Address to the Oslo Freedom Forum, Oslo, Norway, May 10, 2011.

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I would like to thank the Oslo Freedom Forum for inviting me to speak and you for coming to listen. I also would like to dedicate my speech to the following:

Africa:         The Cheetah generation – taking back Africa one village at a time. They have taken back Tunisia and Egypt and will take back more African countries.
Bahrain: Ali Abdulemam, who was invited to speak at this even in Oslo but has suddenly disappeared.
Belarus:   Oleg Bebenin
China: Liu Xiaobo
Iran:    Neda Agha-Soltan.
Russia:    Anna Politkovskaya.
Tunisia: Mohammed Bouazizi.
Venezuela: Judge María Lourdes Afiuni

And to pro-democracy activists in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria, Uganda, Yemen, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Fighting for freedom is a formidable task. Some paid the ultimate price. With me:

• They threw me in jail in Dakar, Senegal in 1994.
• They raided my hotel room in Nairobi, Kenya, and seized copies of my papers in 1994.
• They banned my books.
• They banished me from their state-owned media in 1995.
• They trailed me in Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe and everywhere else I went.
• Even in Washington, DC, they fire-bombed my office at American University in 1999.

But I didn’t back down and won’t be deterred. Freedom is not negotiable.

The “they” are the usual suspects: Murderous dictators, who cause most of the world’s problems. They have been responsible for:

• All the devastated economies in the world,
• All the collapsed and failed states,
• All the humanitarian catastrophes,
• All the vapid cases of grand theft and corruption.

Africa boasts of more dictators per capita than any other continent. It should not surprise you why Africa is poor; she is not free. Africa also harbors the largest collection of coconut republics. Here, kamikaze bandits don’t steal a million here and a million there, They cart away the entire treasury, kitchen sink and all. After a mere a four years in office, Nigeria’s late dictator, General Sani Abacha, amassed a personal fortune of $5 billion. President Omar el-Bashir has siphoned off $7 billion out of Sudan, according to WikiLeaks. And Hosni Mubarak, former president of Egypt, managed to accumulate a family fortune exceeding $40 billion. Put  in perspective, each stole more than $2.7 billion – that is the net worth of all 43 U.S. presidents – from Washington to Obama -- according to the Atlantic Monthly (May 10, 2010).

Dictators have left trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage, devastated economies, and human debris in their wake: Burma, Congo DR, Ivory Coast, Libya, Somalia, Sudan (Darfur). And guess who cleans up after them. The West has spent trillions of dollars trying to persuade, cajole, and even bribe dictators to reform their abominable political and economic systems. In some cases, the West tried rapprochement and even appeasement. Enough.

Dictators are allergic to reform and appeasement doesn’t work with them. They are stone deaf and impervious to reason. They are not interested in reform, period. Ask them to implement reform and they will perform the “coconut boogie: -- One swing forward, three swings back, a jerk in the air and a tumble for a hard landing on a frozen Swiss bank account. [Switzerland froze the bank accounts of Ben Ali,, Hosni Mubarak and Laurent Gbagbo.]

The reform process has been stalled by vexatious chicanery, willful deception and vaunted acrobatics. In 1990, only 4 out of the 54 African countries were democratic; today, 21 years later, this number has increased to only 15. Fewer than 10 African countries can be considered an economic success story, despite Africa’s immense mineral wealth. And a free media exists in only 10 African countries. Call that progress? Some progress.

Fed up with their antics, angry street demonstrators in Africa are giving dictators a taste of their wrath. Ben Ali of Tunisia fled, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was shoved side and more coconuts will tumble. But I must caution you though. Noisy rah-rah street protests alone are not enough to topple a dictator. Three cardinal principles or rules must be followed for a popular revolution to succeed.

• It takes a coalition of opposition forces to remove a dictator. As such, coordination of activities, tactical thinking and strategic planning are imperative.
• “Know the enemy” (his modus operandi, strengths and weaknesses) is the first rule of combat. One never fights him on a turf on which he is strongest. Identify the props of the dictatorship and sever them methodically. Or exploit his weaknesses.
• Getting the sequence of reform right. Toppling a dictator is only the first step in establishing a free society. The next step is dissembling the dictatorship or his system of governance.

A. The Elders Council

It is imperative to establish a small group – call it an Elders Council -- to think tactically, plan strategically, and coordinate the activities of the various opposition groups. Such a Council must be made up of eminent and respectable personalities with no political baggage. The Council must be able to reach out to all political parties, civil society groups and the youth movement. Historical examples include “The Gathering” (Sudan, 1985), The Danube Circle (Hungary, 1988), and Charter 77 (Czechoslovakia, 1989). In Ghana, we formed such a group in 1995, called Alliance for Change, made up of 10 individuals – a professor, a lawyer, editor, a woman, etc. We swore a covenant: That all must eschew political ambition and no one must use the group to advance the political interests of his own or a political party. Members must hold the interest of the country supreme above all personal, political and sectarian interests.  We set up a corresponding group in North America.

This council must be in place at all times, not cobbled together in times of crisis. If the dictator calls for an election, the Council must rope all political parties into an electoral alliance. In 2010, dictators “won” all the election they held because of a divided opposition field:

• In Ethiopia’s May elections, 92 opposition parties challenged the incumbent despot, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.
• In Belarusian December elections, 9 opposition candidates contested against the despot, Alexander Lukashenko and lost.

In addition, the Council should ensure that the Electoral Commission is independent, the voters’ register is not padded with phantom names and all parties have access to the state media. For funding, the Council should rely on its own disaporan community, not on Western donors.

B. Knowing the Enemy

The modus operandi of all dictators are essentially the same: They seize control of six key state institutions (the security forces, the media, the civil service, the judiciary, the electoral commission and the central bank), pack them with their allies or supporters and debauch them to serve their interests. To succeed, a popular revolution must wrestle control of at least one or more of these institutions out of the dictator’s clutches. The game was over for Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak when their security forces refused to fire on civilians. Ditto Philippines in 1986 and Georgia in Nov 2003 when the security forces were charmed with roses; hence, the Rose Revolution. Ukraine’s Orange revolution of Nov 2004 won the Supreme Court to its side and Pakistan’s Black Revolution of March 2007 had the full support of the judiciary.

Props

A dictatorship is kept aloft by various props of both external and internal nature. Identify and sever these props.

External props come in the form of diplomatic recognition, foreign aid, foreign loans from international agencies, among others. For example, the “Odious Debt Principle” holds that a foreign loan to an illegitimate regime to repress its people is deemed “odious” and, therefore, non-repayable. The U.S. applied this doctrine in 1898 when it captured Cuba and refused to repay Cuba’s debt to Spain. In 1923, Costa Rica also refused to repay the debts incurred by its dictator, Frederico Tinoco. In 1990, the threat by Bangladeshi opposition parties to apply the doctrine caused foreign aid donors and creditors to deny funds to the military regime of President Hussain Mohammad Ershad. It subsequently collapsed.

Among the internal props are:

• Key state institutions such as the civil service, the security forces and the judiciary that are packed with the dictator’s supporters. De-politicize these institution. Each institution has a “code of conduct: -- the Civil Service Code, the Bar Code and the Military Code. The latter, for example, debars soldiers from intervening in politics or face court-marshal. The Elders Council should publish and seek to enforce these Codes.
• The media is the first thing a dictator grabs and gags. It is also the first a dictator shuts down when under siege. The internet, social networks sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and al-Jazeera live broadcasts were all shut down during the January and February protests in Tunisia and Egypt. Wrestle control of the media out of the hands of the despot. Set up pirate radio stations in neighboring countries. Develop ways of circumventing government censors, blockage. Put the opposition message on tracts, audio cassettes, etc. Challenge government bans in court.

To wrestle control of the media out of their hands, hit them with their own constitution: The Constitutions of most despotic regimes guarantee freedom of expression, of the media, of assembly, etc. For example,

• Article 9 of Africa’s Charter on Human and peoples’ Rights guarantees freedom of expression,
• Article 35 of China’s Constitution:. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
•  Article 31 of Russia’s Constitution guarantees right of assembly. So Russian opposition protests on the 31st day of each month.

In Ghana, we used the Constitution to free the airwaves. A pirate radio station (Radio Eye) was set up and the military dictatorship of Flt./Lte. Jerry Rawlings immediately shut it down in 1994 and seized its equipment. We challenged the case in court in WON! This opened the airwaves to a proliferation of FM radio stations, which were instrumental in ousting the regime in 2000. The FM radio stations ensured a level of transparency that made it impossible to steal the election.

Weaknesses

A dictator’s weakness is exploited by s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g its military geographically. Shut down the civil service and any military regime will collapse. Not enough soldiers to replace the civil servants spread across the country. It worked in Ghana in 1978 and Benin in 1989. This strategy was also on display in Tunisia and Egypt when street protests simultaneously in many cities and towns across the countries, straining security forces.

C. After the Revolution

Getting rid of the dictator, however, does not establish a free society; it is only a first step. The dictatorship -- a controlled system of governance – must also be dissembled. Too many countries got rid of their dictators but not the dictatorships, leading to reversals of their revolutions. Africans are wont of saying: “We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba. (Darn!” Back in the 1960s, we struggled very hard to get rid of the white colonialists but we did not dissemble the repressive colonial state. Guess who we got to replace them: Black neo-colonialists, Swiss bank socialists, quack revolutionaries, crocodile liberators and briefcase bandits and the oppression and exploitation of the African people continued unabated. If the dictatorship is not dismantled in Tunisia and Egypt, another dictator may emerge.

Dismantling a dictatorship is like overhauling a broken down vehicle. But this must be done carefully and in order or sequence. One does not fix the transmission when the battery is dead. Nor does one replace the fan belt when the radiator leaks. Similarly, dissembling a dictatorship requires reform in many areas and in this sequence:

• Intellectual reform (for freedom of expression, of the media)
• Political reform (for democratic pluralism, free and fair elections)
• Constitutional reform (limiting the powers of the executive).
• Institutional reform (for independent judiciary, electoral commission, efficient civil service, neutral and professional armed forces)
• Economic reform or liberalization (for free markets, free trade)

For Africa, I have called this Ayittey’s Law in my forthcoming book, Defeating Dictators. After the dictator has been ousted, full intellectual freedom must be restored. The dictator’s party needs to be disbanded, the constitution re-written, and new political parties allowed to form. But it takes time. It took South Africa 3 years to make the transition from apartheid to democratic rule and it took the U.S. 13 years from independence (1776) to full democratic rule (1789). Tunisia and Egypt are perilously rushing through this stage.

The most critical stage is institutional reform. Key state institutions need to be “de-wormed” of the nomenklatura, or the old guard -- allies of the ousted dictator. Reversals of revolutions occurred in several countries because the reform process was out of sequence or haphazard. For example, premature economic liberalization -- as per the “shock therapy” in Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia in the early 1990s – produced vampire capitalists. The institutional reforms and legal framework needed to make economic liberalization succeed had not been undertaken. The nomenklatura remained firmly entrenched, frustrating reforms. A few – eight oligarchs – used inside knowledge and political connections to gobble up state assets at rock-bottom prices and became instant billionaires. Worse, they transferred their wealth into offshore accounts. Unlike America’s robber barons, the Russian oligarchs – just like Africa’s kleptocrats – produced no new wealth and they siphoned their profits out of the country. Their activities led Russia to ban offshore accounts in 1994 but it was too late to save the Russian economy and the ruble. Both collapsed in August 1995.

Most disastrous for Africa was the decades-long push for economic liberation ahead of all other types of reform – as per the Washington Consensus. To be sure, economic liberalization engenders prosperity but dictators never level any playing field. They implement only those types of reforms that benefit themselves, families and cronies. Those African countries that pursued economic liberalization eventually failed the political test and imploded: Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe. In Egypt, the street protesters who ousted Hosni Mubarak now seek to roll back his free-market reforms and hold its beneficiaries accountable. And Ivory Coast, once described as an “economic miracle,” now lies in ruins. China currently faces this quandary. If it opens the political space, the Communist Party will be swept away; if it doesn’t, it may disintegrate like the former Soviet Union.

Starting with intellectual freedom is due to the fact that reform must come from within -- made by the people themselves, not by Western governments or financial institutions. Internally-initiated reform is far more sustainable and enduring. Intellectual freedom is necessary for the people to make their own case for reform. Mikhail Gorbachev started with glasnost (openness); Africa needs to start with blacknost. The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi started the Arab Spring. His was the ultimate and extreme form of freedom of expression. In Ghana, the proliferation of FM Radio stations (free media) did the trick in 2000.

A free media is the most potent weapon against all dictators. Get the media out of the hands of dictators. That’s what will unleash the reforms we all cherish so dearly, not Western sermons, sanctions or appeasement.
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The author is a native of Ghana and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington, DC. His new book, Defeating Dictators, will be published by Palgrave/MacMillan in November.

Edited by Emmanuel Odamtten