This article was published in The Fountain Magazine, in April 2019 published annually by the Spiritan Missionary Seminary, Arusha, an Institute of Philosophy affiliated to the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA), Nairobi.
On the opening page of the African Union (AU) blueprint Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, adopted by the Heads of states and governments on the 31st of January 2015, one is greeted by these words: “Prosperity, Integration, Democracy, Peace, Common Heritage, People Driven and Global Influence is what we aspire.”
This excellent read, however, found me waking up from the sobs of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) in his poem I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day: “And in despair, I bowed my head, there is no peace on earth.… For hate is strong, and mocks the song of peace on earth, goodwill to men.” It stirred me into studying the African situation, first in its dream, as is in the Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, and conversely in the real-life state of affairs and genuine possibilities in the continent.
Objectively, the reality of peace in the world today, which is indeed commonplace in literature, both ancient and contemporary, and in the teachings of religions, speeches of influential persons, admonitions of oriental gurus, and the many and countless philosophies, is still far from completion to a considerably great extent. The feeling of tension and distrust among individuals, groups, regions, and in a higher plane among nations and continents is alarming.
To begin with the current situation of Africa, neither common sense nor academic inquest will let us scale Africa, both in the past and the present, as a success in the concern of global peacebuilding and peacekeeping.
In his book, Interventions: A Life of War and Peace, in which he narrates chronologically the various challenging instances during his office as the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan proposes among other things, as one of the ways for a successful peace activism, the necessity of being rightly informed. Right education, he says, “is quite simply peacebuilding by another name. It is the most effective form of defence spelling there is.”
The first Ten Years’ Implementation Plan of The Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, which ends in 2020 notes among the many aspirations of the African Union (AU) to be accomplished by 2020, to “silence the guns by 2020, to end all wars, conflicts and violations of human rights” (Agenda 2063:18).
This year 2019, fifteen countries are noted to be in serious conflicts which do go downhill steadily. There seems to be a loose nut in the celebrated blueprint.
Recalling the last two decades, sub-Saharan Africa particularly has been the most conflict-affected region in the world.
The Consultation Document of the Commonwealth countries titled The Causes of Conflicts in Africa (2001:10) establishes that ten of the 24 most war-affected countries in the world between 1980 and 1994 were African, and four of these (Liberia, Angola, Mozambique and Somalia) were ranked within the five most severely affected countries in the world.
These conflicts have been responsible for a far greater number of deaths and displacement than famine or floods.
In the year 2000, from the records, more than 11 million people were internally displaced within the African continent. By 2018, the reports by the Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) and Pew Research established that 18.4 Million people were internally displaced in Africa.
Among those, 5.5 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa and 4.5 million people in North Africa are displaced by severe political causes (UNHCR: 2000, GRID:2018, Pew Research: 2018).
To mention some countries which have persisted in these crises until today, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Nigeria, North Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Liberia, evoke a global concern. In number, displaced people in Africa are more than refugees (Elizabeth Ferris, Internal Displacement in Africa: An Overview of Trends and Opportunities, Addis Ababa: 2012, 1, 12).
Comparatively, even over many years, not much has been achieved. This speaks of the future if the means employed in the fateful past are not changed. The good dream with its fine thinking may not help resolve our problems since it is not thought of in the right context and real situations. It is worth questioning why we always don’t achieve the desired.
The first question we need to delve into is the nature of the problematic situation. Why do we use arms to resolve conflicts? Can we realistically end wars and silence the guns by 2020 as the AU’s Agenda 2063 looks forward to?
Problems of corruption, extreme debts, refusal to leave power, and poor policies, are all cooked by the same people of Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want, who aspire for “Prosperity, Integration, Democracy, Peace, Common Heritage, People Driven and Global Influence, solidarity between African countries and Africans, and the sovereign integrity of independent African States with good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and rule of law.”
There is a need to begin anew by formulating policies which are workable and close to the real situations of the African continent. All other problems emanate from two battles, one is the struggle to be there on top, and the other is the struggle to find a chance to cheat (Kealaboga Maphunye, Weaning African Leaders off Addiction to Power is an Ongoing Struggle, in The Conversation, Melbourne: April 2018). The two are serious socio-political hitches of our milieu.
It is obvious that one who is not patriotic to one’s country will not be patriotic to the continent, yet these people are entertained in Africa and are entrusted with even more sensitive responsibilities. This was the foe of progress Chinua Achebe wrote about in his work, entitled; Man of the People.
Africa needs to resolve her real problems, and not invent simple and unsubstantiated ideological deliberations to dispute against and justify what is actually not there. The rejection of war and conflict in Africa since it is from our hearts as people of Africa, needs to call us back to quit holding onto the same ideas that would stir the former.
Meanwhile, while we battle in the dim lamplight, the reconcilers’ who ‘love’ us empty their arsenals for personal gains. Terry Mays, an American scholar in Political Science and International Relations, expounds that peace operations have been undergoing an evolutionary change on the African continent.
Historically, he says, the United Nations (UN) and European countries in particular, organized and led peace operations on the African continent. It was not until 1990 that African-mandated peace operations emerged (Terry Mays, African Solutions to African Problems, The Journal of Conflict Studies, Vol. 23 no.1, 2003).
Moreover, in the numerous persisting African crises, nations outside Africa cannot be completely ruled out, especially European Countries and the United States of America, USA.
African independence leads whom we cannot cease to celebrate, at the dawn of free Africa, made a great effort to bring up new thoughts and philosophies fitting for the African people and the African socio-political situation.
It was all an effort to handle beforehand the situation that Africa suffers now; to proffer African solutions to African problems. They were aware that the harms of conflicts and war could not be contained just within the boundaries of the involved states or the involved peoples. But with their demise, there has never been practical room for those great ideas any longer, even though they were appreciated as they are even today.
Delving reflectively into the situation, a genuine chronology of occurrences rightly justifies that external (from outside Africa) intervention to internal wars and conflicts within respective conflicting populations or countries have proved abortive, and often even worsened the situations.
Here in Africa, scholars would affirm and produce as perfect examples of this the nations of Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, the then Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. Peace operations are indeed an umbrella for the more familiar peacekeeping and peace-building missions. But there cannot be realization if the reconciler plays a traitor to his own words.
For the reason that we still think of ourselves in the categories of the Westerners, we cannot but be what they want us to be. Kofi Annan rightly says, “We can thrive in what is our own even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings. We can love what we are without hating what, and who we are not.”
Our priority ought to be in Africa and our own moral and ethical principles, those original to us as African people, among which are patriotism, justice, and respect for dialogue and human life.
To conclude, it is high time we rediscover the African solutions to the problems facing the African continent. This is because the Western solutions have not been all that productive. Our way should not be to dialogue with weapons, nor to put at stake another’s life, but the opposite. There is always a way to avoid such extremities. The songs of war will end if what we put forward is grounded in genuine patriotism and human values.
