It is an organic truth that living organisms are constantly striving to be that which shapes their desire to be influential and powerful. Power is an intrinsic will to be or to become recognized, felt and dominating. Meanwhile, at the threshold of power lies a curtain, and to reveal what lies behind that curtain is to venture into the politics of power. The intricate reality embedded within the phenomenon of power is key to the promptings of this article.
Over the millennia, different definitions and treatments of notable concepts have won the attention of distinguished scholars. Power is one such concept laden with multifarious definitions and interpretations because it is too liquefied to be subjected to dogmatism. Relying on the Oxford dictionary, we learn that the concept at hand suggests the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way. Meanwhile, in social sciences and politics, power is the ability to direct or influence the behaviours of others or the course of events. For instance, ‘a political process that offers people power over their own lives.’ With or without these perspectives of the term in question, the bottom line is that every organism has the legitimacy to define its extent and legality of power.
Man is rationally a willful animal. In the Genealogy of Morals, Fredrich Nietzsche depicts man as someone who would rather will nothing, than not will at all. Therefore, the will in mankind is triggered by the impulse of the conatus essendi. Conatus is a central theme in the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza derived from Latin to mean the struggle of living and an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. It is an instinctive ‘will to live’ found in every living organism. On the other hand, the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer – a German philosopher best known for his 1818; The World as Will and Representation – surfaced by depicting the will as ‘striving and blind impulse’ with no end in view. The illusion of this pessimism was later rejected by Nietzsche following his ideology of the will to power.
The exercise of power is historically endemic to humans and can be exerted in various forms; can be seen as good or evil or as just or unjust. However, as social beings, our capacity to appease the will to power in us should be taken as something inherited as well as a threshold exercising humanistic objectives that will help, move, and empower others as well. Consequently, this establishes an opportune intellectual exposure to review part of Africa’s politics of power which is at the brink of erosion.
Africa has her way of defining and describing power because it is equalled to age, wealth, gender and academic credentials. It is believed that the older one grows, the powerful he becomes. More so, most ethnic groups embrace a hierarchical and patriarchal system, meaning men by default are more powerful than females. Also, the extensive accumulation of wealth amounts to being more influential in the society.
To realize progress in every endeavour, an establishment of a hierarchical order needs to take precedence primarily for good governance. The case of Africa’s civil leadership is one among sectors which has manifested a peculiar will to power which I refer to as hyper-will-to-power. Hyper is analogously employed to emphasize the magnitude of the desire to be more and more powerful while subjugating the less powerful. The hyper-will-to-power is the root of the politics of power in Africa. It permeates different dimensions including the social, economic and political spheres.
Speaking of the current political systems in Africa, mostly subscribing to democracy, it is compelling to mention that the higher civil leaders appear to be investing in their civil powers and securing their political ambitions. Zimbabwe is an ideal case study. Any constitutional activism carried by civilians whether virtual or physical is interpreted as treason or a fabricated crime. This has resulted in having prisons full of individuals challenging the hyper-will-to-power exhibited by the political elite. So, this has resulted in an arrested social and economical progress. It is a disheartening reality because political power should be a fountain that fosters human solidarity, typically in this continent to render the momentum for the emancipation of the African heritage.
Should one not conclude that the hyper thirst for power has proven to be an enemy of progress in the beloved continent as illustrated by a culture of having leaders who are overdue to exercise their roles? Uganda is no exception. Talking about this, I don’t seem to agree with the legend which says absolute power corrupts absolutely. Instead, in these unprecedented times of the present generation, it is no longer simultaneous to equivocate power and corruption, but now we talk of power as the worst corruption in African leadership.
The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. It is an essential quality of humanity. The difference only comes in the manner in which it is actualized in a given context. Africa, no doubt, is what it is today because the leadership structures of many countries rotate within the circle of politics of power in order to recharge the pleasure for power and the hunger to overpower.
One of the hidden secrets is that the thirst for power is an ovary where seeds of underdevelopment have been fertilized in Africa. It resides in none other than wombs of tyrants, puppets and long-standing dictators. Leadership is identified not as a duty to serve but rather a perpetual quench of the appetites of power. This has proven that the possible politics to curb the problems of power centralization in Africa is the politics of a coup d’etat like those that happened in Zimbabwe, Mali, Gabon, Sudan, to mention a few. Thus, Africa is at the suffrage of power crisis, a pandemic that has hijacked the fibre of good governance.
Conclusively, we may become exhausted while seeking possible answers to the puzzle of power politics. One thing to note, however, is that in the struggle to become more powerful, power becomes a vice when it assumes a role of disempowering the less powerful, but a virtue when it becomes an avenue of exalting the less powerful into powerful individuals. At its best, it becomes the medicine to heal Africa, yet at its worst, it becomes a venom to poison the good in Africa. Hence, the power to love is slowly dwindling, because it is being battered by the nonstandard love for power. To diagnose and heal Africa’s politics of power it is imperative to invoke a new epiphany of power to come to the aid of Africa’s ailing power politics.
