Opinion
Africa’s Security Problem
Due to the tired and well-worn Western narrative of Africa – that of a continent continuously engulfed in war, poverty and disease – armed conflicts are often not discussed by African intellectuals or governments or even those of us in the diaspora because it goes against the narrative we want for the continent. Thus, discussions of conflicts are often view as negative or against the narrative of “Africa Rising.”
However, the armed conflicts in the Central African Republic, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and South Sudan have cost the lives of people, human beings whose dreams and aspirations were taken from them by armed groups that African governments have the responsibility of protecting their citizens from. So we must do more to address the reason they died so we can do better in preventing more deaths.
In 1997, in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, African chiefs of defense staff at a conference in Harare, Zimbabwe proposed a continental rapid reaction force of 25,000 soldiers, that would intervene on the continent’s trouble spots. The African Standby Force, as it was named, was supposed to be fully operational in 2010, but it is now 2015 and its implementation appears to have stalled.
Any development on the African continent, whether economic or political cannot be sustained if security is not guaranteed. We can talk all we want about elections and which sector of the state should be privatized, but if security is not guaranteed the corporations that complain about power cuts and corruption will not operate on the continent simply because of insecurity. Hence, security has to be prioritized across the continent.
That does not however mean every country has to increase its number of military personnel or military hardware but rather, increase military cooperation. Security has to be viewed from a regional and continental level. Waiting for Boko Haram or the al-Shabaab militants to cross borders before taking them seriously will not work in the long run.
The Nigerian military been criticized for its seeming inability to stop the Boko Haram and its 6-year terror campaign that has cost the lives of thousands of Nigerians. However, Nigeria has a military of 62,000 with the task of protecting a country four times the size of the United Kingdom, with a population half the size of the United States.
Cameroon, Nigeria’s eastern neighbor which has also faced the brutality of Boko Haram, is twice the size of the United Kingdom, but it has only 12,000 soldiers. The United Kingdom has over 100,000.
Africa has a security problem, and the African states’ fear of their soldiers due to their past history in politics, have for long time relied on foreign intervention as a solution. However, a bankrupt France, or economically weaken foreign state can no longer afford this form of “support” as it did in the past.
Thus, Africa has to find ways of dealing with these armed groups terrorizing the African people as Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda did in Somalia with the al-Shabaab, and as South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania did in the Democratic Republic of Congo with March 23 Movement rebels.
