Date Posted: Thursday 22-Nov-2007
[This is the most amazing article I
have ever seen written by a Black African. The ending is mind-blowing.
It nearly made me cry - and normally, nothing makes me cry! I was
totally blown away by this.
This black man did something I have been crying for for ages. He
formed the "African Conservative Forum". Among his dreams are to
distribute Ian Smith's book, "The Great Betrayal", among black African
leaders and to build a library in memory of Ian Smith of Rhodesia in
Nairobi, Kenya!!
Read what he writes about Robert Mugabe and South Africa. This man
knows what he is talking about. I'm telling you, if there were more
black people like this guy, there would be so much hope for Africa and
Africa would boom and grow and develop like you have never seen.
Perhaps, in the throes of hell, there is hope for us in Africa yet.
Jan]
Posted by Mukui Waruiru on November 01, 2007
The ongoing violence in Iraq has caused observers to reflect on the
challenges of bringing democracy to tribal societies. Before the Iraq
War was launched in 2003, the Bush administration assured Americans
and the world that the removal of Saddam Hussein would result in the
creation of a peaceful, well-governed, and democratic society. But it
is now becoming clear that building a successful democracy is not as
easy as many Americans had assumed. Pure democracy is a system that
works well in particular cultures, and not all cultures are equally
capable of building harmonious democratic societies.
If the Bush administration had been interested in studying the
track record of democracy-building efforts in tribal cultures, they
should have studied the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the
introduction of pure democracy 50 years ago resulted in disaster for
the people of the region. For the purposes of this article, I am
defining ‘pure democracy’ as majority rule under universal suffrage,
in which all citizens of adult age are guaranteed the right to vote in
national elections.
In 1957, Ghana became the first black African country to gain
independence from European colonial rule (Sudan gained its
independence in 1956, but it regards itself as part of Arab Africa,
rather than black Africa). The Prime Minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah,
had won an election in 1956, campaigning on a platform of attaining
immediate independence from British colonial rule. Nkrumah had served
as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1956, a period in which Ghana enjoyed
internal self-government, under the supervision of the British
colonial governor in the country. The governor had the power to veto
decisions by Nkrumah that he felt were harmful to the interests of the
colony. This was the period in which Ghana enjoyed the greatest levels
of freedom and prosperity in its history.
Two conservative Ghanaian politicians, J. B. Danquah and Kofi
Busia, opposed Nkrumah’s campaign for immediate independence. They
wanted to preserve the status quo, because of the stability and
prosperity which Ghana was enjoying. They preferred a more gradual
path to independence, in contrast to the campaign for rapid
decolonization. Both men realized that without the supervision of the
British colonial power, Nkrumah would turn Ghana into a dictatorship,
and impose his deeply-held Marxist beliefs on the Ghanaian people.
The opposition political party that was supported by Danquah and
Busia lost the 1956 elections, and Nkrumah was able to lead his
country to independence on March 6, 1957. The dire predictions of
Danquah and Busia came true, and in a couple of years, Nkrumah
established Africa’s first post-colonial dictatorship. Danquah was
subsequently arrested and jailed as a political prisoner, and he
eventually died because of the terrible prison conditions in which he
was held. Busia fled the country in fear of his life, and he returned
to the country only after Nkrumah was overthrown in a Western-backed
military coup in 1966.
Most of the Black African nations that gained independence after
Ghana followed its path by establishing one-party dictatorships.
Observers soon began to describe the practice of democracy in Africa
as ‘one-man, one-vote, one-time’. In many of the cases, the winning
political party at the independence elections used its majority in the
national parliament, to pass legislation outlawing the existence of
opposition political parties. This left the ruling party with a
monopoly of power. This trend challenged the widely held notion that
pure democracy leads to more freedom. If anything, in many countries,
Africans enjoyed greater personal freedom and prosperity under
colonial rule, than they do today under independent governments. While
opposition parties have been permitted to exist in some countries in
the last few years, the oppressive habits associated with one-party
dictatorial rule have been hard to break.
In the 1960s, American conservatives were outspoken against the
wave of decolonization and democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa, that
was being pushed by the United States and the former Soviet Union.
William F. Buckley, in his book, Up From Liberalism wrote:
“We see in the revolt of the masses in Africa the mischief of the
white man’s abstractions: for the West has, by its doctrinaire
approval of democracy, deprived itself of the moral base from which to
talk back to the apologists of rampant nationalism….Democracy, to be
successful, must be practiced by politically mature people among whom
there is a consensus on the meaning of life within their society….If
the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the
majority may be the indicated, though concededly the undemocratic,
course. It is more important for a community, wherever situated
geographically, to affirm and live by civilized standards than to
labor at the job of swelling the voting lists”.
Buckley tried to make the distinction between universal suffrage
and freedom, in his analysis of the conditions in the American South
before the passage of Civil Rights legislation, which he compared to
colonial rule in Africa:
“Does the vote really make one free? I do not believe it
necessarily does….Being able to vote is no more to have realized
freedom than being able to read is to have realized wisdom. Reasonable
limitations upon the vote are not recommended exclusively by tyrants
or oligarchs (was Jefferson either?). The problem of the South is not
how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to train the Negro – and a
great many whites – to cast a thoughtful vote”
Buckley was however careful to distinguish his position in opposing
universal franchise in the American South, from that of the southern
segregationists who advanced genetic arguments in opposing black
voting rights in the South:
“There are no scientific grounds for assuming congenital Negro
disabilities. The problem is not biological, but cultural and
educational”
Today, if one was to argue in favor of restrictions to the right to
vote, one would be labeled as an enemy of freedom. But, as we have
seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and in much of Black Africa,
democracy does not necessarily lead to freedom. With hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis fleeing their country as a result of the violence
that has engulfed that nation, can anyone seriously suggest that
Iraqis are freer today than they were under Saddam Hussein? Are the
nations of Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo freer today,
than they were under colonial rule?
The state governments that existed in the American South during the
Jim Crow era discredited the respectable and honorable Western
tradition of placing reasonable restrictions on who to allow to vote.
Putting restrictions on the vote using poll taxes, literacy tests, and
property ownership qualifications, has helped many Western nations to
preserve liberty and order for centuries. But Southern state
governments in the post-Reconstruction era applied such restrictions
unfairly, in a manner which was blatantly discriminatory on the basis
of race. In the early part of the 20th Century, Booker T. Washington
called on black Americans to work hard to improve their educational
and economic status, in order to more fully participate in the
American political process. But by denying educated and financially
successful Blacks access to the ballot, the state governments of the
South destroyed Washington’s vision of building racial harmony in
America. As a result, divisive demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al
Sharpton have risen to prominence, and shape the agenda on race
relations in America today.
Universal suffrage is a very recent development in the West.
Britain attained universal suffrage only in 1928, when all adults over
the age of 21 were allowed to vote. A century earlier, voting in
Britain was limited to a tiny percentage of the adult male population.
The Tories held power from 1783 to 1830, a 46 year stretch that was
only briefly interrupted in 1806-1807. Charles Grey finally took over
as a Whig Prime Minister in 1830. He passed the Reform Act in 1832,
which significantly expanded the percentage of male citizens who were
allowed to vote. The 1832 reforms gave one in five adult males the
right to vote. The property qualifications for voting were gradually
lowered over the decades, enfranchising more and more people, before
they were finally abolished in 1928. During this time, the
educational, social, and cultural level of the British masses was
gradually raised, which enabled a successful transition to majority
rule without destabilizing the social order.
In the United States, the founding fathers set out to create a
constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. At the time the
Constitution was adopted, half of the white adult male population
could not meet the property qualification for voting in elections.
Because women could not vote, that meant that only 25 percent of the
white citizens of the US were entitled to vote. The U.S. finally
gained the universal franchise in 1965, where adult citizens of both
genders and all races were given the right to vote. By this time, the
majority of American families were middle-class people who owned their
homes—and therefore, such a measure did not threaten the stability of
the market economy. Given that Britain and the US took so long to
build well-functioning democratic systems, it is unrealistic to expect
African nations to have set up successful democratic societies, given
the high poverty rates and the low levels of civilization of most of
the population.
Classical liberals have long said that one cannot build a free
society without putting in place a political system that protected
property rights. The 17th Century English philosopher, John Locke,
asserted that the prerequisites for a free society were the protection
of life, liberty, and property. Locke did not limit his definition of
property to material goods, but included as a form of property the
ownership of one’s labor. Twentieth century Communists understood
that, by abolishing private property through nationalization, they
would completely strip private citizens of their means of self-support
and independence, reducing them to the status of slaves. This led to a
situation where people living under Communism were completely
dependent on the government for their very survival, which allowed the
government to control every aspect of their lives.
With this understanding of liberalism, Ian Douglas Smith, the
former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, can be rightly regarded as Africa’s
first classical liberal revolutionary. In 1965, he led a revolution
for freedom, when he initiated the Unilateral Declaration of
Independence (UDI) of Rhodesia from Britain. The UDI was intended to
preserve Christianity, freedom, and civilization. For that courageous
action, Smith became one of the most vilified men in history, and his
country was subjected to comprehensive United Nations economic
sanctions in 1966. He was falsely labeled as a racist and white
supremacist. But, unlike the architects of apartheid in neighboring
South Africa, he has never supported claims that blacks are inherently
inferior. However, like Buckley, Smith recognized that the low levels
of education and cultural development of most of the blacks, made the
establishment of a successful pure democracy a difficult undertaking.
In addition, there were numerous previous examples of failed
attempts to establish pure democracies in Africa, from Guinea and
Ghana, to Nigeria and Uganda, and there was good reason to expect that
Rhodesia would follow a similarly tragic path if the universal
franchise was extended. Facing a possible future of either a Marxist
dictatorship or anarchy, the Rhodesian leadership declared
independence and prevented Britain from imposing majority rule in the
colony. The lives, liberty, and property of people of all races in
Rhodesia were preserved.
Smith was motivated by the desire to uphold the historical
Anglo-Saxon tradition of limiting the vote to that segment of the
population that would be able to use it responsibly. The Rhodesian UDI
of 1965 was modeled on the American Declaration of Independence of
1776, and the Rhodesians had great respect and admiration for America.
However, the Rhodesian admiration for America was not reciprocated,
and the U.S. joined the rest of the world in denouncing and isolating
a friendly country.
The Rhodesian government was unfairly compared to the
segregationist state governments of the American South, and to South
Africa under apartheid rule. However, Rhodesia did not have the rigid
racial segregation that characterized those two other systems of
government, and Blacks were allowed to vote in Rhodesian elections.
Blacks were allowed to have 16 seats in the 66 member Rhodesian
parliament, while whites held 50 seats. Voting was limited to those
who could meet the literacy and property ownership qualifications,
just like in Britain and the United States in the relatively recent
past. Rhodesia was a limited democracy, not a pure democracy.
It was expected that, with time, as black Rhodesians became better
educated and more prosperous, they would gradually gain greater
representation in the Rhodesian Parliament. Eventually, white and
black Rhodesians would share power in the Rhodesian Parliament, under
a 50-50 arrangement. This position fell short of majority rule. But
since the whites had created and built the country, and were expected
to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes even in the future, this
arrangement seemed to be fair. Many white and black Rhodesians felt
that this power sharing model would prevent Rhodesia from becoming a
Marxist dictatorship like Nkrumah’s Ghana, or deteriorating into the
chaos of the democratic republics of Congo and Somalia. But the
international community would not accept anything less than black
majority rule.
By the mid 1970s, Rhodesia had, proportionally, the largest black
middle-class in Africa, and it was growing rapidly. This was despite
the fact that Rhodesia was under U.N. economic sanctions, and the
government was spending vast sums of money waging a war against
Marxist terrorists, who were based in neighboring Mozambique and
Zambia. Despite those challenges, Rhodesia was a successful limited
democracy, governed by the rule of law, having independent courts, and
a multiparty system of government. The leader of the official
opposition in parliament was black, and he and other black members of
parliament were able to openly criticize Prime Minister Smith and his
government for what they felt were their shortcomings. This was in
stark contrast to the situation in the rest of Africa, where one-party
dictatorial rule was the norm, and criticism of the president was
equated with treason.
In 1979, a power-sharing agreement between white Rhodesians and
their moderate black allies was arrived at. Free and fair elections
were held under universal suffrage, which led to black majority rule,
but there were strong guarantees put in place to protect white
minority rights. The new government was headed by the moderate black
clergyman, Abel Muzorewa, and he was committed to maintaining
Rhodesia’s capitalist system and its economic prosperity. However,
Muzorewa’s government was denied recognition by the West, and Rhodesia
remained under U.N. economic sanctions. U.S. President Jimmy Carter
and British Prime Minister James Callaghan, demanded new elections
that would include the participation of terrorist leaders who did not
believe in the democratic process.
New elections were held in 1980, and the Maoist terrorist Robert
Mugabe won the vote through appeals to tribal sentiment and by
intimidating rural voters in the Shona-dominated provinces. Mugabe was
a devoted student of Kwame Nkrumah, having lived and worked in
Nkrumah’s Ghana in the late 1950s, where he closely observed how his
mentor managed his government. Since 1980, Rhodesians (now called
Zimbabweans), have had less freedom than they ever had under Smith.
The economy of Zimbabwe gradually declined from 1980 to 1999. In
the year 2000, the Mugabe regime launched the infamous invasions of
white-owned farms that completely destroyed the country’s
agriculturally-based economy. Ironically, the Zimbabwean government
already owned millions of acres of land, which it could have
re-distributed to poor blacks, without touching the white-owned farms.
But Mugabe did not want a sensible solution to the land question. He
was driven by the desire to punish white Zimbabweans for supporting
the emerging opposition party, known as the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC). As anyone with knowledge of the situation in Zimbabwe
knows, Mugabe never had any intention of helping Zimbabwe’s poor,
despite his rhetoric on the issue. The black middle-class, which had
thrived under Smith, has now been almost completely wiped out. Just as
the Bolsheviks of the former Soviet Union enslaved the Russian people
by abolishing private property, Mugabe is now in the process of
seizing privately-owned business enterprises, just as he seized the
white-owned commercial farms. Instead of condemning Mugabe, corrupt
African politicians view Mugabe as some sort of hero, for his defiance
of the West.
Out of concern for Africa’s future, I founded the African
Conservative Forum (ACF) in May, 2007. My organization seeks not just
the downfall of the Mugabe regime, but the complete dismantling of the
disastrous Marxist legacy that Nkrumah and Mugabe have bequeathed to
Africa. One of the major tasks that I plan to undertake is the
distribution of 10,000 copies of Ian Smith’s autobiography, The Great
Betrayal, to African legislators, civil servants, academics,
journalists, university students, diplomats and others. Individuals or
organizations that may be interested in assisting in this important
task, can contact me.
Reading Smith’s memoirs changed my life. His book helped to make me
a conservative. If African intellectuals were to get an opportunity to
read his autobiography, they would realize, as I did, that the true
freedom fighter from Rhodesia is Ian Smith, not Robert Mugabe. Once
they learn about the link between property and freedom, and how pure
democracy and political independence do not necessarily translate into
freedom, then they would get a true idea of what freedom is all about.
If there is any African leader who deserves a presidential library,
it is Ian Smith. His memoirs spell out how Africa can move forward to
a future of liberty and prosperity. It is often said that prophets are
not honored in their home countries. Smith can accurately be described
as a prophet, because he predicted disaster for Rhodesia once it came
under the control of the communist terrorist, Robert Mugabe. Many
people who opposed Smith in the past are finally coming to realize how
right he was. In the British Sunday Times newspaper of September 23,
2007, Judith Todd, a left-liberal human rights activist who was one of
Smith’s most outspoken opponents in the 1970s, now admits that “Mugabe
was rotten from the start”.
Not surprisingly, the Marxist government of Zimbabwe viciously
attacks Smith’s legacy in the history books and in the
state-controlled media. But what is more difficult to understand is
the reaction of the brave men and women who make up the opposition to
the Mugabe regime, whenever the UDI era is mentioned. Zimbabwean
opposition activists, both white and black, make strenuous efforts to
distance themselves from Smith, out of fear of being labeled lackeys
of the colonialists by the Mugabe regime.
The minds of the Zimbabwean people have been so poisoned against
Smith, that it seems highly unlikely that he will receive the honor he
truly deserves, even if the opposition comes to power in the next
general elections scheduled for 2008. I often dream about building an
Ian Smith Library here in Nairobi, where I would be able to educate
future generations of African leaders about Smith’s admirable legacy.
But I guess, given the high cost of such a project, it will remain an
impossible dream.
In 1980, when Mugabe came to power, Rhodesia had a GDP per capita
that was comparable to that of Malaysia. Today, Malaysia is hailed
around the world as one of East Asia’s great economic success stories,
and is a newly industrialized country that manufactures goods of all
sorts. Yet, in 1980, Rhodesia had economic policies that were more
business-friendly than those of Malaysia, and a civil service that was
far more honest and efficient than Malaysia’s. Both nations are former
British colonies, and have a public service modeled on that of
Britain.
Where would Rhodesia be today, if Ian Smith’s vision of
power-sharing rather than majority rule, had come to pass? I will try
to hazard a guess. Rhodesia would have experienced an economic boom
without precedent in Africa’s history, with impressive double-digit
growth in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. The white population would
probably be double what it was in 1980, growing from 250,000 to
500,000. This would have been partly as a result of natural increase,
because of the lower costs of raising children in Rhodesia. Many of
the hundreds of thousands of Portuguese settlers who fled from the
Communist revolutions in Angola and Mozambique would have moved to
Rhodesia. There would also have been some immigration from South
Africa, as well as from many Western nations, attracted by Rhodesia’s
pleasant climate and promising economic future. All those whites would
have brought useful skills that would have benefited the country
immensely.
Interestingly, the dynamism of the free market would have reduced
the racial disparities in land ownership in a fair and transparent
manner. This is because the rapid growth in manufacturing, tourism,
and other industries, would have led to many black workers abandoning
their jobs in the white farms for better economic opportunities in the
cities. The resulting rise in average black agricultural wages would
have put many white farms out of business, and some of the farmers
would have been forced to sub-divide and sell their farms. The newly
economically empowered blacks would have purchased plots of land for
residential use, or for small-scale horticulture.
If Smith’s vision had prevailed, Zimbabwe would have had a GDP per
capita equal to, or higher than, that of Malaysia. But the sad reality
is that Zimbabwe’s GDP per capita today is lower than that of Haiti.
The Caribbean nations of Barbados and the Bahamas are majority black
former British colonies, and they can provide us with a model of what
the future could have been in Rhodesia, if the Communists had not
taken over. Both nations have maintained the colonial tradition of
providing strong protections for property rights, and, today, both
nations have a GDP per capita higher than that of Malaysia.
My British and American friends often ask me to predict the future
of South Africa, and whether that nation will go the way of Zimbabwe.
I am often tempted to tell them what they want to hear – the
politically-correct answer that the situations in Zimbabwe and South
Africa are different, and that all is well in South Africa. But the
past record of the ANC does not give me much cause for optimism.
During the days of white rule, the ANC worked to mobilize black
support by stirring up anti-white hatred. The late ANC activist, Peter
Mokaba, is credited with creating the infamous chant, “Kill the Boer,
kill the farmer”. Not to be outdone, the main rival of the ANC among
the black radicals, the PAC party, had its own rallying cry, “One
settler, one bullet”.
As one can expect, the anti-white hatred that the ANC and PAC
stirred up during the era of white rule, did not dissipate with the
coming of majority rule. The ANC leadership blames all its failures on
whites and the supposed ‘legacy of apartheid’. There has also been an
explosion in the rate of violent crime, in which whites have been
disproportionately targeted, and which the ANC has shown an
unwillingness to deal with. Some 210,000 blacks and 40,000 whites have
been murdered since 1994. When he was challenged on his failure to
tackle violent crime, the South African Security Minister, Charles
Nqakula, told his critics that if they were unhappy with the
conditions in South Africa they should leave the country. His
statement was widely understood as being targeted at South African
whites.
Blacks in South Africa enjoy one of the highest standards of living
in Africa. Yet the ANC blames whites for the poverty and landlessness
of much of the black population. The government of South Africa owns
millions of hectares, and is the largest land owner in South Africa.
Instead of offering this land to South Africa’s poor people of all
races, the ANC focuses on making the blacks envious of the white land
owners who produce most of South Africa’s food. The ANC plans to
maintain its hold on power for decades to come, by inciting racial
resentment against the white minority. There is a real danger that the
country may join the long list of failed democracies in Africa. Unless
a new generation of enlightened black leaders emerges in South Africa,
committed to promoting Christian values, property rights, and free
market economic policies, South Africa’s future looks bleak.
Mr. Waruiru, a native of Kenya, is the founder of the African
Conservative Forum, a Christian human rights and public policy
organization based in Nairobi. His website is www.africanconservative.org
Source: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_failu...
Posted By: Jan
AfricanCrisis Webmaster
Author of:
Government by Deception
Author of: Hollow Planets
http://www.africancrisis.co.za/Article.php?ID=19991&