Will Savimbi’s departure redeem troubled Angola?

I must confess that when last Friday a journalist friend rang to inform me about “the good news” of Dr Jonas Savimbi's death I was very cautious. I grilled my friend, as would a serious police officer on a serious crime scene filing a first information report. My amateur policing effort was dictated by too many similar reports in the past prematurely announcing the death of Savimbi, only for his ‘ghost’ to rise again with more vengeance and menace against the people and government of Angola. I was not sure that last Friday was not yet another one of his many rumoured deaths that had made the man acquire more lives than the mythical cat with nine lives. Several hours later the death was confirmed by many sources and by Sunday his body was displayed on global media. It was unmistakable. The man believed by many of his captive peasant followers to possess so much supernatural powers that he could turn himself into an owl and fly off to finish any enemy anywhere in the world was indeed dead. I must admit that for the second time in the last four years I had a very African reaction to death. Culturally we are not expected to rejoice at the death of another human being even if the dead was a universal villain. The ancestors have to give us discount on some of these villains. They simply do not deserve our sympathy. Savimbi's death put me in the same frame of mind as I was on June 8, 1998 at the OAU Summit in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, when General Sani Abacha's viagra-induced death in Abuja, Nigeria, was confirmed. However my immediate “happiness” was soon submerged by a more sober reflection on what the long awaited death meant and what the implications could be. Would Savimbi's death bring the unjust war in Angola for the past 27 years to an end? My optimistic political will says yes but my intellectual pessimism merely shrugged ‘lets see.’ Both are not unrealistic. To the extent that a human being can represent, epitomise and embody the worst possible traits of a nation's nightmare Dr Jonas (this even rhymes with the biblical Judas!) Savimbi was archetypal. He represented one of the ugliest African faces of the cold war, reactionary African nationalism, political opportunism and naked personal ambition and greed in all shapes and sizes. He was one of those early nationalists who purely because of personal ambitions to move into the palatial seats of government being vacated by colonialists were willing to sacrifice everything and anybody. When he did not realise his ambition he preferred to burn, destroy and sabotage the country for the rest of his life. In that destructive path he was helped by the cold war. The former Maoist rebranded himself an anti-Communist African liberation fighter ready to deliver Angolans to freedom made in Washington and New York. With his ideological partner in former Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, Savimbi became a bulwark against ‘the communist threat’ posed by the liberation movements in the whole of southern Africa. He was allied to Apartheid South Africa and successive US governments in the 1970s up to the late 1980s. Reagan's ‘destructive engagement’ in southern Africa meant that UNITA got an annual budget from the US tax payers in addition to several millions of dollars in covert military support directly and through apartheid South Africa. Just read John Stockwell's In Search of enemies and also Zed Book's CIA in Africa if you think these tales are strange. It is particularly important for people to read these accounts of deliberate destabilisation by the US in these days when ideology is supposed to be dead and ‘we are all democrats’! The CIA may have changed in style but their aims and objectives of Americanising the world, failing which multinationalisation will do. So- called freedom fighters in Afghanistan, Iraqi Kurds, anti-Cleric Iranians, anti-Communist Koreans are being nurtured and funded by the US today much the same way Savimbi and Mobutu were groomed only one generation ago. Today in Africa governments and NGOs are competing for attention in Washington. London, New York, Paris and other Western countries and brandishing their 'high level' contacts in these places as badges of honour. Have we not travelled this road before? Why are Africans enthusiastically going over this covered ground again? Even the likes of Savimbi thought they were using the West only to be used and discarded as and when convenient. Would Savimbi's death bring peace to Angola? It should but all will depend on how the MPLA government handles the situation. So far the reaction from Luanda has been restrained, non-triumphalist and reconciliatory. It should remain so. But more than that the MPLA and President Dos Santos have to reform their ways too in order to instill confidence not only in UNITA supporters but the whole country. The revolutionary MPLA of the 70s is not the one in power today. Long term in government and ideological misdirection has reduced it to the same level of UNITA. They cannot claim to be anti- imperialist anymore since they made their peace with Washington and have handed over huge chunks of their national resources to the US and other Western corporations. The ideological somersault is so complete that Cuba cannot even count on Angola's automatic vote at the UN's annual ritual resolution demanding that the US removes its unlawful and inhuman embargo on Cuba. In truth there may not be serious moral or ideological differences between MPLA generals and UNITA ones in enriching themselves at the expense of their peoples' misery and exploitation of their huge natural resources. The MPLA had succeeded in convincing all of us that development has been postponed in Angola due to the war against Savimbi. Now Savimbi is dead who are they going to blame? Tajudeen28@hotmail.com or Tajudeen28@yahoo.com