JCTR Bulletin 4th Quarter 2011

We have come to the end of 2011! This has been an eventful as well as a defining year for Africa’s political landscape. The innate yearn for justice by peoples in their respective countries manifested itself in gallant feats of revolutionary activity that were before inconceivable. Three dictatorial regimes were overthrown in North Africa; in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Many innocent lives were lost in this significant period of North Africa’s political transition, especially in Libya were the fighting was more intense and more protracted. Many people put their lives on the line in the quest for justice. One truth that this experience has revealed to us is that sometimes the love and longing and hope for eternal justice surmounts the fear of suffering immediate injustice. And one lesson that this experience teaches to leaders is that those who resist progress will always find themselves on the wrong side of history. A similar situation ensued in Ivory Coast, were a civil war broke out as a result of the failure of an electoral system that was perceived to be unjust. Opponents of the incumbent resolved to bring about and dispense justice through pulling the trigger. Without setting to justify what occurred in Ivory Coast or indeed the similar occurrences in some countries, such situations often lead us to grapple with the old but pertinent question of the necessity of violence in the realisation of justice by a people trapped in an unjust political system that seems to offer no other way of escape. I leave the reader to tread on their own on this volatile moral and political path and hopefully arrive at a tenable conviction.