They drink the best champagne in the world. They wear monogrammed shirts and make sure that the correct length of sleeve is exposed, at the wrist. Their ties are matched with colourful kerchiefs in the button hole and their whole outfits are finely coordinated.

These are the image-conscious men who bestride the corridors of power in Africa. To go with their outfits, they drive in the most luxurious, bullet-proof cars, and they either fly first-class or by private executive jet. In other words, they are as modern as their American and European counterparts.

Except in their politics. They wouldn’t dream of allowing a chauffeur to drive them who has not been tutored in advanced driving, anti-terrorist techniques. They wouldn’t allow their executive jets to fly a hundred kilometres beyond their next servicing date.

And yet, when it comes to politics, they do not know any rules. A Bill Clinton can move from being the most powerful man in the world to becoming a private citizen, without blinking an eyelid. A Barack Obama can be vilified by right-wing radio commentators as if no one elected him to office. But in Africa, the ‘big man’ in office often brooks no opposition whatsoever. The opposition against him must be ‘crushed’. First with words – the government-controlled radio, television and newspapers condemn the opposition routinely as ‘unpatriotic’, ‘divisive’ or ‘nation-wreckers’. I have even seen the opposition described as ‘recidivist’ – a word I had to look up, and which politicians use to mean seeking to tear up one’s country into the tiny bits occupied by its ethnic groups.

Having verbally demonised the opposition, some of our rulers next set the police and the army – who are paid for with the taxes paid by both opposition and government supporters alike – on the opposition. Men and women are beaten up and thrown into prison. Layers are denied to them. If at all they are taken to court, evidence is sometimes manufactured against them. Worse, many are taken before corrupt judges and magistrates, who gladly hand down heavy sentences – whether of fines or imprisonment – to the ‘trouble-makers’.

It is this sort of politics that has brought Côte d’Ivoire to its knees and threatens to engulf it in a new round of unimaginable bloodshed. Troops sympathetic to Alassane Ouattara, the winner of last year’s election, have taken the capital, Yamoussoukro. They are also at San Pedro, the port from which Côte d’Ivoire’s most valuable export, cocoa, is shipped.

Ouattara’s soldiers will be attacking the commercial capital, Abidjan, next. But that will be a very different enterprise altogether. How many citizens can survive a full-scale civil war fought in the crowded streets of a city like Abidjan? It is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Africa. Because of its people’s ‘modern’ attitude to life, few chose where they wanted to live, with political considerations in mind. Certainly, the majority did not choose their abodes on the basis of their ethnicity. Yet today, houses are being marked and households branded in terms of how their politics are perceived by their neighbours.

What will happen when fighting breaks out in Abidjan? There have already been skirmishes in such suburbs as Abobo, and reports put at about a million Côte d’Ivoire residents who don’t want to find out about what dangers lie ahead. They have already left for Liberia and other neighbouring countries.

This is painfully ironical, for it is Liberians who used to flock to Côte d’Ivoire, where many sought refuge during their own country’s protracted civil war a few years ago. Barely settled themselves on their return home, Liberians are now being called upon to return the hospitality that they enjoyed when they were refugees in Côte d’Ivoire.

And why is Côte d’Ivoire being torn apart? The country’s champagne-swigging political elite decided that they wanted to hold an election. They argued endlessly over the qualifications that would enable voters to get on the electoral roll. The debate was visceral – atavistic instincts were summoned in aid of a poisonous socio-political concept called Ivoirité.

Eventually, however, agreement was reached on the electoral roll. There was also an agreement claimed to have agreed on the electoral date and the modus operandi for the election.

So the election was held.

But as the results were being tallied and announced, it was as if nothing had been agreed upon beforehand. All hell broke loose. Laurent Gbagbo and his supporters decided that since the result was not in its favour, it must not be allowed to stand.

Coming from educated people, this stand of the Gbagbo side shocked many in the world. At school, right from infancy, we are taught that if a race is held at sports time, and the ‘red’ section beats the ‘blue’ section, then the red section are champions, and that if the blue section does not like that, then it must find better runners next time! Yet as adults educated to a very high level in some of the best universities in the world, Laurent Gbagbo and his supporters refused to accept such elementary rules, to the point of seeking to enforce their point of view through the barrel of a gun.

Hundreds of innocent people have already been killed. Scores of thousands more have been injured. Many have fled from their homes and become wandering refugees.

Côte d’Ivoire’s tragedy is not the only one of its kind in Africa in recent years. We have seen it happen in Kenya and Zimbabwe too. Different forms of the same political dysfunction are currently threatening Burkina Faso, and may affect Nigeria, which is a few days away from a presidential election. The acrimony attending the Nigerian election has not been edifying to watch.

While so many people are dying on the altar of the political ambitions of empty-headed egoists parading themselves as statesmen, while so many have had their lives uprooted for no good reason, while misery stalks our continent like a perforated blood-collecting vessel that never fills up, no matter how much blood is poured into it, we find academics and ‘political commentators’ turning intellectual cartwheels, trying to rationalise issues that should be quite straightforward. The murderous idiocies that are turning some of our streets into blood-soaked ‘no-go’ areas are called anything but their true name – which is, of course, stupidity.

For instance, I just read on the Radio France International website (RFI.fr) someone fervently calling on international opinion not to look at the Côte d’Ivoire situation in terms of a ‘devil’ and an ‘angel’. Who is saying anything about devils and angels? What this apologist forgets is that both Gbagbo and Ouattara went into the election on the basis of rules that had been agreed upon beforehand, rules which, of necessity, had been designed to produced two results, namely, that someone wins and someone loses. What has that got to do with angels and devils?

The African populace must rise up and make it unprofitable for egoists to muscle in on African politics. They should demand that those who cause bloodshed, in order to evade defeat in a simple election, are caught and punished – to discourage others from following the footsteps of the cheats.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.