“Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable and more successful.”
–President Barack Obama, July 2009
At the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit dinner on August 5, President Obama dined on chilled spiced tomato soup, chopped farmstand vegetable salad, grilled dry-aged beef and cappuccino fudge cake with despots, thieves, and homicidal autocrats.
He dined with some of Africa’s longest serving autocrats: Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang, a tyrant with the dubious distinction of being Africa’s longest serving dictator; Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, a man infamous for jailing and assassinating political dissidents; and representatives of Angola’s José Eduardo Dos Santos, an autocrat who has retained power for over 35 years through stolen elections and human rights violations.
It would be all too easy, and too typical, to focus one’s attention on Africa’s strongmen. However, it is more interesting and productive to shift attention to the African leaders who deserve more, and receive too little, of the world’s attention. Africans who actually strive to make Africa a continent more prosperous, stable and successful.
Africans like Angola’s Rafael Marques de Morais, journalist and co-founder of the anti-corruption blog, MakaAngola. In essay upon essay, Marques details the life of a thief masquerading as a leader. He details the abject poverty suffered by average Angolans while President Dos Santos and the oligarchs who surrounds him reportedly live on a presidential budget of $1.8 billion — a sum that actually exceeds the $1.5 billion allocated to Angola’s Ministry of Health.
As you’ve probably already guessed, being outspoken in Angola is not without peril.
Last September, along with freelance reporter Alexandre Neto and Voice of America reporter Coque Mukuta, Mr. Marques was arrested, detained and beaten after interviewing protesters who were urging political reform in Angola. Just for safe measure, government and military officials also concocted nine defamation lawsuits against him to ensure his silence. However, as of July 29, 2014, Mr. Marques is still free, writing, undeterred.
Another Angolan, Manuel Nito Alves, is not free. The 17-year-old is currently in solitary confinement for printing t-shirts deemed offensive to Dos Santos; he is denied legal representation and visitors.
Angola is not alone in repressing freedom of expression and of the press. In Ethiopia, at least 20 reporters and bloggers have been jailed due to a vague 2009 anti-terrorism law that criminalizes reporting that “encourages” or “provides moral support” to groups the Ethiopian government considers terrorists.
Among those currently imprisoned under the law are PEN prizewinner Eskinder Nega and UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize winner Reeyot Alemu, dissident journalists who challenged the Ethiopian government to end political corruption and political repression. Both were sentenced in 2012, Mr. Nega to 18 years and Ms. Alemu to five.
Both are also detained at Kality Prison in Addis Ababa along with a group of popular young bloggers imprisoned for advocating for peaceful political change. Atnaf Berahane, Befekadu Hailu, Abel Wabela, Mahlet Fantahun, Natnael Feleke, Zelalem Kibret, Tesfalem Waldyes, Edom Kassaye, and Asmamaw Hailegiorgis have been detained since April 2014.
Of course, Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, was another invited guest of President Obama.
As was Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, another leader who favors trumped up charges of terrorism as a tactic to silence political opponents. In 2010, opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was arrested after announcing her plans to challenge Kagame in the presidential election. This was after being present in the country for just three months and after having been exiled for 16 years. Ms. Umuhoza was sentenced to eight years in prison for ‘speech-related charges’ and ‘terrorism-related charges’ including ‘divisionism’ and ‘genocide ideology.’
Terrifyingly, imprisonment is not Kagame’s only method of doing away with his political opponents. According to The Guardian, the autocrat of Kigali is also quite fond of murder. In the past several years, both abroad and in Rwanda, many of Kagame’s critics have been beaten, beheaded, shot and stabbed. His latest victim, Col. Patrick Karegeya, an exiled political opposition leader, was strangled in his hotel room in South Africa last December. Col. Karegeya will probably not be Kagame’s last victim. A few weeks ago, he declared that he’ll like if “enemies of the state” were shot on sight.
As in the case Col. Karegeya, even Africans outside of their respective country understand that repressive regimes will stop at nothing to silence dissent. Tutu Alicante, an exiled activist working to create a more democratic and equitable Equatorial Guinea was asked what would happen if he ever went back home while Teodoro Obiang was still in power:
And yet, Obiang and his tyrannical buddies roam freely without fear. At the behest of the leader of the free world one humid August evening, they even got to mingle with America’s political glitterati in the Capitol of the world’s most preeminent democracy.
To the detriment of Manuel Nito Alves, Reeyot Alemu, and other political prisoners currently isolated in cold dark cells; to the detriment of Eskinder Nega, Rafael Marques de Morais and other journalists who currently pray for a day where they can do their job without fear; to the detriment of the family of Col. Patrick Karegeya and the many families who mourn loved ones murdered at the hands of homicidal autocrats, the same President who insisted just years ago that Africa needed strong institutions and not strongmen welcomed despots to dinner.
He served a 2013 sauvignon blanc from Napa and a 2010 pinot noir from Las Alturas.
Jumoke Balogun is the co-founder of compareafrique.com.
The post Don’t Break Bread With Despots: A Reminder For President Obama appeared first on Compare Afrique.