Washington, DC — 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 Now we've lost that universalizing political divide between socialism and capitalism and that has been replaced by this new 'quest for identity'; now our conflicts are identity-driven, they are resource-driven, they are religion-driven.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?
It's not a completely true picture. Yes conflict gets a lot of attention in Africa, but how many really local conflicts are we talking about? The long-standing ones, Angola, Sudan, Somalia, the new ones that have sucked in many countries in the Great Lakes, in the Mano River Union - they reinforce the impression that conflicts are not really local. They may have local pre-conditions but actually you can see they are not really local when you draw the links between the forces that supply the weapons used in these conflicts, the people who are using the weapons and the forces who collect the resources to go and buy the weapons; you are seeing a global context, so that's at one level.
The other is, when you look at the totality of Africa, I would argue that there are more countries in peace than are in conflict. Of course, being at peace does not necessarily equate to having security or at least, not being in a state of war, but it would be useful to look at what it is that has allowed those poor societies continue to maintain conditions of stability.
I would argue that social networks play a critical role in those communities. If that's true then the new regional structures that we create should focus more on long-term strengthening of integrative mechanisms in terms of social structure, in terms of economic arrangements - like those in the markets I mean the place to go to in sub-Saharan Africa to feel the pulse of any nation is the markets. How can we take lessons from those places?
The only way these new institutions - the African Union, Nepad etc. - are going to make a difference, a concrete change, is if they put the citizens, the African people, at the heart of operations. Right now, whether you talk about the African Union or you talk about the Conference on Stability, Security, Development and Co-operation in Africa (CSSDCA) or you talk of Nepad, that hasn't happened.
In terms of conflict - conflict prevention, conflict management, conflict resolution, conflict transformation, nothing much is contained in the various documents that we have, for example Nepad, sadly, is very thin on the conflict strategy; and at the root of all this, the people don't even know that all these institutions have been put in place! So unless something comes from below, linking up to the change happening from the top, it's very difficult to see the African Union really making a fundamental difference in the life of the Africans.
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The necessary context of any kind of effort, whether it's to resolve conflict, or help integrative plans get a foothold, is, obviously, funding; what's your feeling about the impact of the global anti-terrorist focus now? Is that going to make a difference to plans for the African Union and to damping down conflict in Africa?
I think it's very worrying. In fact, I fear for Africa in this new shift that we're witnessing. Already, those of us who work in civil society, we have seen a significant shift of resources from projects that focus on Africa and focus on the longer-term strategies for conflict prevention; now the resources are being shifted to Afghanistan and to internal security issues in the United States.
I think we're now entering an era where we face the risk of unaccountable governments opportunistically going after groups and people that are not in their good books and describing them as terrorists. We already have that happening.
The Libyans, the other day, sent a long list to the United Kingdom of some people who are opponents of the government in Libya, but now they've been described as terrorists and the British government is being told they should throw them out.
And the idea that a Pervez Musharraf can have a red-carpet reception in the United States really bodes very ill for democratisation and securing democracy in Africa because it just sends a message that all you need to be is a good boy in the view of the powers that be, democracy doesn't matter, if you can guarantee stability - however you do it - that's all that's necessary. For me, that's the greatest danger that our democratization process faces.[ADF3]
