What could ‘African solutions’
possibly be in an increasingly globalized era?
After the 1945 end of the Second
World War, the Cold War polarized the world into the East (Second World;
communist; Warsaw Pact) and West (First World; capitalist; NATO). At 1945, the
majority of today’s ‘developing countries’ were the ‘Third World’, who came
together in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), designed to take no sides in the
Cold War. Yet, Nkrumah’s ‘neocolonialism’ meant that NAM countries were at the
mercy of the aggressive capitalist, former colonizer, First World countries,
what with their political elites being products of the colonial system.
The Cold War’s collective security raised
temperatures, but also deterred the crossing of the Rubicon. Thus, the major
Cold War protagonists – USA and USSR, later Russia – have avoided each other, merely
fighting smaller proxy wars.
Meanwhile, the UN has been conscious that
want – poverty, can fuel instability and war, as do cross border disagreements.
Thus, against the backdrop of the UNIVERSAL Declaration of Human Rights (1948),
UN peace keeping has focused as much on improving human welfare; hence the
Millennium Development Goals (2000-15: MDG) and Sustainable Development Goals
(2015-30: SDG). MDG 8 and SDG 17 are about global technical and financial
cooperation over the other seven MDGs and 16 SDGs. Thus investing in human
welfare for peace and development is a global
responsibility.
But the UN has also focused narrowly on
conflict via the Security Council, and through the Secretary General’s UN Peace
Keeping Forces (UNPKF) – the Blue Berets. Countries volunteer soldiers for
specific engagements, six of the current 12 being in Africa. In 2004, Sudan
objected to UNPKF in Darfur, and in the context of AU’s strategic Silencing the Guns by 2020, the UN Security
Council approved the African Union Mission to Sudan in Darfur, eventually
replaced by a UNPKF mission in 2007. The AU’s other peacekeeping initiative is
AMISOM – Somalia, launched in 2007. The nine-country AMISOM has been funded by
the UN, AU, and controversially by EU. The two examples illustrate that African
initiatives are not that African.
Beside UN’s general endeavour for
peace, the AU initiatives are driven by the knowledge that failed states become
breeding grounds for civil war, terrorism and other unrest. Thus even though
the peacekeepers have been African soldiers, the weight behind the initiatives could not sustainably be African.
Some of the nine countries contributing AMISOM forces have indeed threatened to, or actually withdrawn some forces because EU reduced the monthly stipend from USD 1,000 pm to USD 800 pm. That smacks of mercenarism rather than a bona fide commitment to a cause.