The last word is that a country ’ s sovereignty is best determined by the control it has on its political and economic agenda . These two areas need to work in concert to create the necessary enabling environment for development .
When Ochieng got back to his class where he had hurriedly left his tote bag with his notes and books , he was surprised to find his entire class still waiting in class and , as he was to learn later , had been strategizing on how to demand for his return .
If this sounds rather extreme to you , then you have to realize that during that era it was not uncommon for lecturers to be picked up from college and they disappeared since that was a period rife with political detentions without recourse to a judicial process .
Kenya was a police state and the imperial president had the powers to detain anyone he deemed prejudicial to his rule , indefinitely and without having to give reason as to why that person was incarcerated .
What followed was equally bizarre as the relief on the students ’ faces on seeing Ochieng was accompanied by a call from the hastily chosen class leader to the other students to ferret out the mole in class who was snitching to the administration .
They had learnt well that an affront to any member of the institution was an affront to every member and they therefore stood vigilantly in solidarity with any one that the administration singled out for persecution .
The students also insisted that they were not going to miss their lecture and voted to continue with the lesson and ironically the topic was on sovereignty and Ochieng wondered what that meant in reality .
Institutions of higher learning are meant to be independent and sovereign in order to foster a culture of enquiry and research to unearth new realities and methods of making the world a better place for all .
The university college was certainly not sovereign and the decisions the head took were subject to the government ’ s whims but by then Ochieng was beginning to realize that neither was the national government sovereign .
Four decades later the issue is even more confounded as the global geopolitics play out . Ochieng hopes that African nations are progressively realizing that their countries are just pawns in an intricate and ruthless game of thrones .
Recent utterances by the Kenyan president on the global arena demonstrate just how complex and manipulative the situation is when one delves into the murky waters of trying to determine what sovereignty really
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The last word is that a country ’ s sovereignty is best determined by the control it has on its political and economic agenda . These two areas need to work in concert to create the necessary enabling environment for development .
means in the current world order .
Addressing the UN General Assembly , the president lamented that although the institution was created to establish global peace goals to enable economic development , Africa has always been on the periphery and have never been invited to the table .
No African country is represented on the powerful security council which he termed as dysfunctional , undemocratic , noninclusive , unrepresentative and above all to have failed to live up to its mandate to maintain international peace and security .
This was after he had made some very interesting comments at the AU summit where he categorically took a firm stand that African presidents will no longer be summoned like kids by trading partners in the first world .
He wondered aloud why fifty-four presidents in Africa were expected to meet with an American president or a German chancellor or a Japanese prime minister when Africa could and should be represented by AU .
He decried the unfair treatment that was meted out to presidents of less developed countries which demeaned the sovereignty of those countries and overtly demonstrated that they were not treated as equal partners .
This was of course music to the African ears , here we seemed to have a champion for the ignored masses of the developing countries and we seemed to be growing a fearless and outspoken leader taking on the oppressors .
That is precisely why Africans were shocked when the president took a stand denouncing the Niger coup using words that were quintessentially scripted by the same oppressors that he had been railing at for being exclusive .
France had just threatened that it would send in troops to reinstate the ousted leader and restore democracy and Germany had pledged to support the French action . AU joined in the chorus and ECOWAS also threatened to invade Niger to restore order .
If a system of government , in this case , democracy , is manipulated by former colonizers to maintain a state of affairs that promotes neo-colonialism , are the affected countries expected to maintain the holy grail of democratic ideals ?
Ochieng is perplexed since he finds it difficult to digest this contradictory stance , is he to assume that the president and AU are not aware of the exploitative nature of the current relationship of the francophone Africa with France ?
France never left its former colonies in Africa , they just propped up their African stooges as public relation fronts while they continued to pillage and run the countries as de facto provinces of France .
If democracy is really a valued concept by the French , how come in their sphere of influence in Africa is where you find the longest serving dynastic presidents where power is handed over from father to child . Is this a democratic practice ?
How is it that the leaders of these former French colonies are more French than the French ? Some of them have even governed their countries from the comfort of France secure in the knowledge that French troops maintain order at home .
How is it that France is the central bank of the former French colonies . These countries currency is pegged to the French franc and they are just satellites of the French state that controls their economic system . Is this the definition of sovereignty ?
The French used a heinous method to maintain control of their former colonies by assimilating their leaders and joining forces with them to oppress the masses . Former French spheres of influence have typically been the most unstable countries .