eMbathera

Journalist and independent thinker.

[Molly Pitcher @AmericanMama]

Teaching children to hate themselves is absolutely wrong. This evil should not be tolerated anymore.

In the western world is absolutely OK to hate on white people, but not any other race. White people are the minority on earth!

And to teach babies they are racist means we are dealing with nothing but a bunch of psychos who should be nowhere near children.

[Farida Bemba Nabourema @Farida_N]

In my address titled "The Political Economy of Obedience," delivered last month at the Josef Korbel School of Global Affairs at the University of Denver, I identified five key mechanisms through which African populations have been trained into political compliance. I am sharing a summary here because they explain precisely what we are watching play out in real time every day on this continent.

The first is colonial education. The curriculum inherited from the French, the Brits or the Portugese administration was not designed to produce critical citizens. It was designed to produce a particular kind of political subject. one who understood authority as something to be respected rather than questioned, and who experienced his own political traditions as a source of shame rather than institutional possibility. As I said in Denver, the most effective political prisons are not made of concrete. They are made of curriculum. The Togolese school I attended taught us the genealogy of French kings with more precision than the history of the governance systems that predated French colonial presence on our territory.

The second is the economy of obedience itself. Authoritarian systems endure not primarily through permanent terror but because they structure the relationship between political compliance and material survival so that obedience becomes, for most people most of the time, the rational choice. Access to employment, scholarships, market licenses, import authorizations, health clinic access: none of it politically neutral, all of it conditioned on loyalty. People in these systems do not collaborate with power because they are morally deficient. They collaborate because the scaffolding of their daily lives has been designed to make non-collaboration economically catastrophic.

The third is the family as a site of control. In conditions of economic precarity, the individual who considers a dissident act must calculate not only her own risk but the risk she imposes on her parents, her siblings, her children, her cousins etc. I have watched people of intelligence and moral clarity retreat from political engagement not because they were afraid for themselves but because they could not justify the devastating exposure their activism would bring to their families. The authoritarian state does not need to threaten everyone. It only needs to ensure that the threat to one is visible and comprehensible to all.

The fourth is religion. In many parts of Africa, religious institutions have been deployed, not by their most honest practitioners but by their most politically convenient ones, to transmit a theology of earthly resignation and otherworldly reward that discourages political engagement. The pastoral instruction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's sits very comfortably with the interests of Caesars who have no intention of rendering anything to anyone. Liberation theology, which in Latin America produced an extraordinary tradition of religiously grounded political resistance, has had a far more contested reception in much of African Christianity and Islam, partly because of the direct entanglement of many religious institutions with state power, which has made spiritual authority and political compliance structurally allied.

The fifth is media. In authoritarian African contexts, state and privately owned media aligned with power do not typically practice crude propaganda. They practice something more subtle and more durable: the selection of what is visible and what is invisible; the framing of social problems as natural phenomena rather than political choices; and the treatment of opposition voices as marginal or foreign-funded. The film industry participates in this discipline in its own way, through the systematic promotion of narratives that depict poverty and wealth as conditions of fate or personal failure, stories in which the distance between the poor and the rich has everything to do with luck, talent or divine favour and nothing to do with power, policy or the deliberate engineering of inequality.

The cumulative effect, over decades, is a population whose political imagination has been narrowed to the point where alternatives are genuinely difficult to conceive, not because the alternatives do not exist, but because the political ecosystem has ensured they remain invisible.

These are the operating manual of authoritarian systems on this continent. And authoritarianism today is not limited to regimes with a known dictator who has held power for decades. It extends equally to regimes that perform a change of leadership through placebo elections conducted every four to five years, producing a new face every eight to ten years while the same system of impunity, patronage and repression remains structurally intact.

I would argue that these are in fact the more dangerous form of authoritarianism because their citizens are deceived into believing they are living under a democracy when they are in reality governed by plutocrats. The citizen under an obvious dictatorship at least knows what he is fighting. The citizen under a rotating plutocracy has been convinced there is nothing to fight at all. He votes, he watches a new face take the oath, and he mistakes the performance of transition for the substance of change. He ends up with no voice, no justice, no agency, and worse, no drive to fight for his own dignity. For one can only fight for liberation after acknowledging one's condition of oppression.

[Man’s NOT Barry Roux @AdvoBarryRoux]

Arthur Fraser says that after he opened the Phala Phala scandal case in June 2022, he was offered R50 million to withdraw the case.

[City Press @City_Press]

City Press' final hoorah - Tomorrow on https://t.co/VEFJt1Ortw

[JOKAMRREDPILLZ @JOKAQARMY1]

Its not over Ireland

[Iran Embassy SA @IraninSA]

The Strait of Hormuz lies within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman.
South African vessels can pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@JeckovKanani

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@CryptoxxxCoffee Hi

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@adelaf4me @OurFavOnlineDoc Laughing load from Namibia

[Mbuyiseni Ndlozi @MbuyiseniNdlozi]

Grok, embedded in X, is now “officially” a USA military intelligence tool. Joining Google, Amazon, Meta & Apple. But Musk has long been operating with US military with his companies, like StarLink

All these tools are part of the US military industrial complex.

Other countries do the same in the world, like Chinese for example. Many when faced with these facts degenerate into technophobia & populism, often offering ill-informed solutions.

Now let this sink. Slowly, then we can discuss what is to be done.

[Typical African @Joe__Bassey]

This is how HIV was spread through vaccines in Africa, former CIA agents confessed.

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

This is what happens when no one questions Simply Sophie acting on behalf of the politburo. A few days ago, she sent out letters dictating who should go to the National Council and who should be chairperson. No one questioned it. Democracy is gone.

[EWN Reporter @ewnreporter]

Two of the three accused in the #PhalaPhala burglary trial appear before the Modimolle Regional Court in Limpopo. Alleged mastermind Immanuela David and former domestic worker at President Cyril Ramaphosa's game farm, Floriana Joseph, appear in court. Ndilinasho Joseph is sick.

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

How is my vote really secret when voting for a constituency councillor and there are only three candidates for regional council elections? During the campaign people saw you with a candidate. How does the system protect the secrecy of your vote in this instance?
@ECN_Namibia

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@Matt_Pinner Ice cream

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@GwenLister1 The worst part is that the biggest polluters are not even at the event. India, China and America snap meeting. Another talk shop.

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@rumilyrics Appreciative

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@MrsbeastD @grok is this a scam?

[Rowland Brown @pigeon_chess]

So where will the money for free education, Air Namibia etc come from?

Economics is about the allocation (prioritisation) of scarce resources. Politics is about ignoring economics.

[eMbathera @Mweyako]

@MightiJamie Where is Operations Dudula?