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Lovemore Chikova Development Dialogue
As the African Union tries to solve internal conflicts that haunt some of its members, the continental body should resort more to local solutions instead of relying on external interventions that actually worsen the situation.
To achieve total peace on the continent, the AU’s Peace and Security Council, the organ tasked with promoting peace and security, should be empowered more to be able to intervene and offer effective solutions to conflict.
It has now become clear that prescriptions by western countries to solving conflicts in some African countries are actually contributing to their escalation and as a result affecting development.
Development cannot take place in an environment where there is conflict, which often results in the destruction of the very infrastructure that supports progress.
Conflicts in some African countries have also been known to inhibit investments and thus affect economic growth, and their development agenda in general.
But the major challenge confronting African countries when it comes to solving such conflicts is partly because those who interfere in a bid to end the conflicts actually end up inflaming them by offering solutions that do not apply.
Outsiders who intent to help resolve conflicts in African countries must first understand the nature of the conflicts, especially their origins, which are in most cases linked to colonialism as a historical factor.
The Abuja Treaty of 1991 divided the African continent into five regional areas — north, west, south, east and central.
From these regional areas, the continent now boasts of 14 regional and sub-regional groupings whose primary purpose is to enhance regional integration, peace and development.
Unfortunately, most of these regions are now pre-occupied with trying to resolve conflicts in different countries, some of which have turned violent and bloody, thereby stifling efforts at instituting development.
Response to these conflicts must begin with a diagnosis of what the conflict is about — what are the causes and triggers that transform a disagreement into an armed struggle, for example.
To find a solution to a conflict, there is need to understand the reason why it emerged in the first place.
Therefore, response to the emergence of conflict in African countries cannot be effective without taking into consideration the historical facts that assist in the understanding of such conflicts.
The continent has a unique history that should be put into the right framework when it comes to solving conflicts, considering Africa’s diverse background that has been riddled with different epochs.
The pre-colonial era, the colonial era and the post-colonial era all have something to do with the emergence of conflicts in Africa and the response mechanisms that should be designed to solve these conflicts.
In most instances, cases of civil wars and inter-state wars on the African continent are classified by outsiders just as greed for power, yet there are more underlying factors in the background that cause these conflicts.
Frustration from lack of development is one of such reason, yet this can be traced to the deliberate underdevelopment of African countries during colonialism when western countries were pre-occupied with exploiting resources from the continent.
When the same western countries intervene an attempt to solve the conflicts, their responses are just aimed at isolating those they think are the perpetrators and punish them through various means.
Such a method of resolving conflicts in Africa does not address the root cause of the conflicts and neither does it provide appropriate responses that help end the conflicts.
In fact, the conflict solving strategies being employed by western countries in many African countries are often underpinned by personal interests of those trying to provide solutions.
The conflict in Burundi, for example, has recurred in different years — 1965, 1972, 1988, 1991 and between 1993 and 2009 —based on the same factors.
Yet in all these conflicts, the western response has always been to try and isolate those they point to as perpetrators and try to punish them individually, without an attempt to understand why a conflict of a similar nature can recur in one country for so many successive years.
In fact, it would be difficult to adequately respond to conflict in Africa when it is primarily understood as emanating from a crisis of governance or failure of local institutions to intervene when conflict arises.
There are a lot of contradictions of the colonial state that were passed on to the de-colonised state that have been manifest in many countries, more importantly in the Great Lakes region in countries like Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
The same can be noted in Angola and Mozambique, where civil wars erupted soon after the two countries got independence from Portugal.
The failure by western prescribed solutions to conflict in Africa manifest more in Somalia where the deployment of international peacekeepers has failed to end the conflict.
The first move should be to discard the notion that the conflict in Somalia is an ethnicity issue.
While there is a general agreement that those in the Somali conflict are of different ethnicity, the most important question to help understand this conflict is to first ask why they are fighting.
There are social, economic and political factors that those mandated to keep peace in Somalia rarely consider as central to the conflict, hence the inadequate response that has led to the conflict escalating and continuing for many years.
Another good example is that of the South Sudan war, a conflict that was accorded wrong prescriptions because it was not understood.
South Sudan was fighting for its own independence from Sudan, yet for years those who were prescribing solutions to the conflict treated it as Sudan’s internal affair.
In various quarters even up to today, Western Sahara’s fight for independence from Morocco is being viewed as an internal strife, with those prescribing responses to the conflict deliberately avoiding treating it as about gaining independence.
Those who want to effectively resolve conflicts in African countries should first ask a set of questions: Why is the conflict occurring?
How is the conflict occurring? Who are the agents and the agencies of the conflict? What resources are being used to advance the conflict? and can the conflict be prevented both in the short term and long term?
Not all conflicts need similar reactions, even if they are recurring, each diagnoses of the conflict points to different remedies depending on the understanding of the conflict.
Failure to properly understand conflicts can lead to half-baked solutions that do not address the deep-seated causes, resulting in the conflicts recurring or being perpetuated.
Inter-state conflicts should also be understood as such to enable those intending to solve the conflict to come up with responses that are helpful.
States in Africa usually confront each other over territories and this has been witnessed in the Chad-Libya conflict over the Aouzou strip and the Tanzania-Uganda war that removed Idi Amin in Uganda.
Other inter-state conflicts included the Kenya-Somali war (1963-1967), the Somali-Ethiopian conflict (1964-1978), the Egypt-Libya conflict (1977), the Eritrea-Ethiopia border conflict (1998-2000) and the 1994 Cameroon-Nigeria conflict over the disputed oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula.
On the other hand, protracted liberation wars have been fought in Africa, resulting in huge conflicts that claimed thousands of lives simply because of failure to accept that the conflicts were all about independence.
In southern Africa, such wars were witnessed in countries like Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa.
A simple understanding of such conflicts could have avoided the wars by granting independence to the African countries.
In some cases, conflict in some African countries is presented by western countries as a humanitarian crisis, leading to efforts being directing to offering help alone without trying to understand and address the root causes and respond to the conflict.
It seems in most cases, the desire by the so-called international community to solve conflicts in Africa has been inspired by the need for short term solutions that would enable the mediators to quickly extradite themselves from the situation.
Online Reporter