What Next: Democracy or Anarchy?

What Next: Democracy or Anarchy?

As I grew up in inter-states and inter-culture, I nurtured the spirit of curiosity and knowing what is in the basket of an elderly woman. This could not be seen in me with absentia of my interest of the wind of changing blowing across the Middle East that is aimed at bringing cosmetic changes in the political economy of neo-liberal states.
As an observer of events of change, I was not surprise of the event that led to the Tunisian revolution. The Egyptian revolution more akin the Tunisian revolution could not have come a better time than now when the application of neo-liberalism doctrines has failed, paving way for the coming of a blunt force, under the pretentious system of handling power to the ‘Supreme Military Council’.

At this juncture, I must underline my agreement with Dr. Walter Armbrust, a Hourani Fellow and University Lecturer in Modern Middle East Studies at Oxford University, who said: “Social media may have helped organize the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to neo-liberalism.”

Like Dr. Armbrust, I will also observe that these grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined protestors.

Armbrust observed that if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic, but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell. In other words, the logic could be that “it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but the faulty application of neoliberalism”. The concept as defined by David Harvey, a social geographer "Is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." On the sides of Egyptian failed Mubarak, the application of the doctrines of neo-liberalism failed, resulting in ruining the economy, tourist staying away, redundancy increasing, and 30-year angry men breaking the york of the egg that was rotting in the egg’s shell.

Now that Mubarak’s gone, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is no more, Botelfleka nerves are burning, defiant Gaddafi’sregime is in the brink of abating, what will become of the angry mob in the streets of the Arab-World?
What will become of the future of these young reformists? This sent a crystal message to totalitarian rulers around the world that education and awareness couple with the economic factors have contributed to changing the political and social thinking of the youth.

I once heard Brig. General Yakubu Drammeh, former Deputy Chief of defense staff of The Gambia says: “Democracy without development is meaningless, development without democracy is unsustainable”.
On the Doha debate on Aljazeera, I listened to one political commentator who said: “What the people need is not assets or monies, but freedom [freedom of speech and freedom of expression].”
For decades intellectuals in the Middle East and the Africa have been whitewashed by the so-called democrats, who only painted the Greek word with inks on papers.
Bob Marley says: “You can fool some people, but you cannot fool everybody at once.” What we have been seeing in the Middle East, I repeated saying every day, ‘is a paradigm of political changes that swept the whole of Africa when the movement to emancipate African intellects from intellectual slavery was fiercely burning. That crusade could be viewed by many as a microcosm of hope that came to liberate masses.

It’s high time for young African intellects living in grinding poverty, amid rabid governments who practice not what they preach, to say ‘liberate us from intellectual slavery or we liberate you from the wheel chair’. BUT, whenever my mind conceives this, I used to remind myself of my grandmother’s adage that ‘the hare you live with is better than the one that lives miles away from you.’ She qualifies this saying by adding that: “If the one you live with wants to devour you, it never goes directly, rather it takes hesitant steps before doing that; but the one that doesn’t know you, lambastes you and wait for your grandma.”

Now coming back to my heading; democracy or anarchy? What I am trying to say here is, if people should depose {overthrow} their leaders and expect a democratic one; and on the contrary, the coming ones become worst as in ‘Animal Farm’ by George Owell, what would become of the future. Egypt is faced with leadership problem for now, so is Tunisia. The road to democracy is either obvious or anarchy will rule.
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