Africa, the same story always

When you open a newspaper, magazine or website to read about Africa, you turn away afterwards and wonder when, if ever, will the morality of governance change on this continent, with the aim to do things for the benefit of a country's population as a whole and not only to feather your and your friends' nests. And in the process the country concerned, looking at it from various angles, is slipping slowly (sometimes very fast) into chaos, proverty, conflict and epidemic diseases. In South Africa the incumbent President, Thabo Mbeki, has had his wings clipped properly at the ANC conference in Polokwane, when his arch-rival Jacob Zuma was elected president of the ANC and, provided he does not land in jail for alleged corruption, will in all probability be the next President of the country, in place of Mbeki. It was hailed as a victory by the populace. Mbeki and his autocratic style of governing would be something of the past, they reasoned.

Well, a new National Executive Committee was elected and it seems the delegates to the conference in Polokwane had hardly got back to their homes and the very distressing phenomenon popped up: It seems the person in charge really wants to impress on everybody that he is in charge and if in doing so his behaviour does not agree with democratic principles, so be it. City Press reported that there is already dissent among the members of the NEC and that Jacob Zuma gave them a good scrubbing for "doing things behind his back". Is this the eternal Africa? The people at the top fighting among themselves for the best seats in the circus while very little is done about what really would benefit the country as a whole.

Thabo Mbeki and other leaders in Africa came up with the wonderful scheme NEPAD, which in broad terms is a programme for the upliftment of the African continent. But it seems the name was unfortunate because when you look at Africa you can hardly find any reason to remain positive and you think maybe NEPAD is an abbreviation for the same old African story: Never Ending Poverty And Disease.