Otuma Ongalo
What a week it was! The self-declared King of Kings was finally buried in unmarked grave in desert sand.
Unlike the neighbouring Egyptian pharaohs, there will be no monument in his memory. There was no eulogy to proclaim his valour and conquests. And there is no epitaph to commemorate him.
Before his ignominious burial – if not dumping – he was pulled from filth in a drainage pipe, mocked, beaten and executed. His carcass was displayed for all and sundry in a meat store.
Even if you had deepest hatred for the ‘King of Kings’, you cannot resist to remonstrate his chilling end. Gaddafi was certainly not an angel but did he deserve all that?
I am reminded of Brutus’ appeal to his conspirators as they pondered on what do with Julius Caesar:
Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers/. . .Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; /Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, /Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
To paraphrase Brutus, we should have sacrificed Gaddafi instead of butchering him. We should have treated his body as dish fit for the gods instead of butchering it as if it was for dogs’ party.
Yes, Gaddafi overstayed on the throne but it wasn’t certainly 42 wasted years for Libyans. We never heard of hunger and pestilence afflicting the people of Libya during his reign. We never heard of Libyans turning their arms against each other because of political differences or tribal animosity before the revolt in Arab world. There has been free education and medical care under Gaddafi’s reign. The rebels who crisscrossed the country in search of King of Kings drove on superhighways.
Gaddafi did for Libya what many African leaders failed to do yet they have been hailed as heroes. Those who have since passed on were accorded State burials and their remains lie in magnificent mausoleums. Gaddafi was more of a clown rather than a bloody despot. He could certainly not feature in a league of players such as Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, and Robert Mugabe.
As Mark Antony wisely puts it, again in Julius Caesar, the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. When the Libyans celebrated Gaddafi’s fate, they focused on the evil that lived after him. They remembered his firm grip on power and crush of dissent (which African ruler never does this apart from isolated cases like Mandela?).
As they dumped him ignominiously in remote desert, no one remembered that with his bones they also interred a man who brought order and stability in Libya amid the chaos that characterise many African nations. They also interred a man who stood for national pride amid a continent littered with leaders who often dance to the whims of western powers.
If Gaddafi had not so much loathed the west and touted some of its leaders, he would be alive today and firmly in the throne. In fact, it is naÔve to say that Libyans killed Gaddafi. It is the west, under Nato firepower, that overthrew and killed Gaddafi. Nato did everything except pulling the trigger. When Gaddafi was pulled from filth he was already a dying man following Nato air strike and Libyan fighters only finished the job. It is no wonder that after mission successfully accomplished, the west is in a hurry to quit amid disorder and destruction in the country.
That said, I also recall the Kamukuywa saying that when you blame the fox, blame the hen too. It’s true Gaddafi courted his death due to his disdain of critics and cling on power for eons. He ruled for so long until he mistook Libya to be his family property. He stubbornly refused to read the warning on the wall and chose to fight when odds were against him.
His death is a lesson to despots that even though one can spend most of his time in warm hands of Ukrainian nurses, the end can be quite lonely and painful.
The writer is Senior Editor, Production and Quality, at The Standard.
