Africa Is a Cemetery for Africans

-By Abdul Mahmud

The phrase, “Africa is a cemetery for Africans,” falsely credited to Vladimir Putin, has long taken a meaning that goes beyond the dubiety of its source. But, whoever couched it and pushed it into the virtual space, acquiring its virality in the process, must have seen further than most of us. It isn’t just a phrase about the continent’s history of slavery, war, famine and the brutality of tyrannical rulers. It isn’t even just about the millions who die needlessly from hunger or curable diseases. It is, more sharply, a commentary on the kind of men who govern the continent. Men who live off their people and die in lands far away from them. Men who snatch the people’s hope, supplanting it with indignity, and burying their future.

To call Africa a cemetery is to point fingers at the power-holders who turn statehouses into slaughterhouses. At men who transform democracy into dictatorship, and public trust into private holdings. It is to hold the mirror up to the likes of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who ruled the Central African Republic like a butcher, crowned himself emperor in a lavish ceremony modelled after Napoleon, then died quietly in exile. Or Paul Biya of Cameroon, who has ruled from Geneva’s five-star hotels longer than from his country’s capital in Yaoundé. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Edgar Lungu of Zambia, and our own Umaru Yar’Adua and Muhammadu Buhari. These men, whose names merely make up one half of the cycle of rulers, ran their countries into the ground and found their final comforts abroad. And the other half of the cycle is squared by current rulers who not only have ruined what is left and are making weekly and monthly detours to foreign lands as medical tourists. President Tinubu are you there?

It is a tragedy. A continent that raised these men must now bury them in soils they once betrayed. They left in luxury. They returned in caskets. In many ways, these rulers are a symbol of something far more enduring and sinister. They represent a political culture that rewards oppression and celebrates impunity. In their hands, power isn’t a tool for service, it is an instrument of self-preservation. Here, governance becomes nothing more than the extraction of value from the state to feed a narrow circle of cronies. The people? Forgotten. Their suffering? Just background noise to the wailing of sirens and the clinking of champagne glasses at state dinners.

The facts have been consistently laid bare in the public space. Let’s recall a few here. African presidents are some of the most travelled in the world. Not for diplomatic shuttles; but for healthcare. They build no functioning hospitals at home, but they travel to London, Paris, Berlin and Dubai for treatment. They abandon their people in crowded and understaffed clinics, but they fly first-class overseas to seek the best medical attention money can buy. And when their bodies fail them, as all bodies must, they breathe their last far from the people they ruled. Far from the streets they never fixed. Far from the schools they underfunded. Far from the hospitals they refused to equip.

What else can one call it but medical tourism, the grim betrayal dressed as privilege? The brutal irony lies in this: men who, in life, denied their citizens the dignity of basic healthcare, now claim in death the full embrace of global medical excellence. It is a perverse reward system, where rulers who left their nations gasping for breath are themselves intubated in sterile wards abroad. Since the days of Bokassa, Banda, and Nyerere, whose memories now live mostly in footnotes and faded eulogies, a new figure has emerged to personify this legacy of abandonment. Buhari. His memory stands today as the emblem of that cold, clinical disregard. He will forever remain the poster child of the paradox: a ruler absent from his people in sickness, yet ever-present in their sufferings. In his eight years in power, he spent over 200 days in London receiving medical treatment. No one knew the nature of his ailment. No one knew the cost. He never spoke of it. But the planes flew, and the presidential entourage never grew smaller. At home, doctors were going,  coming, and going on strikes – in that endless cycle of going. Patients were dying. Hospitals were gasping for life support. But the president was always in the UK, wrapped in the quiet of Harley Street clinics. When he eventually left office, he slipped out of the country again, reportedly for medical treatment. He died there. In a land not his.

What kind of man does that? What kind of ruler spends more time receiving treatment abroad than fixing what’s broken at home?

This is the paradox: they die abroad. But they are always buried here. They want our earth, but not our air. Our soil, but not our service. They want the glory of being mourned by the people they abandoned. State burials, public holidays, military salutes and obsequious rituals designed to lend dignity to the undignified. Even in death, they take from the people. But, come to think about it, which country buries its own betrayal with such fanfare? Nigeria. There’s a point to note just as well about a good number of these rulers who die nameless deaths in luxurious suites abroad. Their final breaths are heard not by the nurses in their own public hospitals, but by foreigners whose names their citizens will never know. Then, after death, the surreal drama begins: the flag-draped coffins, the sorrowful national broadcasts, the endless condolence registers. The body returns. But the damage remains.

The story always morphs into a drama that repeats itself. Over and over. New rulers emerge, promising change. Promising health reforms. Promising to stay at home. But in time, the lure of the nanny-state; the state that pampers and provides for their every private need draws them in. They forget the people. They remember only their pleasures. Governance in Africa, to these men, is not duty. It is privilege. The State becomes the nursemaid. It feeds them, bathes them, tucks them into presidential suites, and sends their children abroad to elite schools. It handles their birthdays and bankrolls their funerals. Even in retirement, the State remains their slave.

This is what all Africans must call out. This nannyhood. This warped conception of public office as a private inheritance. This sucking of the breast of the nation until it runs dry. There is no nobility in dying abroad, far from the people you led. No honour in returning as a cargo on a presidential jet. No dignity in a life that denied others theirs. Yet, how many more must we watch go this route? How many more African leaders will fail to understand that leadership is not about luxury? That power is not about self-protection?

Africans know what good governance looks like. They see it in countries that invest in their people, in their institutions, in their futures. They see it in leaders who die among their people, not above them. But Africa has been denied this reality for too long. Too many of its rulers rule like monarchs and flee like fugitives. Their names decorate airport lounges and stadiums. But their legacies rot in the ruins they left behind.

Africa needs a new kind of leadership. One that sees the presidency not as an escape, but as a service. One that understands that a hospital bed in Lagos is worth more than a thousand hospital visits to London. That education for all is better than scholarships for the few. That the real measure of leadership is not in miles travelled, but lives touched. Until then, the cemetery metaphor remains. And the burials will continue. Not just of bodies. But of dreams. Africa deserves more than being the final resting place for men who ruined it. Africa deserves leaders who will live for her, suffer for her, and if they must, die with it. Not in exile. Not in a foreign suite. But on the soil they swore to serve.

That, perhaps, is how Africa must escape the cemetery.