The Putin Paradigm revisited
Events unfolding in Burundi and in neighbouring Rwanda must concentrate the mind about the democratic prospects of post-colonial Africa. In Burundi, the determined efforts of the Hutu president, Pierre Nkurunziza, to hang on to power after exhausting the constitutionally stipulated two terms has led to epic bloodletting on a scale that is beginning to rival the 1972 genocidal mayhem which convulsed the land-locked nation and set it on the path of endemic instability.
Nkurunziza is no stranger to the killing fields of Bujumbura. His own father, a notable and influential Hutu politician, was killed in the 1972 pogrom when the Burundian president was a mere boy. He has never looked back. When Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected president of Burundi, was assassinated by rogue Tutsi officers in 1993, the nation unraveled in a spiral of violence. After his Hutu successor was killed with the Rwandan Hutu president in 1994 in a mysterious air crash, Nkurunziza took up arms against the Burundian state and its Tutsi supremacist hardliners.
It should be recalled that this was also the genesis of the Rwandan genocide. The ensuing Burundi Civil War lasted ten years. In 2005, Nkurunziza was elected president by the parliament after some arduous and tricky negotiations which tested the political ingenuity of Julius Nyerere and later Nelson Mandela. Nkurunziza’s argument for a third term is that since he was not originally elected president by a popular suffragette, his first term could only be regarded as an interim tenure. This has cut no ice with the irate opposition, and the entire country has erupted in chaos.
In neighbouring Rwanda, Paul Kagame is also toying with a constitutional amendment which will allow him to run for a third term and perhaps perpetual rule. It will be recalled that the austere no-nonsense former guerilla leader has been the de facto ruler of Rwanda since 1994 when his rebel forces swept into Kigali amidst the carnage and cannibalism that accompanied genocide. Kagame himself is a veteran of the Homeric battlefield of the volcanic region, having fled into exile in Uganda as a toddler with his parents after an earlier Tutsi massacre.
With Yoweri Museveni who has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and Robert Mugabe who has ruled Zimbabwe with an iron fist since 1979, we can now come to the tentative conclusion that the iron rule of strongmen is the rule rather than the exception in that part of post-colonial Africa. This is not discounting the Democratic Republic of Congo where Kabila the son has been in power since the assassination of his father in 2001, or the other Congo where Nguesso is up to the old tricks having ruled his country in one guise or the other for almost thirty years.
One thing that unites all the six rulers mentioned , Nkurunziza, Kagame, Museveni , the old wizard of Harare, Kabila and Nguesso ,is the fact that they are all former guerilla leaders who deposed the existing status quo of their respective countries by sheer force of arms. They are not about to be dismissed by moral suasion or teary remonstration by the international community. Welcome to guerrilla democracy in Africa.
Often touted as the most ideal form of governance ever devised by humanity, there is as yet no perfect democracy on earth. Great Britain, the founding father of modern liberal democracy, still has a constitutional monarchy and the American president is not elected by popular votes but by an electoral college. The American senate, patrician and authoritarian, is a deliberate hedge against a descent into mob rule and the more plebian House of Representatives.
But turning elections to a farce and hollow ritual presents democracy with great difficulties. This is where the Putin paradigm comes to mind. The Putin paradigm is an extremely potent concoction brimming with a petulant defiance of western institutions powered by Russian nationalism, pan-Slavic gusto and an authoritarian democracy which guarantees safety, security and reasonable accountability without caring a hoot about freedom of association, freedom of expression and ultimately freedom of election itself.
For the past twenty years or so, Vladimir Putin has been cocking a snook at the west without his national support base shrinking. When he exhausted his constitutionally delimited terms, Putin simply put his trusted ally and served as Prime Minister while ruling from the background. After his loyal collaborator finished his term, Putin swept back to office without batting an eyelid.
Why does the Putin paradigm resonate so profoundly with the Russian people? This is where nationalism often trumps the finer ideals of democracy. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, its Russian rump quickly unraveled into a reign of political and economic gangsters. A crack security operative, Putin halted the slide into democratic anarchy by putting the oligarchs to sword thereby restoring order and Russian pride. The entire country united behind the new avenging tsar.
The Putin paradigm finds a fertile soil in a Russian populace long accustomed to treating patriarchal and harshly paternalistic but benevolent authority with indulgence and awe-struck reverence. Having exchanged their old Tsars with a long line of socialist Czars, they are not hooked on the anarchic individualism of liberal democracy.
In the botched 1905 revolutionary uprising, many of the protesters were found clutching the portrait of the Tsar they called “father” in their bosom even as they succumbed to bullets from OGPU, the Russian secret police. An accidental politician, Putin is the latest Tsar of modern Russian.
So why don’t the African strongmen try the Putin formula by installing their favourite allies to fulfill all democratic righteousness? This is where national complexion matters, and where the post-colonial state has tripped very badly in Africa. Unlike Russia which is a fairly organic and homogenous country in terms of culture and ethnic composition, most African nations are rumbling cauldrons of ethnic, regional and cultural contraries.
It is obvious that despite his outstanding performance in governance and heroic efforts in imposing unity and harmony on his fractured country from above, Paul Kagame fears another Hutu apocalyptic meltdown once he vacates office or loosens his grips on the levers of the power that he has wielded with such authoritarian sternness and severity. With Hutu nationalism very much at play despite genocide and Kagame’s undeniably sterling performance, it is an excruciating democratic conundrum.
In Burundi, a curious reverse logic is at play. With Tutsi supremacists such as Pierre Buyoya and Jean-Baptiste Bagaza still very much on the prowl, Nkurunziza fears that evacuating state control and the levers on military institution would eventuate in a steamrolling by the old Hima Tutsi lions and former ethnic overlords of the nation. It was very much the same group in 1993 that assassinated the hugely popular former Hutu president and his supporters under the pretext of taking them to safety from military mutineers.
Thus we can see how in a post-colonial Africa riven by ethnic, regional and religious divisions fighting old tyrants often consecrate new tyrannies. It will be recalled that the only time Robert Mugabe allowed free and fair elections, he was defeated hands down before the old warrior-caste stepped in to disband both the elected and the electorate. It is this fear of the unknown that has turned Yoweri Museveni into a delinquent despot and tired tyrant in the same land where he was dubbed a liberator as his troops swept through Kampala in 1986. Ditto for Joseph Kabila.
Much as the western democracies clamour for democratic rule in Africa, it can be seen that the situation depends very much on the actual forces on ground and varies from country to country and subcontinent to subcontinent depending on the logic of the cultural and political dominant.
In West Africa, despite atrophied family tyrannies in Togo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon and untrammeled military and civilian despotism in Gambia, Congo Brazzaville and Cameroons, the subcontinent as a whole has taken giant strides towards the consolidation of democratic rule in the last two and a half decades. There is no single case of guerrilla democracy in the subcontinent.
In the Benin Republic, Ghana and Nigeria entrenched military autocracies and regnant forces of the status quo have been defeated in landmark elections with the last election in Nigeria completing the glorious triad. In Senegal, the political status quo has been defeated twice by nationalist forces. In Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone the old political hegemony has been disbanded after civil wars. The same thing has happened in Mali, Guinea and lately Burkina Faso after unwarranted military interventions which led to the self-destruction of the old order.
It is useful to note that what happens in West Africa is a clash of the residual formations of liquidated pre-colonial empires whereas in Rwanda and Burundi you have the unique situation of pre-colonial feudal formations and kingship systems surviving colonization unscathed while casually reclaiming authority and dominance after colonization. The ensuing collision between this old feudal order and the new forces and relations of economic and political production unleashed by modernity provoked such stress and social convulsions that it eventually led to genocide in the two countries.
What is important in all this is for each country to bolster its strengths and banish its fears. In vibrant western democracies with entrenched citizenship, democracy is sustained when individuals, groups and guilds subsume their competing and countervailing egos and self-pride under the rubric of higher national interests. By so doing, individual rights do not disappear but are tailored to national needs and necessity.
In a post-colonial nation like Nigeria fissured by ethnic, religious and cultural polarities what often drives the system is a negative equilibrium powered by competing and countervailing centres of power. Often, and with enough prayers and luck, this equivalent of tribal nuclear deterrence is enough to prevent the nation from sliding into an apocalyptic meltdown.
But this neither guarantees national stability nor enhances democratic development in the long run. It merely calcifies the categories leading to a fractured public of competing proto-republics. From the mixed reaction to the announcement of his cabinet, it is obvious that despite President Buhari’s most heroic efforts to reform the delinquent Nigerian post-colonial state and make it amenable to a rational order, the ethnic caterwauling and sponsored calumny will not just disappear .
There two options available to the president in handling this elite-driven disaffection and sponsored hysteria. He can ignore it as mere blackmail and treat it with the icy contempt he thinks it deserves hoping that when his reforms and outstanding corrective measures finally kick in, even his most craven critics will be shamed into silence. On the other hand, he can see it as a symptom of a state that is overburdened by self-imposed unitarist and statist responsibility.
There is no harm in erring on the side of caution. This is the time to be creative and think out of the box. In order to enhance the prospects of democracy and accelerated development, Nigeria must achieve what we now propose as an equilibrium of ethnic hubris, that is a situation in which ethnic narcissism is subsumed under national interest no matter the military prowess, economic vibrancy, political sagacity or diplomatic perspicuity of competing ethnic formations.
Although a Herculean task, it is not as impossible as it seems. A way out is to take another look at the political architecture of the nation and realign it in such a way that it liberates and harmonizes the competing and countervailing energies and geniuses of our different people. In a multi-ethnic nation, what holds true for genuine federalism also holds true for genuine democracy.
No constituting bloc or cultural unit must be in a position to exercise a veto power on the democratic destiny of the nation. This is the abiding tragedy of guerilla democracy in many African countries. Nigeria must avoid the road to Bujumbura and a passage to Kigali.
