Resignations

It is yet another Friday and once again we are treated with an article. I must admit that this was not the article that I had prepared to draft and send, but along the way I had to discard the article in which I was explaining why I have exactly K4, 903.00 in my account shortly after the mid-month mark; and why people need to avoid (mis)managing their finances the way I do.

So… the resignation.

I was on call when I read the news that Jacob Zuma had stepped down as the President of the rainbow nation. The news did not come as a surprise to me because over time I had been hearing the Zuma’s party, the African National Congress had been recalling him. Some of us may not understand why the party leaders had the guts to recall its own leader but this happened due to the political structure of South Africa. While political parties field candidates and running mates who automatically become president and vice president respectively, things are different in South Africa. There, people vote for a party which nominates the leader of the nation pending approval by parliament. The party, then, has the power of recalling their person should they feel dissatisfied with the performance (or something along those lines). Thabo Mbeki suffered the same fate, paving way for Zuma to be at the helm and now Zuma has also been recalled, giving way to one Ramaphosa whose State of the Nation Address I am watching as I draft this. It is interesting to learn that this month has an estimated net worth of a whopping $450 million at his ascendance to presidency. I will probably get back to that.

The news of Zuma’s resignation was not exciting enough to get a space on the Richie Online blog. If Mugabe didn’t get the privileged, we wouldn’t have given it to someone who didn’t even hit double digits in the number of years of his tenure. This article came up as a reaction to the mass reaction of the African continent especially the disproportionate reaction of my fellow Malawians who have taken it to the social media to celebrate as if Zuma’s resignation is going to bring the end to our electricity woes.

There has been a diverse range of reactions to the resignations. There are some who have chosen to remain silent about it while some have blown the whole thing out of proportion and taken it to the social media with long celebratory posts. There are two or three sections whose reactions made me take an interest in this issue and craft this writing about the resignation in relation to our own country.

The jokers took this as a moment to laugh at poor Jacob. The social media got awash with memes of jobless Jacob and videos of him dancing traditional dances in a funny way. In one of the Catholic groups, some posted memes about Jacob saying that he was giving up the presidency for the Lenten season, in which Catholics are meant to fast and give up other things as a way of devoting to meditation and prayer in a bid to get closer to God. This, again, was expected. When I went to check out my Facebook feed, I found that almost all the local news pages were awash with the news of the resignation. This is where I found the unexpected; Malawians praising Jacob Zuma for being a hero and paving way for another person when he had seen that things were not good. This was totally unexpected and I wondered if these people were in the know of what was going on in South Africa. This, to me, was the same thing that the BBC did when they posted a headline “President Mugabe Resigns Voluntarily”. Mugabe’s resignation was not voluntary for all I know. He walked out when he was at the verge of being faced by the humiliation of impeachment proceedings. He knew that there was nothing for him and did not want to be ousted with an impeachment hearing. This fresh resignation is pretty much the same as Mugabe’s. Someone was cornered and he should not be praised for bowing out when all had been clearly lost.

Some people went on and posted a picture of a fallen Mugabe and Zuma in the comment section. The picture also had a picture of a some old fella (probably Mu7, as the Venomous Hope spells his name) clinging to the Ugandan flagpole and someone else hanging on to what looked like the Malawian flag. In the eyes of these people, there was hope that these oldies were going to resign, following the lead of their fellows who have led the way. From the look of things, the people who were commenting did not understand that the Zuma resignation had been conceived by pressure from the people he was serving. They used the system and their constitutional provisions to get rid of the president when they felt like they needed to. I am not sure if they did it for the right reason. That is their thing to worry about. My worry is that we have been reduced to people who are hoping that our bad leaders will wake up with a strong conviction and decide to resign after reflecting on their wrongs. That is not going to happen, if you are to ask me. My other worry is that while we have many people who are not happy with the leadership, they will probably not take the initiative and do something to change the state of the leadership through the ballot when they have a chance to.
African leaders hardly have the remorse that can make them resign and we need to learn to live with that. While other countries talk of succession, most African leaders hear “suck session”. For them it means that they need to be suckling out the wealth of their countries while they still can. To hope that these leaders would resign voluntarily without sufficient pressure is to live with a futile dream that will not come to actualization.

I am hoping that all the praises that were showered on Zuma were mere jokes and that we will realize, sooner than later, that the power of shaping the country’s leadership lies in our hands (well, to some extent) and that we need to do something to reclaim and reshape the destiny of this country. Mugabe and Zuma might have resigned, but our citizenry should not resign to fate and hope that things will solve themselves.

And oh! Did the Ethiopian Prime Minister just resign too?

Enjoy the weekend.