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Joram Nyathi Spectrum
THERE are times when self-hate becomes self-animating, becomes a source of illusions and fantasies. We have had plenty of that in the past few days. It was in the period leading up to the handover of the Sadc chairmanship from President Mugabe to President Ian Khama of Botswana.

In this fantasy world of self-hate and masochism, this was portrayed in some sections of society as a transition from a dictatorship to democratic rule. Never mind how a mere “ceremonial” position suddenly yields tectonic shifts in the lives of separate, independent polities. It is a world of make-believe, and there are believers.

To appreciate the world of believers, one must take large doses of opium brewed largely in the United States. Once that opium is taken in large enough quantities, the adage South, East, West, North, home is best is reversed. Home is worst (ignore the pun), even if that West is only a desert called Botswana, so long as its leader can repeat the words “democracy”, “human rights”. Everything else ceases to matter. Democracy has become poor nations’ Holy Grail, the panacea to all our woes, in this best of possible, make-believe world.

If this prognosis is true, that is, that liberal democracy is all that is missing for us to live in utopian America, I might be persuaded to return to church.

For now, let’s make a brief tour of the heart of America.

On my first visit to the US in 2008, I had the impression of a dreamland. Washington DC was fine. California was pleasant. Street vendors, drug pushers here and there. New Orleans was still recovering from the ravages of Cyclone Katrina and people were working valiantly to bring back order and sanity. Too much graffiti on buildings. As we drove into New York for the first time from the airport to the Carlton on Madison hotel, I was struck by piles of rubbish bins outside Ali Baba.

This certainly wasn’t what the media had prepared me for. This was third world-like stuff, that’s where it belonged. Then followed “sale”, “sale” “sale” signs on most shop windows. The mother city was on sale. Then followed street people, or homeless people, mostly found lying idle under bridges. Call it some form of culture shock. But it simply was not what I expected to encounter in a major western city, in a leading democracy. How could people live on the streets, be homeless in the land of plenty!

The scales simply fell off my eyes.

That experience completely shattered my faith in the efficacy of the twin sisters of liberal capitalism and bourgeois democracy practised by America as the best models for ordering human socio-economic existence. As such, when the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon came about years later, some of us were not taken completely by surprise. The economic and social inequalities are fire and snow.

That experience seven years ago was all but vindicated in an article published in the New York Post this week. Foreign diplomats from different countries based in New York expressed shock at life’s contrasts in the land of infinity opportunities and its utopian democracy. Below are excerpts:

“America is one of the richest countries in the world, and New York is one of the richest cities. But there are more homeless people here than there are in Gambia,” said that country’s attache in New York. His country is reportedly ranked 182 among 192 global economies.

A diplomat from Cote d’Ivoire, whose country’s poverty rate is put at 40 percent, remarked that “in Africa, we think America is a place in the sky”.

“It’s very shocking to see how it really is,” he said. “I can’t understand how in New York, you can come and see people living on the streets.”

A guy from Guyana, in South America, remarked, “It is ironic and embarrassing that they (homeless people) are right in front of the United Nations. We are an organisation that seeks to help and protect people around the world, and here, there’s poverty right in your eyes.”

Many people will recall with righteous indignation how democratic America under George W Bush orchestrated the ouster and murder of “evil” Saddam Hussein in Iraq in order to save his people from him. Yes, the same Americans who, now under a black man Barack Obama, have laid to waste one of the best welfare states in the world, Libya, after killing its leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 in the holy name of their democracy.

But in New York this week, a diplomat from war-torn Iraq conceded that things were better back home. He described the sight of homeless people in front of the United Nations as “a very painful thing to see. In Baghdad we have a lot of homeless people, too. But at least the social network is very strong there.”

A superintendent in a nearby apartment building near the UN couldn’t conceal his embarrassment at what he must observe every day. He complained about the image being portrayed of America, and New York, in particular. “People from 180 other countries come through here and take that image back home,” he said, pointing to dishevelled, semi-naked homeless people lying on a bench.

“They do their laundry, they shave, they shower. You even see them making love under the blankets,” he said.

If someone can freely shout here under Mugabe’s “dictatorship” that they don’t eat sovereignty, and live happily ever after, I don’t understand why I can’t safely declare that I don’t subscribe to a perverted democracy, where people make democratic love in the street because they have no home in the richest city in the world. That is democracy.

Yet another diplomat, this time from India, was equally unflattering in his observations on the sights in front of the United Nations headquarters. I quote: “We have extreme poverty in some parts of India. Poverty is there, but homelessness is much less. Society takes care of them.”

There is one fact which cannot be gainsaid with a clean conscience, and that fact is that apart from neglecting its own people and foisting a phoney democracy in the third world, America is guilty of aggravating poverty and human suffering across the globe by either fomenting civil unrest against leaders it doesn’t want, declaring unilateral wars and ruining the economies of presidents opposed to its hegemonic policies, and imposing equally unilateral sanctions on countries whose leaders it wants out of power, because they are inconvenient to its ordering of the world.

Back to the desert of Botswana and Zimbabwe’s media charade.

On many occasions in the past, President Ian Khama has behaved like a maverick, making himself the odd one out on most issues related to Zimbabwean elections, in particular. That has made him a darling of local self-haters. (Mugabe would have been mocked as isolated in a pariah state.)

But this time around he (Khama) resolutely ignored media hectoring, sometimes amounting to badgering. That could also explain the MDC-T’s aborted Lusaka-style raid.

Instead, Ian Khama tried to be presidential, acknowledging the efforts and legacy of his predecessor with measured dignity. In accepting the baton, he stated: “During his tenure (President Mugabe), Sadc adopted the industrialisation strategy and roadmap and I think it’s true to say that it indeed was his idea that we embark on this as well as the Revised Regional Indicative Strategy Development Plan and the extraordinary summit held in April of this year (adopted it).”

The Gaborone summit’s theme, “Accelerating the industrialisation of Sadc economies through transformation of natural endowments and improved human capital,” simply restates the Sadc strategy. You would think this was plain enough! No hope, if it casts Mugabe in good light.

Seeing it would be blasphemous to openly attack President Khama for endorsing President Mugabe’s industrialisation strategy as a first step out of regional poverty and international competitiveness, local media took refuge in cajolery. Khama, we were told, was the only hope for the region’s fight for democracy and human rights. He (singlehandedly, in one year apparently) should use his position as Sadc chair to push for electoral reforms in Zimbabwe!

The narrative is not only misplaced; it betrays a lot of ahistorical nonsense if not infantile wishful thinking. History as we know it today shows us that democracy and human rights are a by-product, not the agent, of industrialisation and human development. It was the Industrial Revolution, not democracy and human rights, which killed the slave trade. There is not a single country under the sun which has accelerated its development on the back of a strong human rights movement.

That is why most developed nations to this day prefer to outsource their manufacturing in countries such as Pakistan and China where there is cheap labour, poor safety standards and therefore possible to make super profits.

Africa is a rich source of raw materials, but not good enough for industrialisation or to set up mineral processing plants. It is only fertile enough for human rights and democracy. We have the history of economic development and human exploitation being turned on its head and we swallow this deception hook, line and sinker.

At least with sufficient democracy, we can make love in the streets for lack of homes!