By Artwell Nhemachena

ACCUSATIONS of corruption are part and parcel of what Mahmood Mamdani calls ‘the politics of naming’.
And so, at the point, when African States were becoming independent, Western states put in place battalions of NGOs, CSOs and media houses that would rachet up accusations of presence of corruption in Africa.
But Africans would trace corruption to the point when colonialism started.
The point of this article is that, in order to solve the problem of corruption in Africa, it is essential to track ‘where the rain started beating us’, as a popular Igbo idiom would say.
The Igbo say: “A man who does not know where the rain started to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.”
This means Africans must get to know when corruption started to beat them in order for them to know when corruption will stop.
When the Igbo advise humanity to trace when the rain started to beat them, they are, in essence, advising Africans that a focus on the immediate problem alone, imagined or real, will not help generate a solution.
A good solution is not a function of lamentations about the immediacies of a perceived problem.
Lamentations have turned many Africans into town criers or whistleblowers, as they call them.
But whistleblowing does not translate to solving a problem.
Problems do not need whistleblowers, rather solutions to problems need those who know when the rain started beating us.
Put differently, if the point at which problems started beating Africans is not traced, whistleblowers can whistle until they blow out their windpipes.
But the problems, real or imagined, will remain unsolved.
In other words, a whistleblower, being a slave of immediate circumstances, cannot think beyond the immediate.
Hence a whistleblower cannot trace when the rain started to beat him or her.
And because the beginning is not known, they also do not know when they are dry.
Whistleblowing without restraint would often attract the label ‘bofu ranhonga pembe’.
The implication is that it is the mad ones among us who would keep on blowing whistles without caring about the beginning or end.
The fact that the CSOs, NGOs and Western media do not whistleblow about resilient colonial crimes denotes that whistleblowing itself is weaponised by the West.
It is a tool that is weaponised to deconstruct and destroy African States.
Africans need to discern the coloniality of whistleblowing and they need to ask themselves why colonialists encouraged and even trained some Africans to become whistleblowers rather than tracers of when the rains started beating Africa.

A whistleblower is not a solver of problems in Africa.
Rather, a whistleblower is a lamenter, or a town crier who runs all over town crying and lamenting without solving the problem, whether real or imagined, which is the source of the lamentations.
Being a man who tirelessly runs around town shouting out news and lamentations about imagined or real events, a town-crier is ill-equipped and ill-disposed to meditate and solve problems by tracing their sources.
When the Shona people say: “Imbwa nyoro ndidzo tsengi dzamatowo,” they are warning humanity that it is often those who pretend to be good who quietly and stealthily chew the cow hides in the villages.
The whistleblowers or town criers themselves may pretend to be good but they could be the ones chewing the hides in the villages.
Or they could be complicit in the sense of covering up for those who are quietly chewing the hides.
Western-funded CSOs, NGOs and media do not tell Zimbabweans that corruption started at the time when Cecil John Rhodes and his fellows bribed King Lobengula’s most trusted induna called Lotshe Hlabangana in the 1800s.
Rhodes and his fellows wanted Lotshe to help them convince King Lobengula to sign the Rudd Concession.
The Rudd Concession would legitimise the colonisation of Zimbabwe.
Pathisa Nyathi (2005) captures the event very well when he states that:
“When Cecil John Rhodes’ emissaries came to seek a mining concession from King Lobengula Khumalo in 1888 (the Rudd Concession), Sikhombo Mguni was a prominent chief in the Ndebele State. It is alleged that Sikhombo Mguni, together with Inkosi yamaaNtshali Lotshe Hlabangana, was bribed by the emissaries (namely, Charles Dunnel Rudd, James Rochford Maguire, and Francis Matabele Thompson).
They prevailed over the King to sign the concession, which gave Rhodes mineral rights in exchange for guns, amongst other things.”
The lesson that Zimbabweans should learn from this is that the entire fabric of then Rhodesia was based on corruption.
Yet whistleblowers would not have been tolerated by Rhodes and the West.
In fact, even after getting information that Rhodes had fraudulently secured King Lobengula’s signature on the Rudd Concession, Queen Victoria proceeded to grant Rhodes the Charter with which to colonise Zimbabwe.
King Lobengula sent his indunas to let Queen Victoria know about the fraud but she could not care less about it.
Corruption cannot be solved through the solutions, including whistleblowing and town crying, which Western-funded CSOs, NGOs and Western States are prescribing and sponsoring.
Corruption and any other problems, that Africa may have, require decolonial solutions.
Whistleblowing is not a decolonial solution.
In fact, it is weaponised by those who want to deconstruct independent African States.
If accusations of corruption were not weaponised against Africans, then Western CSOs, NGOs and media would have equally attacked France which, since the 1960s, is forcing Francophone African States to pay what it calls ‘colonial tax’.
The assumption in colonial tax is that the Francophone West African States benefitted from being colonised and must, therefore, pay for the benefits of being colonised.
Francophone West Africans are forced to pay about US$500 billion every year to the French Treasury yet Western CSOs, NGOs and media remain quiet about what has been going on since the 1960s.
The Shona idiom: “Imbwa nyoro ndidzo tsengi dzamatowo,” assists those Zimbabweans who have been fooled by the West to become whistleblowers and town criers on the basis of fallacious assumptions that corruption is African in origin and hue.
If those that whistleblow are genuine and unbiased, they would begin from the colonial origins of corruption.
If CSOs, NGOs and Western media are serious about addressing corruption, they would start by pressuring their own home States overseas to return what they corruptly stole from Africans.
They would also have been putting pressure on France to stop what it is doing to West Africans.
In fact, one of the big problems is that CSOs, NGOs and Western media themselves are being funded by those who corruptly colonised Zimbabwe and by those exploiting Africans.
Put differently, CSOs, NGOs and Western media are being funded through proceeds of corruption. Corporations and businesses which thrived on the bases of colonising Africans are the ones that are funding many of the NGOs, CSOs and Western media which ironically point accusing fingers at African leaders.
The CSOs, NGOs and Western media are being funded by global capitalism which prospered on the basis of colonising Africans.
This means NGOs, CSOs and Western media themselves are also corrupt because they rely on proceeds of transnational corruption in the sense in which Lotshe and Mguni were corrupted by Rhodes’ emissaries in the 1800s.
In other words, the hides in the villages are not necessarily being chewed by African leaders but by those who are accusing African leaders of doing so.
The dogs that are seemingly innocent are the ones chewing the hides in the African villages.
As is evident in the case of Rhodes’ emissaries who corrupted Lotshe and Mguni, corruption is not only about financially bribing public officials.
Corruption is also about causing the public to lose trust in their public institutions.
Whistle-blowers or town-criers are corrupt in the sense that they cause African publics to lose trust in their public institutions which are selectively pilloried.
By corrupting Lotshe and Mguni, Rhodes’ emissaries caused the African public to lose trust in their King.
In other words, corruption is also perpetrated by those who cause African publics to lose trust in their leadership.
Disparaging African leadership is as much evidence of corruption as is receiving bribes because it also results in the collapse of trust and public institutions in Africa.
Public institutions in Africa do not collapse only because public officials are embezzling public funds. Public institutions in Africa also collapse because whistle-blowers are embezzling public trust in their institutions.
Who says it is only funds that are capable of being embezzled in Africa?
Disparaging African leaders corrupts the Africans’ minds such that they turn their backs on their own institutions.
A corrupted mind is one that hates itself.
It is one that hates its own institutions.
It hates its own history, identity and heritage. A corrupted mind is one that fights its own kind and resists its own liberation and freedom.
A corrupted mind is one that refuses to accept its own heritage and prefers devolving its heritage to others.
If computers are said to be corrupted by viruses, why must Africans not discern that colonial viruses have also corrupted African minds?
Why must they think that corruption is all about receiving bribes and other pecuniary benefits?
When Africans fight their own ancestors, this is a sign that Africans have been corrupted by the colonial virus. When one is corrupted, one fights one’s own ancestors. When one is corrupted, one fights one’s own parents and leaders.
When one is corrupted by the colonial virus, one fights one’s own brothers and sisters who may even have brought one’s freedom and liberation.
When one is corrupted by the colonial virus, one destroys one’s own African marriage.
When one is corrupted one destroys one’s own family and when corrupted, one destroys one’s own state.
Undoing corruption in Africa requires undoing the virus of colonialism.
To undo colonialism, Africans do not have to rely on CSOs, NGOs and Western media that are thriving on the basis of proceeds from colonial corruption.
To rely on Western-funded CSOs, NGOs and Western media amounts to hypocrisy.
It is a sign that one has been corrupted.
There is a need for African solutions to problems in Africa.
Instead of whistle-blowing, Africans must learn to respectfully engage one another.
Whistles are not needed in African engagements. Europeans and Americans do not blow whistles about their own – at least not loud enough for Africans to hear.
Imagine a child who each time he/she has a problem with his/her parents, he/she whistle-blows.
Imagine a child who each time he/she has problems with his/her siblings he/she whistle-blows.
Imagine a child who each time he/she has problems with his/her teacher he/she whistle-blows.
Whistle-blowing in these ways would be likened to ‘bofu ranhonga pembe’.
Africa does not deserve the politics of naming.
It is time for respectful decolonial engagements with our leadership.
The quality of the response one gets from one’s leader depends on whether or not one has respectfully engaged one’s leaders in the first place.