MBONEKO: How ready are we to mark Africa Human Rights Year?

By Mboneko Munyaga, East African News Agency

In January last year, the African Court on Human and Peoples Rights (AfCHPR) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR) asked the African Union (AU) heads of state at their summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to declare 2016 the continent’s human rights year.

The main objective was to commemorate the significant achievements in the continent’s human rights record over the last four decades, which despite a number of frustrations had some quite noteworthy milestones, including the establishment and operationisation of AfCHPR ten years ago.

Now, 2016 is just around the corner but I am not quite sure how prepared the continent is to mark the year and send a clear message to the rest of the world that Africa is not a land of impunity, that it would like to be known and recognized as such and that others too should recognize and respect the continent and its peoples within that paradigm.

I always like to take the Black American civil rights movement as part of the universal struggle of the African people to be respected as equal members of the global community and heritage. Kwame Nkrumah once said: “Seek ye first the political kingdom and everything else shall be added unto you.” Of course he only parodied Jesus who taught his followers to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and everything else would be added unto them.

Africa gained independence after a relatively short period under colonial domination. If we take 1885 as the year of colonisation and 1960 as the threshold year of freedom, then Africa was under foreign domination for only 75 short years. By contrast, India was under British rule for more than 400 years and Jews also were enslaved in Egypt for more than 400 years.

But Africa remains a sorry state both over its human rights record and economic development. In fact, there can be no economic transformation without a firm bedrock of human rights because that is the manifestation of societal core values, without which no society can develop!

The reason the West leads the world today is because during its age of enlightenment, the West  learnt to separate church from state and allowed the indulgence of logic in seeking answers to complex social and scientific questions beyond the closed edict of spirituality, of course without comprising faith in God although religion in some respects, suffered collateral damage.

The situation in Africa was quite the opposite. The post-colonial period did not necessarily usher in a new era of enlightenment and mutual respect. In fact, in some cases the independence rulers who replaced the colonial masters became even worse. Nkrumah himself was a sweet Pan-Africanist externally but a terrible despot in his native Ghana, Africa’s first country to gain independence from colonial rule in 1957.

The author has heard many stories on how people who crossed paths with Nkrumah went into prolonged hiding to escape from his tantrums of wrathful vengeance. In short, Africans lived under a new culture of fear that could never enable them to unleash their full potential, true also even for those in their midst who showed relative wealth and success. The entire continent was one huge cocoon and its rulers the new Appolos, Zeus and Dianas.

Human rights stresses respect for the sanctity of life, equal treatment before the law and in the other corridors of power for individuals, their communities and property. In fact, it is the consolidation of freedom or Independence Phase ll. African Human Rights Year should not be confused with the African Human Rights Day marked annually on October 21, to commemorate the coming into force of the ACHPR on that date in 1986.

Africa shall never develop or its people gain respect wherever they may be without demonstrable veneration back home for human rights. It is the message also of the Black Lives Matter Movement that has been campaigning against police brutality and targeting of black people in the US. The movement’s leaders are now saying there is need to tackle black-on-black crime as well. In the US, the black brother can often be your most dangerous neighbour. Africa and the Diaspora need to change in order for them to gain respectability in the global comity of nations.