African leaders as Africa’s problems, Africa’s solutions

AFRICAN UNION (AU), the various regional economic communities (RECs), and a whole lot of heads of nations’ heads of government within Africa have repeatedly confirmed that little is to be expected from them as to what the future holds for the continent under their watch. In addition to official incoherence and low level of synergy, they have also given ample room for doubts about their genuineness of purpose in stabilising Africa politically and economically. Two wars that have been receiving media attention for a while in eastern and central Africa tend to defy armistice. A third one, given less attention, is no less pernicious. For two years, Sudan has been in a bitter war led by two rival strongmen. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) has been unsettled by bouts of armed attacks on the eastern flank, particularly in the Kivu province. And the AU’s impact is yet to be felt beyond mere talks and post-meeting communiqués. 

This is understandable to a great extent. Realistically, any significant change with Africa’s current crop of leadership in place? Old, worn-out and compromised leaders, operating on decades of political playbook, cannot be rightly expected to do the same thing differently. Their reaction is usually the same – resistance. It is akin to trying to teach old dogs new tricks or putting new wine inside old wineskins. The sit-tight despots currently running the affairs of many African countries cannot bring anything new to the table. Beyond ceremonial attendance of REC or AU meetings, nothing practical is to be expected from them as they have literally become out of touch with realities, seeing practically everything through the lenses of stability of their governments and retention of their political power and influence, rather than from the perspectives of the greater good of their countries.

A meeting of heads of state on the AU’s Peace and Security Council (PSC) scheduled for last weekend in Addis Ababa to discuss the twin conflicts in eastern DR Congo and in Sudan is expected to come up with a text on its deliberations. What should not be expected, however, is anything new or different from what was common in the past. The outcome of a meeting, chaired by Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo who has been ruling the country since August 1979 – and is unlikely to step down alive – is predictable. Just as his northern neighbour, Paul Biya still stubbornly clings to power at 92, after ruling Cameroon for 42 years since November 1982.

It is rumoured that Biya is preparing for a re-election in October, for his eighth term in office in a country that he has woefully failed to unify, but has actually succeeded in dividing along regional and foreign language lines. Under the physically frail and now mostly absentee president Biya, a separatist war, which has been raging since September 2017, is yet to end. The Anglophone separatist movement leading the civil war is fighting to secure economic benefits for its people from the rich natural resource base in that troubled region where most of the country’s oil reserves are to be found. The stories of natural resources-related armed conflict, engineered and supported from outside Africa are many and similar in nature. External influences, divisions among local people and using the divisions to exploit resources are the common features.

The intellectual discourse over resource curse or Dutch Disease seems to have omitted one major component: that of external influence on local people. But for the pacifist disposition of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua in making peace with the Niger Delta’s disgruntled militants and acceding to many of their demands, Nigeria would have been dealing with a more complex and multifaceted security crisis today. The Ambazonia region, which shares borders with Nigeria, extends to include the Bakassi Peninsula, which holds about a fifth of the total crude oil in Africa. It is even surmised that France has a hand in the sustenance of the separatist war and that it is furtively supporting the war to enable it keep control on the oil reserves while the region remains embroiled in crisis. The story of the DR Congo sounds similar. 

Will it be wrong to affirm at this point that many – perhaps most – African leaders are not committed to a safe and prosperous Africa? Is it not rather disappointing that the various African countries’ leaders have failed miserably to rein in the two warlords that have held Sudan hostage since April 15, 2023 in what has largely become a forgotten war? Talk of nations’ sovereignty. Yes. But the African Union meetings are not rising up to the challenge of bringing the war to an end. The same applies to the war in the DR Congo. 

Disclosures on the recent allegations that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was reportedly sponsoring terrorism in Africa and other places point to the relevance of a searchlight on the various African countries undergoing one crisis or another relating to natural resource control. A U.S Congressman, Scott Perry, has accused the USAID of funding terrorist organisations, including Boko Haram, to the tune of $697 million annually, an allegation that has elicited concerns in Nigeria. For the duration of – and increase in – terrorist attacks in more and more countries of Africa, the need has now arisen to consider digging deeper into possible causes. This calls for committed leadership, coherent regional or continental policies, programmes and strategies and coordinated implementation of intervention strategies. This is where foreign aids in all their forms should henceforth be questioned, viewed with suspicion and even rejected. 

Before calling for an eastward shift to China on the US aid motives, it should be borne in mind that hardly is there any foreign aid without strings. In 2012, the African Union Conference Centre and Office Complex (AUCC), serving as the new headquarters of the African Union (AU), became open for use. Built with Chinese assistance, the 20-storey tower overlooking a conference centre in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, was designed to also serve as a conference centre for African and diaspora businesses. The 99.9 metres (328 ft) tall main building, financed and constructed at a cost of $200 million, was mainly funded by the Chinese government in what was described as “a gift to Africa and the African Union.” That, however, is not the end of the story. It was followed by scandalous espionage and eavesdropping allegations as China reportedly hacked the AU computer servers for five years until the activity was discovered in January 2017. Sensitive information from the building had been transferred nightly to Chinese servers for five years until the massive hack was discovered indicating that hackers, probably from China, had been filching security camera footage from inside the AU headquarters building in Ethiopia. Upon discovery, attempts were made to obfuscate the truth as there were denials from the AU and China sides. According to Le Monde, a French newspaper, the AU kept the Chinese surveillance secret for a year after discovering it, suggesting African leaders’ complicity even as Chinese authorities also denied hacking.

Considering the intensities of activities of the various donors, especially government donors, their motives have increasingly become suspect. It may now be safely inferred that the official aid donor outposts are actually undercover surveillance posts, in particular, the various military bases. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES), founded in September 2023, has become weary of military agreements with France and has therefore scrapped them. Lately, Chad has followed, tearing apart its own military agreement with France. In March 2024, Niger ended its military agreement with the US. The military leaders revoked the existing accord with immediate effect, calling it “profoundly unfair.” In retrospect, did these military leaders not make sense in challenging the status quo that those “democratic” leaders of many other African countries have timidly preserved?

To underscore the fact that the African Union is a lame duck, consider the meetings of heads of governments, which are more of mere formalities, ego trips and sheer wastes of time and resources. Since 2013 when the African Union (changed from the Organisation of African Unity, OAU) turned 50 and a new ambitious Agenda 2063 was unveiled, how much progress has the AU made? How many landmark feats has the AU accomplished? The official window of AU’s communication with the public is its website. The website is drab. A look at the section on Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) opened with this statement: “Promoting intra-regional connectivity between the capital cities of Africa by creating a single unified air transport market in Africa, as an impetus to the continent’s economic integration and growth agenda.” But in reality, a traveller from Yaounde Cameroon to Lagos in Nigeria still has to travel over Nigeria to Lomé in Togo for a connecting flight, then travel back to Lagos. A trip that should take less than two hours now takes nearly half a day. Such is the relevance of the AU “towards One African sky.”

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a free trade area founded in 2018, created by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement among 54 of the 55 AU nations, with trade commencing as of January 1, 2021. It is now in its fifth year of operation. Although the World Bank estimates show that the AfCFTA could raise Africa’s exports to the rest of the world by 32 percent by 2035 and catalyse the continent’s foreign direct investment, intra-African trade is still less than 20 percent of Africa’s total trade in which the figure still hovers below 13 percent, in comparison to 66.9 percent in Europe, 63.8 percent in Asia and Oceania, or 44.4 percent in the Americas.

The AU has yet to show if it is anywhere on the path of fulfilling its lofty ambition of ending existing wars or preventing new ones. Its failures in the Tigray People’s Liberation army faceoff with the central government recently and Sudan’s largely forgotten war are examples. The same applies to the on-going war in the DR Congo. The M23 rebel group was formed in 2012 in protest against DR Congo’s government’s unwillingness to implement the March 23, 2009 peace deal. It has since become a thorn in the flesh of the DR Congo’s government. M23, or the March 23 Movement, is one of more than 100 armed groups fighting Congolese forces in the mineral-rich eastern DR Congo. It has embarked on repeated attacks on the army and people of DR Congo, particularly at the mineral-rich areas of the eastern DR Congo. In what has taken a different turn, the now Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have recently captured Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu and have attacked Congolese army positions in South Kivu. 

Although France has reportedly backed the DR Congo’s calls for international action, particularly in urging the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Rwanda, there are doubts about the sincerity behind such calls as France desperately courts Rwanda while Tshisekedi has twice had openly embarrassing encounters with Macron in less than two years. The AU, on its part, has failed to achieve its own goal of “Silencing the guns by 2020,” including “ending all wars, civil conflicts, gender-based violence, violent conflicts and preventing genocide in the continent by 2020.” Part of the consequences of such failures could have been what was experienced last week by the AU Commission Chairperson, Moussa Faki Mahamat, as he was told to leave a closed session at a joint Southern African Development Community (SADC) and East African Community (EAC) summit in Dar es Salaam over the escalation of violence in the eastern DR Congo and the capture of Goma by Rwandan-backed M23 rebels.

“It is most regrettable and unfortunate that such a high personality from the AU could be excluded from discussions pertinent to the resolution of the crisis in eastern DRC,” Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the AU High Representative for Silencing the Guns, said. According to Chambas, a “synergy” between the AU and regional economic communities (RECs) is important for peace making. “It is not right that the chairperson can be at such a meeting to attend only a ceremonial opening ceremony. As these conflicts unfold, securing the political will of leaders on the continent to address issues decisively is rapidly narrowing each year,” he lamented, portraying the obvious hopelessness of the situation, especially as there are suspicions of taking sides in the East Congo conflict. Last week was not the first. In December 2023, Faki was excluded by Sudanese participants from an IGAD summit on the civil war in Sudan.

Although Liesl Louw-Vaudran, an official of the International Crisis Group, opined that “the AU can come in with technical expertise, funding or even offer to host such inter-RECs discussions,” realities point in a different direction. What she has just said is simply that African leaders should act responsibly and stop waiting for foreign handouts. Simple.

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