Ibrahim Traore And The Tale Of Another African Messiah (2)

As I stated in the first part of this essay, the fact that President Ibrahim Traore is being made to assume a cult personality should worry both his supporters and all those genuinely concerned about good governance and progress in Africa. This is irrespective of whether he is the instigator of such acts or not, as even an initially disinterested leader can with time get so intoxicated by such adulation as to start acting like an infallible god among imperfect mortals. The nexus between dictatorship and cult personality is never coincidental. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and the Kim Dynasty in North Korea are but few modern examples.

This leads me to the very important issue of how the euphoria about Traore’s leadership “magic” in Burkina Faso is tending to legitimize dictatorship as an enabler of development while directly or indirectly de-legitimising democracy in this respect. It is important that we reflect on this subject matter deeply.

To understand the place of dictatorship and democracy in development requires a holistic imagining of development that sees beyond the sparkles of infrastructural improvement, reduced inflation, higher income, job availability, and other socioeconomic desirables to envision stability, sustainability and inclusion as critical and indispensable components of development.

Development built around a dictatorial leadership may not stand on a firm footing. In dictatorships, unlike in a democracy, institutions of state – which are the pillars of development – are not a product of consensus and collective internalisation of values, but of brute force. Thus, the likelihood is always there for the structure to be unsettled from the root, setting off rapid degeneration as soon as anything happens to the dictatorial set-up. The current state of Libya after the Gaddafi era is a typical example. Upon his overthrow, it became clear that the hitherto seeming stability of the nation was merely a product of one man’s suffocating grip on dissenting tendencies, as various armed groups suddenly emerged to stake their various claims. Iraq post-Saddam Hussein is another interesting example. The long-lauded exploits of Gaddafi in improving standard of living in Libya suddenly came crumbling simply because the political and cultural structure that propelled them was never rooted in consensus but precariously stood on the one-legged dictatorial platform of one man.

Compare this experience with that of several democratic European nations that were invaded and their governments ousted during the World War II. These nations’ institutional structure did not crash, as they subsisted, not in particular individuals in power, but in the collective consciousness as embodied in institutions built on consensus and collectively internalised values.

Sometime ago while reflecting on this reality, I decided to prompt ChatGPT to tell me what may become of North Korea if the Kim Dynasty happens to be overthrown. Instructively, the answer I got corresponded exactly with what I believe. According to the chatbot, unless there is an instant emergence of another dictator who would take hold of the same dictatorial structure on which the dynasty thrived to prevent any vacuum, the nation is likely to degenerate to anarchy as dissenting tendencies suppressed for decades will suddenly be able to express themselves – including in ways that may become unmanageable. This outcome is not difficult to envisage in the light of the reality that since the creation of North Korea in 1948, it has been a nation where brutal repression, state terror, and personality cult have sustained the rule of one family – each ruler handing over to his son. This historical peculiarity has not afforded the nation the chance to build institutions around commonly agreed values. From the onset, it has survived on one man’s ability to make dissent impossible.

Given that it is effectively a government by one man, what may be needed – other things being equal – to achieve such regime overthrow and create anarchy is merely to assassinate the one-man ruler. On the contrary, it is difficult to imagine that mere assassination of President Donald Trump or Prime Minister Keir Starmer will bring down the governments of the US and the UK respectively, talk more of creating a vacuum and anarchy. This definitely makes the difference clear.

Another reason development may suffer under dictatorships is that under such political climate, so much focus is often on protecting the ruler and the regime, which may render pursuing collective welfare a secondary concern. Anyone and anything can be sacrificed in the often brutal cause of preserving the regime. In such states, large amounts of resources are invested in setting up formidable clandestine security apparatuses to protect the ruler and their regime simply because the ruler’s emergence was through brute force and not consensus and so can only be preserved through brute force. In this process, the important dividing line between the political interest of a single human and the collective welfare of the people is blurred, reducing the state to an instrument of advancing narrow interests. Burkina Faso under Traore risks walking this path, more so with the way the regime has been suppressing opposition and freedom of expression.

Crucially, one other reason democracy is essential to development is that under such a system that better guarantees civil liberties, development is more likely to unfold in a just and inclusive manner than under dictatorships. Resources are often more evenly distributed in free political set-ups. In other words, democracy better assures distributive justice, while absence of democracy may impose hegemony and marginalization.

This is because every instant of development comes with the tendency to create its own privileged and marginalized class. For example, as modern capitalism unfolded in the 19th and 20th century Europe, a new privileged class (factory owners) arose to dominate the socio-economic space where a new marginalized class (wage labourers) would be serving them. The emergence of machine weaving to replace hand weaving suddenly turned hitherto self-employed individuals and families into wage labourers that toiled in the textile factories of the capitalists. The same occured in the agricultural sector with replacement of manual farming with mechanised farming.

However, there were, thankfully, strongly evolving democratic institutions at this time in Europe to challenge the economic hegemony and marginalization, where more wealth was being created, yet more people were becoming poorer. Taking advantage of the atmosphere of freedom of expression and association, labour movements began to rise strongly, thanks to pioneer activists like Robert Owen. So, in time, practices like child labour prohibition, eight-hour working day, and minimum wage became entrenched in place of practices where even children toiled in factories and mines for up to 12 and 13 hours daily for paltry wages. This way, democracy offered the free spaces for workers to contest their marginalized status, thus forcing better distribution of wealth and social justice.

Hence, it is not a coincidence that countries with the most advanced democratic institutions are where you find the highest standard of living in the world as development becomes better distributed among the populace. For example, in Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark where strong democratic culture (the strongest in the world) has translated to strong labour rights, conditions of ordinary people who live on wages are the best in the world. High wages and other favourable working conditions have enabled better distribution of wealth and development in those climes.

Compare this with what obtains in in China where the one-party government of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has relentlessly suppressed democratic tendencies in the country since 1949. This repression of democratic spaces has so much stunted labour rights that comparing working conditions in the country and those in advanced democracies, including the USA, is like comparing slavery with affluence. In my view, there is little chance that wages (hence distribution of wealth) in China will meet up with what obtains in these other climes in foreseeable future as the CPC adamantly and brutally upholds a hegemony that excludes sufficient spaces where marginalized people can contest their condition. Hence, while China will continue to be the second largest economy in the world, its development will remain undermined by distributive injustice.

In Nigeria, despite our failure to evolve strong democratic institutions, labour movements have – within the highly constraining expressive space available to them – contested, and have over the years succeeded in extracting valuable concessions, especially in relation to wages. Imagine what could have happened if we had been a true democracy all these years and how worse it could have been if the little expressive space had been completely absent!

That said, however, I will not end this discourse without briefly addressing the situation where many people, given Africa’s struggle with democracy, have doubted the viability of this system of government for the continent. The economic stability experienced under Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya was another important factor lending credence to this thinking. Some persons have argued that Africa’s past reveals a people more at home with more centralized systems of social organization where a dictatorial monarch was at the helm of affairs.

However, this argument is historically flawed, as Africans are not the only people with dictatorial pasts. It is something present among all peoples and races. The admirable democracies we see in Europe today are standing on territories where absolute monarchs (i.e. kings, queens and emperors) once wielded unchallenged powers. If anything, the traditional Igbo society with its largely republican landscape where most towns lacked a monarch should have placed Ndigbo better than Europeans vis-a-vis the capacity to build and function under democracy. Truth is that democratic culture represents a stage in the evolution of human social organization which earlier stages included dictatorial arrangements. Has Africa merely failed to evolve?

The argument that dictatorship (in whatever form it may come) may better serve Africa’s development further labours under the reality that modern society has got much more diverse and complex than the older societies that preceded it. This is a direct effect of rapid expansion of frontiers of human endeavours, creating multiple spaces of Identity along, for example, professional, class, gender, ideological, and political lines. Added to this is the increasing accessibility of resources for self-expression (including the Internet) which tends to liberate long-suppressed views while of course birthing new ones. All this, in a continuous and unstoppable way, generates more and more spaces of contestations in modern world, making consensus building – hence democracy – increasingly inevitable for human progress.

Earliest societies were tribal climes with homogeneous cultures, so dictatorship presented far less problems. Later on, larger political societies began to emerge but could never be compared with today’s societies in terms of diversity and complexity. In many cases, invading kings and emperors imposed religious and cultural hegemony that in time wiped out indigenous cultural identities, thus enabling a homogeneity that suited dictatorship and control. Today, it is all different – very different.

Whatever the argument is against the preferability of democracy as a form of social organization and tool of development, fact remains that Africa will be swimming against the tide of reality if it hopes that dictatorship is the most efficient political instrument for driving development in its states where multidimensional heterogeneity makes consensus, unity and stability indispensable for sustainable development.

CONCLUDED.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.