African Unity Must Be Based on a Mutuality of Reciprocal Leadership Responsibility and Efficient Governance - Part 1

Until Yours Truly chanced across a news bulletin captioned “Jacinta Ngobese Fires Back at President Mahama Over Comments on Xenophobia” (Ghanaweb.com 7/24/26), he had never heard the name of Ms. Ngobese, described by the media as the leader of a xenophobic political activist organization in the Democratic Republic of South Africa called March and March, accused of being at the forefront of recent anti-immigrant and migrant activities in the Post-Mandela and Post-Apartheid South Africa that has, reportedly, led to the massive and the brutal attacks of Indigenous Continental African Non-Native South Africans.

These “Alien African” immigrants and migrants have been virulently accused of having illegally influxed and plunged South Africa’s economy into insufferable chaos, by putting undue pressure on a hitherto robust and salutary South African labor market and the socioeconomic resources of Africa’s most technologically advanced country. In the process, South Africa has come under a severe socioeconomic strain and hardship the likes of which has not been experienced in at least a decade for the barely 30-year-old Black-Majority sovereign nation that is also presently being seismically convulsed by its own acute internal problems of a nature strikingly akin to many of the same problems that have taken grips of some of its relatively much older “Northern Neighbors,” largely involving rank socioeconomic and political corruption of COVID-like dimensions in countries like Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana.

In the quite understandable opinion of social and political activists like Jacinta Ngobese, South Africa appears to have become a dumping ground and the punitive brunt of thoroughgoing corrupt regimes of the kind listed above in the preceding paragraph of this column. In of itself, the truth needs to be told, which is that the apparent decision by the South African Government of President Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa to tacitly back rabidly anti-immigrant and migrant South African activist organizations and leaders like Ms. Ngobese is absolutely nothing new or out of the ordinary, and Ghana’s 67-year-old President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama is old enough to be intimately familiar with the strikingly similar “Tit-for-Tat” tug-of-war” that transpired between West Africa’s two most significant Anglophone economies, namely, Nigeria and Ghana, that took turns within the 10-year period between 1970 and 1980.

Which is also why rather than cavalierly pretend that the South African Dilemma is, somehow, a pure happenstance that is completely removed from the realm of the practical socioeconomic history of postcolonial Africa, or that one that is completely out of the blue, as Americans are wont to say, President Mahama, who is also widely known to be the bosom-buddy of former President Jacob Zuma, an equally infamous and inveterate foe and a longtime “internal political opponent” of President Ramaphosa, would have done better to have more constructively and fraternally instructed his present South African counterpart, in Berraian (Yogi Berra) parlance, that” “It is simply deja-vu all over again.”

You see, in the case of Nigeria and Ghana, and one can almost be certain of the same phenomenon having transpired between and among several other African countries all over and across the proverbial Primeval Continent, the ultimate endgame, as it were, will amount to absolutely zilch! As usual, though, a prime-time hogging Professor P L O Lumumba - Yours Truly actually like this quite brilliant and erudite legal scholar and historian - was cynically all over the airwaves and on several multimedia forums, including the ubiquitous YouTube, caustically lambasting the South Africans, both politicians and ordinary working-class citizens, for being inexcusably “Afrophobic,” almost as if his very own country of Kenya was emulative exception, even to the unnecessarily farcical extent of calling out some commercial-vehicle drivers for bitterly complaining about having their jobs rudely and illegally taken over and from them by “foreigners” and “outsiders.”

And guess what? The jobs being complained about by these low-skilled workers were such out-of-reach, high-end jobs as those of doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and bureaucrats! Naturally, economically comfortable and high-horse riding sociopolitical critics and commentators like Professor Lumumba preferred to unctuously and mischievously damn civil society activists like Ms. Ngobese, for only one of the most strikingly obvious examples of South Africa’s brand of “Afrophobic” campaigners, instead of candidly and pragmatically taking the proverbial and/or the metaphorical bull by the horn - which, of course, clearly and fundamentally has to do with the fact that the so-called marvelous engines of economic bonanza, such as the lawyers, doctors, engineers, the traders and the bureaucrats from countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Ghana have swamped and wantonly and suffocatingly besieged a Post-Apartheid South Africa essentially and primarily because they have exhaustively done with making the economies of their own native countries the cynosures of tourist attraction that Professor Lumumba supposes them to have turned Africa’s most advanced economy into.

Which, of course, is absolutely in no way to naively concur or agree with Ms. Ngobese’s equally bankrupt conservative analysis as to why there are way too many West Africans and East Africans - the South Africans prefer to call them “North Africans” - “scattered all over the world.” You see, the stark and the unpalatable fact of the matter is that the South Africans, under the perennial spell of White-Supremacist Oppression and virtual imprisonment during the Apartheid Era, had been nihilistically and coercively indoctrinated and conditioned with a kind of sociopolitical and cultural insulation that made and expansive and a modernistic outlook on life scandalously unfathomable.

In other words, the average South African may be pathologically afflicted with what the late Ghanaian lawyer and politician, Mr. Victor Owusu, once described as “a pathogenetic crisis of mental and moral insularity. You see, we “North Africans,” relatively speaking, of course, ought to be charitable enough to come to the morally instructive appreciation of the fact that, by and large, the overwhelming majority of Indigenous South Africans are the veritable products of centuries and generations of the patently criminal and the barbaric culture of White-Supremacist Apartheid Political Culture of the kind or sort that is presently most strikingly exemplified by the Jewish State of Israel, at least as one Jewish friend and bosom brother who has actually had the privilege and the prime opportunity to live in Israel, the so-called Holy Land, informs Yours Truly.

Which, in effect, ought to tell even the most lambent-witted kinsfolk among us, both of South African identity and nationality and otherwise, that the sort of monomaniacal xenophobia apparently in hermetical and convulsive grips of the Post-Mandela South Africa was simply a long-awaited event of logical psychosis bound to unleashed or vented on proximate targets perceived to the causative objects of a Post-Apartheid South African economy that is only now beginning to experience the limits of a hitherto White-Minority-Focused Service Area. Under such a multiracially and multiculturally bankrupt economy, almost any group of people perceived to be “alien” to the primal “Collective African Unconscious” is prime game for legal proscription.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]