Online Reporter
Gibson Nyikadzino
Zimpapers politics Hub
THE “African solutions to African challenges” is a mantra that is at a major crossroads in terms of conflict prevention and dispute resolution using available African mechanisms.
For its strengths or lack of, those who invented or manufactured that mantra have been intellectually and epistemically made unconscious when one looks at how forsaken that idea has been in consideration of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda conflict.
For years, African leaders at continental and regional levels invested time, resources, and diplomatic communications through the Note Verbale exchanges while others sacrificed their citizens and military resources to find an eternal solution to the decades-old DRC-Rwanda animosity.
This year, Angola’s President Joao Laurenço continued to lead mediation efforts under the African Union (AU)’s auspices to have the DRC government and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels be in direct talks. At the same time, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC) led joint peace efforts between the DRC and Rwanda, which at one point DRC President Felix Tshisekedi spurned, only to attend the Munich Security Conference in March.
From all these efforts, President Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame could not meet in person to resolve the war in eastern DRC’s North Kivu province, which houses one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises and internally displaced persons (IDPs). The two only emerged in Qatar for the first time in direct talks.
What it means is to both the DRC and Rwanda is that they do not recognise or trust that in Africa, there are neutral mediators who can help resolve their conflicts. Their consensus to be in Qatar was premised on existing evidence that Qatar is building its image using soft power as a reliable peace broker between belligerents, as it has done between Hamas and Israel, between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel, and recently between Iran and Israel.
From these developments, efforts by the AU and regional organisations have been seen and interpreted as a “failure,” yet in essence, what is deemed as a successful initiative is actually a reincarnation of the Berlin curse of 1884-1885.
The goal of the curse was and remains to keep Africans mistrusting each other, reminding them of old ethnic wars that have deep wounds and entrench divisions among their people.
That is why the DRC and Rwanda signed a peace deal in Washington, the USA, on June 27, a total blow and disregard of the peace brokering efforts of Africans.
What is also key is understanding what the US is getting from this process, and how the interests of the continent, where the DRC and Rwanda are domiciled as AU members, are also considered.
According to the peace agreement, its effective implementation is to be through the establishment of a Joint Oversight Committee (JOC) consisting of an AU facilitator, Qatar and the United States, and intergovernmental organisations. There is a soft power victory that the US has also scored, exerting its power through summoning hostile states to agree to peace, not only is a foreign nation, but one that has sponsored several unending wars.
This is the dilemma the AU has. It is not a supranational bloc. In the name of African unity, each country remains sovereign, and its sovereignty defies agreed mechanisms and efforts that for years have been made to bring peace and shared security and experiences.
US President Donald Trump recently revealed that his country will have access to mineral rights in the DRC in exchange for security because of the Rwanda deal. This means the US is using the DRC as its new vital source for critical minerals supply, such as cobalt, in which the DRC is the world’s leading supplier. The DRC is also the second-largest producer of copper, as well as a significant producer of tin and coltan.
In early May, KoBold Metals, an American firm supported by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, announced the execution of a framework agreement to invest one billion dollars in the extraction of a segment of the Manono lithium deposit in the country, where a Chinese firm has an investment.
By granting mineral access to the US, the DRC is also seeking to counterbalance Chinese dominance in its mining sector, and give minerals to the US in its energy transition, when it is known that it is trailing China. By accessing the DRC’s subsoil, the US is playing to outcompete China in the name of security.
However, oftentimes African countries have complained that Western countries and multinational corporations (MNCs) have been fanning wars and internal conflicts to steal African minerals on behalf of their government to the disadvantage of the people. But now, the same minerals are being accessed without beneficiation for the people.
Messianic calling
The DRC-Rwanda case shows that Africa remains trapped in the legacy of several forms of exploitation. The continent has failed to have a Messianic calling in the DRC-Rwanda hostilities; the Sudan war; the South Sudan conflict and the challenges of the Sahel region, which grapples with terrorism.
The African Messiah, in this case, has already appeared to be an outsider in the name of President Trump. It is instructive that President Trump is in his legacy term and wants to emerge as a global peacemaker. This is through peace initiatives he is working to break through between Russia and Ukraine; his calls for peace between India and Pakistan; Iran and Israel; and now the DRC and Rwanda.
At the centre of his peace calls are geopolitical and strategic mineral interests as the case with Iran-Israel-India-Pakistan and Russia-Ukraine-DRC-Rwanda, respectively.
To Africans, the US intervention can be seen as a major heartbreak or setback on the continent’s efforts to achieve peace. Some can also see the US intervention in the DRC-Rwanda case as a setup for Africa to upgrade its capabilities in conflict resolution.
Socio-culturally, this peace deal also reinforces and plays badly on the future depictions of the continent in the Hollywood film industry that often demonstrates or depicts Africans and Africa in a negative light. Already, Western media has been condescending in the way it reports about the DRC-Rwanda hostility and how it continues to report about other issues in Africa.
This remains a concerning reflection of attitudes described as Orientalism by the late Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said.
