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07.03.2010 Feature Article

African News – The Good, The Bad and The Annoying

African News – The Good, The Bad and The Annoying
07.03.2010 LISTEN

New York March 3, 2010 - There is good news and there is bad news. But as far as Africa goes, we continue to be feed relentlessly with bad or negative stuff about the motherland and its people, well in excess of anything good or positive. This is to say hardly any good news comes out of the continent.

Just for the heck of it, let's attempt to squeeze in a third category between the good and the bad. Call it annoying, sometimes very annoying news. I do believe that most of what we see as bad, upon further analysis, may be more annoying than bad, especially when they relate to the characters who call themselves leaders on the continent. I have no intention of easing their conscience (i.e. those who have any) with regards to the effects of their bad behaviors on the people.

This is for my own sanity, lest I cross that fine line into lunacy, dragged along by the sheer enormity of reports on bad African leaders behaving very badly.

But first, lets savor this rare piece of good home-cooked African news (though with a caveat): Togo goalkeeper Kodjovi Obilale has recovered well enough to return to his football club after the French Football Federation stepped in to pay his flight home. He is one of the members of the team severely hurt in a terrorist attack the team while in Cabinda for the recent CAN soccer tournament. Two others were killed in the incident.

Now the caveat: despite being given the all clear to return to France Kodjovi was stuck in South Africa for a while because Africa Nations Cup hosts Angola failed to clear unpaid bills. The French stepped in after Angola reneged on its promise to pick up the bills!

The deeds and misdeeds of Mamadou Tandja, the newly unemployed former President of Niger, apart from being bad (because lives were lost) were also extremely annoying. Since July last year, he did his darndest to shove his brand of dictatorship down the people's throat. Nothing anybody (ECOWAS, AU, EU, UN, Nigeriens, big brother Nigeria etc) said or did could sway him away from the suicidal path. In the end, he got what he deserved – a coup and a call for his indictment as a saboteur and corrupt ex-leader.

Take Angola's President Eduardo Dos Santos. The man has been in power since 1979, when most of the people he now rules over were not born -- some 31 destructive years. As we write, he is locked into creating a constitutional device that can keep him up there till 2022. If he lives that long - 80 years precisely, he would have led or misled the richly endowed but poorly managed country for 43 years!


Mr. Laurent Gbagbo's circus act in Ivory Coast has the potential of ending up bad. For now, it is annoying. Since 2005, anytime scheduled elections are due to be held, he would cry wolf and postpone them. It is openly known that his chances of winning are probably as good as Mugabe being awarded the OBE by the British queen.

Some actions taken or not taken by Ghana's John Atta Mills are more annoying than they are bad. Making a National Day of Prayer a top priority issue?? Now that is annoying, not bad. Don't Ghanaians pray, fast, supplicate enough already? “There is time to work and time to play (as in pray)” so says a verse in the best selling book “Roadmap to Economic Development and Salvation” written by the greatest and successful democratic economies of the world, the ones we are struggling pathetically to emulate!!

Recently, Mr. Mills went before parliament and proudly proclaimed he's failed. There is nothing inspiring about a leader who goes before his people and admits that he has failed. It makes no difference if you got there in a fast trot or like the tortoise, proceeded slowly and steadily. Failure is failure.

But probably the most annoying piece to come out of Africa these past days involves the African Football Federation and its leader Issa Hayatou of Cameroon.

Fall back once more to the recent CAN tournament in which terrorists attacked and killed two members of the Togolese team. Subsequently, the Togolese withdrew from the tournament.

Then Mr. Hayatou and CAF went to work. First he assumed a George Bush “bring on the terrorist” posture, suspended Togo for two tournaments and levied a fine of $50,000.00 on them. Talk about rubbing pepper and salt into a skin cut that you helped (by acts of omission) inflict. Mr. Hayatou has held the position for 22 years, and is predictably basking in the arrogance of entrenched power.

When asked if he had any regrets in holding the tournament in Angola, more so in Cabinda, an area known to be festering with secession rebellion, Issa Hayatou chimes: “Why would we regret bringing the competition here? …. What happened with Togo happened outside the city of Cabinda – nothing happened in the perimeter of the city which the Angolan government put at our disposal.”

In other words he expected the Togolese to travel through some subterranean or atmospheric medium and appear in Cabinda without setting foot on any stretch of land space outside “the perimeter of the city” assigned by the Angolan hosts. Some thinking!!

Then he goes on to deliver this cynical statement “Do you want us to tell the Angolan government to stop the tournament because a little group put out a release?”

The “little group” managed to cut short the lives of two innocent young men, one a month after he got married. Hayatou's response reminds me of a disgraced late Ghanaian leader who when asked about a lingering draught and famine in the country responded: “what do you want me do? Am I God? Can I make rain?”

CAF's Executive board and Issa Hayatou's words and actions are typical of Africans put in charge of a public trust. A principled sense of accountability towards that trust is either minimal or totally non-existent. Thus instead of distinguished public service, they routinely go for entrenchment and its attendant arrogance. In the end we are left with such annoying statements and other acts by those from who better is expected.

And the sad saga of a richly endowed land run down by incompetent, inept, morally and philosophically bankrupt leadership at all levels continues. So does the incidences of pitiable poverty and deprivation in the midst of plenty.

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