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Blueprint for revolution

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George Ayittey does not mince words. So when his latest manuscript landed on his publisher’s desk a few months ago, the book’s title shouldn’t have surprised anyone: How to Topple a Brutal Dictator.

“I had so much trouble convincing my publisher on the title,” he laughs. “He was so spooked. He said, ‘No, no, no we cannot go with this title. It is too provocative. We don’t want to do a how-to book on revolution.’”

The publisher countered with his own: The March of Freedom: Fighting Dictators in Africa and Around the World. But those words rang hollow to Ayittey, MA’70 (Economics).

“I don’t like the word ‘fight.’ You can fight someone without winning. I don’t want to ‘fight’ these dictators; I want to defeat them, topple them,” he says from his Virginia home. “And what is this ‘around the world’? Everyone knows where these sons-of-bitches are.”

You see, for George Ayittey, the only good dictator is a dead dictator.

As president of the Washington, D.C.-based Free Africa Foundation, which he founded in 1993, Ayittey has dedicated his life to the argument that Africa is poor because she is not free. Through a half dozen books and countless appearances in front of audiences and political bodies across the globe, he has brought his message – often unpopular – about how to save Africa.

“This is a story which has to be told by an African. It cannot be told by a Canadian or an American. It has to be told by an African because we have experienced this, we have seen these dictators and how they operate,” he says. “(After colonialism), independence was in name only. All we did was trade one set of masters for another and the oppression and exploitation of the African people continued unabated.”

His most recent book, published in November, continues telling that story. In the eventually titled, Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World, Ayittey argues financial and other aid to Africa, while virtuous, is done in vain unless the continent sheds itself of violent dictatorships. Offered on the book’s pages is what his publisher feared, a near blueprint for how to bring down a tyrant.

Ayittey has run counter to conventional wisdom most of his life. But just as he was growing accustomed to being a “voice in the wilderness,” his message has started to gain traction as the world looks for another way in Africa.

And to this day, he credits Western for helping him not only find his voice, but make the connections necessary to spark his revelation on revolution.

*   *   *

Ayittey graduated from the University of Ghana in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. That fall, an exchange program between the Canadian and Ghanian governments brought him and three fellow countrymen as students to Western.

He landed at the London airport on a cold September day, wearing only a “puny little jacket.” The professor who picked him up took Ayittey straight to the Hudson Bay Company and bought him a winter coat. That would be the first of many warm memories for Ayittey at Western.

“We looked different. You’re talking about 1969, about the first batch of black students at Western. A lot of people were curious about us, asked us where we’re from, and made us feel welcome,” he says. “It put my mind at ease. I could focus on my studies and not worry about being accepted.”

Ayittey, who would graduate from Western in 1970 with a master’s degree in economics, admits much of his revolutionary fire was stoked in Western’s classrooms. His professors put economics into a political context, preaching the importance of individual freedoms and liberties to a fair economic system. Those words stuck.

“They very much believed in economic freedom. For me, it was just natural to leap from economic freedom to political freedom,” Ayittey says. “It made me instinctively aware of the lack of freedoms in Africa – not just economic, but political as well.

“It created this passion that we have to do much to liberate Africa.”

He returned to Ghana in 1971, where he would use his economics background to deliver informed radio commentaries, often critical of the country’s ruling party’s policies. The Ghanian military government didn’t take kindly to the criticism and would haul Ayittey in for questioning, even raid and rifle his home.

“That was when I became more and more radicalized about military regimes and the way they have robbed people of their freedoms,” he says. “That’s when it dawned on me that we will never make any progress in Ghana until we rid ourselves of these military regimes.”

Stepping back, he saw problems not just in Ghana, but a proliferation of military regimes across Africa. He knew something needed to be done. “Maybe it was being hauled into a military barracks that was the spark,” he laughs. “Then I decided to fight this particular scourge.”

Prior to leaving for Ghana, Ayittey had completed his PhD requirement at Western, needing only to write his thesis. But a military coup and the ensuing new regime at home ended his country’s exchange program. He would end up at the University of Manitoba where he received a PhD in 1981.

That same year, yet another military coup swept yet another military dictator into power in Ghana. “At that point I said to myself I want to devote my life to ridding Ghana of this type of military dictatorship,” Ayittey says.

That was accomplished in 2000 when John Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party was elected president. As the nation’s first legitimate leader since 1966, Kufuor knew what he had in Ayittey, calling him an “architect of change in Ghana.” He invited Ayittey to join the new government as a cabinet minister.

Ayittey declined.

“I didn’t wage this war for my personal benefit,” he says. “We had liberated Ghana. But there are many other African countries we have to liberate.”

*   *   *

You would short Ayittey to simply brand him controversial.

Throughout his career, he has challenged the deep-rooted dogma that has formed the foundations of some of the world’s largest government aid agencies and NGOs. To get his point across, Ayittey has aligned his organization with powerful conservative think tanks (Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and Earhart Foundation) to influence the way the world does business with Africa.

And people are listening.

In 2008, Foreign Policy magazine named Ayittey one of the world’s ‘Top 100 Public Intellectuals.’

“The externalists believe Africa is poor because of external factors like colonialism, Western imperialism and an unjust international economic system,” he says. “In other words, Africa is poor, but it’s not its fault.  It’s a victim of hostile external factors.

“This is the orthodoxy that has held sway for much of the post-colonial period.”

But Ayittey knows internal factors can play just as detrimental a role.

“One of those factors is bad leadership,” he says. “In the West, very few Westerners want to talk about bad leadership in Africa for fear of being called racist. Many in the West didn’t want to talk about bad leaders like (former Uganda President) Idi Amin, even (former Zimbabwe President) Robert Mugabe. Political correctness was a problem in the West.”

The West’s silence, combined with the oppressive nature of the regimes, has fed drastic reactions in African populations, often with catastrophic consequences. Civil wars. Breakaway republics. Mass exoduses causing humanitarian crises on biblical scales. These scenarios, playing out across the continent for decades, leave little room for the development necessary to lift its people out of poverty.

Ayittey stresses change – in government, in economics, in leadership – is necessary. “Until we do that,” he says, “no amount of financing is going to help us in Africa.”
Written off as a gadfly in his early years, Ayittey has remained steadfast in his beliefs, remarkably consistent in his message for two decades.

He has been denied academic promotions, even ostracized by colleagues for his opinions. He has been jailed in Senegal, banned from store shelves and banished from state-owned media across Africa. His hotel room was raided and papers seized in Kenya, and he has been followed on the streets of his own country. In 1999, his office at American University in Washington, D.C., was firebombed.

“What have I done wrong?” he says. “The more these things went on, the more radical I became, the more passionate I became about freedom.”

He has clashed with the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, colleagues in academia and counts few friends among the aid elite.

“I don’t question their motives,” he says. “They want to help poor people.”

But he feels they are going about it the wrong way.

In Canada, he testified about foreign aid in front of the Senate, a body he found too rooted in the wrong-headed belief that more money to African governments equals a better life for Africans. “My god, what do you mean governments? We don’t have governments in Africa,” Ayittey says. “What we have are mafia states, vampire states, governments that have been hijacked by bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to advance their own interest and enrich themselves.”

Today, his message is resonating. In light of an Arab Spring focused on the overthrow of long-time dictators in the Middle East, people are taking another look at Ayittey’s thesis. He has held audience with everyone from U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to rock star/humanitarian Bono to TED conference attendees. From Parliament Hill to the White House to halls of power around the globe, people are now listening to George Ayittey.

But it’s not Ayittey who has changed; he has preached much the same message as he did during his days at Western. The world has simply, and slowly, come to him.

“There is very little the West can do to affect change on Africa,” Ayittey says. “Africa – and Africans – must start it all.”

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To read an excerpt from Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World click here.

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