Why has the world failed to practice what it preaches? What it instructs at homes, teaches in classrooms; what it sermonizes in churches and mosques and what it advocates at domestic and international meetings, conferences and assemblies since the beginning of time?
Is it the case that countless generations of mankind have been deceived and fooled that law and order is the soul of the human community, especially nation-states; that the emergence of law and order helped transform the state of nature, wherein mankind hitherto existed, into nation-states; that the concept of government emanated from the decision of all men and women to surrender their individual natural sovereignty (powers) to a group of selected few to exercise on behalf of each and all; that such a group of selected few represents the government that shall exercise and protect the sovereignty of the nation-state; and finally that disputes amongst the individual and group components of any nation-state must be settled in the court and NOT on the battlefield?
Still, permit me to state yet another final question for our world to answer – Is it no longer the case that contextual factors, as Richard Rorty, James Dewey and many other globally respected pragmatists opined, determine what is right and acceptable in any context? Or, has Rorty, in particular, deceived the world through his postulation that there is no ahistorical truth – a truth that is tenable and applicable in all contexts irrespective of circumstantial differences?
With the current distasteful reality in Ethiopia, particularly the disposition and reactions of the global community towards it, I am afraid, the world, particularly generations of Africans that have dissipated immeasurable resources and time to learn and cultivate the western-propounded notions of the nation-state and democracy have been misled. What a pity!
Indeed listless are the legions of questions that leap out of the ongoing war in Ethiopia and the attitude of the world towards it.
Again, some further questions seem irresistible here. Or, is it because Ethiopia is an African country that the powers-that-be in the world have chosen to make an exception to the norms that they have historically unleashed humongous resources to protect and preserve?
When Abiy Ali Ahmed was elected and sworn in as the fourth Prime Minister of Ethiopia in 2018, it was globally applauded as a victory for democracy in a state erstwhile under a 27-year repressive domination by a single tribal group and party – the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF).
If the mere emergence of Abiy represented nothing but a sudden and unexpected change and loss of power by the elite of a single tribe which had hitherto developed the mentality of ‘born-to-rule’, due to their prolonged political domination in an 80-tribe country, then globally applauded penchant of the new prime minister for reform, particularly at the political sphere, must not only be strange, distasteful and loathsome to the beneficiaries of what legal practitioners globally refer to as the ‘status quo ante bellum’ (the reality before the change), it must ultimately be provocative.
The above thesis is never a prophetic postulation, astronomic soothsaying or mere human projection with some usually inherent but reasonable and acceptable probability of inaccuracy. Rather, it is a logical statement of cause and effect relationship which mankind has, since the beginning of time, been made to believe and die for, through that globally adored indoctrination – that change can’t but be resisted but, still, change is the only unchanging phenomenon out of all prospects and possibilities in human communities, nations and the world in general.
This logical cause and effect relationship is, to every sane mind, perfectly mirrors the history and realities of the ongoing war between the Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) and the Tigray People Liberation Forces (TPLF).
The hostile reactions of the Tigrayan regional authorities through un-masqueraded hostility and belligerence towards Abiy’s administration are, however, easily explainable.
Abiy, though a product of democratic dialectics, can’t but be seen as a strange ‘usurper’, by the Tigrayan elite, of their seemingly self-conceived ‘right-to-rule’ and domineering power entitlement psychology deceptively instigated and imposed by not just prolonged but, more importantly, unquestioned and unpunctuated tenancy in the corridors of power but which naturally they had hitherto mistaken as lordship in the Ethiopian house of power.
Please, don’t get me wrong. I am, in no way, castigating the Tigrayan elite or even people as bad or abnormal specie of Ethiopians or mankind in general, particularly the African genre of the humans. On the contrary, they have behaved true-to-type as an everyman or group of natural humans, particularly in democratically kindergarten countries that most African countries still are. Even, the supposedly civilized and democratically-mature men and women of the so-called developed countries, in this 21st Century, still evince traces of similar predilections towards drawing the hands of the humanity clock backwards into the Hobbesian State of Nature age.
Or, how best do we categorize the pre-emptive resort of the mammoth crowd of the fans of the former President Donald Trump to self-help invasion of the US Parliament in 2021, in a desperate bid avert a looming change of the White House tenancy that was perceived as unpalatable to their interest?
Or, if the US security apparatus were like the Nigerian and most other African countries, which allegiance and loyalty has ever been religiously tilted towards the helmsman, his party, friends and family at any point in time till date, surely Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the ‘God’s Own Country’ and most of the then parliamentarians would, by now, be the goner instead of Trump.
The drama, surely, wouldn’t have ended there. The sure resistance by right thinking masses of the US, not just Biden’s supporters, expectedly backed by global allies of this most powerful country in the world, would have most likely dwarfed the series of street confrontations that had pitched the Trump and Biden’s fans against one another in the days leading to the last election into a child’s play. Who knows? Americans would have, by now, been fighting Americans with countries like the United Kingdom aligning even against a pro-Trump Federal Forces to protect and preserve the sanctity of democracy.
But, what saved the day for the global headquarters of democracy was not just that its system worked – its law and order machine milling as configured – more importantly, contextual facts freely determined where the rest of the world stood on the American saga. Even if the rest of the world had refused quell the glowing fire at its infancy through condemnation in unison, the American people and security forces, I’m convinced, would by now, have sacrificed many lives on both sides, even damning the most appealing of global war ethics, particularly war crime sentiments, to protect what they believe in and cherish more than anything else – democracy.
But, regrettably, in Africa generally, not just in Ethiopia, the context is never allowed to determine what is right or wrong. Rather, it is the utopian concepts of absolute and unrestricted human freedom and rights that are typically deployed to allow impunities, particularly socio-political terrorism, to grow and germinate into widespread inferno currently shredding such mutually-executed charters of progress as the African Free Trade Agreement which Ethiopia as the foremost African Country had been religiously advocating, championing and facilitating, prior to the breakout of the war.
In the long and short of it all, if the rest of the world, particularly the global powers and police of democracy around the world allow their habitual double standard and behaviour to destroy the Centre of African stability and cohesion, they would have succeeded in fuelling the raging inferno currently burning democracy in Africa. I mean the very democracy which is, undoubtedly. the stabilizing factor which the Western and even the Eastern powers of the world need badly to continue their age-long harvest in the huge market that Africa has always been to them. All they need realize is that peace and stability of Ethiopia will only mean boosted mutual benefits between Africa and the rest of the world, putting an end to the historically dull and drab one-sided game that has ever limited what the world makes of its prospects as a global village.
- Olokode is a journalist.