Burundi’s powerful and hardline former Prime Minister Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni, who was fired in a purge last year, this week appeared in court, accused of insulting President Evariste Ndayishimiye, among other alleged crimes.
Arrested last month in Burundi’s commercial hub Bujumbura after he had “gone missing” for some days, fuelling speculation he had fled to neighbouring Tanzania, it has a dramatic fall from grace for Bunyoni, once considered the power behind the throne.
His alleged offence of “insulting” the president is familiar, and just one in a long list of unusual and bizarre crimes fellows have been accused of in this great continent in the past.
During the rule of Kenya’s elderly founding president Jomo Kenyatta, speaking about his health was a political crime. To this day, where there is an elderly or ailing president in the State House, you could get in trouble for “speculating about the president’s health” or “spreading rumours and causing alarm following [his] regular medical check.”
To this day, politicians in several African countries are still jailed, beaten, or sacked from the government for “having presidential ambitions”. In some, it is a career-ending omission not to show up at the airport to see off the President leaving for a foreign trip or to receive him upon his return. It is considered a sign of great disrespect, and you would be accused of “considering (yourself) to be the president’s equal.”
In years gone by, the picture was bleak. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, critics of the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (and you might have seen it in some of the many documentaries on his excesses) allege that it was a crime to show up at a state event where he was in attendance without your wife – particularly if she was reputed to be beautiful.
Mobutu, it is claimed, would wander around the room looking for which of his ministers’ and civil servants’ wives he would take for the night. He would pinch her bottom, and you would see her only the following day. Not bringing your wife to the state reception, where the President might pick on her, would be looking down upon the big man, suggesting he was “not in her class.”
Extreme subservience
Other dictators weren’t so lecherous, but they demanded – or invoked – extreme subservience from their ministers.
In Uganda, the times of military ruler Field Marshal Idi Amin in the 1970s were full of similar stories of servility. In subsequent years, it turned out that many of these stories were false, but their juiciness meant they endured.
A particularly popular one claims that Amin’s ministers, especially the civilians, would often kneel when they spoke to him on the phone, although he was kilometres away and wouldn’t know whether they were standing, sitting, or kneeling.
In today’s more democratic times, these rules persist, though they are more subtle. You have to be careful to wear a different suit, shirt, and shoes than the president. You will likely be encouraged to leave the party or event earlier than you had planned.
Even worse, God forbid, you show up in the same dress as the First Lady. It is a tricky rule this one because the opposite can also be true. Mobutu turned against the white man’s suit, introducing the abacost (down with the suit) style. If he employed you and showed up sans-abacost, you were finished.
The only thing you needed to be careful about was not to wear one made of the same material as the Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga’s (“The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”).
Of course, common sense dictates that you can’t, as a minister, drive the same make of Mercedes Benz as the President. If you are a wise man or woman, you cannot live along the same street as His/Her Excellency if you want to keep your job for long.
I know a few African countries where it is deadly to walk across in front of the President after he is seated.
An account in a book by an American foreign correspondent who interviewed Malawi’s autocrat Kamuzu Banda in the 1970s reports one of the most unbelievable acts of humiliation before a president.
He writes that he was taken to the interview by the minister of Information. However, shortly after they entered Kamuzu’s big office and walked towards the President’s desk, he noticed that the minister had vanished. So where had the man gone to?
The mystery was solved when he looked down. The minister was crawling on the carpet just behind him. Apparently, most of his ministers and officials couldn’t appear before Kamuzu standing upright. At a minimum, they had to bow as far down as they could.
When you enter a president’s office crawling, you cannot turn your bum to him as you exit. You have to reverse on all fours. Serving many an African Big Chief has never been for the faint of heart. BY DAILY NATION