0:00 let me enter into this conversation by giving a historical context in the month of May 1963 the leaders of the then independent African countries assembled in Addis Ababa Ethiopia and many speeches were delivered and the thrust of all the speeches was that African countries haven't regained their independence their primary focus and
0:45 objective was to ensure that they exercised their Regained mandate for the benefit of the people to ensure that the people are liberated from ignorance disease and poverty on the 24th day of May but the most powerful speech ever made by an African leader was delivered by Ghana's panic Kwame Nkrumah and he reminded the leaders who are present on that day about a number of things one he told them that not to delude themselves that by regaining
1:33 their independence they asked while colonizer would recoil and remain inactive that in fact the erstwhile colonial master was going to be more pernicious but in a very subtle way Kwame Nkrumah was right he reminded his audience that going forward it was necessary and indeed urgent the Africans should begin to think as one whole because if they remained in this unit they would remain weak and vulnerable and therefore susceptible to manipulation
2:19 kwame nkrumah was right he reminded his audience that because many of if not all of the African countries were artificial they were created in Berlin and the boundaries were artificial but he had his audience that they should respect the in viola bility of the boundaries because if they tried to redraw the boundaries conflict would never end and that was reinforced in 1964 in Cairo on the doctrine of inviolability of inherited boundaries I remind us of
3:06 these particular incident 58 years ago because in 2013 the African Union came with agenda 2063 and if you look at the text of agenda 2063 and the speeches that were given around it it was the rehash of what Kwame spoke about and the other leaders spoke about and is not lost on me last year that one of the themes of African Union was the silencing of the guns by the year 2020 I'm not a Jewish prophet but the guns will not be silent next year in fact there are more guns that I imagine in Africa which means that peace is still
3:53 very elusive and then we have been given the history the founding fathers of the African countries took the view that because we States made out of many nations there was wisdom in having a style of politics that was different so that in the early days of many African countries many leaders held the view whether they were mistaken or not is another debate for another day but they held the view that one of the things that they had to do was to have single-party States so that if you went to Zion then no Congo before it becomes
4:39 a Zambia Malawi or Kenya or Uganda or Tanzania everybody believed that in order to hold the many nationalities together you needed a single party under whose aegis organization of state affairs would be undertaken mistakes were made and then the conceptual West convinced us that our salvation could only come from something they call democracy and I'm using the word very deliberately something they call democracy which they defined and they defined it in English
5:26 if you are colonized by the English and they defined it in French if you are colonized by the French and they defined it in Portuguese if you are colonized by the Portuguese and they defined it in Spanish if you are colonized by the Spaniard we never defined it in Kinyarwanda no it was never defined in ebo or Yoruba and we were told after the collapse of the Soviet Union that democracy was equals to one multi-party politics to periodic elections three limitation of terms of the presidency that is how the conceptual West defined it for us and we
6:13 who have had the advantage if it is an advantage at all of being educated in the West there is a sense in which our thought processes are also confined by those definitions however might we want to free ourselves we find our default mode being how we were trained so when we define democracy we are also caught up in these books sometimes we tell ourself to think outside of the box but the - north of our thought processes still remained the box we never think without the box so when we talk about peace in Africa and we talked about adversarial politics
7:02 we are not talking about anything that is African the political party is not Africa it is something that we inherited you know in the United Kingdom they talk about their loyal opposition loyal to the monarchy because there is a process permit me to say at this stage that Africa deals with the diversity much better than Europe much better if you look at your typical European nation the Dutch is the Raj largely the Swedes are the suits like then no agents are the new agents likely the finns are the finns largely and where they have many
7:47 ethnicities they don't do very well ask the Spaniards if you doubt where they had many nations in Yugoslavia asked them they created many nation to create fewer ethnicities but African nations have succeeded thus far in working with diversity in very unique circumstances we had the conceptual West despite their protestations to the contrary always interfering in our affairs in a very subtle manner when we are holding election they will deny but there is a way in which they are always moving in a subterranean fashion because the the faeces still is that you divide them in
8:35 order to rule them that is the thesis we don't say it as loudly as we should because we want to be politically correct and I refuse to be corrected and this is exactly what Kwame Nkrumah wanders about and the political party therefore lends itself to that manipulation we will be persuaded because it is asked to have gone to school who form political parties will be persuaded to form outfits and in many African countries these outfits are formed on the basis of ethnic affiliation your typical African political party is simply an assembly of ethnicities and in many African nations you will discover that what we call elections is simply an ethnic census to determine which ethnic
9:23 group is larger than the other it is common in Julius Nyerere area of Tanzania who said it he said that the tragedy of Africa is not what the song is not the song that is being sung but who the sing is and what he meant was very clear that you may have an agenda that is good for your nation but if you do not come from a particular ethnic group those who will follow you will not be from your ethnic group you may sing the best song but when you look back you'll discover that is only people from your ethnic group who are following you and when you have such a situation the design is inherently conflict and that is why therefore when you look at Africa
10:08 today you discover that after every election soccer in many African countries there is conflict because you go into the election or the political parties go into an electoral process on the basis that we must win and if we don't win the election have been raped in other words we place so much premium on the presidency and you see in many African countries entry into government is like winning a lottery it is winning a lottery because it gives you access to resources and therefore people say people claim the president if you are in a country say and one of you are on one of your own means a son they are normally sons one of your own sons has
10:56 won the presidency the tribe celebrates from the hutments the herdsman to the from the fishermen to the intellectual because we have now won the presidency we have worn the lottery we will have ministers we'll have all these and everybody else feels excluded and that generates conflict and we have seen it whether if we don't see it in Gabon we see it in Guinea Bissau if we don't see it in Guinea Bissau we see it in Kenya if we don't see it in Kenya we see it in South Sudan so that in South Sudan if one were to ask them what is the problem the contest is of an ethnic kind they
11:41 are contesting because one of our own must occupy the Statehouse and that is why therefore you see under the guise of democracy in a number of African countries we create offices which arson occurs you will have a president you'll have a deputy president you'll have a second deputy president you'll have a Prime Minister first Prime Minister first Prime all those useless offices which make no sense because you have to appoint people into those offices and give them a motorcade so that when they go to their villages they look important and the people on them as hours people want to be included in such a scenario my verdict is number one Africa's long
12:30 term salvation demands that we avoid adversarial politics Africa's salvation demands that we define for ourselves what democracy means and you said it very correctly professor and the good friends from the United Kingdom very correctly what people want is to participate what people want is to have a government that is accountable many people in many African countries simply want food on the table many people in many African countries simply want to have access to health care many people simply want good education young men and women in Africa simply want to put unities for innovation and invention and they want a government that creates an environment
13:18 where that can be achieved and therefore in my view I think the time has come that Africa must define ourselves one of the problem that we have in Africa is that we do not define ourselves and permit me to annoy you in many African nations today after every election whether we like it or not we have observers and when the elections are being held observers may come from Nigeria from Kenya from Uganda but people are waiting what did the European Union say you know this belief by us that the European have a divine duty to
14:04 tell us what to do and we have a divine duty to accept to do what they say is one of the problem that we have and until the day that we liberate ourselves duty to decolonize our minds in a manner of speaking we are going to embrace the kind of politics that will only perpetuate conflict right now as I move towards my conclusion I simply want you to look at the map of Africa and look at the map of Africa against the declaration that this guns must be silenced by 2020 and simply tell me is there peace and calm in Asia is there peace and calm in booking of us do you have peace and calm in Mali is it peaceful in Mauritania is it peaceful in
14:50 Benin is it peaceful in Gabon is it peaceful in in in in Cameroon is it peaceful in South Sudan is it peaceful in the Democratic Republic of Congo is it peaceful in Somalia it look at the map of Africa you look at that and you are being told through declarations that we are going to assign us the guns in 2020 is as if you are being told to go to Kigali but and and meanwhile you have engaged a gear taking you to the Democratic Republic of Congo's border and you are jet lag speed this this this is why I think that it is incumbent upon us to remember one thing that peace is not
15:35 merely the absence of war it is much deeper than that that the development is not building of skyscrapers in African cities now and that therefore if we want to sustain peace and development what we must look at are the human indices I think the Bhutanese have got it right they what they call the Gross National Happiness index these things that Europe tells us many useful things but there are certainly useless things that they tell us one of them is the thing called per-capita income that they take all the world half of which is owned by two people and then they divide it and say the per capita income is $800 and meanwhile other people are suffering I'm
16:22 submitting to us that time has come that we must define what development is I want to go to a typical randy's village and Beyond peace beyond the absence of what I want to see peace at the dinner table I want to see peace at the hospital and the dispensary and I'm suggesting to us that politics defines all these and one of the things that we must do and professor I can't agree with you more is that there is no one-size-fits-all there is no one-size-fits-all what works for Wanda is not necessarily what works for Uganda in 1984 the Ethiopians came up with a constitution which I think is the only
17:07 one in the world that allowed that defines itself on the basis of ethnic identity and even allows the ethnicities to secede under certain conditions whether it has worked or not I think the jury is still out but they recognize the fact that ethnicities are real and if we continue to delude ourselves in Africa that ethnicities are unreal we are cheating ourselves different the United States of America when you hear them talking about the vote they they talk about the Hispanic vote they talked about the black vote they talk about the Caucasian vote they are beginning to recognize that those blocks are critical how then do you use them in a manner that is positive
17:53 because look at the Democratic Republic of Congo with over 233 ethnicities look at Nigeria with over 200 languages look at Kenya with over 56 look at Tanzania with 136 plus these are the realities in the African nation and I am convinced that going forward number one we need to have peace but we will not have peace by declaring that peace will come and reign we must do things that move us in the direction of attaining peace and until we introduce what I have called elsewhere hygiene in our politics
18:40 we are moving nowhere and part of the introduction of Aegina is to recognize the environment and the context in which we operate one of them move the areas in which we must move is to recognize that going forward we are different nations in single States trying to create mega nations and unless we have inclusivity so that people belong feel they belong and I want to give this example in in Kenya it happens that I believe in other countries when I'm individual is elected as a member of parliament in many African countries they have things they call homecoming parties these homecoming parties is an attempt to demonstrate to the village by the newly elected member
19:27 of parliament or newly appointed Minister that we went to hunt we have come back with a price that price is membership in Parliament or a ministerial post let us eat and celebrate so that when you want to punish that individual you are not punishing the holder of the office but you are punishing the whole village people on these positions and I'm suggesting to us that politics must be of such a nature that allows ethnicities and groups to negotiate I do not as yet have an answer which I think I can't in on the ground but I have the following things that it cannot be uniform that it must be specific to the circumstances of each country that it is us who must
20:13 define it and that we must have a vocabulary for it and that we must warn ourselves that the actual colonial master is alive and well subterranean and pernicious to the core don't delude yourselves and remember that sometimes the disunity of Africa is big business and if we forget that we will once again be manipulated lastly I saw the African National Congress winning an election in South Africa last week not that is a bad thing but somebody sent me a clip that was very telling it was a clip where all the celebrities were Chinese and they were
20:59 celebrating hail African National Congress Chinese in in Johannesburg that laughter suggests to me that our you have understood my message [Applause] you [Music]
