Prof Baregu
President John Magufuli of Tanzania
Late Nelson Mandela
Professor Mwesiga Baregu, Tanzanian political scientist and opposition politician, took a look at Africa yesterday and declared that the problems are not weak institutions, wrong policies, lack of capacity, poor implementation, lack of accountability or poor leadership but illegitimate power. Speaking at a lecture in Abuja, the African intellectual said all these problems lie in the legitimacy problem of the African State, the manner in which governments came to power or the outcome of elections which did not reflect the interest of the people but the interest of power seekers
Relying a lot on data from his own country, Prof Baregu pointed out how most of the governments manufactured the legitimacy they enjoy, sometimes through a modicum of good governance but at other times through use of force. Still, they don’t become legitimate because the people do their own post election analysis by asking each other who they voted for.
In use of force, governments in Africa rely on poverty, ignorance, disease and fear to subdue the people, instruments which he said they had borrowed from the colonial mode of administering the natives in the past. This is why, according to him, it is only during elections that the people get new dresses by way of T-Shirts and meat, rice and so on. Citing the case of Tanzania where the government of late Julius Nyerere had already won the UNESCO award on eradication of illiteracy by 1974, Baregu spoke of how “illiteracy has come back with vengeance” in Tanzania, not just in the form of adult illiteracy but lack of education in general. Not only is this the case, the thinking about and the responses to illiteracy hardly touch on the fundamental question of the quality of teachers but always around technical issues of number of classrooms, laboratories and other teaching aids.
Linking the weaponization of illiteracy to the power project of the government in Tanzania, for instance, the professor argues that this is why the ruling party performs best where education is worst while opposition does better where education is better. This happens because giving people quality education makes them capable of qualitative judgment which can take you out of power, he theorised. Extending this argument to the use of fear as an instrument for acquisition and consolidation of power, Baregu espouses two ways in which this works. One is the same contempt for the natives as people who do not know anything or cannot think while the second is contempt for the natives based on fear of their rebelliousness. The concept of governance in Africa has remained on this package of controlling the natives, explaining that this is why the attempts at new social contracts in Africa have collapsed. He mentioned such attempts as the Ujama in Tanzania, Kenneth Kaunda’s Humanism in Zambia, The Common Man’s Charter in Uganda, among others.
Prof Baregu disclosed how his thinking on the African crisis emerged. He said they came from the attempt to follow democratisation and elections across Africa at the Nairobi based Africa Research and Resource Centre and his membership of a constitution review commission which aimed at creating a people’s constitution in Tanzania. This process, he added, took the members to the listen to the people in the villages and to the workers in the urban centres but when a constituent assembly was convened, “80% of the transformative clauses were the ones expunged”.
Without dismissing weak institutions, wrong policies, lack of capacity, poor implementation, lack of accountability or poor leadership, Baregu noted how the analysis of the African state of recent has tended to be centered on them but that they are not the real problems.
Yesterday’s lecture organised by Africa Vision 525 at the Olaiton Oyerinde Hall at the Nigeria Labour Congress was attended by pan-Africanists such as Lindsay Barret, Ben Asante, Wale Olaoye among others. The lecture had been preceded by a simulation of the African Union Summit by student-presidents. Speaking for the host organisation, Professor Okello Oculi expressed gratitude to Baregu for the lecture which is a series in which other African intellectual stalwarts have participated in previous years.
