You see, critical thinkers must go to work in Africa. Assessing Jameh’s refusal to leave power only confirms some salient facts about Africa, but the reaction of Ecowas constitute the superficial solutions we proffer–either for being ignorant, tacitly supportive or seeking to maintian the pseudo stability of the non-progressive status quo while shying away from decisive solutions to our problems from their root causes.
The problem of Africa is the issue of extractive political and economic institutions on which the colonial masters built them and which black African leaders inherited at the independence of these countries.
African states are not peoples’ states, the peoples are sidelined: the state own the resources, and personalities define the states and so the resources are in turn owned by these personalities in who the powers of these states are vested. The laws of these countries are designed to make this so–hence the concept of extractive political economic institutions.
The logic is that these leaders design a polity that factors out the people from the ownership of the reources and most viable means of production of their country and then exploit then profiteer write large from these means of revenues excslusively–they do these by laws. They proceed to design other vital institutions of state to serve them–such include the army, the police, the judiciary.
In so doing, they become so economically powerful that they have the capability to influence all those who man these institutions of state and sway them as they would.
In fact, going by the general attitudes of humans, it is better to “Play ball” than to rock the boat against such powerful and influencial leaders that totally influence these states.
What Africa peoples need do–I mean ordinary African peoples–is to liberalize their states, remove all extractive policies that translate to extractive economies, retire government from being resource owners and owners of means of production using new statutes, and proceed by same statutes to balance out powers between their governments and their people.
Today, what we see Yaya Jameh try to do it to preserve for himself all extractive institutions built by him and his men in power, the same is what Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Eyadema (Togo), D. Sassou Ngueso (Congo) Paul Biya (Cameroon) and the rest of them are doing.
These men know that with those extractive institutions in place, their successors would simply come in an exploit same not just to the detriment of the people, but to retaliate against them for having sidelines them and to build their own political empire that excludes the people.
They sure do know that theirs are not peoples’ countries and that the entire showdown are between them and other powerful groups who wish to grip such institution–so why simply hand over power? That would be naive!
Unfortunately, those by the sidelines (the people) are the real owners of the country and need to constitute a third force to take back their country.
According to the book “Why Nations Fail”, this third force would be needed to create a sounder system. That third force would include the ordinary business men–(not those ones benefiting from prebendal scehemes afforded them by the same system), the artisans, the merchants,etc.–whose motive would be carry to be able to unleash the power of creative destruction so as to benefit from a free society–as they would be driven by the need to create a more egalitarian society for their enterprises to thrive in a competitive sphere.
These ones would scarcely need the emeregence of any extractive political or economic institutions.
That said, one wonders why is ECOWAS charging at Gambia over mere regime change, they should allow the people of the country to save themslelves and such salvation would depend on their knowledge level, their resilience and tenacity.
Where the extractive Institutions in Gambia are not expired and Ecowas aided to exit Jameh for Barrow, it would simply be the case, as van de Walle implied in his put it. “Meet the new Boss, Same as old boss”
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