We are all islands

I watched a gruesome video of a Tunisian protester shot dead by the Tunisian police the other day.

I was struck by the fact that the people of Nigeria have not reacted to the events unfolding in Tunisia. There were no mass demonstrations in front of the Tunisian embassy in Abuja, or in front of Aso Rock or the National Assembly to use citizen pressure to force our federal government to intercede at a maximum or speak out at a minimum in defence of the Tunisian citizens.

True, we have our own problems. I have watched videos of summary, extra-judicial executions of Nigerian citizens by our security services in the Niger-Delta and Maiduguri. Come to think of it, the people of Tunisia did not react with mass demonstrations at the Nigerian embassy.

Actually, when the people of one African country suffer for one reason or another, the people of the rest of the countries in Africa just go on with their lives, unconcerned so long as it does not affect them.

Yes, I know our governments don't listen to us, and yes, I know that any mass protest, even over events in another country, is treated by the governments of our own country as a possible coup-de-tat. The thought of thousands of people rallying together without government participation or permission, in favour of an issue the government doesn't care about, for the purpose of pressuring the government to do something it has no interest in doing, with the belief that the government is supposed to do what the people want it to ... well, the whole thing just terrifies every regime in Africa.

As for us citizens, most of us have seemingly given up hope. It is not that we do not care, it is more that we have come to accept the fact that there is nothing we can do about it even if we do care.

But in order to live like this, you have to build a very, very, very hard shell around yourself, to lock out the sights and sounds of your fellow Africans' suffering. You have to walk past him, drive by him, fly over him, and otherwise pretend you do not see him. Even as you pray, in Church or Mosque, for the Almighty to intercede on behalf of your land, your decisions and actions betray the mindset of one who does not expect anything to change, and who fears he may lose what little safety he has if the powers-that-be perceive him to be caring a little too much about the effect everything they are doing has on the ordinary citizen.

And so, if ethnic violence breaks out in Kenya or Rwanda, there is no reaction from the people or political class of Angola. If the Mozambican police crack down viciously on citizens protesting the rise in the price of staple commodities, you hear nary a whisper from the people of Ghana or Gabon. Women could be mass-raped in Congo or Liberia, and Nigerians and Moroccans just go about their day. Oh, there is xenophobic violence in South Africa? Don't expect so much as a whisper out of the people of Ethiopia.

Yes, we all have our own problems ... but if we do not stand together, who will stand with us? We are all hesitant to risk our lives for change because we know no one will come to our aid after we start; but does it occur to us that they won't take the risk of coming to our aid because they know we won't come to their aid after they have taken a risk (on our behalf or their own)?

African governments do not, will not act to prevent, forestall or ameliorate crises in other African countries. You would be wasting time and energy if you invested it in expressing anger at African governments for inaction when crises are imminent or on-going. They are just as bad when they do decide to act, usually after the crisis produces the sort of shocking images which attract the global media long after it is too late for their reports to do any good to the dead; and at that, the African governments just tag along with whatever the "international community" decides to do even though the "international community" never has a clue what to do and just sort of fumbles around until the crises resolve themselves or run out of steam.

It is what it is.

African governments barely if ever respond to potential, threatened, imminent or existing crises in their own countries; it would be self-deception to expect them to react helpfully to a neighbour's plight. Moreover, the continent's political/social/economic/bureaucratic/intellectual elite share a substantially similar, warped worldview. When the leaders of an African country do the sort of things that promote avoidable crises or make unavoidable crises unnecessarily difficult to deal with, the leaders in other African countries think they are doing the right things -- they do the same things in their own countries and see nothing wrong with it, and are just as offended as their leadership colleagues by anyone suggesting that these are in fact bad things they are doing.

I don't know if they don't care, or if they just neither realize nor understand the difference between that which is optimal and that which is self-defeating. Human beings are motivated by rational self-interest, and in this case we the people of Africa face a double roadblock: (a) the status quo is beneficial to the people with the most power to change the status quo; and (b) crises do not seem to affect the security and economic well-being of those with the most power to avoid the crises in the first place -- the rich and powerful either remain rich and powerful when the dust settles, or they fly abroad into "exile" in countries where they own real estate and have banked fortunes, leaving the poor and the middle-class behind to dodge AK-47-totting gunmen. What the rest of us perceive as terrible outcomes are in fact outgrowths of what people of power consider to be the "normal" way of doing business, politics, diplomacy, etc.

If they lack the internal motivation to stand up for what is right, they are under no external pressure to change their stance. We the people do not pressure them because we know what they will do to us if we do (and know that no one, from Africa or beyond, will stand up for us or fight alongside us).

If you are interested in peace, stability, democracy, development and progress in Africa, don't waste your hopes on the "international community", a sort of wannabe-global-junta made up of a dozen or self-anointed countries. Their rhetoric insists on their right to decide things over the heads over everyone else in the supposed interest of all humanity, but their actions are the usual self-interested strategic manoeuvres familiar to anyone who has studied great powers through history. Iraq invading Kuwait alters the political and economic dynamics of crude oil; hundreds of thousands of Rwandans getting massacred does not have quite the same strategic resonance. These powers get whatever they want from Africa, whatever the continent has or can provide that they deem necessary to their strategic interest. They don't just talk about it, they forcefully get it, doing whatever is necessary regardless of the ethics. More often than not, the things they do to advance their interests result in the opposite of what they loudly profess to be their aims as "development partners"

I am not being bitter or resentful. We Africans are going to continue suffering unnecessary negative outcomes as long as we believe the rest of the world has any intention to come and fix all of our problems for us. If we do not tackle our problems, we will suffer for it. I can't describe the feeling I got while watching documentaries of the Liberian civil war, seeing Liberians in the conflict zone wailing before the cameras begging the United States to come and save them. The Americans did not come. The Americans were never going to come. Why in the world did they expect them to?

I am not angry at the "international community". Every country on Earth acts or should act in its own strategic self-interest. We complain fruitlessly, strictly rhetorically, that other countries do not take our interests into account when making their decisions and taking their actions; practically, we do everything in our power to make ourselves useful to their interests even as we neglect our own.

Africans should start thinking and acting in our own interests. The catalyst for this change will never come from the elite; their interests are diametrically opposed to the peoples' interests. If we do not care about each other enough to fight for each other, then there is no point to it, is there?