A FEW DAYS AGO, we were ambushed with the untimely news of the passing of Mikhail Gorbachev, acknowledged popularly as the last Supreme Leader of the Soviet Union in as much as his legacy that history has always judged controversially. As an African, I elect to argue the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, broadly in terms of Globalism, albeit as an important incubator for democracies in Africa, Latin America and the Far East Asia. However, it is in the position of the Soviet Union and/or its remnants that we can question whether the Late Ex-President was a successful Captain or a failed apostate. Interestingly, the debate on Gorbachev’s legacy is “glass half-full, half-empty”. Globally, President Gorbachev was a progressive, novel and democratic force who I humbly think that Africa owes a lot to. In Africa, the 20th century’s “wind of change” started with the decline of the iron curtains of dictatorships that were cushioned by the precedent Soviet regimes. Kenneth Kaunda fell to the side, Mobutu Sese seko, and say, the Apartheid regime in South Africa among others. Also, the Soviet Union helped support Julius Nyerere’s government profoundly for the nursing of the camps of the African National Congress that were in Tabora and other scattered locations in Tanzania during the South African struggle. It is because of President Gorbachev that dictatorial infallibilities and regimes collapsed under the rise of a new international democratic agenda advanced by his presidency that was so integral, and provided intellectual leadership that put nationalistic pride and praise aside for the advancement of democracy and globalization. By dissolving the Solviet Union, President Gorbachev helped the West expand its neoliberalism to Russia, so it ceased to be a threat anymore to what Samuel P. Huntington termed “Third wave of Democratization”. It was actually popularly stated that “neoliberalism would be the end of history” and perhaps “the last man in the ring”. Interestingly, as Samuel P. Huntington put it, it will not be the end of history but just the beginning of a new civilization of democracy: that which we would start to embrace on the African continent through the emergence of the ideological agenda that broke the predominance of nationalist forces and fostered integration and Pan Africanism on the African continent. The journey of neoliberalism was long overdue. Neoliberalism forces started in Western Europe in the 1940s, receiving the membership of notables from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan; in a move in Britain that was termed “Thatcherism”, and in the United States, “Reaganomics”. A reform package called the Washington Consensus would later be exported to Latin America, to struggling Juntas with unmatched successes that in-turn led to the synthesis and adoption of what in Africa, would be known as the era of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), and a global outcome that saw the Collapse of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s the end of Apartheid and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, in trying to fulfill the global progressive agenda, Gorbachev disregarded the Soviet nationalist project. Perhaps, he was a traitor. It is only natural that when you are praised by your enemy as “the best thing that’s happened since the Invention of the Radio” then, you’re no better than a traitor, a renegade and for President Gorbachev, a Presidential Judas. Gorbachev, to many will be remembered as a disintegrator, one that was saluted by the enemies of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. For us in Africa, we name our children after Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba or Thomas Sankara because history has always cherished acts of integration and the shared abilities of our integrated societies. Similarly, we forget with inordinate fear those that participated in pacifying the disintegration of our unions. President Gorbachev, like Boris Yeltsin was a nemesis to the Soviet nationalistic project. President Yeltsin however, slightly differs modestly however in a basic sense that his most remarkable maxim was “opening up” Russia but not destroying the bonds that integrated the Union. Deng Xiao Ping of China at the same time had fully relegated the thought of an ‘opening up’ reform,-an argument in the era that he claimed was all about the market and perhaps not about the fads of political correctness or democracy. To cut the long story, China succeeded greatly because Deng Xiao Ping and his multiple successors were able to deal with the political consequences of “opening up” and was able to reform the ruling party in a manner that would not yield disintegration. It was therefore Gorbachev’s, like Yeltsin’s case , that they ended the cohesive context of the integration in the Soviet Union through the rapturing of their commitment to the Leninist, Marxist orthodoxy and fast forward the rise of Russia today that is playing the role of a second fiddle to the dominance of other international forces that are competing forces at the global scale. So, to judge Gorbachev globally, he was a unifier. However, like an oxymoron, nationalistically, he was a destroyer. But to compare him with Deng Xiao Ping, we can weigh the loss. Today, China has surpassed Russia on many fronts because perhaps, Gorbachev failed unlike Deng that held his strengths firm. Derick B. Wesonga is a medical student passionate about International Relations. The views expressed in this article are of the author. @derickb.wesonga@gmail.com
