Irony

The UK Guardian has a story about mooted Chinese "investment" in Zimbabwe. It seems this "investment" will be loans (to be repaid with interest) and lines of credit.

This paragraph....

But such an investment would be likely to heighten concerns about president Robert Mugabe's increasingly warm relationship with China, which has been accused of turning a blind eye to human rights violations across Africa.

....and this paragraph ....

Last year the Chinese embassy in Harare threw an 86th birthday party for Mugabe. Such gestures have fuelled speculation that China is content to prop up Mugabe and could even bankroll his next election campaign. It has refused to join America, Britain and the EU in imposing sanctions against the president and his allies.

.... caught my attention.

You know, I had the same thoughts about vast amounts of North American and European investment propping up vicious dictators like Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema (not to mention ex-dictator of Tunisia Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and current dictator of Egypt Hosni Mubarak).

Mugabe is bad, no doubt, but between them, Uncle Macias and Nephew Teodoro of the Nguema Dynasty have killed or driven to exile a proportion of the Equatorial Guinean population roughly equivalent to the propotion of the Cambodian population killed or exiled by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Macias Nguema was the country's first president; as is the case with such regimes, he only trusted his family, and he made his nephew Teodoro his principal enforcer (which implicates Teodoro in his uncle's crimes as well as his own). Teodoro's position was eventually strong enough that he ousted and assassinated his uncle, before going on to create a country that might as well be North Korea if North Korea discovered crude oil.

Yet, is is seemingly okay for the United States to massively invest in Equatorial guinea and to politically prop up the Nguema dynasty (US Presidents actually smile and take pictures with Teodoro), since there are mineral resources to be had. Everyone knows it is better to have a dictator that guarantees the resources go to you than to have an unpredictable democracy that might actually try to develop the resources in a manner beneficial to the broader economy and not just foreign corporations and a narrow local elite. Everyone knows it. China knows it. Which is why is also okay to express "heightened concern" at China doing exactly the same thing the Americans and Europeans do.

Funny.

It is like the Cold War isn't it? Everybody backing dictators that serve their interests while hypocritically criticizing their rivals for doing the same.

Actually it is not funny.

Why do we Africans just sit by the wayside, as our economic policies, resource exploitation, political structures and governments are decided and imposed (with no democratic input from us) by internal Big Men that work hand-in-hand with external Big Powers? It has been this way for a long time, and it has not worked out particularly well for us, yet we allow it to persist. Heck, even before we fell under the sway of the external Big Powers, we spent centuries as no more than serfs to pre-colonial Big Men.

They talk to themselves and argue with themselves as to which of them should get which chunk of us, and we wait for them to decide, and once they do we let them take the chunks they have apportioned to themselves.

We just watch them.

I don't get it.

There are even people, so-called intellectuals, academics and commentators, who waste a lot of breath appealing to "the West" to come and install democracy in Africa.

Are they kidding me? Why do people keep feeding the people of Nigeria (and Africa) the false line that they are not supposed to rise up and free themselves? Telling them they are supposed to wait for a "Great Nigerian Leader" or a "Benevolent Big Power" to come and save them?

If the Tunisians and Egyptians had waited for Big Powers to come and save them, Ben Ali would still be president.

Of course, the jury is still out on whether or not the changes in Tunisia (and eventually Egypt) will be real and substantive or merely cosmetic and deceptive. There are likely a lot of internal Big Men and external Big Powers working hard to ensure that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The thing about revolutions, all revolutions, is they always remove the sitting Czar .... and replace him with another Czar, except the new Czar makes sure no one ever calls him Czar, lest people start to wonder what the point of the whole exercise was.