2023 was annus horribilis; here’s to a better year

The year 2023 was bleak for Africa. Countries either experienced violence, coups and coup attempts, economic retrogression or the same old ills of thievery and mismanagement.

In Nigeria, there were bloody clashes between farmers and herders.

In Gabon, the military removed the dynastic misrule of Omar Bongo, who had just been elected to a controversial third term. Bongo, even after suffering a stroke that rendered him hardly able to walk, still insisted on staying in power. In Niger, the military overthrew the government, citing bad governance and corruption.

Militias continued their bloody pogroms in eastern Congo. In Uganda, Islamist rebel group ADF staged deadly attacks. Chaos and death persisted in the Central African Republic.

In April of 2023, a bloody conflict erupted in the Sudan. Chaos and economic stagnation continued in Burundi.

In South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa continued his ponderous, bumbling reign. South Africa, which the Reverend Jesse Jackson once said would provide a paradigm for Africa’s renewal, has been stumbling along.

In countries that had recent elections like Kenya, 2023 showed that the new rulers are just as inept, tribal, corrupt and megalomaniac as their predecessors. Ever since the election of William Ruto, mainstream papers have reported on corruption, extra-constitutional police behaviour, death threats against critics, cases of mismanagement, endless, useless foreign travel by officials that gobbles up billions of shillings, and other ills.

In a recent survey, over 60 percent of Kenyans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. I can wager that if similar surveys were conducted in other African countries, citizens would express similar pessimism.

This year, migrants hoping to escape poverty continued to lose their lives in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s like we have a forgotten low-level conflict off the Libyan coast that claims hundreds of lives every year. The unfathomable fact is that most of the people trying to escape to Europe come from resource-rich countries like Equatorial Guinea. Yet despots like Teodoro Obiang, his family members and their cronies are dollar billionaires.

In 2023, Africa’s refugee problem was exacerbated as people fled poverty or war in Ethiopia, Sudan and eastern Congo. According to some estimates, almost 30 percent of the world’s refugees are African. In the Congo, 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Continent-wide, a staggering 431 million Africans live in conditions of extreme poverty.

Clearly, Africa’s crisis of governance continues to underpin our crisis of development. We try to resolve the governance crisis through coups and elections. Either way, we end up with a bunch of people with the perennial afflictions of self-aggrandisement and megalomania.

Perhaps in 2024 Africans will see the need to have national conventions in order to have soul-searching structured conversations about the genesis of our crisis of governance, what sustains it and, most importantly, how to resolve it.

I wish Africa a reflective 2024.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.