Janvier Tchouteu

The New Africa Janvier Tchouteu

The independence fervor that gripped African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s was supposed to give birth to a "New Africa" that was expected to play a major role in advancing world civilization. What happened to make Africa fail so abysmally? By the end of the 1980s, a culture of political monolithism, dictatorship, corruption, coup d'état, mismanagement, underdevelopment and violence was dominating the political leadership of most African countries, fuelled by leaders with the evil disposition and their foreign puppeteers keeping them in power. The era of Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika was expected to sweep Africa clean of these anti-people forces, but in a continent replete with failed systems, only a handful of African countries benefited from that wind of change, as most of the dictatorships in the continent morphed into pseudo-democracies or multiparty autocracies, tapping on the backing of their foreign puppeteers and benefactors. The Tunisian revolution of 2011 that jolted North Africa appeared to have left Sub-Saharan Africa untouched until October 2014, as the world watched the end of the 27-year rule of Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso. Would this be a wind of change that would end the half-a-century old dictatorial and autocratic systems in Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Chad, Gabon, Togo, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Algeria etc? Or would the powers that be turn this into a fluke that would see most of Africa trapped in futility for several years to come?