A new paradigm needed to deal with Africa’s problems

After a lifetime of watching news on international news channels like BBC and CNN, I have began to recognise certain code language of the news presenters. If they start a news item with a warning that images about to be shown may be distressing to some viewers, I recognise instantly that the news item is about Africa. And what usually follows are heart wrenching images of starving children with protruding stomachs and flies feeding out of their mucus-filled noses, bed-ridden Aids sufferers facing their last moments, mutilated victims of political and other forms of violence and similar distressing scenes.

This past week there has been a continuous deluge of such imagery emanating from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where fresh rebel attacks in the eastern areas of the country have triggered another humanitarian catastrophe. As is now all too common, the international community is rallying efforts to confront the unfolding tragedy. Humanitarian organisations are struggling to attend to the many suffering people while leading politicians have negotiated a cease fire and are pushing for urgent talks between the belligerents to secure future peace and stability. Perhaps, and just perhaps, the current ceasefire will hold and sooner rather than later the whole issue will again be forgotten only to resurface at some other point in future, as it has done in the past decade or so.

Superimpose this humanitarian catastrophe on other desperate situations elsewhere in Africa – Darfur in Sudan and Zimbabwe, of course – and you begin to have a sense of the depth of the hole which the continent of Africa is in and how much it has to work to dig itself out of the morass. It is all very well to claim that there are some successes elsewhere on the continent but the sheer scale of failure in these few spots dwarfs any small successes as may be claimed. There have been many attempts to explain why Africa, despite its unimaginable wealth of natural resources and other God-given blessings, remains wallowing in the depths of poverty and underdevelopment.

Leading historians, scholars and other researchers have not reached a consensus on these issues. Some few years ago, a professional friend recommended to me a book by Chabal and Daloz entitled Africa works: Disorder as political instrument. In this book, the authors argued that the acuteness of Africa’s crises is such as to defy the usual parameters of current political analysis because the reality of the politics in contemporary Africa is exceptionally multi-faceted as compared to the realm of politics in the West which is relatively well-defined and self-contained. Chabal and Daloz described a new paradigm for Africa which they labelled the “political instrumentalisation of disorder”.

This paradigm referred to the process by which political actors in Africa seek to maximise their returns on the state of confusion, uncertainty and sometimes even chaos which characterise most African polities. They argued that all African states share a generalised system of patrimonialism and an acute degree of apparent disorder which is “evidenced by a high level of governmental and administrative inefficiency, a lack of institutionalisation, a general disregard of the rules of the formal political and economic sectors and a universal resort to personal(ised) and vertical solutions to societal problems”.

Aha, I thought! That sounds all too familiar! That may certainly explain why in a country which is reeling with inflation measured in billions of percentage points, where hospitals are empty of any drugs, where a majority of citizens are surviving on wild fruits and roots and where the education system has completely collapsed; the country still has sufficient resources to pamper its judges with the latest models of cars from Bavaria, plasma television sets and other creature comforts. Plausible as Messrs Chabal and Daloz’s theory is, it still does not explain why and how the ruling elites in Africa are allowed to get away with this destructive buffoonery by their own people and by the international community which professes a different set of values.

More recently I have been reading Martin Meredith’s The State of Africa: A history of fifty years of independence in which he states that Africa’s per capita national income is one-third lower than the world’s next poorest region – South Asia, and in most countries the per capita incomes are lower than the levels of 1980. Meredith argues that Africa has generally suffered from weak political governance characterised by “bloated bureaucracies and systems of regulation… (providing) the means by which ruling elites provided jobs, contracts and other opportunities for gain for kinsmen and political supporters”. Again, that sounds quite familiar but again there are no suggestions on how these ills can be tackled.

The standard response of the international community, especially the developed countries, has been to apply diplomatic though regional institutions such as the SADC and AU. Given the predominance of similarly inclined colleagues in such institutions, the approach has not been successful giving rise to the notion that African leaders are not amenable to diplomatic influence. And when such pressure has not yielded the expected results, they have thrown in conditional-laden aid packages in an attempt to bribe or coerce the errant regimes to conform. All this humanitarian aid that is provided to distressed countries serves no useful purpose than to encourage the rogue leaders to disregard their obligations to look after the interests of their citizens and, instead, allows them to concentrate on strengthening their hold on power. They simply do not care about the suffering of their people.

When all such responses have failed, the next options has been to apply the so-called smart (or targeted) sanctions aimed purportedly on the leaders but, in reality, are general sanctions which hurt the ordinary citizens much more than they do the leaders. These smart sanctions generally include travel bans and freeze on personal assets which, unfortunately, also do have very limited impact on the targeted people who have many ways and means to circumvent the sanctions. More recently, the erring leaders have been threatened with prosecution at the International Court of Justice in the Hague however the effect of this is still to be fully assessed. Al least, this has elicited some welcome anxiety in the case of Omar al-Bashir of Sudan who has recently been indicted for crimes against humanity.

My view, however, is that any such measures are incremental and insufficient to drive the change which is so necessary in the governance systems in Africa. What may be required is external military intervention to depose obnoxious and weak regimes and replace them with stronger administrations. From time immemorial, weak and unpopular regimes have been overthrown by the citizens and, where this was not possible, where invaded by stronger neighbours. I do not have a quarrel with the doctrine of national sovereignty but I believe that it has its limits. National sovereignty should be respected only where the leaders also respect universally recognised and accepted democratic conventions and norms – such as the protection of their citizens and the respect of human rights.

In the case of the DRC, it is quite clear that the regime there is pathetically weak and is incapable of providing effective administration and protection to its citizens. The stationing of the largest peace keeping force in the world in that country has not brought any noticeable peace and tranquillity and is not sustainable in the long term. There may therefore merit in allowing stronger forces in the region to move in and take over administration of the country. I suspect that the likes of Rwanda would relish that prospect. It may initially be messy, I should admit, but it could provide long term stability to the country and provide its people with much needed relief from perennial suffering.