By Rev. Fr. Paul Irikefe
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Pope Benedict XVI |
The
shocking announcement of Pope Benedict XVI on February 11 will certainly go
down in history as one of his greatest reforms, maybe the most modernizing
decision for a conservative pontiff.
A once-in-6oo-years event does not happen
every other day, nor is it enacted by any other personality. It is the product
of a vigorous intellect and an authentic personality. In this sense, Pope
Benedict is a revolutionary who with regard to the petrine office, has balanced
the mystical and the pastoral in favor of the latter: being a pope is a job,
and the Pontiff must be in the condition to do the job.
Then
again on February 14 during a meeting with the clergy of the Diocese of Rome,
he left further hint of that announcement: he would not just be retiring, he
said, he would remain hidden to the world in prayer.
In reaction, priests in
attendance said they felt they had witnessed a powerful moment in church
history. Some were moved to see the pope smile. He has found peace within
himself, they rightly concluded. And not just them, the entire world still
receives this news like a bolt out of the blue.
It
is never really easy to limit one’s power, let alone to voluntarily abdicate
that which is supreme, full, immediate, and universal over the 1.2 billion
Catholics worldwide. And yet Benedict did it.
Arguably the greatest scholar to
rule the church since Pope Innocent III in the 13th century, his
thought puts in sharp relief some of the key questions bordering on the
relationship between faith and reason, the Jesus of history and the Christ of
faith, and the unbreakable bond between scripture and tradition.
This
willingness to accept the verdict of time, to realize that it is possible to
define one’s future and the meaning of one’s life as something other than the
ability to control someone else’s is in no doubt in serious short supply in
Africa. Our continent stand in need of men and women who accept the
responsibility of power because they have a vision for their people, and not
just for their own family or party or regional base.
The
politics of power has always been the bane of African leadership. The landscape
is strewn with autocracy, oligarchy, and illiberal democracies. Everyone seems
to be taking his chapter from Idi Amin’s playbook.
Shortly after seizing power
through a putsch, he renamed himself: “His Excellency President for Life, Field
Marshal Al Hadji, Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC. Lord of all the Beasts of the
Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in
General and Uganda in particular.”
As
a result, Africa is home to some of the worst dictators and longest serving rulers,
definitely not leaders: Teodoro
Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea (33 years
and counting), Jose Eduardo dos Santos,
Angola ( 33 years and counting), Robert
Mugabe, Zimbabwe (32 years and counting), Yoweri Museveni, Uganda, (26 years and counting), King Mswati III, Swaziland, (26 years
and counting), Blaise Compaore,
Burkina Faso, (25 years and counting), Omar
al-Beshir, Sudan (23 years and counting), Idriss Deby Itno, Chad (21 years and counting), Emperor King Haile Selassie, Ethiopia
(44 years), Muammar Gaddafi, Libya (42
years), Omar Bongo Ondimba, Gabon, (41 years), and so on. It is the same
syndrome that drives an incumbent to seek for a pliable candidate that would
run the office like a prebend. But the opportunity cost is always
professionalism and merit.
The irony is that many started like revolutionists, reformers,
heroes, and sometimes as freedom fighters, but morphed into autocrats due to
the proclivity for power and quest for control of the money jugular. Yes
election may be held, but the vote may not count. Some of them even master the
craft of using experts, and reformers in their cabinet like Ibrahim Babangida,
but in the end these technocrats emerge from their stint in office severely
compromised.
In fact in the gap-tooth general’s case, it was taken to a level
of fieldcraft in which all institutions, the police, the various arms of
government, most especially the judiciary and the civil service were
ferociously battered and morally eviscerated. Nothing eventually became the
country like the way they left it: socially devasted, morally decrepit, and
politically moribund.
Again not a few were in their early days in schools without
shoes, without school bags, and even had to carried their books in their hands.
Some even left their political imprisonment with barely 20,000 naira in their
account.
But today, they are billionaires, and while their country has stayed
poor, they have benefited from it, and only through that way. Indeed in Africa
failure works, first for those in power and then second for their front men
through whom contracts, assets and cash are channeled to foreign accounts and
investment, and finally for their narrow base of supporters.
Zimbabwe is case study on the politics of poverty. Barely a few
weeks back, the finance minister Tendai Biti announced to the press that his
country has just $217 (roughly 34, 720 naira) in the national coffer! “The
government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment,” he said. And
that was not the first of its kind. Zimbabwe had made similar news in 2008 when
its annual inflation hit an estimated 96 sextillion percent. The Central Bank had to print a $100 trillion
note which now sells on Ebay for a few U.S dollars.
But while the country is
hemorrhaging, and more than a majority living on less than $1 a day, Mugabe and
members of his ruling party have grown stupendously rich. Robert Mugabe himself
has an estimated wealth running into Billions of Dollars. In November last year, a Canadian watchdog
alleged that more than $2 billion worth of diamonds have gone missing in
Zimbabwe since 2008. That is how far elites can go in stealing a nation blind.
It is the lack of strong institutions, compounded by illiteracy
and poverty that continues to make Africa a continent where the demand for
civil and political rights far outstrips its supply.
From South Africa to
Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria and to the Gambia, and indeed to much of
the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, we witness regular election but it is
successively less fair, less efficient and less credible. Nor is it placing
credible and responsible government in place. Across the continent, democratic
and autocratic systems of power are simultaneously in play.
Indeed, in the voluntary resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the
Catholic Church has spoken a loud and a strong moral message: the last best
hope of Africa is not the strong man with a messiah complex, but strong
institutions that work for the people. And yes, there is a messiah, but it is not
you for a lifetime. Pope Benedict has said a big no to the big man syndrome in
Africa.
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