Africa must find a way to silence the guns tearing it apart and secure future

The African Union’s fifth annual retreat of special envoys and mediators will take place this week in Arusha.

“Trouble shooters” and think-tanks will focus on the theme, Silencing the Guns: Owning the Future. One of the topics under discussion is the triggers of violence in Africa.

Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui, the intellectual father of the concept of Pax Africana who died on October 13 at the age of 81, in 1967 called for Africans to create and consolidate peace on their continent.

His idea of continental jurisdiction was a sort of Monroe Doctrine, urging outsiders to stay out of the continent.

In the related idea of racial sovereignty, Mazrui argued that inter-African interventions by brotherly outside states was more legitimate than those of outsiders. So, who killed Pax Africana?

Five villains can be blamed.

First, poor governance has been a scourge that has stalled socio-economic development on the continent.

Between 1960 and 1990, no single ruling party lost power in Africa and only three leaders voluntarily left power.

The “men on horseback” — the military — rode to the national stage 72 times following coups d’état that distorted politics, but were no more successful than civilian autocrats at socio-economic transformation.

Though regular elections now take place in Africa and alternance (change of government) of political parties has occurred in Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, and Malawi, while governance has generally improved, polls are still sometimes unfree and unfair.

Elections have sometimes become a way of waging war by other means, with ethnicity and religion mobilised to devastating effect.

Many military strongmen have, in fact, never left the stage, swapping their military uniforms for civilian khakis.

The second villain is the failure to protect Africa’s one billion citizens, making the continent the largest generator of conflict nomads in the world, with over 10 million internally displaced persons and three million refugees.

The third villain is the scourge of corruption, which has eaten into the continent’s body politic.

The United Nations panel on illicit financial flows noted that capital flight from the continent between 1970 and 2008 amounted to between $854 billion and $1.8 trillion.

This is money that should be used to meet the basic needs of Africa’s citizens and build the infrastructure that the continent so desperately needs.

VIOLENT EXTREMISM

Fourth is the violent extremism that has wracked Africa.

In Mali, the Tuareg group, Mouvement National Pour la Libération de l’Azawad, Ansar Dine, as well as the Algerian-dominated Islamic extremists, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and the Mouvement pour l’Unicité et le Jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest (MUJAO) launched attacks against the government in Bamako in 2012.

These groups number around 3,000 core fighters and also involve criminal networks.

MUJAO and Ansar Dine have been reported to be fighting alongside the Nigerian militant group, Boko Haram, which has killed about 5,000 civilians since 2009, and also has ties with Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

For its part, Al-Shabaab continues to wreak destruction in parts of Somalia, while also launching attacks on Kenya and Uganda.

Fifth is the spread of arms and the often pernicious role of powerful external actors.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council incredibly account for about 70 per cent of arms sales that fuel conflicts around the globe.

Since some 85 per cent of UN peacekeepers are deployed in Africa, the five have a large impact on security on the continent.

It will be important that in silencing the guns in Africa, national governments improve democratic governance.

Africa’s rapid-reaction capability must also be urgently activated, its peacekeepers timeously provided with logistical and financial resources, and an effective division of labour established with the UN.

Finally, since in nearly half of the post-Cold War cases, war-torn countries have relapsed into conflict within five years as a result of inadequate peace building, the international community must urgently provide the resources needed to implement post-conflict activities.

Dr Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, South Africa. ([email protected])