African lives must matter

So Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir came to South Africa, enjoyed our hospitality and left behind a country licking its wounds from reputational damage.

The question now is can we regain any moral high ground following this fiasco?

The Sudanese president was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. As a member of this court, South Africa had an obligation to execute its arrest warrants against him.

Al-Bashir’s alleged crimes include murder, mass extermination, rape, torture, etc.

Despite a Pretoria High Court order barring his departure, South Africa allowed him to leave the country. Why?

The position of the African Union (AU), to which South Africa seemed to kowtow, is the ICC is biased against African leaders. African leaders seem more prone to face justice in this court than leaders from other parts of the world.

The AU has also taken a stance against the ICC serving an indictment against a sitting president. Their rationale is if you haul a sitting president to an international criminal court you risk provoking civil unrest back in that president’s home country.

Now if being a sitting president gives a leader some kind of open-ended immunity, including for committing horrific crimes, then what will prevent the same leader from doing everything possible to remain in power eternally?

Take President Robert Mugabe for instance. I don’t see him facing any culpability for the massacre of his opposition or for the protracted suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans.

The favoured line that accompanied the al-Bashir debacle is we in Africa need to come up with “African solutions to African problems”. But what exactly does this mean?

All I know is someone like al-Bashir stands accused of serious crimes and should have to answer to these charges. But even after he leaves office, I do not see any of al-Bashir’s peers championing a process to have him face justice.

The question is, if the ICC lacks credibility who do people seeking justice against tyrannical leaders turn to?

Let us put the ICC aside for a moment. How much value do African leaders attach to accountability – both for themselves and their continental peers?

When was the last time you heard of an African leader voluntarily leaving office because of misdemeanours or shortcomings under his watch – or worse, his own?

We are often told a person is innocent until proven guilty and this is true. The problem, however, is our leaders’ ability to subvert judicial processes and brazenly continue in office with many accusations following them.

Others simply replace judges who make findings against them and appoint lackeys who toe the line.

How then do ordinary people obtain justice? In Big Men, Little People author Alec Russell chronicles the life of African leaders who have dominated the post-colonial era, including Mobutu Sese Seko of the then Zaire, Jonas Savimbi of Angola and Hastings Banda of Malawi.

What is interesting about these leaders is under their rule their countries were worse off than under colonial rule. Mobutu, for example, stole so much of his country’s resources he once boasted on US television of being the second richest person in the world.

“In his heyday his fortune was estimated at between two and five billion pounds,” Russell says.

Banda, who ruled Malawi for over three decades, was fond of saying Malawians were like children and could not govern themselves.

Maybe I am a pessimist but I do not see someone like al-Bashir ever facing justice, not as long as his African peers continue to shield him. They will continue to talk about African solutions when none are forthcoming. And there will be no closure for the victims of al-Bashir’s atrocities.

Africans cannot allow their leaders to continue to rule with impunity and show absolute disdain for their countrymen. We must prove with our actions African life matters and cannot tolerate it being cheapened – not even by the continent’s despotic rulers.