The African polity is filled with
class='tags' onclick="javascript:counttag('Failed', 1, 501832)"; href="/tags/failed/">
failed states,many claiming to lack resources to develop,many blaming the colonial experience and lots more ,take a deep breath as you go through the world of my analysis.
Never in the history of human reality, was an ode ever commissioned to celebrate
failure. This flows from a conventional metaphysic. In the halls of reason, only perversity strives to roll out the drums, in honour of failure. Eulogising failure is not an employment proper to the orchestra of optimism. Failure gets a burial; never a funeral. Burial is for realities doomed to the isle of the forgotten. What we want to forget, we bury. But funeral celebrates a life, to immortalize a memory. Man
naturally hastens to forget failure and its bitter pills. But he glories in success. It is normal. He is primed that way by default. Only a perverse
appreciation of existence, celebrates failure amidst pomp and pageantry. That is what we see, at least on superficial level. But underneath our pretences lies an insurmountable paradox; namely: that success is predicated always on deeper appreciation of failed attempts, and its festival of lessons.
An appraisal of failure reveals its peculiar ability of spawning a chain reaction, which forcefully compels its cognizance. It shocks the mind back to a rethink of its shallow assumptions, in a way that success cannot. The failure of one construct can have such concentric effect for all other endeavours in its environment, as to forcefully warrant its imprisonment of our attention. In this situation, failure then rises to be appraised; in order to serve as a critique of the present, and a launching pad for future success. Here, then, failure becomes a catalyst to success. It is only in this light that we look backwards on the battlefields of African history, littered with the fractured and fragmented pieces of African dreams. We are occupied in this piece, with the appreciation of this history of our failures, to explore the lessons that are imperative if we are ever to escape this present predicament, and bequeath a future to our posterity.
The African continent is littered with failed states. Most of these states are economic backwaters, social apologies and political ruins. This landscape runs from the Casablanca to the Cape Town and from The Horn of Africa in the East to the Island of No Return in the West Atlantic. Most of these states true to type were the creatures of imperial convenience. To that end, they were meant to serve a purpose after which their ontological legitimacy or raison d'' etre would then expire. At this expiration; the states, naturally not designed for self-propulsion; were condemned to tether on the brink, and finally implode upon the inglorious weight of their inherent contradictions.
Colonialism designed and inspired the problems. But the decadence was then driven along by a horde of native pirates; trained in the fine art of piracy. These set of political actors were rogues personalities, weaned on selfishness. They were brilliant students of kleptocracy and political perversity. In about four decades they completely outclassed colonial perfidy and bested them in thievery. They did an inglorious job of mismanaging Africa, so much so that she is today the laughing stock of the world.
1. In the beginning there were tribesBefore the advent of colonialism, Africa was a large mass of land, populated by quasi-isolated
tribal pockets, and ethnic nationalities. These constructs interacted with each other through trade, intermarriage, and even wars. There were no states so to say. There were villages, kingdoms, empires and republican democracies. The Ashan, the Kanem Bornu, The Ethiopian/Abyssinian, The Egyptian, The Benin, The Yoruba, etc were empires in their own rights. Ndigbo of Southern Nigeria had already fashioned a functional republican and egalitarian democracy in antiquity, while ancient Greece slumbered in primitivity.
These social embraces were characterized by singular political and culture centres within their sphere of influence. This gave rise to common identity, both lingual and cultural. They ran their societies on their own terms, save naturally, when conquered in wars. In spite of this, the cellular political unit of African life was the tribe. It was so basic, and yet so primordial. It transcends the clans, composed of families, to embrace a wider collection of clans. This presupposed common ancestral or cultural ties, dating to time immemorial. Most of these tribes pay allegiance to one heritage. It was a basis of social bonding. It was the influential factor in the political matrix of the African tribal community. This could be seen today, in the fact that politics in Africa, despite its affinities to Eurocentric-Judeochristian vision of modernity, and to modern conceptions of democracy, still conjugates the tribal verb.
More abstracts about the AFRICA :A GRANDMASTER OF FAILED STATES