It is said that Margaret Thatcher bullied three British prime ministers after her into planning for her a funeral befitting of a national war hero. She probably suspected that snobs among the ruling aristocracy would drop her into history’s dustbin as grocer Mr Do Little’s daughter. She saw herself as a true entrepreneur: ‘an innovator who introduced new political commodities and discovered new markets and methods’. Christopher Columbus and Cecil Rhodes had become canonised for opening pockets of Europeans to new frontiers of wealth and homelands. That German, Karl Marx, had glossed over them as mere tools of “capital” and not the powers inside engines of trains and ships. She would claim her true status.
Her strength had been to link money-making and the brutality in state power which feudal rulers of England had invented for promoting their enjoyment of the fruits of other people’s sweat. She used that power to smash socialist notions of ‘community property’ and shared national wealth through paying “living wages”. She ignored fears of millions of unemployed and impoverished citizens aroused by Adolph Hitler into anti-democracy politics of hatred and hysterical violence in Germany.
Her sense of political vision and grit had benefited from witnessing from a keen distance incredible determination to fight for freedom and independence which African politicians and liberation movements had shown for putting democracy on trial across the global arena. Kwame Nkrumah had ignited passions for freedom in rural farmers, market women, lorry drivers and traders and outflanked Britain’s colonial officials.
Amilcar Cabral in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Augustinho Neto in Angola, Samora Machel in Mozambique had confronted brutal colonial troops using borrowed guns wielded by peasants and urban unemployed men and women. If Africans could fight for a vision, so could she in a Britain now short on imperial manhood.
Amilcar Cabral and Samora Machel wrote about ‘the cheeky word’ as a weapon spoken to challenge colonial rule and economics. Their liberation struggle recruited foot soldiers with the whispered word shot out as molten bullets despite dangers from the Portuguese secret police. Their strategy for political growth was anchored on developing (by inciting and educating), minds of frightened impoverished peoples. Cabral was insistent about avoiding appeals to people’s religious and tribal marks; and creating new nations by uniting people through a common fight for their children’s education; health clinics; ending forced labour, lashes and good prices for their farm produce. Military coups blocked their rain falling all over Africa.
Their hut-to-hut, mouth-to-ear method of political education would be borrowed by Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns. Inventors of communications technology had transplanted Cabral’s and Machel’s strategies into cell phones, twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. The whispered word, which Mau Mau guerrilla fighters had used in fighting British troops in colonial Kenya, now had powerful tools. Mau Mau oaths by eating meat soaked in each recruit’s blood became small campaign donations by each in Obama’s team. The development of the mind of potential voters became the critical force for political change. Obama’s African ancestry had made a critical donation.
Devotees of Thatcher’s economics also borrowed apartheid South Africa’s long-tried strategy of ignoring internal black purchasing power and exporting products to external markets, including Chile, Australia, New Zealand and Europe – Euro-America. Impoverishing Europe’s middle classes and throwing workers into unemployment is inspired by visions of exports flowing to vast billions in China. Fighting for “human rights” in China is a struggle for colonising billions of stomachs and appetites. If African liberators could win freedom with animated minds of masses, Euro-America would win debt-repayments from Africa and consumers from China. Thatcher’s challenge to Africa is our re-inventing visioning entrepreneurship.
The assassination of Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel and the death of Augustinho Neto denied Africa the benefit of their thinking out the transition from developing minds of their peoples for political revolt and armed struggles to their production of capital goods and commodities. Invading racist South African troops bombed transport infrastructures, cooperatives and self-reliant manufacturing plants that had been built in Mozambique by FRELIMO, its liberation movement. Angola’s liberators were bled by civil wars (in Cabinda’s oil fields and the mainland), imposed on them by NATO and South Africa. These leaders lost the drive to feed other entrepreneurs of Africa’s road to strong self-reliant economic growth, high employment, and shared economic welfare.
Other African leaders had been trapped into debt-galloping loans by treaties signed on their behalf by departing colonial governments with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Repaying debts became a form of invisible violence against newly independent peoples through bleeding out debt-repayment funds away from health services, education, and capital for rural farmers and food processors, and manufacturers (including “black smiths”). “We Must Overcome! is a sign board waiting for workers.
Military coups disrupted visionary anti-colonial politicians and their road to the type of political entrepreneurship that Margaret Thatcher would exhibit. It is worth considering if a ‘season of migration to political entrepreneurship’ – to echo Tayib Saleh – has arrived in Africa. With economic productivity aborted through ‘debt-bombs’ planted by departing colonial politico- social and economic engineers, it is easy to see where we went onto swampy roads of “it is our turn to eat” governance. Such corruption-economics sees ethnic and religious incitement as fuel for gaining political and economic power.
Source: Daily Trust
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