Wanted: A new global rule of engagement

The photo-up is good for kleptocracy – out are zany suits and colourful ties,  they latch on to any good comment by the real leaders and would quote it like the Bible or the Quran to their critics. This is their way of telling critics that a prophet is without honour in his own backyard. The true Global Leaders snigger, but practically, they pretend that nothing is wrong and that these wannabes have a right to stand as leaders in a world where the noun has been bleached off its meaning.

Foreign media have been predicting the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime as if they were dosing when his late father bequeathed the people’s power and common patrimony to him? They pretend not to know that he ‘won’ a landslide term of his own in 2007 and has no penchant for harakiri. Yes, like in their movies, they were waiting for the leopard to change its spots. Today, the insurgents are the new toasts of the West, having carried their bloody battle to Damascus. The could have rolled in the tanks if not for global Siamese – Russia and China – the one is erratic, possesses nuclear power but very little less; the other, a blatant dictatorship which has bootlegged its way into global acceptance with robust foreign reserves.

By the time they reach a consensus on the sticky points, nothing or very little would be left about this new hallucinogen called democracy to breed anything but religious fanaticism and a new army of converted terrorists. Who were Saddam Hussein’s best allies in the halcyon days; who benefitted from the rule of Idi Amin; Mobutu Sese Seko; Jean Bedel Bokassa; Hosni Mubarak? Where were the Hisbah of Democracy when Ahmadou Toumani Toure was messing up Mali? Who propped up Laurent Gbagbo and who benefitted from the extraction of the diamond fields of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Who is propping Joseph Kabila?

Except for the southern part of Africa, the larger part of the continent has been declared ‘independent’ for upwards of 50 years – but what is there to see but poverty and penury; despotism that breeds destitution? Yet, if the West were to spend a quarter of the resources it spends now supporting rebels with questionable credentials, if it were to invest in setting standards of good governance and, like the dutiful prefects they want us to see them, enforcing the rules we could have saved the world the impending economic and social catastrophe. In practical terms, that means having a better world; halving defense budgets; increasing food production and fighting hunger and drought; creating sustainable jobs; minimizing the plagues of war.

But they play the ostrich as a means of preserving the open field needed to test the latest weapon of man’s destruction on real humans instead of laboratories? Global politics and the standards of recognition of statehood is a charade as we know it. We must peacefully change the standards. That would mean setting irreducible governance standards and performance indices that qualify governments to be recognised and leaders to be accepted into the comity of nations. That would mean getting acclaimed custodians of democracy to stop rubbing shoulders with dubious democrats; worshipful excellencies and demented majesties who get their mandate via globally acclaimed sham elections.

It would mean putting their chairs in the corridors of global meets instead of the main hall. It would mean rewriting the rules of the Vienna Convention and denying them entry visas and the accreditation to global meets and denying them avenues to make fake speeches even to the usual half-empty halls. It would mean, biting rather than barking.

A government that is born of rigged elections; propped up and nurtured by the proceeds of corruption like the one we have in Nigeria and other parts of Africa would be made to sit up. Our country is the seventh producer of crude oil, it has 35 other largely untapped solid minerals; yet it more than 90 per cent of its citizenry live on less than a dollar a day. Our roads are death traps, terrorism writ large and threatens global cohesion, the hospitals are dilapidated and can’t even cater for the dead, our best universities are a shadow of what they were twenty years ago.  Our best brains are outside our shores and have sworn never to return.

It does not end here. This government, like the ones before it have no vision for the transformation of the rut. Yet, our leaders gallivant all over the world, giving boring speeches at summits and even contest for global positions. Leaders of nations like Nigeria should not be allowed the photo-op that global junkets afford them. We should not wait until millions of Nigerians are bursting through the borders as affirmed refugees before taking preemptive action. Regimes, propped up willy-nilly on the blood of the people should not be recognised beyond the borders where they decimate the very fabrics of their societies.

The world should not wait for nations to be destroyed beyond redemption by clueless and pathologically corrupt leaders before true nations ostracise them. They should not wait for groups with questionable democratic credentials before they declare a state failed. It should suffice to declare a state failed when it fails either to chart a course that is beneficial to 70% of the populace or display such crash governance ignorance as the regime in power in most parts of Africa including the sleeping giant – Nigeria.