allAfrica.com: Africa: 'Home-Grown African Democracy Needed to Achieve Peace' (Page 1 of 2)

For many, the most troubling task ahead of Africa is to end the seemingly endless cycle of violence and conflict that causes so much suffering in so many parts of the continent. Could the African Union achieve its goals with this level of bloodshed and lack of stability? For Kayode Fayemi, Director of the Center for Democracy and Development in Lagos, Nigeria, It's wrong to see war as an African fact of life.

Would you say conflict is the biggest factor holding the continent back?

Conflict is, itself, a manifestation of a larger structural crisis that Africa is caught up in. We can see that within a global context and ask 'why are we having conflicts now that we did not have ten years ago?'

If you just cast your mind back to the cold war era, we used to have particularly vicious conflicts, but not in the form that they now manifest themselves, because there was that strong ideological divide at the time. Now we've lost that universalizing political divide between socialism and capitalism and that has been replaced by this new 'quest for identity'; now our conflicts are identity-driven, they are resource-driven, they are religion-driven.

In itself, conflict is not necessarily a bad thing; I don't want to adopt the Hobbesian view that man is always in a state of nasty, brutish nature, but the truth is that if you have structures that are impervious to change, people are going to look for alternative ways of changing such structures; war can be good, in that regard, provided it's driven by a goal to improve the status quo.

Unfortunately, recent conflicts in Africa have had no particular ideology driving them, no nationalistic ideology in terms of programs, no economic ideology in terms of improving the livelihood of the people, nor a security ideology, in terms of safety.

So what we're saying is that current conflicts are just competitions for power between rival forces, nothing worth fighting for?

Well it can be worth fighting in situations where you have competition for limited resources. We often talk about resources only in terms of the portable or high-value resources like diamonds, like gold, like Tanzanite, or oil; but actually the resources that really cause the most conflict in Africa are resources such as the grazing land, agricultural materials; these are resources that are tied to communities and really define the difference between individual rights and group rights.

So then what has to happen for the AU to be effective and somehow overcome the tendency to conflict?

I think there's a combination of things that we need to put in place.

One would really needs a universal approach that is culturally sensitive. We cannot adopt democratization by just transposing it from the West into Africa and expect it to work. I think it needs a lot of adaptation. We need to return to the old consultative approach within the pre-colonial communities. I'm not suggesting that everything about the pre-colonial era was good, that clearly wasn't the case. But there can be consultation within the community before decisions are taken.

Secondly, we need to achieve the twin objectives of security on the one hand and accountability on the other. That is what has been lacking and the only way we can get that is to have proper governance. I'm not using governance in the World Bank mode, in the sense of privatizing the state to increase efficiency. The state is still important in Africa. But - and this is where the African Union comes in - there should be regional mechanisms, or sub-regional mechanisms, that monitor the behavior of states and actually set up 'peer reviews', as Nepad seems to be doing; this would be a way to say, 'these are the minimum conditions that we will tolerate'. In a sense, we would be using regionalism to reinforce state-building projects.

So the picture I'm getting is of an African Union that is vital to the creation of security and accountability, but doesn't necessarily have a big role to play in resolving conflict.

In the long term, yes. But the point that I'm making is that states are still important and there ought to be a degree of responsibility at the level of states, which they - peer nations and peer leaders - can enforce. We really need to make that critical as a benchmark of even belonging to these new regional structures, whether it's the African Union or the New Partnership for African Development or the Cooperation for Security Stability Development in Africa; we need to have clear-cut mechanisms so we that we do not just accept anything, simply because this is a club of dictators or a club of leaders that wants to pat themselves on the back.

There is such a diversity of causes for conflict, it's difficult to imagine being able to put enough of those fires out at once to achieve genuine security in African communities; it's an image of a fire-fighter running from fire to fire, but there are never enough firefighters to finally put out all the fires and new ones keep starting... Is that a completely false picture?

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