Bishop Tutu and Africa’s post-colonial political elites

 2021/12/30

 

The late Bishop Desmond Tutu, whose life was closely intertwined with the engrossing political fortunes of South Africa over the past few decades, had his strong reservations over the integrity of the ‘cream’ of the country’s post-apartheid political class. Inasmuch as he was trenchant in his criticisms of apartheid and its white supremacist practitioners, he warned grimly those incoming native South African rulers against ‘mispresenting’ the country’s best interests.

If the charges currently being leveled against former South African President Jacob Zuma are anything to go by, then Tutu’s reservations could be considered as having a substantial basis to them. Zuma not only amassed personal wealth on a profligate scale at the expense of the state but went on to figure in a couple of high-profile corruption cases that are continuing to be heard before the country’s superior courts. Recently, Zuma was jailed for failing to attend court in connection with one of these corruption law suits.

Another African political strongman to enter the record books for eye brow-raising corruption is Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe. He is probed for corrupt links with British American Tobacco (BAT). Recent reports said that BAT was aware of discussions to facilitate a large payment for Mugabe ‘for the purpose of continuing its alleged corporate espionage activities in Zimbabwe.’

Needless to say, the above cases constitute only the proverbial tip of the ice burg. The charge of amassing personal wealth by questionable means could be made at quite a few members of the political class well outside the African continent as well. If the recent Pandora Papers revelations, for example, are anything to go by such parasitical public figures are numerous in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for instance. However, none should be surprised if all regions of the South are preyed upon by such self-aggrandizers with impunity.

The mind-numbing amassing of personal wealth by post-colonial indigenous rulers should not come as a surprise when it is realized that such ruling strata are an integral part of the transnational capitalist class (TNC) whose interests are at great variance with those of peoples worldwide. These local rulers are in league with international capitalist interests whose sole motive is the earning of profits at the expense of native populations.

For example, foreign investment and other forms of international business transactions are prominent among the mechanisms through which international capitalist interests are served with the willing collaboration of local political elites, who, of course, gain in the process, through shared profits, commissions, kickbacks and the like. Fortunately, for progressives everywhere, there is ample work by contemporary political science scholarship that sheds light on these vampirical processes through which the peoples of the South in particular are relentlessly pauperized. One such relatively recent book that merits mentioning is, ‘Politics of Globalization’, edited by Samir Dasgupta and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a publication of SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. (www.sagepub.in). This volume could be considered a veritable update on the state of the South, particularly in the areas of economics and society.

What the foregoing disclosures indicate in the main is the need for intense and continuing watchfulness on the part of Southern peoples and civic organizations, lest the promise of people-centric self-governance goes unfulfilled at the hands of their ruling elites. That is, accountable governance is the insistent need and local systems need to be in place to secure this imperative. Thus, Bishop Tutu was right in cautioning local elites against betraying the best interests of the South African public.

The lack of role models among local elites of the South needs to be factored in when assessing the multi-level degeneration that is gripping the hemisphere. It could be said that South Africa had the potential of developing as a model polity in the immediate post-apartheid years. It had positive trend-setters, such as Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, to light up the path into the future. However, as could be seen, subsequent principal figures in politics and society have largely failed to measure up to the standards established by the likes of Tutu and Mandela.

What Tutu and Mandela conceptualized was a ‘Rainbow Nation’ or a South Africa that embodied ‘Unity in Diversity’. And they were prepared to pay whatever price was required to achieve this end. Mandela’s decades-long imprisonment proved the point. He remained true to the cause of national liberation and social equity and did not stray from this target, whatever the odds. The spirit of self-aggrandizement, seen in the likes of Jacob Zuma, was totally alien to him.

In these times when ‘reconciliation’ has become a much bandied around word in the South, it is important to recollect what this term meant for Tutu and Mandela. For the latter, reconciliation was inseparable from forgiveness. That is, unless antagonists to a conflict were willing to forgive each other in a spirit of brotherhood, reconciliation could not be achieved.

It is important to focus on the point that forgiveness is possible only among equals. It was on the basis of such principles that apartheid was ended in South Africa and the foundation for a democratic, multi-racial South Africa was laid.

Accordingly, we are left with no choice but to draw the discouraging conclusion from the self-aggrandizing tendencies of some post-Mandela political leaders that vital founding values of post-apartheid South Africa have been gravely eroded. Progressives the world over are likely to hope that South Africa would rejuvenate itself on the basis of the Tutu-Mandela legacy, with its focus on people-centric development and national healing based on forgiveness.

The experience of post-colonial states of the South is that power centralization, self-aggrandizement among rulers and repression go hand-in-hand. Democratization involves the elimination of these iniquities. With regard to political repression, Nelson Mandela states the following in his epochal autobiography, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’: ‘A man who takes another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.’

Insights such as the above are a measure of the yawning democratic deficits in the majority of contemporary Southern states. Once again, one is reminded of the fact national rejuvenation and progress are impossible without statesmen.