in which the Arab Spring brought leadership change had had little if any history of rival political parties and democratic elections; these were, in large measure the demands that were being made in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya. The argument has been made that sub-Saharan Africa having known democracy – so to speak – there are no real demands that can serve as a rallying cry for an African Spring. This argument, of course, overlooks the fact that the past year or so has witnessed a far greater sense of assertiveness among sub-Saharan Africans in matters to do with freedom and democracy in their countries including popular protests in Kenya, Zimbabwe and – with significant remedial results – in the Ivory Coast.
Up until now and for the most part, however, Africa’s “sit tight” rulers, while having been given reason to become uneasy, have come under no sustained popular pressure to relinquish power though the seeming paranoia about travel evinced recently by Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaore and the security consciousness of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni attest to the level of paranoia that can afflict the continent’s ‘big men.’
There have been other points-of-view on the likelihood of sub-Saharan Africa facing an African, Spring particularly from a Washington-based think tank asserting that the “sit tight” regimes on the continent sometimes appear more amenable to using force to suppress the kind of insurrection that might lead to popular revolution. Even if that were indeed the case – and it is by no means necessarily true that sub-Saharan African rulers would exceed the excesses that are currently being perpetrated against the Syrian people by the Assad regime – official tyranny, as the events of the Arab Spring have proven, provides no insurance against popular revolution. Indeed, as the events of the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria, particularly, have shown, incremental increases in repression can precipitate a reciprocal determination on the part of a people in revolt. Is time running out for Africa’s “sit tight” rulers?
