Populism sure is getting bad reviews. All manner of evil is getting laid at its door: racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, jingoism – and that’s just the start. The conventional view is that populism is an irrational and impatient response to modern dilemmas that are best solved by conventional politics and economics. There is much evidence linking current politicians and political campaigns deemed populist – Trump, much of the Brexit campaign, Orbán in Hungary, the far-Right parties across Europe – to simple-minded scapegoating as a way to achieve or stay in power. But throwing the term populism around so loosely is just a bit too easy and analytically lazy.
For a start – who is a populist? Looking over the span of decades since decolonization (the 1950s and 1960s) a plethora of leaders and their movements have earned the label. These include Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso. Here we have some of Africa’s most revered and effective leaders. Sankara (who did not have much time before his assassination) and the others earned their populist labels by their effort to forge a deeper, more self-reliant decolonization than so many African leaders were willing to settle for. Today, Ghana and Tanzania are two of the more coherently democratic societies in post-colonial Africa.
