I have written recently about the worrying spectre of armed groups in Guinea seeking to overturn the will of the people by attacking the home of the man whom they had elected president, Alpha Conde. A

Niger's president Issoufou

 similarly sinister development has been uncovered in the land-locked and impoverished state of Niger, where a group of middle-ranking officers have been arrested on foot of an attempt to assassinate the recently elected president, Mahamat Issoufou who has used his power to pursue and stamp out corruption within the military – an activity which has won him few friends among the officer corp. It is not unusual amongst the armies of many African states to grow rich by pocketing money intended as salaries for more junior officers and soldiers.

 Keeping it in the family.

Wade

When Abdouilaye Wade was elected president of Senegal in 2000 many saw it as a sign of how the country’s democracy had matured. Wade was a long-time opponent of the (admittedly well-educated) clique who had ruled the country since independence. He was no street-savvy firebrand, but a French-educated lawyer with two PhDs who was fluent in French, English and numerous African languages. He came to the international stage in 2002 for all the right reasons, not because his country had been hit by devastating natural disasters but because his country had not only qualified for that year’s world cup, but had beaten many stronger European teams. A beaming President Wade appeared on television screens around the world holding aloft a football.

 Wade is unfortunately old. He claims to be 85 but even he is unsure. As his time in power has started to drag rumours of corruption have increased. The inevitable popular discontent has been met by repression. Wade had wanted to hand over power to his son Karim, and many believed that he was prepared to use both fair and foul means to bring this about. Riots erupted and the president was compelled to deny any such intention. Plan B was then put into action; Wade would run for a third term in the 2012 president elections, something that was unconstitutional. Once again popular outrage was met by the imposition of a ban on political protests in the capital Dakar and a wave of arrests that have included the popular singer Thiat. While the clampdown is benign by the standards of some rulers, it does seem to augur badly for the country that was starting to generate goodwill for pursuing policies that placed it outside the general tenor of a headlong rush to disaster and national misery.

 The country’s first president, Dr Hastings Banda was educated by missionaries from the Church of Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century. He qualified as a doctor in the United States before taking up the role of a GP in England and Scotland. He left for the Gold Coast after impregnating his secretary, a married woman, whom he refused to marry. This did not stop him being hailed by those seeking an end to colonialism in his native Nyasaland as the territory’s natural leader, and so he returned home after an absence of more than forty years. On Nyasaland gaining its independence in 1964 he became the first president of the newly independent Malawi – he even chose its name. 

 Already in his late 60s (though he never knew quite how old he was), he soon showed autocratic symptoms. The country was declared a one party state with Banda as president for life; membership of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) became mandatory for all citizens. Former friends of Banda were declared enemies and were imprisoned or died in traffic accident; alternatively they were chased around the world by Banda’s secret police, if they managed to get out of the country alive. The media was censored, mail was opened and telephones tapped. The country was criss-crossed by a network of spies who denounced people as critics of the government, often in pursuit of personal grudges. As Banda aged his actions became more eccentric. He banned television from the country as an immoral influence, while he sponsored the teaching of Latin and Greek in elite educational institutions, while ignoring local languages such as his own ChiChewa which he had forgotten. As an elder of the Church of Scotland he instituted a dress code for all citizens: women were forbidden to wear miniskirts or trouser suits, while men could not sport beards, long hair or wear flared trousers. (No one seems to know what he thought about kilts.) His own form of attire was equally unfashionable, preferring conservative three-piece suits, as well as carrying and freely brandishing a flywhisk made from a lion’s tale. He never married but instead cultivated a very close relationship with a lady called Cecilia Kadzamira who was rewarded with the title of “official hostess”.

 Throughout his reign Banda dipped freely into the country’s financial resources, siphoning off an estimated $20m. By the 1990s Malawi’s people had had enough and riots broke out, culminating in Banda agreeing to allow other political parties, as well as rival candidates in presidential elections. When Malawi’s people had a chance to vote against him in 1994 they took it with vengeance, and he was roundly defeated, being succeeded by Bakili Muluzi. He died in 1997, well into his ‘90s.

The present president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, is 77 – a little younger than Banda. He tried to paint himself as a long-time opponent and victim of Banda, forced to flee his homeland and change his name to avoid detection by the dictator’s goons. In truth he never was an opponent of Banda and benefited from his largesse, receiving his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Economics in India with the financial support of Banda’s government. He then returned to Malawi, becoming a very prominent member of Banda’s civil service.

Since coming to power in 2004 he has sought to rehabilitate Banda’s reputation. Buildings which had originally carried the moniker of the old dictator, but which had been renamed by Muluzi, reverted to their original names.

His presidency began so well. Even though he was Muluzi’s handpicked successor, he immediately launched a campaign against corruption under Muluzi But his actions have started to show those telltale signs of autocracy, followed by eccentricity, blending into grotesque absurdity. Critics within his government, including two vice presidents, have been dismissed. His defence of his sacking of vice president Joyce Banda demonstrates a degree of megalomania.

… When God noted that Lucifer was being bigheaded, he did not hesitate to evict him from the Heavenly Government. am not the first to fire someone, it started in heaven. So before you start faulting me for being intolerant because I have sacked Joyce Banda… fault God for sacking Lucifer from heaven.”

 The journalist Farai Sevenzo comments on the BBC World Service news site: “Even Malawi’s great dictator Banda was not given to such analogies; and every missionary who ever trod the warm heart of Africa must be doing somersaults in their graves at a job half-done in Bible lessons and humility”.

Opponents are routinely called “ enemies of the people”  and some have been thrown into jail. He spent £20m of the State’s money on a private jet, causing a currency crisis. There have also been signs of erratic behaviour, including his claims that he could not sleep any more in the State mansion because he saw ghosts there who were not being very nice to him. (He should get the Most Haunted team to take a look – I wonder what Derek Acorra might say?)

Some might put this behaviour down to the loss of his wife to breast cancer in 2009. However, Mutharika was not to remain single for long, marrying his tourism minister (25 years’ his junior) in a lavish ceremony paid for by the state.

At present Mutharika is losing friends faster than he is making them. The UK has cut its development aid program, as well as expelling the Malawian High Commissioner in a tit-for-tat move following Mutharika’s expulsion of the British envoy, who, in a leaked memo had referred to the president as autocratic. His invitation to the royal wedding was even withdrawn – a cruel blow, considering some of the riffraff who were there, but I’m sure he’s got the DVD  The economy is in a mess with the shortage of foreign currency leading to long queues for petrol, as well as significant food shortages. Riots have broken out, first in the northern city of Mzuzi, and then spreading to the capital Lilongwe and the largest city, Blantyre. At least 18 people have died in Mzuzi and their bodies have been buried in a mass grave. While Mutharika speaks of his willingness to talk to the opposition, it is only on his terms.

What is the future for this country? Presidential elections are scheduled for 2014 when Mutharika will be 80. He is not standing, but he plans to keep the job in the family, having paved the way for his brother Peter, a former Law professor in an American university, to fill his shoes. He has already been appointed a cabinet minister.  He is currently aged 71. Things are likely to disimprove still more before they improve.

 What do these plotters want? I don’t think there is any appetite for a coup in Guinea at the moment. The country has been through too much conflict and has se3en too much innocent blood spilled. President Conde has also been in power for a relatively short while. He has not had time to make any glaring mistakes. As a man of 73 he has suffered a lot at the hands of the country’s former dictators, such as Ahmed Sekou Toure and Lansana Conteh. Neither his age nor his experience would prevent him however, from turning into an aged autocrat. If that were to happen, (and I very much hope for the people of Guinea’s sake that it will not) then it might be time for the men in uniforms to intervene.

Aam de business bro

Surprise, surprise. Sudanese strongman and would-be break-dancing king Omar al-Bashir has won re-election in the country’s presidential elections. Now isn’t that a turn up for the books?

 Al-Bashir is a wanted war criminal, so he can’t travel that much outside of his country, except to visit other despots. He had been hoping for a relaxation on British travel restrictions, as he had set his heart on taking part in this year’s Strictly Come while Dancing. Being honest Omar, you’ll have to put in more practice before you could get by Len Goodman. Brucie wouldn’t mind you though. You could even stay in his gaff. Augusto Pinochet was his neighbour for a while, so he’s used to living beside blood-thirsty dictators.

 Reducing commitment to the peacekeeping operation really sends the wrong signals. The long serving Chadian dictator, Idriss Deby, would dearly like to see the back of it so that he an his cronies could get on with siphoning the country’s wealth into their own pockets. Over the years Ireland’s reputation as a country has been immensely enhanced by our presence in UN peacekeeping missions.

 The trimming of overseas involvement is in line with the McCarthy report. This canonical document’s author is wedded to the maintenance of useless state frippery like armies.  If he was really committed to worthwhile savings he would have recommended the disbandment of the army altogether.

 What does it do? Does anyone really think it’s capable of putting up a fight were this country to be invaded. Maybe against the armed forces of somewhere like Sao Tome e Principe or the Swiss Guard if they were pissed.

 And look at the amount that the government would save. Not only would there be no army salaries to pay but barracks could be closed and sold off for development as brothels and alternative health resorts, while the increasingly obsolete equipment could be hawked to film crews. Fishery protection vessels could be turned into prison hulks (most of them are leaking anyway), while search-and-rescue helicopters could be knocked off to people wanting to leave the country in a hurry and on the QT. What’s more no armed forces, no need for a Department of Defence, and even better a minister of Defence. The savings would be mega….

 But the McCarthy report didn’t recommend this because, in spite of all their uselessness, McCarthy and Co. see the armed forces as potentially having an important role in Ireland’s future. It might come in useful in case those lefties ever seemed capable of introducing real change here. In that even the army could be relied upon to step in and restore law and order.

 And let’s face it none of the boys themselves really mind leaving Chad. It’s all desert and it must be murder getting a pint there, and as visiting government delegations have found it’s too far from the coast to be a serious junket destination.

Mad uncle Frank

Francisco Macias Nguema, was Equatorial Guinea’s first president. In the eleven years he held the post he was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 people, as well as sending thousands of others into exile. Before his overthrow and murder by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema (who is still in power) the country had earned the unwelcome epithet of “the Dachau of Africa”. Amnesty International’s annual report were full of the heinous acts of human rights violations carried out by Macias, not t mention the crimes against humanity to be laid at his successor’s door. He oversaw one of the most bizarre personality cults in history – so bizarre because it was so unmerited. He adored bestowing grandiose titles on himself, yet he was barely literate. It is said he failed the colonial exams to become an office clerk three times and was only successful on the fourth because of some positive discrimination. He was given to violent swings of personality and received treatment in Spain and the United States for unspecified psychiatric problems; towards the latter years of his life he had acquired some unidentifiable disease

Not really like his uncle?

which may have been AIDS-related.

His hold on power was maintained through fear, not only of his loyal thugs but of Macias personally. He deliberately cultivated the belief that his father had been a witch doctor and sorcerer, and that he had inherited many of these gifts. He was rumoured to have drunk the blood of some of his political opponents, and he kept a large stockpile of human skulls at his presidential compound, alongside all of the country’s foreign currency reserves and medical supplies. Macias loved the dark and detested light; a Spanish airline pilot was arrested and tortured when he accidentally shone his ‘plane’s headlights on Macias’ jet as it sat on the airport tarmac one night. In 1977 a visiting researcher was told that “… you may be against Macias while the sun shines, but after dark you have to be for him,” Even when overthrown and sentenced to death, no locals could be found to man the firing squad, and the task had to be performed by Moroccan soldiers.

Macias  Nguema’s preference for the dark reminds me of the activities of a solicitor employed by the Irish health Service Executive, who is sadly well-known to her victims, and who seems to delight in working in the hours of night, well after “The Bard’’s witching hour. Does she feel that her victim are more cowed by the inky blackness, and less able to put up a defence to her machinations when they are awoken suddenly by the headlights of the garda cars ferrying her to the scene of her nocturnal sacrifices? or is there a yet more sinister reason for this, tied up perhaps with practice of the dark arts?

While the sun shines it is easy to be against Ms Helen (or is it Ellinor?) Stone, but after dark …

I wonder what she’s doing for Halloween?

 Guinea, like many similar African states, shows the truth of Mao Zedong’s belief that power comes from the barrel of a gun. When you give the power that a loaded automatic weapon confers, to illiterate or semi-literate soldiers who may have very short-term but pressing grievances over things like pay, the results can be disastrous.

 No one can excuse what happened in Conakry. I am not going to seek to defend Camara, but the image that is painted of him by the western media, including the BBC, is slightly inaccurate. One recent biographical profile told how he was born in a very remote village but was lure by the bright lights (never that bright considering the omnipresent power-cuts), but far from finding riches, he encountered a different form of poverty, which he sought to allay by selling kola nuts on the street. This attempts to place him in the historical mould of pat leaders like Idi Amin and Samuel Doe, who found that they were able to grab and hold onto power, even though they were barely literate.

 But there’s one big difference. Camara studied law at Conakry’s university, which may not be Oxford or Cambridge does impose certain standards – higher, it must be said, than some institutions calling themselves universities in Nigeria.

 Then we hear about Camara’s quirks of personality and his short temper. This may be true, but such peculiarities are certainly better than the habits of many African leaders, such as lounging in air-conditioned luxury in antique chairs and doing no more than putting out their hands to grasp the most expensive vintage champagnes served in Baccarat goblets – all paid for by their desperately poor compatriots.

The reaction of the international community and many commentators to last December’s coup in Guinea shows woeful lack of understanding for African developments. Looking at the event through a really narrow and legalistic framework it has been characterised as an example of a step backward from “democratic” development to a world dominated by men with guns. But where was democracy in Guinea? It was a country whose many resources were being freely pillaged by a corrupt coterie close to the increasingly incapacitated President Conteh. While there were voices raised in opposition to his regime they were too feeble and badly organised to mount any effective resistance, and you got the feeling that, given half the chance, these civilian voices would be just as adept at the grand larceny of the state’s resources.

  Captain Dadis Camara’s coup has the potential of wrenching the country out of this quagmire and offering Guinea and its people an alternative.

 Elections are to be held later this year; indeed Camara wanted to hold them next year when the basic infrastructure for holding a poll might have been put in place, but the solicitous international community insisted that they be held sooner rather than better – as if going through the motions of holding a ballot can introduce democracy in a country with high levels of illiteracy and with no experience of casting ballots or counting them.

 Captain Camara is not standing in the elections. This is a pity, because he has shown himself to have vision beyond what passes for vision among many of Guinea’s politicians – getting rich quickly. He joined the army after his university education, so he must be set apart from semi-literate thugs of the past like Samuel Doe or Idi Amin who used the army as a means of gaining power quite literally through the barrel of a gun.

 He has pledged to hand over power to civilian politicians. Because such people wear business suits the international community feels more comfortable with them than uniformed soldiers. That such besuited figures are often thieves doesn’t seem to worry them – indeed it may be a further common feature.

 Fate can be a really weird thing, the way it can unite people in a

Guinea-Bissau's first president

 cruel and absurd way when it comes to cashing in your chips in this world and collecting vouchers for the next. Take the political leadership of that sad country Guinea-Bissau, now viewed by many commentators as a basket case, a narco-state. Its first president was a guy called Luiz Almeida de Cabral. His brother had headed the independence movement until he was assassinated by fascist Portuguese hit-men in 1973. Luiz was an eternal optimist – he had to be when he became president of one of the poorest countries in the world. He tried to institute educational reform – the Portuguese hadn’t bothered their arses. Sadly, someone up there didn’t like him and in the late ‘70s his country was hit by natural disasters. His prime minister, Joao do Vieira, felt he could do a better job, so in November 1980 he seized power, throwing Luiz into jail for a while.

 Now this is where it gets a bit wild. Vieira crawled back into the presidency through a democratic election, but not everyone liked him in the country. This March he was murdered in controversial circumstances by soldiers who believed he’d been behind the death of their commanding officer. And then last week Luiz passes away, in a far more peaceful setting – leafy Lisbon where he’d been in exile.

 So you can imagine what might happen if they happen to meet in the great VIP lounge in the sky. What will they have to say to each other? Nice to see you to see you nice?

 Anyone seeking enlightenment about the meaning of the first line of this post should seek help from the museum’s curator.

Afriican Violets blog, looking at contemporary African news. And that is what it deals with, no hidden subliminal messages about the so-called great and not-so-good of Cavan. There is a wider world out there.