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From Mauritius to Somalia




I was recently reading on Financial Times and BBC that the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has been studying governance in Africa for a few years now. The studies aim to give a prize in governance every year to those African countries making remarkable progress towards stable democracies, though for the past two years the Foundation has not found any country in Africa to qualify.

Current rankings from the Foundation put Mauritius, the Seychelles and Botswana in the top ten, and Somalia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the bottom ten.

I'm just thinking aloud: Why haven't we as Africans developed scales of improvement that are relative to our peoples' cultures, resources, and ambitions?

Though moves to incessantly grade each other - from our schooling days, to the work place, to retirement pensions - are meant to philosophically help us improve eachother, I feel that we are getting carried away with assessing eachother.

I fear that when it comes down to governance in Africa specifically, we are comparing African systems to Western systems. We do not consider Africa as the largest continent on Earth, and possibly where human life first originated. We do not consider that ancient, indigenous systems of governance somehow prospered and allowed people to live right through into colonialism and out of colonialism.

Most of all, we don't consider that peoples are different. And while we all share some basic things as humans, we have different histories and essentially different values. If our values are different, we need different ways to measure these values. But since we seem to be moving into consistent ways to measure values across peoples and cultures, it seems we're locking ourselves out of the diversity of possibilities.

Like I said, I'm just thinking aloud. Don't mind me.
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