By Professor Artwell Nhemachena
AFRICAN States that refuse or fail to liberalise rights to sexual orientation, including queer sexualities, are sanctioned by the US, the EU and even threatened by the UN, yet African States that fail to liberalise or to democratise ownership and control of resources are not sanctioned as well.
In fact, African States that try to democratise ownership and control of resources are sanctioned for supposedly upsetting property rights of descendants of colonialists or of transnational corporations.
It is time for Africans to critically consider why they are readily granted all other liberal freedoms except the right to own and control their natural resources.
Why are Africans assisted so much to have ‘sexual revolutions’ even as they are punished for fighting to recover ownership and control over their natural resources?
As the English people say, when a man is sliding downhill, everyone gives him a push so that he slides down faster.
Africans have been sliding downhill in terms of losing ownership and control over their natural resources since the beginning of colonialism, and colonialists have not assisted the Africans to recover their resources.
Africans have, of course, been given pushes to ensure they slide downhill faster.
In order for Africans not to easily realise that they are being given a push downhill, colonial ideologies about sexual orientations have been designed, foregrounded, and extended to Africans so that it would appear like Africans are being pushed uphill.
Similarly, colonial ideologies about fighting African dictators are designed, foregrounded and deployed so that Africans get a false sense that they are being pushed uphill and not downhill.
Colonial ideologies about fighting African authoritarianism and autocracy are deployed to give Africans a false sense that they are being pushed uphill when in fact they are being pushed down the hill of ownership and control over their natural resources.
Indeed, Africans must critically consider why the UN is quick to condemn African States that criminalise queer sexuality, but it has been silent since its formation on matters of restitution and reparations for crimes of enslaving and colonising Africans.
Put differently, the UN itself is weaponised and it has become an instrument or apparatus of those who seek to retain the colonial and imperial status quo — retaining land and other resources.
Of course, the UN itself is funded by money from transnational corporations, some of which have dispossessed and exploited Africans for centuries.
The idea of the Global Compact concretises the communion between the UN and transnational corporations.
In other words, instead of launching a Global Compact with transnational corporations that have dispossessed and exploited Africans for centuries, the UN should have started by launching Global Compact with those that were dispossessed and exploited, so that their grievances and rights could be resolved.
The upshot of the foregoing is that the UN is not only weaponised by global capital, but it is also impossible for the UN to unite a divided world.
In a world that is still divided in the absence of restitution and reparations following centuries of enslavement and colonisation, the UN cannot be united.
It is a fantasy, in such a divided world, to assume that there is unity between those who have enslaved and colonised others, with impunity, and those who were enslaved and colonised.
Real unity in a real UN has to be premised on rock-solid foundations of justice, including restitution and reparations, for the centuries of enslavement and colonisation. Otherwise, the UN has been built on, and is sitting on, the quicksand that is being witnessed in respect to the Russia-Ukraine war.
A world that is built on enslaving, dispossessing and exploiting other people cannot be a united world.
As is said in the Bible, a clever man builds his house on rock-solid foundations.
Similarly, a world that has clever leaders will build its unity on rock-solid foundations and not on sand, as is the case with the UN.
Humanity is not yet clever and intelligent if it thinks that unity can be built on the sands of enslaving and colonising other people.
Humanity may have haggled over which race is more intelligent than the other, but there is no sign that humanity is intelligent when it is trying to build unity on the quicksand of centuries-old injustices.
Call it the UN, call it the ‘One World Government’, call it a World Federation, call it a Great Reset, call it ‘globalisation’ and what not, unity will not stand on the sands of injustices of enslavement and colonisation.
Even in the spiritual realm, God will not allow unity that circumvents justice to those who were enslaved and colonised for centuries.
The world may set international criminal courts but to the extent that these courts circumvent and dodge centuries-old injustices of enslavement and colonisation, they speak more to weaponisation of international law and international relations than to justice and freedom for the victims of enslavement and colonisation.
Much as colonial courts and jurisprudence were blind to colonial injustices, including dispossessing and exploiting the colonised, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is blind to the injustices of enslaving and colonising others. It has not, and does not, seek to address these injustices of enslaving and colonising others, yet it seeks to be an international court that would set itself apart from colonial courts.
The ICC does not even support those who struggle to recover reparations and resources that were stolen during the colonial era, and yet it seeks to address itself as a court in the postcolonial world that supposedly speaks to unity and globalisation.
Thus, when the late former President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, sought to recover land that was unjustly seized from Africans during the colonial era, we did not see the ICC intervening to help him and the Zimbabweans.
Much like the UN, the ICC is built on the quicksand of colonial injustices that it refuses to address and redress.
Much like the colonial courts, the ICC is a victors’ court; it is not a court of the victims of centuries-old injustices.
A victors’ court serves the interests of the victors while pretending to be serving the interests of the victims.
In other words, a victors’ court is a weaponised court.
It is a court that does not demand restitution and reparations from the victors whose interest it serves.
In this sense, it is a court that is less about justice than about keeping up appearances of justice.
Because it is weaponised, it is a court that upholds the rule of lawfare rather than the rule of law.
For the reasons that the ICC has been unfairly targeting African States and disrupting the sovereignty of African States, African States have recently threatened to leave the ICC.
Without proper jurisprudence, courts and laws to address and redress centuries-old injustices, the world will find it difficult, if not impossible, to unite in a real and meaningful sense.
If international relations in the 21st Century are premised on crimes of centuries of enslavement and colonisation, how can international courts be not similarly premised on proceeds from enslavement and colonisation?
In other words, if transnational corporations that are funding the international courts are themselves complicit in centuries of enslaving and colonising other people, how can we be sure that the international courts’ hands are not bloody in the sense of subsisting on proceeds of crimes of enslavement and colonisation?
The problem is that, courts, including the ICC, are not engaged in profitable businesses.
They, therefore, rely on proceeds of the bloody global capitalist order, and this makes the courts bloody as well, even as they ironically profess to be premised on justice. After centuries of enslaving and colonising other people, global capital is using the proceeds to set up and fund courts and international institutions that are expected to dispense justice despite relying on proceeds from enslavement and colonisation projects.
The centuries of enslaving and colonising other people and the use of profits and proceeds from dispossessing and exploiting other people implicate the courts and international institutions in the crimes.
If receiving stolen goods or proceeds of crimes is itself a crime, then all courts and international institutions that are established and run on the bases of proceeds or funds received from complicit transnational corporations are criminal.
This could be one of the reasons real justice for victims of centuries of enslavement and colonisation is not easy to come by.
Real justice may only be attainable after restitution and reparations.
Perhaps, just like there is BRICS, the group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as an alternative to the Western economic system, there should be the equivalent of BRICS in the jurisprudential sense of having alternative jurisprudence to the Western capitalist system.
Africans need not be fooled that there is justice in courts that were established and that are subsisting on the basis of funding from global capital which enslaved and colonised other people in the Global South.
The courts themselves may need cleansing because they receive proceeds or funding from centuries of enslaving and colonising other people.
They also become handicapped in dispensing justice even though they would be very capable of launching lawfare as their special legal operations.
Courts are launching covert special (capitalist) operations even as they pretend to be premised on equality, fairness, and justice.
This is the import of Mattei and Nader’s 2008 book, ‘Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal’ – the point in the book is that international law, including the so-called rule of law, aid global capital to plunder other nations.
The problem is that courts and the capitalist jurisprudence, on which they are based, assume that they are dispensing equality even as they uncritically presuppose that the capitalist order is the only one that should reign.
The question is: How can there be equality and justice in a world that is very unequal and unjust in ownership and control of resources?
The courts assume that they are dispensing fairness even as they assume that victims of enslavement and colonisation should not get redress.
They assume that they are dispensing justice even as they presuppose that justice exists only in the capitalist economic order.
Put in other words, humanity has become prisoners of equality, prisoners of fairness and prisoners of justice in the sense of being trapped and imprisoned in definitions and ideologies founded on, and extolling, global capitalism.
Indeed, Harry Englund, 2006, has published a book titled, ‘Prisoners of Freedom’.
Conceptualisations of equality, fairness, justice and freedom depend on the social systems that one subscribes to — be it a capitalist, socialist or communist system.
Yet humanity is often presented with iron-cast definitions that have their basis in the capitalist system.
In other words, it is necessary to ask whose justice the courts are dispensing, whose fairness the courts are propping up, whose equality the courts are advancing and whose laws the courts are advancing.
In a world order that is premised on historical injustices which remain without redress, the law and courts cannot be fair, just and equal while there is blindness to the injustices.
The New World Order cannot be new if it is built on old injustices; similarly, the Great Reset cannot be great and it cannot be a reset when it is premised on old injustices.
Even the revolutions, such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cannot be fair and just if they are built on the basis of old injustices.
The problem is that there hasn’t been substantial alternative jurisprudence from other social systems, including from communism, socialism and from Afrocentric perspectives.
This chapter prods scholars to develop alternative jurisprudence that will make the world richer in perspectives.
The problem is that liberal political ideologies have made Africans believe that (liberal) multiplicity and plurality equals liberation and freedom from dictatorship and authoritarianism.
Africans have not been told that the global capitalist system itself is a system of dictatorship that does not even allow humanity to develop alternative definitions of liberation, freedom, fairness, equality, democracy and justice.
Humanity is locked up in capitalist definitions of fairness, justice, equality, freedom, liberation and democracy, among other platitudes.
What humanity has not been taught is that capitalism has multiplied and pluralised itself such that it now dictates to us through multiplicity and plurality rather than through singularity.
Capitalism has become so cacophonous, polyvocal and noisy that some sections of humanity have started to believe that we have real plurality and multiplicity in the world even as capitalism explicitly reminds humanity that there is no alternative to itself.
Put differently, the cacophony and polyvocality of capitalism is meant to hide the singularity or the monovocality of it.
Multiplicities, pluralities, cacophony and polyvocality do not necessarily signify democracy when they are premised on a singularity which is the source of the multiplicity and plurality.
As a system, capitalism survives by deceiving its victims; it issues cacophonous noises which make it appear to be a plurality; it makes polyvocal sounds that makes it appear to be a plurality; it even pretends that it has died and has been replaced by something else, as is currently the case with discourses on post-capitalism.
Like the emperor, capitalism desires new clothes from time to time but under the new clothes the essence remains; the essence may even become more virulent.
As Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued in their book ‘Empire’, a new (capitalist) empire is emerging even as humanity is made to believe that a post-capitalist and post-imperialist world order is the future.