Many African countries had been consumed in war in one form or the other in the past forty years- from ANC and apartheid South Africa to the Sudanese Liberation group, to the National Liberation Movement of Eritrea.
Then there was the FRELIMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, both engaged in proxy wars sponsored by the West and DR Congo where all kinds of interests and groups emerged since the killing of Patrice Emery Lumumba. The groups had been engaged in guerrilla struggles, beginning with Pierre Mulele and then Joseph Kabila. Since 1959, Rwanda and Burundi had been engulfed in a citizenship crisis that was to re-bounce in the 1990s. With the emergence of war lords and rag tag armies, Somalia was split with the emergence of Somaliland and the Mano-River region was equally engulfed in crisis that was never before seen in the region with rebel groups emerging in Liberia and Sierra Leone and posing a huge social, humanitarian and political challenge to the entire sub-region. Traditionally, Ethiopia has been a country always at war with neighbors in spite of the perennial famine and humanitarian crises that it encounters. This has led many to ask, why do African leaders like investing in war rather than peace?
The point is that war pays, war is good business in the west and through war, a lot of money can be made through sale of arms rather than sale of grains or evaporated milk to a country. It is in the interest of the west for our countries to be divided rather than united. It is in the interest of foreign powers for the African continent and its peoples not to have one voice in their dealings with the west and when they discuss among themselves at the African Union (AU). Worse still, once wars have been embarked upon, there has to be the peace process. How do you negotiate peace? With whom do you negotiate peace? How can you make way for enduring peace? For how long can we continue to blame the west? When shall Africa grow and take responsibility for its actions?
The AU had adopted the platform of the CSSDCA as the basis for peace initiative in Africa . And in order to prevent external forces and external interests on the continent, it also established an African Standby Force. However the first major outing of that force was in Darfur . The force was genuine and had all that it takes, professionally, to keep peace, but it was frustrated logistically and because of western interests who wanted to redefine what was happening in Darfur to fall in line with the ideology of the “Save Darfur” initiative-a humanitarian group that had specifically western agenda and interests. In the end, the AU force was exposed and made vulnerable and weak. Its own members became highly subjected to unnecessary risks. The west then began to use that as a propaganda chip to argue that there was need for another form of intervention from a higher body because the AU seem incapable of bring peace to Darfur.
My claim is that Africa is on another threshold, which unfortunately did not follow the same pattern of the creation of the OAU in May 1963. In that era, Africa was coming out of the wars of decolonization, whereas in the era of the creation of the AU, Africa was coming out of civil wars masterminded by warlords and rag tag armies bereft of ideology that were seeking raw power, informed by greed and the quest for resources. The historical circumstances of the formation of the AU was such that Africa was also fighting the war against hunger and the war against authoritarian rule, mostly orchestrated by the pernicious consequences of structural adjustment programme.
These have created also a political leeway for many African leaders, some of whom had experimented various brands of socialism and capitalism that were never well understood nor properly implemented, ideologies that were merely used to unleash more repression on the people, and hence brought more hardship and misery. These leaders were the first to embrace political liberalization.
Africans are truly unhappy that things are either degenerating or at best are at a stand still. There is no African country today, perhaps with the exception of Botswana , that can be said to be making both economic and political progress. It is either one is making economic progress without political progress or political progress without social progress. But on a balance sheet, more than two-thirds of African states have neither made political nor economic progress in the last twenty years. The implication of this is that their peoples have been subjected to all kinds of social, economic and political repression and hardships. Even where multi-party rule or political pluralism have been imposed, there have been the problems of access and the role of state gatekeepers, which have prevented opposition from having genuine entrance.
The case of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is an apt example; the role of Mwai Kibaki in Kenya is another; it should be noted that Kibaki was originally in KANU with Arap Moi an Jomo Kenyatta. Hence the products and beneficiaries of the so-called era of multi-paryism and pluralism are by themselves beginning to join the new club of dictators and gatekeepers.
Given this kind of template, how can we approach the peace question in Africa ? Peace is not so much the absence of war, it is indeed the “silent war” that people wage on a daily basis around their existential conditions and their politics. It is about their ability to survive, to have access and express themselves. Peace is being able to empower people, giving them basic freedoms as citizens. All over Africa this has not happened. There have been complains and even revolts of emerging dictatorships in Zimbabwe in Uganda , Libya , Egypt and so on. These counties are certainly not the best of political examples in democratization.
There is need for a more integrated approach to the study of peace and the peace question in Africa . There are many NGOs and groups studying peace, Including the Kofi Annan International Peace Centre in Accra . However it will be useful to consider peace not merely as the absence of war, but the daily challenges people confront in their survival quests which provide trigger factors for hostility, riot, and rebellion. In so doing, it can be seen that peace is about how to address these survival questions. To do this, there has to be an integrative and inclusive approach driven by citizens participation and self-expression. It should be noted that the most remarkable initiatives undertaken in war torn Mano-River region, were by women groups, churches, youth groups and so on. These are the people who led initiatives that produced the more far-reaching results. Healing has been a slow process in the region because many feel that justice had not been given. Many youth who fought in the wars were excluded from the peace process; from the disarmament process or the DDRR. These youth are aggrieved. The consequence of that grievance was the ouster of the Tijan Kabah’s party in the last Sierra Leonean election.
This raises the question of what to do with the surging or soaring youth population of Africa . The core feature of Africa is that it is a youthful population. It is claimed that 67% of the population of Africa is made up of youth below the ages of 35 years. This is also in a situation where life expectancy averages 42-47 years on the continent, due principally to HIV/AIDS and mass poverty. The youth are the ready tools of war, defined in any form. They have no means of livelihood, they are denied access, they are armed by rebel forces to fight. They become easy tools for anybody who wishes to instrumentalise them. The youth have therefore become the most formidable social and political force of the continent due to their strategic role. They cannot be excluded from the peace process. The same thing with women who have been victims of rape and abuse by both government and rebel forces respectively. They are the ones left in the refugee camps with their children who are equally abused and denied rights. This has often raised the issue of citizenship and rights of refugees.
What the AU needs to do, using the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) is to try and combine multiple approaches to the peace question by broadly formulating what constitutes peace and build mechanisms for approaching it. It is true that ECOWAS now has a manual that defines Conflicts and Mechanism for its prevention.
The point being made is that there is need to take a more inclusive and totalizing approach to the definition of peace and war; and broaden the mechanism and social actors that will be involved in consummating peace. The key social actors that need to be brought in are youth and women. Take South Africa , the youth of the ANC era, are still aggrieved. The rebel youth of Liberia are equally aggrieved the same thing is happening in Sierra Leone and so on. These youth need to be heard and their case need to be taken up, not merely through “Truth and Reconciliation” or “Transitional Justice” initiatives but through more enduring social and political programmes that re-connect and reintegrate those youth to the society.
Africa stands to gain more by cultivating and investing the energies of the victims of alienation and wars in the peace process, they stand to gain a lot by bringing in ordinary people who are victims of social and economic hardship into processes that foist peace. Weapons and other security paraphernalia do not bring peace, they only further exacerbate and propel wars. And when wars are fought, it is the ordinary people that lose, and war-mongers and foreign interests benefit, including mercenaries who have made strategic inroads into Africa in the lat twenty years. To bring about enduring peace, we must ask why African leaders are interested in war. They must be sanctioned for embarking upon wars and signing fragile peace pacts. The heat should be on African leaders who are war mongers and who do not really want peace on the continent.
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