President Pierre "Messi" Nkurunziza.

'There is always something new out of Africa'- Pliny the Elder.
But first let's start with an invention in a place far away from this mostly blighted continent. President Trump in far away America forms a football team. American football or gridiron football so to say and names it The White House Patriots. He spends most of his team moving around with this team and engaging all forms of opposition in football matches, a traveling choir providing the entertainment because the president claims to be an evangelical christian. So no Justin Timberlake or Janet Jackson and all that wardrobe malfunction nonsense, just thumping gospel music in heavy metal mode while the president and his team carry out another sort of thumping on the opposition: always scoring at will, always winning silly, with unbelievable margins. Because the president is not expected to be tackled, or roughened or impeded. If there is going to be any engagement, it would have to be the softest of all touches. In essence it is not supposed to be a contact sport anytime the president is holding the ball. So he makes all the throws, all the catches, all the running, all the touchdowns. He is the quarterback, the halfback, the fullback, the wide receiver rolled into one. And naturally he is the superstar and takes all the plaudits. And why not? He is the president of the United States of America.
That is until he travels to Texas and plays a team made up mostly of refugees being held in camps along the Mexican border. Latinos and blacks, guys being held in concentration camps. Fellows who were not in the happy mode at all. Guys who would like to kick some presidential ass. And which they gleefully did, roughening up the president, sending him tumbling into the dirt several times and getting his jersey torn. Respect my foot!
Naturally, the president is not happy about it, not happy at all and he gets the governor of Texas and his deputy arrested and corralled into a little fetid jail. Crime? Conspiracy against the president of course. You can't arrange a little roughening up of the president in the evening and expect to eat breakfast in your own house the following morning.
A very short, dystopian  story? Sure.
But if you change the settings to Africa, precisely to a nasty corner of it called Burundi, and gridiron football becomes soccer and Trump transforms to President Pierre Nkurunziza and the Texas team is replaced by a group of hungry refugees from Congo, you have the latest comedy from Africa. Nkuruziza runs a football outfit called Haleluya FC and as a self-acclaimed evangelical christian, travels with his own choir called' Komeza gusenga which in the local Kirundi language, means 'pray non-stop.'
A real, real comedy. Dystopian to the ends of nightmare. And not funny at all because the governor of Kiremba region of Burundi where the president was made to 'fall several times and kiss the dust' and his deputy are now in even a dirtier jail for conspiring against and humiliating the president. It is not everyday that Messi has his way. Even Messi of Africa.
What is fiction anywhere else in the world can turn into a nasty, grinding reality in Africa.
Yes, there is always something new out of Africa. And most of it is not always pleasant.

The Curse of Liberators.

All countries on earth, without a single exception, have been under one sort of occupation or the other before attaining their present sovereign/independent status. Either the occupiers were foreigners, or were native rulers who had visited so much toil, ruin, suffering and unease on their own people that they soon grew to become horrid, repulsive aliens.In both cases, they had to be driven out by largely peaceful but intense political pressure- India, Nigeria, Ghana- or by violent insurrection, uprising: Russia, China, the US, Zimbabwe, South Africa.
But it is expedient to look into recent political history to understand better a scourge that is just becoming well-defined but which has always ravaged, on all fours, polities as diverse as Liberia and Ukraine. We have all heard of the curse of resources in Nigeria and Congo, yet it is the same African continent that has seen the worst of the curse of the freedom fighter, a pestilence that ate its cancer so unobtrusively into the social, political and economic fabric of the countries under its invasion that it is only now the full extent of the hideous damage it had wrought is being fully felt. Yes, we are talking about ANC, ZANU-PF, FLN, to mention a few of the insurgent groups that played a key role in the decolonization or, to use a more glamorous term, liberation of Africa. But we are not talking about the copious atrocities they too committed even on their own populations while driving away the much-hated, arrogant foreigners: excesses that have been poorly recorded, acknowledged, Excesses that were even celebrated in the euphoria of grand heroism. What eventually mattered was what they did with the power they wrestled from the terrible occupiers. The present scourge in Zimbabwe did not start with the British, it started when that hero of liberation, Mugabe, started entrenching himself as a long-term dictator: too long for his own good or for the good of his country. It was a common plague in Africa. Hardly had the colonial masters left when they were supplanted by the torrid dictatorships of Gaddafi, Siaka Stevens, Sekou Toure, Dauda Jawara; freedom fighters and independence heroes of yesteryears. It could be argued that similar outcomes unraveled in Russia, China, Vietnam, but rickety republics like Nigeria Liberia, Burundi had no technological prowess, economic resilience or organizational acumen to paper over the defaults and in many cases of these African countries, fresh political upheavals such as coups and  mass rebellions had to inevitably erupt  to resolve some of the scourge. Often unsatisfactorily. The victims have been social, political and economic progress. The symptoms have been appalling poverty, telling political repression and a wave of migration most of which end up in the watery graves of the Mediterranean.
Authoritarian regimes or lines of party succession that were as far from democracy as Timbuktu is far from Toronto and likely to throw up characters as outlandish as Jacob Zuma. Succession that implied George Washington telling Americans: "Hi folks! We did well to secure your freedom from the infernal Brits and it is legit if your leaders till eternity come out of a line anchored on me, or my comrades." It wouldn't be monarchy, but certain blood must prevail.
The blood is increasingly going under the microscope and folks must necessarily turn to China, a country whose influence is growing very powerfully in Africa and whose leaders have become very adept at tweaking the line. In Zimbabwe, the military had to step in to effect a mini purge, before Grace Mugabe got too powerful, a situation that looked like a perfect recreation of the Gang of Four conundrum after the death of Chairman Mao. And still borrowing from China, the ANC has done very well to ease out Zuma. Jacob Zuma is actually a likeable guy but the controversies surrounding him were getting a bit tiring and he could have been more careful of his association with the Guptas. As shopkeepers or as managers of big enterprises, Indians have a business reputation a bit on the unsavory side in Africa. Of course nothing really has been proven yet. It might even have been a myth made popular by the infamous Idi Amin but Zuma should have realized his hobnobbing with the Guptas was going to profit him little.
He had to go. Not for his own good but for the continued good of the ANC. Cyril Ramaphosa has his work cut out and perhaps our Zuma would have more time to perfect his celebrated recipe for AIDS cure.