Lots has been said, already, about how empowering Civil Society helps fight corruption, how Civil Society is, indeed, corruption’s “kryptonite”. The events of the past month in North Africa add to From here on end, political scientists around the world will study the different waves and layers of a powerful movement, of a revolution as surprising to the world as its magnitude and consequences: Civil Society on the path to war for its freedom. Social scientists will struggle for the next years with the novel idea of a popular, non-ideological uprising, which many characteristics include no defined leadership, something foreign to western thinking. In this piece, we will focus our attention on part of the “puzzle” that, to some degree, made it all real, concrete: Why did the military refused to shoot?

Many reasons explain why, in both Tunisia and Egypt, the military refrained from charging the protesters in the popular uprisings that pushed out of power their fellow comrades, Ben Ali and Moubarak. Many in the international press and a number of western political scientists were quick to point as a reason for their restraint the fact that many of the most senior officers were educated in the West, especially in the US, where the military is traditionally apolitical, and whose loyalty lays with the people. Though not necessarily mutually exclusive, we offer here a slightly different point of view, which is they didn’t order mass killings of civilians because they would have found themselves burying members of their own families, in this new kind of civil society that has been quietly transforming the fabric of society and politics, in Africa in the past decades.

Represent?!

I have said it time and again over the past month: The events in Tunis and Cairo have taught us nothing. Nothing that we, Africans, didn’t know, that is. Democracy, good governance and social justice can only hold when they are initiated from the grassroots, from the bottom up. For decades now, the international institutions, donor-countries and other prominent international actors have used these buzzwords as sounds bites to justify their agendas and raison d’être, while at the same time reserving the right to keep the statu quo when it fitted their interests, leaving the oppressed around the world, well, to fend for their poor selves. It’s called Real Politik, stupid! What’s new there? Nothing, really. For the western media, their pundits and other instant modern-day “Egyptologists”, this part of our commentary is already boring. Unless you take into account the reaction of the armed forces to the popular uprising, in both Tunisia and Egypt. This indeed is symptomatic of a shift of power, that has been quietly brewing over the years, out of sight of the cameras of CNN, in our countries, where dictators, comfortably floating in their bubble of wealth and privilege, have come to believe in their own hyped superpowers and their carefully built mythology of infallibility, to the point where they lost any contact with, well, basic reality: tanks and machine guns work fine as deterrent for a couple of hundreds, but power still rests on the people.

Before and after January 2011:

Before 2011, civil society was, well, a foreign concept. It belonged to so-called “experts” of the IMF and the World Bank and their likes, who would show up from time to time in our capitals, with their fancy programs and never far behind, the cameras of a press eager to “show progress” on a continent “cursed with wealth.” Along with catch phrases like “empowering people”, “grassroots organizations”, “local associations… they “pushed” for “reform”, but not change; they advocated for democracy, though dealing with regimes that oppressed the people they are supposed to serve. But one thing remained true, all along: the moral qualms they once in a while found themselves in, sometimes very publicly, between their interests and the ideals of freedom and democracy, were a luxury to the people victims of their games couldn’t afford to pay attention to. And to be completely honest about it, nor were they ever so inclined to, either. When you are deprived from even the most basic dignity of being considered a fellow human being by “the system”, things actually become very simple!

And so people started organizing, many preparing for they envisioned would be their death. They did so in places where the government, the establishment’s police were hard press to hurt them. God Truly Bless the Internet! For, for all the things that it has brought us, good or bad, from the tribune it offers to neo-nazis and Al-Qaedas of the world, it has allowed the voiceless around the world to speak, yet again, and to rally for freedom.

But this piece is really not about Tweeter and Facebook, though these outlets respectively in Tunisia and Egypt certainly deserve, indirectly at least, credit for a brilliant, yet age old idea: the inter-connectivity of all peoples, and their natural aspirations for human rights. This is about a new kind of civil society. Generally speaking in the West, civil society is supposed to be this separate entity of people who for various reasons, won’t associate themselves with either “declared” groups in society: the government, the opposition parties, the military… They have thus created a different kind of civil society, a hybrid that keeps close ties to all “traditional” segments of society. Indeed, all families – in the sense of the extended African family – is “represented” in the government as well as the opposition, the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy, etc… This new kind of civil society – the top being represented at the bottom, if you will - is the real reason why the generals didn’t order the shooting down of the protesters: they knew some of them are related to them personally, intimately, some by bloodline.

As this ‘new’ Civil Society takes hold, like its ‘classic’ version, there is no indication it has any intention of installing itself in power, in some kind of resurgence of the Bolshevik revolution. For one, the military, in both countries won’t allow this to happen. But this does not mean the military will get a free pass, by a long shot (pun intended there), during the transition. As one protester put it in Cairo Saturday February 12, 2011 on CNN, “[If the Military fails us], we know the way back to Midan Al-Tahrir (Liberation Square).” In countries where unemployment reaches 40 percent in rural and urban areas, where 40 to 60 percent of the population is 35 years old or younger, where education leads only to more corruption, desperation becomes a way of life. Until there is nothing left to believe in, to hang on. Things indeed become very simple, when your country and its leaders have thoroughly failed you: Death is a true relief. And so they did march, all fear gone, some to their grave, dancing and chanting, as we always do in Africa: We dance in mourning, just as we celebrate every joyous opportunity we get…

Nothing new, really…

Thierry Onga

Political Scientist.