Africa Still Weighed Down by Draconian Laws
By Eric Sande
Legislators are tasked with a heavy duty to make laws and defend them on the land. This comes with a lucrative pay package at the taxpayers’ expense.
In Africa, citizens expect a lot from their leaders in the August house, yet many a times the house is treated to a charade, as some pieces of legislation passed due to individual vested interests or those of various political parties, some of which cannot stand the test of time.
Currently, there is a growing list of draconian laws, some passed in this 21st century in a number of countries on the continent. Malawi is about to pass a law Local Courts Bill of 2010 that would make breaking wind in public punishable which in other terms means criminalizing an everyday natural occurrence of “passing gas” with the intention to “mould responsible and disciplined citizens. Someone may wonder if the leaders are forgetting the pertinent serious issues affecting Malawians today, not forgetting the global recession that affected all corners of the world.
An irritated commentator said, “We have serious issues affecting Malawians today. I do not know how fouling the air should take priority over regulating Chinese investments which do not employ locals, serious graft amongst legislators, especially those in the ruling party.”
At a MPs’ HIV/AIDS workshop in Mombasa-Kenya, Esther Murugi, Kenya’s Special Programmes minister shocked the whole world when she suggested to the attentive MPs that people who test positive for HIV should be arrested, isolated and locked up, never to be allowed to mix freely with the rest of the community. She cited as an example what Fidel Castro did in Cuba when he was ‘strong enough’. That is her antidote to stemming the tide of the HIV pandemic. The utterances were met with mixed reactions, with most people condemning them as callous to the extreme, and asking the minister to resign.
Cote d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo is hitting the headlines each passing day as he continues to ignore calls to transfer power to Alassane Ouattarra. Notwithstanding the world record number of mediation talks, that is now to be controlled in part by Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who used his anti-imperialist rhetoric to fend off criticisms of his horrific human rights record.
Across other parts of the continent, a ban is imposed on women putting on trousers in Sudan; a ban on underwater sex in Swaziland; a ban on Christmas under former leader of Equatorial Guinea, Macias Nguema; a ban on music in Somalia under al-Shabaab.
In South Africa, a license is required to purchase a basic television set rather than dealing with more pressing issues such as wide spread poverty, unemployment, and the highest number of people infected with HIV/Aids in the world.
The latest Human Development Index on measures of education, life expectancy and standard of living ranks most African countries bottom of the list making the continent seen as one of the most unequal large landmasses of the world. Our leaders need to rise up to the occasion and not overshadow the issues at hand with politics. More effort is needed to focus on lifting the continent’s long-derided “lion” economies and vanquish Afro-pessimism.