DI SPATC H E S| THE SCHISMS OF AFRICA
Hope and hopelessness in Africa
Robert I. Rotberg
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Hakainde Hichilema’s election as president of Zambia represents a triumph of popular democracy in an Africa that is increasingly politically fraught.
tion and restore prosperity in a land long dependent on the export of copper and cadmium. Zambia defaulted on its bond payments to Europe in 2020, Africa’s first victim of profligacy. Whether Hichilema can persuade the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to give Zambia the massive loan it needs to pay off its remaining debts to Europe and China and stabilize an economy, now running wild deficits remains to be seen. Under Lungu, Zambia’s public debt as a share of GDP doubled from 66 per cent to 113 per cent, the value of the local kwacha currency fell precipitously, food prices soared and copper production slumped. The austerity that the IMF will demand promises to make Hichilema’s early governing efforts unpopular. Nevertheless, Hichilema has already accomplished the bringing together of a state long organized along ethnic lines. He could be the unifier and nation-builder that Abiy is not, and his election and efforts in office could advance the cause of democratic modernization in a continent otherwise still focused largely on ethnically acquired spoils. Ever since winning a Nobel Peace Prize, Abiy, a member of the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group of 38 mil-
lion people, has led his country in exactly the opposite direction. The successor as prime minister to the Tigrayan junta that had organized and fought a guerrilla war to take Ethiopia back from an oppressive Marxist regime that had assassinated Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and ruled all of Ethiopia despotically until 1991, Abiy tried and is still trying to conquer Tigray (one of his country’s 10 regional governments) and extirpate Tigrayans (6 per cent of Ethiopia’s population) in 2020 and 2021. By attempting to gain control over Tigray and thus end a theoretical threat to his personalist rule, Abiy has revived contentions among all of the country’s other large ethnic entities, and engaged in wholesale ethnic cleansing (a precursor to genocide) in Tigray. As many as half of Tigray’s 8 million inhabitants are now hungry and starving. Abiy has prevented humanitarian aid from reaching Tigray and his actions have driven 150,000 Tigrayans across the border into impecunious Sudan. Meanwhile, a Tigrayan militia regained control of the region, thus further nullifying Abiy’s efforts to become a new paramount ruler of a now-divided Ethiopia, but deepening internal schisms. Abiy’s forces bombed and invaded Tigray again, in October. FALL 2021 | OCT-NOV-DEC
WHITE HOUSE
akainde Hichilema’s resounding victory in Zambia’s August presidential poll proves that Africans can abandon identity preferences, resist intimidation by an incumbent regime and oust a sitting autocrat accustomed to rigging elections. Voters in that one southern African country removed president Edgar Lungu, a despot who had increasingly brutalized opponents, curtailed free speech and assembly and wrecked the nation’s economy while lining his own pockets and the pockets of cronies. Hichilema’s success represents a rare triumph of popular democracy in an Africa increasingly fraught with vicious ethnic disputes and intranational rivalries. Ethiopia, the continent’s second most populous country, with 110 million inhabitants, is a poster child for such internal antagonisms; as a result, Ethiopia is in danger of dissolving into its separate ethnic sections thanks to misguided policies pursued since 2020 by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the nation’s arrogant leader. The two leaders and their policies represent the disparate poles of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa discourse: Will the post-colonial nations of that continent hold together and eventually become full nations, or will they continue to remain pre-institutional states dominated by particularly populous or influential ethnicities intent on marginalizing minorities? Zambia has never elected someone from its neglected south to high office. But, because Lungu, backed by the country’s Bemba majority, ruled high-handedly, mismanaged the country’s economy, borrowed lavishly from China and Europe to finance extravagant infrastructure projects, and threatened to extend his term of office beyond constitutionally permitted limits, voters tossed him out and thus ended northern (Bemba) hegemony in Zambia. Hichilema, a CiTonga-speaker, promises to unify Zambia, end corrup-
