by HORACE CAMBELL
I listened to the results of the Egyptian elections while I was having meetings on the future of the Global Pan-African Movement. What was comforting for those of us who converged was the sense from our comrades in Kampala that the convening of the next Pan-African meeting had to be in another venue other than Uganda. From the declarations of the 7th Pan African Congress in 1994 it had been agreed to hold the 8th Congress in Libya but now the political change in Libya has ruled out such a meeting there. It was from this same Libya where the current NTC leaders welcomed the results of the first round of the Egyptian presidential elections. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the chairman of the ruling National Transitional Council , praised the elections as “superb,” stressing that an “a stable Egypt means a stable Arab World.”
I was listening out for commentary from East Africa where the experience of demobilizing the people through elections has been most developed. But there was not a word from the leader of Uganda who had gone on a visit to Eritrea. This visit was just one more manifestation of the way in which former freedom fighters had degenerated into despots.
Ugandan activists were eager to hear of the results of the Egyptian revolution and those who have been organizing walk-to-work campaigns are anxious to see what can be learnt from Tahrir Square. The Ugandan political establishment is afraid of the mention of the word Tahrir Square. I left two copies of ‘African Awakening: Emerging Revolutions’ and the people wanted to know where they could get the books from Pambazuka. There was a similar demand in Addis. The young people wanted to get their hands on the materials on the Egyptian revolutions and the implications for the processes of awakening. If one reads the books and articles on the sham and rigged electoral processes in Uganda since 2001, then one can get a sense of why it is important for the Egyptian revolutionaries to build new structures outside of the parliament and outside of the rigged game that is called elections.
On the plane I have read the book, ‘The Correct Line: Uganda under Museveni’ by Olive Kobusingye. This is a book about a country that is in perpetual electioneering. As the writer observed at the end of this book, “It appears that at any one time an election is being planned, conducted, or contested.”
This tactic of keeping a repressive government in power seems to have been adopted in Egypt. After the revolution in February 2011 that ousted Mubarak, there was a referendum in March 2011. Then between late November 2011 and January 2012, Egyptians were again voting in elections to elect their parliament over three different stages in nine different provinces in each stage. At the end of this process the Muslim Brotherhood and the other Islamist forces emerged winners in the elections. Esam Al Amin has been writing on how to grasp the ‘perplexing dilemmas in reading Egyptian elections.
Pambazuka News for more