Mutumwa Mawere

Who has power and on whose behalf is power exercised in post-colonial Africa? How is power held to account and how can it accessed by all who want to play a part in shaping the future?

The story of power, influence and control in post-colonial Africa is a complex one reflecting the commonly shared ignorance of the majority about how to use existing and new tools to access, harness the energy and innovation of front-line professionals in Africa and the diaspora, local government, citizens and communities.

Africa's many challenges cannot be met by central governments acting alone but by enhancing the rights of citizens and more importantly making institutions more accountable.

This can best be done by the seemingly powerless who normally operate at the coalface. We all know that power in Africa is not fairly distributed across the whole of the society and communities and citizens feel powerless and excluded. 

I was privileged to be one of the few people who attended the special opening of the South African Parliament last week on 11 February 2010 at which President Zuma delivered the State of the Nation address. 

We all know that on this day, 20 years ago, former President Mandela was released from prison.

As we look back on the challenges and progress in building an inclusive and progressive South Africa, we cannot help but reflect on the evolving relationship between people and their power.

After almost 16 years of democracy, it was striking that generally people expect, like in many African states, the central government to think for them.

There was expectation that President Zuma would come up with his vision and blueprint on how to solve the challenges that confront South Africa.

We generally expect the people we elect into public office to be smarter than us.
It was former President Mandela who rightly said that he was no prophet but an ordinary human being with no special qualities from any other human being and yet people expected him to have all the answers.

Although we all want a brighter and secure future, we rarely look at our own actions as the real driver of change.

We expect state actors to play the role that we should play.

The post-colonial experience has seen the power that ordinarily resides in communities to set and meet their own priorities through participation in the governance chain being daily eroded through increasing centralization of power in state offices.

After 54 years of independence, we must acknowledge that local democracy is weak in Africa and people generally believe that their voices are not important in shaping the future.

The majority of Africans are politically, socially and digitally excluded from the knowledge they need to make their own decisions.

The explosion of information and the technologies to utilize it has regrettably not touched the majority of Africans.

The few of us who are part of the digital society have failed to package the growing knowledge and experiences of other societies and cultures so that the generality of the African population can be part of the exciting changes that are taking place globally with critical implications on governance.

The changes that have been and are taking place in the digital world mean that modern citizens are more empowered to make the real choices and expect high standards across a range of services, from their finances, clothes, food, music, holiday to the big decisions about what kind of society they want to be part of.

In many of our democratic systems in Africa, citizens are not allowed to exercise the same level of choices they make in daily lives in the digital space. Knowledge is and can be empowering and yet our collective investment in knowledge and community building is minimal.

We cannot take for granted that the people we surrender power to during elections will exercise that power in our interests.

We can and should demand the best from our state servants but ultimately the responsibility lies with us to be the change that we want to see.

Technology has made it easier for knowledge to be shared.

In 1791, Thomas Paine in "The Rights of Man" wrote: "Revolutions create genius and talent but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, which unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its facilities should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by quiet and regular operation, all that capacity which never fails to appear in revolution."

Revolutions created remarkable African revolutionaries like Nkrumah, Lumumba, Machel, Neto, Nujoma, Kaunda, Nyerere, Kenyatta, Mugabe, Mandela, Tambo and many others but the post-colonial experience has demonstrated that the absence of something to excite the African spirit has led to many of its geniuses descending with them a mass of sense still in the dormant state to the grave.

The daring Africans have regrettably been externalized and could only show their talent in foreign states.

The few actors who seized the state at independence saw regarded themselves as indispensable to the prosecution of the national democratic revolution.

What is needed to excite the mass of sense that lies in African minds? We all have work to do. It was Lao Tzu (600 - 531 BC), the Chinese Philosopher who said: "Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with that they know. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say - We have done this ourselves."

At the end of the day, human progress is in evidence when people are allowed to feel that they own the process and outcomes.

However, in many of our states, state actors would want to think and act on behalf of citizens and in doing so kill the dormant mass of sense that resides in each and every human being.

The challenge is that people would want to be led. They want a smart leader forgetting that no leader however smart can realistically be expected to address the challenges of the people he/she leads.

It is up to us to create the kind of society that we want to see.

The role of frontline professionals and general citizens in creating the kind of environment that encourages power to be devolved cannot be understated. It is our duty to make the people who accept to lead us to know what we want.

The only power we have is the power to organize ourselves so that those privileged to govern us cannot take us for granted.

Even in South Africa, the most developed African economy, the majority of the people expect President Zuma, for instance, to have a day with more hours than what is available to us.

They expect him to think and find solutions for their future forgetting that any civilization founded on expecting someone to do what one can do in his/her own interest is doomed to fail.

Political leaders are wholesalers of political faith and the moment they sink to retail dispensing of faith they are bound to be ineffective.

By participation, citizens can be part of the solution rather than spectators of change.

As Chairman of Africa Heritage Society www.africa-heritage.com it is not unusual to get people requesting for meetings on a one-on-one basis clearly oblivious of the fact that I am also human with no better control of time that any other citizen.

Some wait to see me expecting that I may have the answers that they do no have.

The real answers lie in our ability to organize ourselves so that working together we can make the changes that we want to see.

It is easier said than done because there is something about the human mind that expects the next person to be better at resolving challenges than the person facing the challenge.

Africa has the leaders it deserves and before pointing a finger at leaders we have to look at ourselves and ask the question: "What makes me come alive and not what the Africa needs." Africa needs people who have come alive.