Opinion: Al-Bashir, Bouteflika and Change In Africa, By Owei Lakemfa
Abdelaziz Bouteflika, president of Algeria for twenty years from 1999, until a mass peoples’ movement forced him out on April 2, was a political giant in the country. In 1962, at 25, he was appointed the minister of youths and sports. He later became defence minister, foreign minister and, in 1974, president of the United Nations General Assembly.
As chairman of the AU, he successfully pulled off the Algiers Peace Treaty that ended the Ethiopia-Eritrea Border War, which claimed 70,000 to 120,000 lives. He was quite sick in 2005 and, as mentioned, suffered a stroke in 2013. Despite this, he contested and won the presidential election in 2014 by 81 per cent. Although unable to run the affairs of state, he ill-advisedly announced on February 10, 2019, that he was seeking re-election. That was his undoing. Mass protests brought him down.
Despite these events, Algeria and Sudan are a few of the best run African countries we have with a sense of historical duty, responsibility to the populace and a pan-Africanist spirit; many like Nigeria have simply collapsed into the neo-colonial mode, swimming along with the dictates of foreign masters and the tidal waves they unleash.
The hope is that the middle class and the masses that have triggered the tidal waves of change in both countries, can steer the course and enthrone genuine pro-people change so that the revolutions are not aborted like those in Egypt and Tunisia. Not the cosmetic changes with lots of motion without movement, as in Nigeria, or jumping from the frying pan into fire like in Egypt.
Change in Egypt has been a monumental tragedy; from a secular dictator, Hosni Mubarak, to a religious fanatic, Mohammed Morsi, to a brutal fascist, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who has no restraints in his rule books. But as Africa arose from the ashes of the slave trade and the grave of colonialism, so shall she rise from its current tragedies.
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